Revelation Space (The Inhibitor Trilogy Book 1)

by Alastair Reynolds

“He was already over a century old before he ever left Sol system,” Sajaki said. “He waited until it was possible to do so, then was among the first thousand to leave, when the Conjoiners launched the first ship from Phobos.” “At least, someone called John Brannigan was on that ship,” Volyova said. “No,” Sajaki said. “There’s no doubt. I know it was him. Afterwards… it becomes less easy to place him, of course. He may have deliberately blurred his own past, to avoid being tracked down by all the enemies he must have made in that time. There are many sightings, in many different systems, decades apart… but nothing definite.” “How did he come to be your Captain?” “He turned up centuries later—after several landfalls elsewhere, and dozens of unconfirmed apparitions—on the fringe of the Yellowstone system. He was ageing slowly, due to the relativistic effects of starflight, but he was still getting older, and longevity techniques were not as well developed as in our time.” Sajaki paused. “Much of his body was now prosthetic. They said that John Brannigan no longer needed a spacesuit when he left his ship; that he breathed vacuum, basked in intolerable heat and quenching cold, and that his sensory range encompassed every spectrum imaginable. They said that little remained of the brain with which he had been born; that his head was merely a dense loom of intermeshed cybernetics, a stew of tiny thinking machines and precious little organic material.” “And how much of that was tru...