Author: Alastair Reynolds
Category: Science
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‘That makes it easier for you, doesn’t? To write me off as an irrelevance?’
‘Do you have the TE dates you promised me?’
‘Yes.’ She passed a card to him. ‘I don’t break my promises, Doctor. But I’m afraid the little respect I have for you is in serious danger of vanishing altogether.’
Sylveste glanced at the trapped-electron summary scrolling down the card as he flexed it between thumb and forefinger. Some part of his mind was entirely unable to detach itself from what the numbers represented, even as he spoke to Pascale. ‘When your father told me about the biography, he said the woman who would be authoring it was someone whose illusions were on the point of being shattered.’
She stood up. ‘I think we should leave this until another time.’
‘No; wait.’ Sylveste reached out and held her hand. ‘I’m sorry. I need to talk to you about this, do you understand?’
She flinched at the contact, then slowly relaxed. Her expression was still watchful. ‘About what?’
‘This.’ He tapped his thumb against the TE summary. ‘It’s very interesting.’
Volyova’s shuttle was approaching a shipyard; up near the Lagrange point between Yellowstone and its moon, Marco’s Eye. About a dozen lighthuggers were parked in the yard; more ships than Khouri had ever seen in her life. At the yard’s hub was a major carousel, smaller in-system vessels attached to the wheel’s rim like suckling pigs. A few of the lighthuggers were encased in skeletal support structures for major ice-shield or Conjoiner-drive overhauls (Conjoiner ships were here, too: sleek and black, as if chiselled from space itself); but the rest of the starships were basically drifting, following lazy and slow orbits around the Lagrange point’s centre of gravity. Khouri guessed that there must be complex rules of etiquette governing the way those ships were parked; who had to move out the way of whom to avoid a collision which a computer might predict days in advance. The expenditure of fuel which might have to be burned to nudge a ship off a collision course would be tiny against the profit margin of a typical trade stopover . . . but the loss of face would be much harder to amortise. There had never been as many ships as this parked around Sky’s Edge, but even then she had heard of skirmishes between crews over issues of parking priority and trade rights. It was a common groundsider’s misapprehension that Ultras were a homogeneous splinter of humanity. In truth, they were as factional, and as paranoid about one another, as any other human strain.
Now they were approaching Volyova’s ship.
The thing, like all the other lighthuggers, was improbably streamlined. Space only approximated a vacuum at slow speeds. Up near lightspeed - which was where these ships spent most of their time - it was like cutting through a howling gale of atmosphere. That was why they looked like daggers: conic hull tapering to a needle-sharp prow to punch the interstellar medium, with two Conjoiner engines braced at the back on spars like an ornate hilt. The ship was sheathed in ice, so glisteningly pure that it looked like diamond. The shuttle swooped in low over Volyova’s ship, and for a moment Khouri apprehended the ship’s vastness. It was like flying over a city, not another vessel. Then a door irised open in the hull, revealing a glowing docking bay. Volyova guided the shuttle home with expert taps on her thruster controls, latching onto a berthing cradle. Khouri heard thumps as umbilicals and docking connectors thudded home.
Volyova was first out of her seat restraints. ‘Shall we step aboard?’ she asked, with something that was not quite the politeness Khouri had been expecting.
They propelled themselves through the shuttle and out into the spacious environment of the ship. They were still in free-fall, but at the end of the corridor they were facing Khouri could see a complex arrangement where the stationary and rotating sections were joined together.
She was beginning to feel nauseous, but she was damned if she was going to let Volyova see this.
‘Before we go ahead,’ the Ultra woman said, ‘there’s someone you have to meet.’
She was looking over Khouri’s shoulder, back towards the corridor that led to the shuttle which had brought them aboard. Khouri heard the shuffling sound of someone working hand-over-hand along the rails which ribbed the passage. But that could only mean that there had been another person aboard the shuttle.
Something was wrong here.
Volyova’s attitude was not that of someone who was trying to impress a potential recruit. It was more as if she cared little what Khouri thought; as if it was of no consequence at all. Khouri looked around, in time to see the Komuso who had come with them in the elevator. His face was lost under the expressionless wicker helmet they all wore. He carried his shakuhachi in the crook of his arm.
Khouri started to speak, but Volyova silenced her. ‘Welcome aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, Ana Khouri. You’ve just become our new Gunnery Officer.’ Then she nodded towards the Komuso. ‘Do me a favour, will you, Triumvir?’
‘Anything particular?’
‘Knock her out before she tries to kill either one of us.’
The last thing Khouri saw was a golden blur of bamboo.
Sylveste thought he smelt Pascale’s perfume before his eyes separated her from the crowd outside the prison building. He made a reflex move towards her, but the two burly militiamen who had escorted him from his room quickly restrained him. Catcalls and muffled insults came from the cordoned-off crowd, but Sylveste barely noticed them.
Pascale kissed him diplomatically, half hiding the conjunction of their mouths behind her lace-gloved hand.
‘Before you ask,’ she said, her voice barely audible above the noise of the crowd, ‘I have no more idea what this is about than you.’
‘Is Nils behind it?’
‘Who else? Only he’s got the clout to get you out of that place for more than a day.’
‘Pity he’s not so keen to prevent me returning.’
‘Oh, he might - if he didn’t have to placate his own people, and the opposition. It’s about time you stopped thinking of him as your worst enemy, you know.’ They stepped into the sterile hush of the waiting car. The vehicle was adapted from one of the smaller surface exploration buggies, four balloon wheels at the extremities of its air-smoothed body, comms gear stowed in a matt-black hump on the roof. It was painted Inundationist purple, with Hokusai wave pendants mounted on the front.
‘If it wasn’t for my father,’ Pascale continued, ‘you’d have died during the coup. He protected you from your worst enemies.’
‘That doesn’t make him a very competent revolutionary.’
‘And what does that say about the regime he managed to overthrow?’
Sylveste shrugged. ‘Fair point, I suppose.’
A guard climbed into the front seat, behind a partition of armoured glass, and then they were moving, rushing through the crowd, speeding towards the edge of the city. They passed through one of the arboreta, then descended down one of the ramps which passed beneath the perimeter. Two other government cars accompanied them, also modified from surface buggies, but painted black and with masked militia riding postilion, holding rifles to their shoulders. After travelling for a kilometre along an unlit tunnel, the convoy arrived in an airlock and halted while the breathable city air was exchanged for Resurgam’s atmosphere. The guards remained at their posts, pausing only to adjust their breather masks and goggles. Then the vehicles moved on, ascending back towards the surface. They arrived in greyish daylight, surrounded by concrete blast walls, driving across a surface patterned in red and green lights.
An aircraft was waiting for them, parked on the apron on a tripod of skids, the undersides of its wings already uncomfortably bright to look at, already beginning to ionise the boundary layer of air below them. The driver reached into a dashboard compartment and removed breather masks, passing them back through the security grill, motioning for them to place them over their faces.
‘Not that you have to,’ he said. ‘Oxygen’s up two hundred per cent since you were last outside Resurgam City, Doctor Sylveste. Some
people have breathed naked atmosphere for tens of minutes with no longterm effects.’
‘Those must be the dissidents I keep hearing about,’ Sylveste said. ‘The renegades Girardieau betrayed during the coup. The ones that are supposed to be communicating with True Path’s leaders in Cuvier. I don’t envy them. The dust must clog their lungs almost as much as it clogs their minds.’
The escort looked unimpressed. ‘Scavenger enzymes process the dust particles. It’s old Martian biotech. Anyway; dust levels are down. All the moisture we pumped into the atmosphere allowed the dust particles to bind into bigger grains which aren’t so easily transported by the wind.’
‘Very good,’ Sylveste applauded. ‘Pity it’s still such a miserable hellhole.’
He palmed the mask to his face and waited for the door to open. A moderate wind was blowing, no more than a stinging abrasion.
They dashed across the ground.
The aircraft was a welcome oasis of space and quiet, its sumptuous interior outfitted in governmental purple. The occupants of the other two cars boarded by a different door, Sylveste catching a glimpse of Nils Girardieau crossing the apron. Girardieau walked with a swaying motion that began somewhere near his shoulders, like a pair of architect’s dividers being walked across a drawing board point to point. There was a momentum to him, like a glacier compressed into a man’s volume. The leader vanished out of sight and then a few minutes later the visible edge of the closest wing turned violet, enveloped in a nimbus of excited ions, and the aircraft climbed from the apron.
Sylveste sketched a window for himself and watched Cuvier - or Resurgam City, as they now called it - grow small beneath him. It was the first time he had seen the place in its entirety since the coup, back before the statue of the French naturalist had been toppled. The old simplicity of the colony was gone. A froth of human habitation extended messily beyond the dome perimeters; air-sealed structures linked by covered roads and walkways. There were many smaller outlying domes, emerald-green with plantations. Even a few undomed strips of trial organisms laid out in eye-hurting geometric patterns, waiting to be unleashed far beyond the city.
They circled the city and then took off on a northerly course. Lacework canyons furled below. Occasionally they overflew a small settlement, usually just an opaque dome or streamlined shack, the glare from the wings momentarily illuminating whatever they overflew. Mostly it was wilderness, uncrossed by road, pipe or power line.
Sylveste catnapped intermittently, waking to see tropical deserts of ice and imported tundra washing below. Presently a settlement came over the horizon and the aircraft made loitering spirals towards the ground. Sylveste moved his window to get a better look.
‘I recognise this area. It’s where we found the obelisk.’
‘Yes,’ Pascale said.
The landscape was craggy and mostly unvegetated, the horizon ruined by uprearing broken arches and improbable rock pillars, all of which looked on the point of imminent collapse. There was little flat ground, just deep fissures, like a calcified unmade bed. They came in over a solidified lava stream then landed on a flat hexagonal pad surrounded by armoured surface buildings. It was only midday, yet the dust in the air attenuated the sunlight so severely that it was necessary to bathe the pad in floodlights. Militia dashed across the ground to meet the flight, hiding their eyes against the light from the aircraft’s underside.
Sylveste grabbed his mask, regarded it disdainfully, then left it on the seat. He needed no help making it the short distance to the building, and if he did, no one was going to know about it.
The militia escorted them into the shack. It was years since Sylveste had been this close to Girardieau. He was shocked at how small his adversary now seemed. Girardieau was built like some piece of squat mining machinery. He looked capable of scrabbling his way through solid basalt. His red hair was short and wirelike, sprinkled with white. His eyes were wide and quizzical, like a startled Pekinese pup.
‘Strange allegiances,’ he said, as one of the guards sealed the door behind them. ‘Who’d have thought you and I would ever find ourselves with so much in common, Dan?’
‘Less than you imagine,’ Sylveste said.
Girardieau led the team forward through a ribbed corridor lined with discarded machines, grimed beyond recognition. ‘I suppose you’re wondering what all this is about.’
‘I have my suspicions.’
Girardieau’s laughter boomed off the derelict equipment around them. ‘Remember that obelisk they dug up hereabouts? Of course - it was you who pointed out the phenomenological difficulty with the TE dating method used on the rock.’
‘Yes,’ Sylveste said tartly.
The implications of the TE dating had been enormous. No natural crystalline structure was ever completely perfect in its lattice geometry. There would always be gaps in the lattice where atoms were missing, and in those holes, electrons would gradually build up over time, knocked out of the rest of the lattice by cosmic-ray bombardments and natural radioactivity. Since the holes tended to fill up with electrons at a steady rate, the number of trapped electrons provided a dating method which could be used on inorganic artefacts. There was a catch, of course: the TE method was only useful if the traps had been emptied at some point in the past. Luckily, firing or exposure to light was enough to bleach - empty - the outermost traps in the crystal. TE analysis of the obelisk had shown that all the surface-layer traps had been bleached at the same time, which happened to be nine hundred and ninety thousand years earlier, within the errors of the measurement. Only something like the Event could have bleached an object as large as the obelisk.
There was nothing new in this; thousands of Amarantin artefacts had been dated back to the Event using the same technique. But none of them had been buried deliberately. The obelisk, on the other hand, had been emplaced deliberately in a stone sarcophagus after it had been bleached.
After the Event.
Even in the new regime, this realisation had been enough to draw attention to the obelisk. It had stimulated renewed interest in the inscriptions over the last year. On his own, Sylveste’s interpretation had been sketchy at best, but now what remained of the archaeological community came to his aid. There was a new freedom in Cuvier; Girardieau’s regime had relaxed some of its proscriptions on Amarantin research, even as the True Path opposition grew more fanatical.
Strange allegiances, as Girardieau had said.
‘Once we had an idea of what the obelisk was telling us,’ Girardieau said, ‘we sectioned the whole area and excavated down sixty or seventy metres. We found dozens more of them - all bleached prior to burial, all carrying basically the same inscriptions. It isn’t a record of something that happened in this area at all. It’s a record of something buried here.’
‘Something big,’ Sylveste said. ‘Something they must have planned before the Event - perhaps even buried before it, and then placed the markers afterwards. The last cultural act of a society poised on annihilation. Just how big, Girardieau?’
‘Very.’ And then Girardieau told him how they had surveyed the area first using an array of thumpers: devices for generating ground-penetrating Rayleigh waves, sensitive to the density of buried objects. They’d had to use the largest thumpers, Girardieau said, which meant that the depth of the object had to be at the extreme range of the technique; hundreds of metres down. Later they had brought in the colony’s most sensitive imaging gravitometers, and only then had they gained any idea of what it was they were seeking.
It was nothing small.
‘Is this dig connected with the Inundationist program?’
‘Completely independent. Pure science, in other words. Does that surprise you? I always promised we’d never abandon the Amarantin studies. Maybe if you’d believed me all those years ago we’d be working together now, opposing the True Pathers - the real enemy.’
Sylveste said, ‘You showed no interest in the Amarantin until the obelisk was discovered. But that scared you, didn’t it? Be
cause for once it was incontrovertible evidence; nothing I could have faked or manipulated. For once you had to allow the possibility that I might have been right all along.’
They stepped into a capacious elevator, outfitted with plush seats, Inundationist aquatints on the walls. A thick metal door hummed shut. One of Girardieau’s aides flipped open a panel and palmed a button. The floor fell away sickeningly, their bodies only sluggishly catching up.
‘How far down are we going?’
‘Not far,’ Girardieau said. ‘Only a couple of kilometres.’
When Khouri awakened they had already left orbit around Yellowstone. She could see the planet through a porthole in her quarters, much smaller than it had looked before. The region around Chasm City was a freckle on the surface. The Rust Belt was only a tawny smoke ring, too far away for any of its component structures to be visible. There would be no stopping the ship now: it would accelerate steadily at one gee until it had left the Epsilon Eridani system completely, and it would not stop accelerating until it was moving barely a whisker below the speed of light. It was no accident that they called these vessels lighthuggers.
She had been tricked.
‘It’s a complication,’ the Mademoiselle said, after long minutes of silence. ‘But no more than that.’
Khouri rubbed at the painful lump on her skull where the Komuso - Sajaki was his name, she now knew - had knocked her out with his shakuhachi.
‘What do you mean, a complication?’ she shouted. ‘They’ve kidnapped me, you stupid bitch!’
‘Keep your voice down, dear girl. They don’t know about me now and there’s no reason they have to in the future.’ The entoptic image smiled jaggedly. ‘In fact, I’m probably your best friend right now. You should do your best to safeguard our mutual secret.’ She examined her fingernails. ‘Now, let’s approach this rationally. What was our objective?’
‘You know damn well.’
‘Yes. You were to infiltrate this crew and travel with them to Resurgam. What is now your status?’