Author: Alastair Reynolds
Category: Science
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Over the weeks, Khouri had considered and discarded numerous theories, without coming close to anything that sounded plausible. It was not the military side of the ship’s nature that troubled her, of course. She had been born to war; war was her natural environment, and while she was ready to consider the possibility that there were other, more benign states of being, there was nothing about war that felt alien to her. But, she had to admit, the kinds of wars which she had known on Sky’s Edge were hardly comparable to any of the scenarios in which the cache-weapons might be used. Though Sky’s Edge had remained linked to the interstellar trade network, the average technological level of the combatants in the surface battles had been centuries behind the Ultras who sometimes parked their ships in orbit. A campaign could be won just by one side gaining one item of Ultra weaponry . . . but those items had always been scarce; sometimes too valuable even to use. Even nukes had been deployed only a few times in the colony’s history, and never in Khouri’s lifetime. She had seen some vile things - things that still haunted her - but she had never seen anything capable of instant, genocidal death. Volyova’s cache-weapons were much worse than that.
And perhaps they had been used, once or twice. Volyova had said as much - pirate operations, perhaps. There were plenty of thinly populated systems, only loosely connected to the trade nets, where it would be entirely possible to exterminate an enemy without anyone ever finding out. And some of those enemies might be as amoral as any of Sajaki’s crew; their pasts littered with acts of random atrocity. So, yes, it was quite likely that parts of the cache had been tested. But Khouri suspected that this would only have ever been a means to an end; self-preservation, or tactical strikes against enemies with resources they needed. The heavier cache-weapons would not have been tested. What they eventually planned to do with the cache - how they planned to discharge the world-wrecking power they possessed - was not yet clear, perhaps not even to Sajaki. And perhaps Sajaki was not the man in whom the ultimate power lay vested. Perhaps, in some way, Sajaki was still serving Captain Brannigan.
Whoever the mysterious Brannigan was.
‘Welcome to the gunnery,’ Volyova said.
They had arrived somewhere near the middle of the ship. Volyova had opened a hole in the ceiling, folded down a telescopic ladder and beckoned Khouri to climb its sharp-edged rungs.
Her head was poking into a large spherical room full of curved, jointed machinery. At the centre of this halo of bluish-silver was a rectilinear hooded black seat, festooned with machinery and a seemingly random tangle of cables. The seat was fixed within a series of elegant gyroscopic axes, arranged so that its motion would be independent of that of the ship. The cables passed into sliding armatures which transmitted power between each concentric shell, before the final thigh-thick clump dove into the machinery-clotted spherical wall of the room. The room reeked of ozone.
There was nothing in the gunnery which looked much newer than a few hundred years old, and plenty that looked as if it had been around for considerably longer. All of it, though, had been scrupulously cared for.
‘This is what it’s all been building up to, isn’t it?’ Khouri pushed herself through the trapdoor into the heart of the chamber, slithering between the curved skeletal shells until she reached the seat. Massive as it was, it seemed to beckon to her with promises of comfort and security. She could not stop herself from sliding into it, letting its cumbersome black bulk softly encase her with a whir of buried servomechanisms.
‘How does it feel?’
‘Like I’ve been here before,’ she said wonderingly, voice distorted by the bulk of the studded black helmet which had slid over her head.
‘You have,’ Volyova answered. ‘Before you were properly conscious. Besides, the gunnery implant in your head already knows its way around here - that’s where half the sense of familiarity comes from.’
What Volyova said was true. Khouri felt as if the chair were some familiar piece of furniture she had grown up around, its every wrinkle and scratch known to her. She already felt powerfully relaxed and calm, and the urge to actually do something - to use the power that the chair bestowed on her - was building by the second.
‘I can control the cache-weapons from here?’
‘That’s the intention,’ Volyova said. ‘But not just the cache, of course. You’ll also be directing every other major weapon system aboard the Infinity - with as much fluency as if these instruments were simply extensions of your own anatomy. When you’re fully subsumed by the gunnery, that’s how it’ll feel - your own body image swelling out to take in the ship itself.’
Khouri had already begun to feel something similar; the sense at least that her body was blurring into the chair. Tantalising as it was, she had no wish for the sense of subsumption to continue any further. With a conscious effort she eased herself from the chair, its enfolding panels whirring aside to release her.
‘I’m not sure I like this,’ the Mademoiselle said.
SEVEN
En Route to Delta Pavonis, 2546
Never quite forgetting that she was aboard a ship (it was the ever-so-slightly irregular pattern of the induced gravity, caused by tiny imbalances in the thrust stream, which in turn reflected mysterious quantum capriciousness in the bowels of the Conjoiner drives) Volyova entered the green seclusion of the glade alone and hesitated at the top of the rustic staircase which led down to the grass. If Sajaki was aware of her presence, he chose not to show it, kneeling silently and motionlessly next to the gnarled tree stump which was their informal meeting place. But he undoubtedly sensed her. Volyova knew that Sajaki had visited the Pattern Jugglers on the aquatic world Wintersea, accompanying Captain Brannigan, back when Captain Brannigan was capable of leaving the ship. She did not know what the purpose of that trip had been - for either of them - but there had been rumours that the Pattern Jugglers had tampered with his neocortex, embossing neural patterns which configured an unusual degree of spatial awareness: the ability to think in four or five dimensions. The patterns had been the rarest kind of Juggler transform: one that lingered.
Volyova ambled down the staircase and allowed her foot to creak on the lowest tread. Sajaki turned to regard her with no visible hint of surprise.
‘Something up?’ he asked, reading her expression.
‘It concerns the stavlennik,’ she said, momentarily lapsing back into Russish. ‘The protégée, I mean.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Sajaki said absently. He wore an ash-grey kimono, damp grass darkening his knees to olive-black. His Komuso’s shakuhachi rested on the stump’s mirror-smooth, elbow-polished surface. He and Volyova were now the only two crewmembers yet to enter reefersleep, two months out from Yellowstone.
‘She’s one of us now,’ Volyova said, kneeling opposite him. ‘The core of her indoctrination is complete.’
‘I welcome this news.’
Across the glade a macaw screeched, then left its perch in a flurry of clashing primary colours. ‘We can introduce her to Captain Brannigan.’
‘No time like the present,’ Sajaki said, smoothing a wrinkle from his kimono. ‘Or do you have second thoughts?’
‘About meeting the Captain?’ She clucked nervously. ‘None at all.’
‘Then it’s deeper than that.’
‘What?’
‘Whatever’s on your mind, Ilia. Come on. Spit it out.’
‘It’s Khouri. I’m no longer willing to risk her suffering the same kind of psychotic episodes as Nagorny.’ She stopped, expecting - hoping, even - for some response from Sajaki. But instead all she got was the white-noise of the waterfall, and a total absence of expression on her crewmate’s face. ‘What I mean,’ she continued - almost stammering with her own uncertainty - ‘is that I’m no longer sure she’s a suitable subject at this stage.’
‘At this stage?’ Sajaki spoke so softly she largely read his lips.
‘I mean, to go into the gunnery immediately after Nagorny. It’s too dangerous, and I think Khouri is too valuabl
e to risk.’ She stopped, swallowed, and drew breath into her lungs for what she knew would be the hardest thing to say. ‘I think we need another recruit - someone less gifted. With an intermediate recruit I can iron out the remaining wrinkles before going ahead with Khouri as primary candidate.’
Sajaki picked up his shakuhachi and sighted along it thoughtfully. There was a little raised burr at the end of the bamboo, perhaps from the time when he had used the stick on Khouri. He rubbed it with his thumb, smoothing it back down.
When he spoke, it was with a calm so total that it was worse than any possible display of anger.
‘You’re suggesting we look for another recruit?’
He made it sound as if what she was proposing was easily the most absurd, deranged thing he had ever heard uttered.
‘Only in the interim,’ she said, aware that she was speaking too quickly, hating herself for it, despising her sudden deference to the man. ‘Just until everything’s stable. Then we can use Khouri.’
Sajaki nodded. ‘Well, that sounds sensible. Goodness knows why we didn’t think of it earlier, but I suppose we had other things on our minds.’ He put down the shakuhachi, although his hand did not stray far from its hollow shaft. ‘But that can’t be helped. What we have to do now is find ourselves another recruit. Shouldn’t be too hard, should it? I mean, we hardly taxed ourselves recruiting Khouri. Admittedly we’re two months into interstellar space and our next port of call is a virtually unheard-of outpost - but I don’t envisage any great problem in finding another subject. I expect we’ll have to turn them away in droves, don’t you?’
‘Be reasonable,’ she said.
‘In what sense am I being anything other than reasonable, Triumvir?’
A moment ago she had been scared; now she was angry. ‘You haven’t been the same, Yuuji-san. Not since . . .’
‘Not since what?’
‘Not since you and the Captain visited the Jugglers. What happened there, Yuuji? What did the aliens do to your head?’
He looked at her oddly, as if the question were a perfectly valid one which it had never struck him to ask himself. It was, fatefully, a ruse. Sajaki moved quickly with the shakuhachi, so that all Volyova really saw was a teak-coloured blur in the air. The blow was relatively soft - Sajaki must have pulled at the last moment - but, gashing into her side, it was still sufficient to send her sprawling into the grass. For the first instant, it was not the pain or the shock of being attacked by Sajaki that overwhelmed her, but the prickly cold wetness of the grass brushing against her nostrils.
He stepped casually round the stump.
‘You’re always asking too many questions,’ Sajaki said, and then drew something from his kimono that might have been a syringe.
Nekhebet Isthmus, Resurgam, 2566
Sylveste reached anxiously into his pocket, feeling for the vial which he felt sure would be missing.
He touched it; a minor miracle.
Down below, dignitaries were filing into the Amarantin city, moving slowly towards the temple at the city’s heart. Snatches of their conversation reached him with perfect clarity, though never long enough for him to hear more than a few words. He was hundreds of metres above them, on the human-installed balustrade which had been grafted to the black wall of the city-englobing egg.
It was his wedding day.
He had seen the temple in simulations many times, but it had been so long since he had actually visited the place that he had forgotten how overpowering its size could be. That was one of the odd, persistent defects of simulations: no matter how precise they became, the participant remained aware that they were not reality. Sylveste had stood beneath the roof of the Amarantin spire-temple, gazing up to where the angled stone arches intersected hundreds of metres above, and had felt not the slightest hint of vertigo, or fear that the age-old structure would choose that moment to collapse upon him. But now - visiting the buried city for only the second time in person - he felt a withering sense of his own smallness. The egg in which it was encased was itself uncomfortably large, but that at least was the product of a recognisably mature technology - even if the Inundationists elected to ignore the fact. The city which rested within, on the other hand, looked more like the product of some fifteenth-century fever-dream fantasist, not least because of the fabulous winged figure which rested atop the temple spire. And all of it - the more he looked - seemed to exist only to celebrate the return of the Banished Ones.
None of it made sense. But at least it forced his mind off the ceremony ahead.
The more he looked, the more he realised - against his first impression - that the winged thing really was an Amarantin, or, more accurately, a kind of hybrid Amarantin/angel, sculpted by an artist with a deep and scholarly understanding of what the possessing of wings would actually entail. Seen without his eyes’ zoom facility, the statue was cruciform, shockingly so. Enlarged, the cruciform shape became a perched Amarantin with glorious, outspread wings. The wings were metalled in different colours, each small trailing feather sparkling with a slightly different hue. Like the human representation of an angel, the wings did not simply replace the creature’s arms, but were a third pair of limbs in their own right.
But the statue seemed more real than any representation of an angel Sylveste had ever seen in human art. It appeared - the thought seemed absurd - anatomically correct. The sculptor had not just grafted the wings onto the basic Amarantin form, but had subtly re-engineered the creature’s underlying physique. The manipulatory forelimbs had been moved slightly lower down the torso, elongated to compensate. The chest of the torso swelled much wider than the norm, dominated by a yokelike skeletal/ muscular form around the creature’s shoulder area. From this yoke sprouted the wing, forming a roughly triangular shape, kitelike. The creature’s neck was longer than normal, and the head seemed even more streamlined and avian in profile. The eyes still faced forwards - though like all Amarantin, its binocular vision was limited - but were set into deep, grooved bone channels. The creature’s upper mandible nostril parts were flared and rilled, as if to draw the extra air into the lungs required for the beating of the wings. And yet not everything was right. Assuming that the creature’s body was approximately similar in mass to the Amarantin norm, even those wings would have been pitifully inadequate for the task of flying. So what were they - some kind of gross ornamentation? Had the Banished Ones gone in for radical bioengineering, only to burden themselves with wings of ridiculous impracticality?
Or had there been another purpose?
‘Second thoughts?’
Sylveste was jolted suddenly from his contemplation.
‘You still don’t think this is a good idea, do you?’
He turned around from the balustrade which looked across the city.
‘It’s a little late to voice my objections, I think.’
‘On your wedding day?’ Girardieau smiled. ‘Well, you’re not home and dry yet, Dan. You could always back out.’
‘How would you take that?’
‘Very badly indeed, I suspect.’
Girardieau was dressed in starched city finery, cheeks lightly rouged for the attendant swarms of float-cams. He took Sylveste by the forearm and led him away from the edge.
‘How long have we been friends, Dan?’
‘I wouldn’t exactly call it friendship; more a kind of mutual parasitism.’
‘Oh come on,’ Girardieau said, looking disappointed. ‘Have I made your life any more of a misery these last twenty years than was strictly necessary? Do you think I took any great pleasure in locking you away?’
‘Let’s say you approached the task with no little enthusiasm.’
‘Only because I had your best interests at heart.’ They stepped off the balcony into one of the low tunnels which threaded the black shell around the city. Cushioned flooring absorbed their footsteps. ‘Besides,’ Girardieau continued, ‘if it wasn’t transparently obvious, Dan, there was something of a feeding frenzy at the time. If I hadn’t put
you in custody, some mob would eventually have taken out their anger on you.’
Sylveste listened without speaking. He knew much of what Girardieau said was true on a theoretical level, but that there was no guarantee that it reflected the man’s actual motives at the time.
‘The political situation at the time was much simpler. Back then we didn’t have True Path making trouble.’ They reached an elevator shaft and entered the carriage, its interior antiseptically clean and new. Prints hung on the wall, showing various Resurgam vistas before and after the Inundationist transformations. There was even one of Mantell. The mesa in which the research outpost was embedded was draped in foliage, a waterfall running off the top, blue, cloud-streaked skies beyond it. In Cuvier, there was a whole sub-industry devoted to creating images and simulations of the future Resurgam, ranging from water-colour artists to skilled sensorium designers.
‘And on the other hand,’ Girardieau said, ‘there are radical scientific elements coming out of the woodwork. Only last week, one of True Path’s representatives was shot dead in Mantell, and believe me, it wasn’t one of our agents who did it.’
Sylveste felt the carriage begin to convey them down, towards the city level.