Author: Alastair Reynolds
Category: Science
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There had been other surgical procedures, too. Khouri’s body was peppered with shrapnel from her soldiering days, in addition to the almost invisibly healed scars of beam-weapon or projectile impact points. Some of the shrapnel shards lay deep - too deep, it seemed, for the Sky’s Edge medics to retrieve. And for the most part they would have caused her no harm, for they were biologically-inert composites not situated close to any vital organs. But the medics had been sloppy, too. Near the surface, dotted under Khouri’s skin, Volyova found a few shards they really should have removed. She did it for them, examining each in turn before placing it in her lab. All but one of the shards would have caused no problems to her systems; non-metallic composites which could not interfere with the sensitive induction fields of the gunnery’s interface machinery. But she catalogued and stored them anyway. The metal shard she frowned at, cursing the medics’ procedures, and then laid it next to the rest.
That had been messy work, but not nearly as bad as the neural work. For centuries, the commonest forms of implant had either been grown in situ or were designed to self-insert painlessly via existing orifices, but such procedures could not be applied to the unique and delicate gunnery interface implants. The only way to get them in or out was with a bone-saw, scalpel and a lot of mopping up afterwards. It had been doubly awkward because of the routine implants already resting in Khouri’s skull, but after giving them a cursory examination Volyova had seen no reason to remove them. Had she done so, she would sooner or later have had to re-implant very similar devices just so Khouri could function normally beyond the gunnery. The implants had grafted well, and within a day - with Khouri unconscious - Volyova had placed her in the gunnery seat and verified that the ship was able to talk to her implants and vice versa. Further testing had to wait until the loyalty therapies were complete. That would mainly be done while the rest of the crew were asleep.
Caution: that was Volyova’s current watchword. It was incaution that had resulted in the whole unpleasantness with Nagorny.
She would not make that mistake again.
‘Why do I get the idea this is some kind of test?’ Khouri said.
‘It isn’t. It’s just—’ Volyova waved a hand dismissively. ‘Indulge me, will you? It’s not much to ask.’
‘How do I oblige - by claiming to see ghosts?’
‘Not by seeing them, Khouri, no. By hearing them.’
A light was visible now, beyond the black walls of the moving room. Of course, the walls were nothing but glass, and until that moment they had been surrounded only by the unlit metal of the shaft in which the room rested. But now illumination was shining from the shaft’s approaching end. The rest of the short journey took place in silence. The room pushed itself towards the light, until the chill blue luminance was flooding in from all angles. Then the room pushed itself beyond the hull.
Khouri upped from her seat and went to the glass, edging towards it with trepidation. The glass was, of course, hyperdiamond, and there was no danger that it would shatter or that Khouri would stumble and plunge through it. But it looked ridiculously thin and brittle, and the human mind was able to take only so many things on trust. Looking laterally, she would have seen the articulated spider-legs, eight of them, anchoring the room to the exterior hull of the ship. She would have understood why Volyova called this place the spider-room.
‘I don’t know who or what built it,’ Volyova said. ‘My guess is that they installed it when the ship itself was constructed, or when it was due to change hands, assuming anyone could ever afford to buy it. I think this room was a very elaborate ploy for impressing potential clients - hence the general level of luxury.’
‘Someone used it to make a sales pitch?’
‘It makes a kind of sense - assuming one has any need in the first place to actually be outside a vessel like this. If the ship’s under thrust, then any observation pod sent outside also has to match that level of thrust, or else it gets left behind. No problem if that pod’s just a camera system, but as soon as you put people aboard it it gets a lot more complicated; someone actually has to fly the damned thing, or at the very least know how to program the autopilot to do what you want. The spider-room avoids that difficulty by physically attaching itself to the ship. It’s child’s play to operate; just like crawling around on all-eights.’
‘What happens if . . .’
‘It loses its grip? Well, it’s never happened - even if it did, the room has various magnetic and hull-piercing grapples it can deploy; and even if those failed - which they wouldn’t, I assure you - the room can propel itself independently; certainly for long enough to catch up with the ship. And even if that failed . . .’ Volyova paused. ‘Well, if that failed, I’d consider having a word with my deity-of-choice.’
Although Volyova had never taken the room more than a few hundred metres from its exit point on the hull, it would have been possible to crawl all around the ship. Not necessarily wise, however, for at relativistic speed the ship pushed through a blizzard of radiation which was normally screened by the hull insulation. The spider-room’s thin walls only shielded a fraction of the flux, lending the whole exercise of being outside an odd and hazardous glamour.
The spider-room was her little secret; it was absent from the major blueprints, and to the best of her knowledge none of the others knew anything about it at all. In an ideal world, she would have kept it that way, but the problems with the gunnery had forced her into some necessary indiscretions. Even given the state of the ship’s decay, Sajaki’s network of surveillance devices was extensive, leaving the spider-room as one of the few places where Volyova could guarantee absolute privacy when she needed to discuss something sensitive with one of her recruits; something that she did not want the other Triumvirs to know about. She had been forced to reveal the spider-room to Nagorny so that she could talk with him frankly about the Sun Stealer problem, and for months - as his condition deteriorated - she had regretted that decision, always fearful that he would reveal the room’s existence to Sajaki. But she need not have worried. By the end, Nagorny had been far too occupied with his nightmares to indulge in any subtleties of shipboard politick. Now he had taken the secret to his grave and for the time being Volyova had been able to sleep easy, safe in the knowledge that her sanctuary was not about to be betrayed. Perhaps what she was doing now was an error she would later regret - she had certainly sworn to herself not to violate the room’s secrecy again - but as always, current circumstances had forced her to amend an earlier decision. There was something she needed to discuss with Khouri; the ghosts were merely a pretext so that Khouri would not become overly suspicious of Volyova’s deeper motives.
‘I’m not seeing any ghosts yet,’ the recruit said.
‘You’ll see, or rather hear them, shortly,’ Volyova said.
The Triumvir was acting oddly, Khouri thought. More than once she had hinted that this room was her private retreat aboard the ship, and that the others - Sajaki, Hegazi, and the other two women - were not even aware that it existed. It seemed strange indeed that Volyova was prepared to reveal the room to Khouri so soon in their working relationship. Volyova was a solitary, obsessive figure, even aboard a ship crewed by militaristic chimerics - not someone with a natural instinct for trustfulness, Khouri would have thought. Volyova was going through the motions of friendliness towards her, but there was something artificial about all her efforts . . . they were too planned, too lacking in anything resembling spontaneity. When Volyova made some kind of friendly overture to Khouri - a piece of smalltalk, shipboard gossip or a joke - there was always the feeling that Volyova had spent hours rehearsing, hoping she would sound off-the-cuff. Khouri had known people like that in the military; they seemed genuine at first, but they were usually the ones who turned out to be foreign spies or intelligence-gathering stooges from high command. Volyova was doing her best to act casually about the whole spider-room business, but it was obvious to Khouri that the ghost thing was not all that it appeared. A number of d
isquieting thoughts struck Khouri, prime among them the idea that perhaps Volyova had brought her to this room with no intention of her ever leaving . . . alive, anyway.
But that turned out not to be the case.
‘Oh, something I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ Volyova said, breezily. ‘Does the phrase Sun Stealer mean anything to you yet?’
‘No,’ Khouri said. ‘Should it?’
‘Oh; there’s no reason it should - just a question, that’s all. Too tedious to explain why, of course - don’t worry about it, will you?’
She was about as convincing as a Mulch fortune-teller.
‘No,’ Khouri said. ‘I won’t worry, no . . .’ And then added: ‘Why did you say “yet”?’
Volyova cursed inwardly: had she blown it? Perhaps not; she had delivered the question as blithely as she dared, and there was nothing in Khouri’s demeanour to suggest that she had taken it as anything other than a casual enquiry . . . and yet . . . now was emphatically not the time to start making errors.
‘Did I say that?’ she said, hoping to inject the right degree of surprise-mingled-with-indifference into her voice. ‘Slip of the tongue, that’s all.’ Volyova groped for a change of subject, quickly. ‘See that star, the faint red one?’
Now that their eyes had adjusted to the ambient light-levels of interstellar space, with even the blue radiance of the engine exhausts no longer seeming to blot out everything, a few stars were visible.
‘That’s Yellowstone’s sun?’
‘Epsilon Eridani, yes. We’re three weeks beyond the system. Pretty soon you wouldn’t have such an easy time finding it. We’re not moving relativistically now - only a few per cent of light - but we’re accelerating all the time. Soon the visible stars will move, the constellations warping, until all the stars in the sky are bunched ahead and behind us. It’ll be as if we’re poised midway down a tunnel, with light streaming in from either end. The stars will change colour as well. It isn’t simple, since the final colour depends on the spectral type of each star; how much energy it emits in different wavelengths, including the infrared and ultraviolet. But the tendency will be for those stars ahead of us to shift to the blue; those behind us to the red.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be very pretty,’ Khouri said, somewhat spoiling the moment. ‘But I’m not quite sure where the ghosts come into it.’
Volyova smiled. ‘I’d almost forgotten about them. That would have been a shame.’
And then she spoke into her bracelet, vocalising softly so that Khouri would not hear what it was she had to ask the ship.
Voices of the damned filled the chamber.
‘Ghosts,’ Volyova said.
Sylveste hovered in midair above the buried city, bodyless.
The encaging walls rose around him, densely engraved with the equivalent of ten thousand printed volumes of Amarantin writing. Although the graphicforms of the writing were mere millimetres high and he floated hundreds of metres from the wall, he only had to focus on any one part of it for the words to slam into clarity. As he did so, parallel translating algorithms processed the text into something approaching Canasian, while Sylveste’s own quick semi-intuitive thought processes did likewise. More often than not he came to broad agreement with the programs, but occasionally they missed what might have been a crucial, context-dependent subtlety.
Meanwhile in his quarters in Cuvier, he made rapid, cursive notes, filling page after page of writing pad. These days, he favoured pen and paper over modern recording devices where possible. Digital media were too susceptible to later manipulation by his enemies. At least if his notes were pulped they would be lost for ever, rather than returning to haunt him in a guise warped to suit somebody else’s ideology.
He finished translating a particular section, coming to one of the folded-wing glyphs which signified the end of a sequence. He pulled back from the dizzying textual precipice of the wall.
He slipped a blotter into the pad and closed it. By touch he slipped the pad back into a rack and removed the next pad along. He opened it at the page marked by its own blotter, then ran his fingers down the page until he felt the roughness of the ink vanish. Positioning the book exactly parallel with the desk, he stationed the pen at the start of the first new blank line.
‘You’re working too hard,’ Pascale said.
She had entered the room unheard; now he had to visualise her standing at his side - or sitting, whichever was the case.
‘I think I’m getting somewhere,’ Sylveste said.
‘Still banging your head against those old inscriptions?’
‘One of us is beginning to crack.’ He turned his bodyless point of view away from the wall, towards the centre of the enclosed city. ‘Still, I didn’t think it would take this long.’
‘Me neither.’
He knew what she meant. Eighteen months since Nils Girardieau had shown him the buried city; a year since their wedding had been mooted and then put on hold until he had made significant progress on the translating work. Now he was doing exactly that - and it scared him. No more excuses, and she knew it as well as he did.
Why was that such a big problem? Was it only a problem because he chose to classify it as such?
‘You’re frowning again,’ Pascale said. ‘Are you having problems with the inscriptions?’
‘No,’ Sylveste said. ‘They aren’t the problem any more.’ And it was the truth; it was now second nature for him to merge the bimodal streams of Amarantin writing into their implied whole, like a cartographer studying a stereographic image.
‘Let me look.’
He heard her move across the room and address the escritoire, instructing it to open a parallel channel for her sensorium. The console - and, indeed, Sylveste’s whole access to the data-model of the city - had come not long after that first visit. For once the idea had not been Girardieau’s, but something Pascale had initiated. The success of Descent into Darkness, the recently published biography, and the upcoming wedding had increased her leverage over her father, and Sylveste had known better than to argue when she had offered him - literally - the keys to the city.
The wedding was the talk of the colony now. Most of the gossip which reached its way back to Sylveste assumed that the motives were purely political; that Sylveste had courted Pascale as a way of marrying his way back into something close to power; that - seen cynically - the wedding was only a means to an end, and that the end was a colonial expedition to Cerberus/Hades. Perhaps, for the briefest of instants, Sylveste had wondered that himself; wondered if his subconscious had not engineered his love for Pascale with this deeper ambition in mind. Perhaps there was the tiniest grain of truth in that, as well. But from his current standpoint, it was mercifully impossible to tell. He certainly felt as if he loved her - which, as far as he could tell, was the same thing as loving her - but he was not blind to the advantages that the marriage would bring. Now he was publishing again; modest articles based on tiny portions of translated Amarantin text; co-authorship with Pascale; Girardieau himself acknowledged as having assisted in the work. The Sylveste of fifteen years ago would have been appalled, but now he found it hard to stir up much self-disgust. What mattered was that the city was a step towards understanding the Event.
‘I’m here,’ Pascale said - louder now, but just as bodyless as Sylveste. ‘Are we sharing the same point of view?’
‘What are you seeing?’
‘The spire; the temple - whatever you call it.’
‘That’s right.’
The temple was at the geometric centre of the quarter-scale city, shaped like the upper third of an egg. Its topmost point extended upwards, becoming a spiriform tower which ascended - narrowing as it did - towards the roof of the city chamber. The buildings around the temple had the fused look of weaver-bird nests; perhaps the expression of some submerged evolutionary imperative. They huddled like misshapen orisons before the vast central spire which curled from the temple.
‘Something bothering you about this?
’
He envied her. Pascale had visited the real city dozens of times. She had even climbed the spire on foot, following the gulletlike spiral passage which wound up its height.
‘The figure on the spire? It doesn’t fit.’
It looked like a small, daintily carved figurine by comparison with the rest of the city, but was still ten or fifteen metres tall, comparable to the Egyptian figures in the Temple of Kings. The buried city was built to an approximate quarter-scale, based on comparisons with other digs. The full-size counterpart of the spire figure would have been at least forty metres tall. But if this city had ever existed on the surface, it would have been lucky to survive the firestorms of the Event, let alone the subsequent nine hundred and ninety thousand years of planetary weathering, glaciation, meteorite impacts and tectonics.
‘Doesn’t fit?’
‘It isn’t Amarantin - at least not any kind I’ve ever seen.’
‘Some kind of deity, then?’
‘Maybe. But I don’t understand why they’ve given it wings.’
‘Ah. And this is problematic?’
‘Take a look around the city wall if you don’t believe me.’
‘Better lead me there, Dan.’
Their twin points of view curved away from the spire, dropping down dizzyingly.
Volyova watched the effect the voices had on Khouri, certain that somewhere in Khouri’s armour of self-assurance was a chink of fearful doubt - the thought that maybe these really were ghosts after all, and that Volyova had found a way to tune into their phantom emanations.