Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘We shall verify,’ Lady Arek declared, nodding slightly. ‘I do not doubt your essential account, Hourglass. You will have conducted the necessary biometric audits: you are nothing if not thorough. But there will be no harm in verification, using our independent genetic samples.’

  ‘They will establish consanguinity.’

  ‘They will have to, because no other outcome is tolerable.’

  Pinky sidled even closer. He was measuring me up as if I were some dusty artefact left over at the end of an auction, something no one wanted. ‘Not sure what I want to believe less. That he’s an impostor who’s hoodwinked us all. Or that he really is the old man’s brother.’

  Lady Arek looked down at her companion. ‘Why would you not want to credit the latter?’

  ‘Because if those blood checks of yours prove reliable, we’re really fucked.’

  Lady Arek looked a little disconcerted by this outburst. ‘How so, Pinky?’

  ‘Look at the evidence. He might be cut from the same cloth as the old man. But the way he’s standing there, shivering in his boots, letting Glass push him around like a sack of old meat . . . can’t even find the balls to speak for himself?’ He dismissed me. ‘He’s nothing.’

  ‘He is all we have,’ Lady Arek said.

  ‘I am . . . Miguel de Ruyter,’ I said, forcing out each word like a hard, jagged stone. ‘That’s what I know. All I know. I didn’t ask for this, and I don’t know the man you seem to think was my brother.’ But, needled by the pig’s assessment of me, I plumped my chest out and jutted my chin forward. ‘But that’s your problem, not mine. My business begins and ends with Glass.’

  ‘Ooh, tough guy,’ Pinky said. ‘And the nature of that business?’

  ‘Killing her,’ I said.

  Glass made a dismissive sniffing sound. Pinky turned away, sneering his disregard. Snowdrop was silent. The guards, Cater and Omori, brooded. Only Lady Arek said: ‘And what if she is too valuable to be allowed to die, Clavain?’

  I frowned. The eyes were as sharp and cold as ever, but some of their effect was attenuating through exposure. I thought of the men who developed an increased tolerance for snake venom, through being bitten repeatedly.

  ‘You called her Hourglass just now. That wasn’t a slip.’

  ‘The name reflects her nature,’ Lady Arek answered crisply. ‘Like me, she is a Demi-Conjoiner. ‘

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You know of Conjoiners, if only from second-hand intelligence. Demi-Conjoiners have all the usual gifts of their kind, but few of the restraints. We are none of us alike. Some of us came about by design, some by happenstance.’

  ‘And what of Glass?’

  ‘They found her, grievously injured, left for dead by her own supposed allies during a compromised military operation. With grace and kindness – and not a little self-interest – the Conjoiners took her into their compound and rebuilt her broken mind using experimental techniques. Since she was essentially a new person at that point, with only the thinnest threads still binding her to the past, they gave her a new name. It was not uncommon among Conjoiners to adopt forms relating to timepieces, or components thereof. Clepsydra. Remontoire. Hourglass. That is her true name. But she prefers the shortened form, imagining it distances her from her origin and nature.’

  I looked at Glass. ‘Is this true? After everything, you’re a Conjoiner?’

  ‘I am no more a Conjoiner than Lady Arek is,’ Glass replied. ‘Their methods touched us. I was useful to them, once. But that doesn’t make me one of them.’

  ‘You travel alone,’ I acknowledged. ‘Unusual for a Conjoiner, from what I’ve gathered. They can’t handle isolation from their brothers and sisters. It’s worse than any sensory deprivation we can imagine.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Lady Arek said. ‘But you are correct about Hourglass: she is different, as am I. Better to think of her as an engineered instrument, a military tool. She was designed to act independently of the mother nest, without the neural support framework of other Conjoiners. A sociopath, by their standards. But useful, in certain situations. They needed an assassin: an agent of death. She became the very personification. Her name: Death’s timekeeper. Her ship: Death’s implement. The hourglass in her hand, her scythe by her side, the Mistress Death leads them on. Even her face: skull-pale, a mask that both conceals and illuminates her nature. She is a work of art as much as a weapon.’

  ‘And you?’ I asked, feeling an unexpected bristling protectiveness towards my captor, the very woman I had sworn to kill. I hated Glass, but I hated hearing her belittled even more. ‘You’re better, are you?’

  ‘I contain multitudes,’ Lady Arek said. ‘Hourglass is defined by her Conjoinerhood. For me, it is merely a facet.’ But she dipped her face, some tiny increment of severity dropping away from it. ‘Hourglass has been effective, in the long run. You are testament to that. And we still have need of her. You will not hurt her, Clavain, nor attempt to. You are useful to me as well, but not irreplaceable.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, forcing a smile. ‘Now that we’ve got the warm civilities out of the way . . .’

  Lady Arek met my remark with indifference. ‘Have you immediate needs, after your journey?’

  ‘I don’t even know what you want with me, or what Glass has already done. She mentioned stones. Gideon stones, whatever the hell they are.’

  ‘She hasn’t told you?’

  ‘I told him as little as he needed,’ Glass said. ‘There was no point dwelling on the significance of the stones until I had confirmation that they were in our possession.’ Some boldness returned to her. ‘Are they, Lady Arek? You’ve had six years. Tell me you haven’t been sitting around doing nothing all that time.’

  Pinky dipped a stubby finger into what remained of his ear. ‘This is where it gets complicated, boys and girls.’

  Snowdrop moved nearer to his side. She reached for his hand, touching it for an instant.

  ‘Have you, or haven’t you, secured the stones?’ Glass persisted.

  ‘Secured is an elastic concept,’ Lady Arek returned. ‘The stones have been extracted from the wreck at the bottom of the chasm. Nine in all: sufficient for our needs.’

  ‘What wreck?’ I asked.

  ‘Someone please enlighten him,’ Lady Arek said, touching a hand to her brow as if she might swoon from exasperation.

  Glass angled the white mask of her face to mine. Her black eyes swam in pools of deeper blackness. The Mistress Death. Something was battling within her. She enjoyed enlightening me about anything. But she did not enjoy being given orders by the effortlessly superior Lady Arek.

  ‘An alien vehicle lodged itself at the base of the chasm millions of years ago. For years, before the wolves came, it was an open secret among some of the factions within the city. They even extracted the occupant of this vehicle, and coerced it into . . . well, that’s another story. But the technology remained buried under hard-packed rubble and the enormous pressure and toxicity of the chasm’s base. Hard to reach, harder to extract. No one managed it in all the living years of the city.’ She cocked her head at the other woman. ‘But Lady Arek arrived with the tools and the expertise. She was meant to obtain armouring devices, the so-called Gideon stones, for the purposes of our larger mission.’

  ‘Did she?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, did she?’ Glass echoed.

  ‘I said nine have been extracted. That is not to say that nine are in our immediate possession.’ Lady Arek regarded my captor, the Demi-Conjoiner about whom I now knew a tiny bit more. ‘We have one. You shall be shown it.’

  ‘One?’ Glass queried.

  ‘I believe my diction was clear enough.’

  Glass nodded, accepting this news as a teacher might accept a poor excuse for late homework. For the first time I had a sense of the balance shifting between these two antagonistic allies, Glass seeing her chance to press a temporary advantage. ‘And the other eight? You’re going to tell me where they are?’

  ‘In C
hasm City, or the ruins thereof.’

  Glass made an impatient snapping gesture with her fingers. ‘Give me the location. Scythe is atmosphere-capable and still has a full weapons load.’

  ‘If it were that easy, Hourglass, if it were a question of mere brutality, do you not imagine we would have already secured the remaining eight?’ Lady Arek breathed in through her nostrils. ‘There is a difficulty.’

  ‘What kind?’ I asked.

  ‘Me,’ said Pinky, spreading his arms magnanimously. ‘I’m the sticking point. I’m the reason she doesn’t have the other eight stones. And you want to know why?’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘It’s because she likes me too much. Somewhere beneath that scary born-in-a-neutron-star space-goddess exterior there is actually a beating human heart.’

  ‘I won’t send him to die,’ Lady Arek said. ‘Not for eight stones. Not for any stones.’

  ‘Damned right no one sends him to die,’ Snowdrop said, and closed her hand around his again.

  Snowdrop was charged with showing us to our rooms. Even Glass accepted the wisdom of this arrangement, since it was far too much fuss to keep coming and going from Scythe without good reason. Besides, there were many rooms, and (as I discovered) they were surprisingly well appointed.

  ‘We didn’t furnish them,’ Snowdrop said, keen to make this point as we were led through tunnels. ‘This rock is much as we found it, except for the extra security arrangements we put in around the lock. Lady Arek mentioned that this place might have been illicit.’ The hood was pushed all the way back now, allowing her hair to spill down onto her gown and shoulders in loose, colourless strands. ‘I think she’s right. It was a gaming arena, built around a central core where various contests could be held.’

  ‘The grey space beyond the windows in Overlook?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, and I’ll show you a little more of it after you’ve settled in. We’ll eat later, and then you’ll probably want to rest. Tomorrow, I’ll give you the tour.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  She looked at me doubtfully. ‘Really? It’s a miserable, fog-filled rock floating in space. Provided I could take Pinky with me, there are about a million places I’d sooner be than here.’

  ‘You forget that for the last few decades I’ve seen almost nothing but the caves of Sun Hollow. A change of scenery . . . any scenery . . . it reminds us of what we’ve lost, and what we’ve still to lose, if we’re not careful.’ I stroked my fingers against the rough-hewn wall, thinking of the fingers that had gone before my own. ‘This place only existed because there was a society beyond it, a civilisation of people and other worlds. The mere fact of it is something marvellous.’

  Snowdrop made an equivocal noise. ‘It’s been useful to us, that I won’t deny. But what they got up to in here wasn’t very nice.’

  ‘I suppose you have some idea of what it was for?’

  ‘There are some giveaways. The inner core, the arena, is very well shielded in addition to the precautions built into the rock as a whole. We think various sports took place there, and the rooms were for the spectators and bidders. It seems likely that some of the wealthy came with champions of their own: sponsored talent. Highly augmented warriors, with a high degree of cybernetic enhancement. Pampered prize fighters – willing participants, to an extent.’

  Glass said: ‘But not all of them?’

  ‘From the evidence we’ve gleaned, it seems that, on occasion, having a willing participant wasn’t enough to keep the spectators engaged. So they spiced things up by bringing in an outsider.’

  I asked: ‘An unwilling participant?’

  ‘We can only speculate. What is clear is that the shielding in that arena would have been very hard for a distress signal to penetrate, even one sent by a Demarchist, Conjoiner, Ultra or Skyjack. No neural alerts would have got through it. And the challenges that were deployed against these champions . . . again, what we’ve seen of them point to a deliberate attempt to design weapons and traps that are inimical to those with a high degree of cybernetic augmentation. Neural weapons. Nanotechnic weapons. Things that would have made the Melding Plague look like an itch. We think they captured these poor souls, then let them loose in the core while laying bets on how long they’d last.’

  I shook my head. ‘Just when I think I’ve imagined everything people can do to each other.’

  ‘Wait until you hear about the Swinehouse,’ Snowdrop said.

  I thought back to the conversation in the Overlook. ‘Is that something to do with Pinky?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘I don’t think he really took to me.’

  ‘See it from his side. He was with the old man when he died. The old man trusted him with everything, including being the hand that wielded the blade that killed him. He looked up to him when the old man was alive, and tried to walk in his shoes when he was gone. Hard, for a hyperpig. And now you show up in the old man’s place.’

  I did not know whether to agree or disagree. ‘If it’s any consolation, I’m not trying to measure up to any man Pinky may have known. I don’t even claim to be that man’s brother! Glass and Lady Arek can say what they like. I know my past.’

  ‘You know what you think you know,’ Snowdrop cautioned. We had arrived somewhere: a pair of adjoining rooms. Glass in one, me in the other. ‘We still need to run those genetic verifications. They kept back tissue samples from the old man. Probably Rose will be coming down shortly.’

  ‘You’re not even sure if she’s coming down or not?’ Glass asked, plainly resentful that her word alone was not being trusted with regards to my identity.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Snowdrop said.

  It might have been two hundred years since the room last hosted a paying spectator. Nothing about the furnishings, though, suggested any comparable passage of time. Everything was clean, and neither scuffed, faded nor stained. The floors and walls were fleeced in grey and ruby, all other surfaces mirrored (and probably reconfigurable, if I had the means to control them) and the bed was enormous. So were armchairs, settees, cabinets and writing desks. They were decorated with inlaid designs showing various exemplars of athletic prowess, martial combat, bloody dismemberment and death. A bathroom as large as my entire office in Sun Hollow, tiled in shades of scarlet and bone and with vein-and-artery drainage runnels worked into the floor. Power, light and warmth. And all of these amenities to satisfy the tastes of men and women who (I was ready to believe) gladly collaborated in murder for sport. The only grace was that they were all almost certainly dead, and had probably perished in the same orbital firestorms that had turned ten thousand habitats to ash. I hoped their fun and games had been worth it.

  If the room allowed me to sleep and wash, it was enough. The rest of it I could ignore. I was clean enough, despite Pinky’s protestations, and far too confused and anxious for sleep to be an option. But I was hungry, and curious, and wondering when either might be sated.

  There was a knock at the door, followed immediately by the door’s opening. A human woman came into the room, pushing a trolley. I sat down on the bed, watching her as she propelled the trolley softly and silently across the grey fleece.

  ‘Are you Rose?’

  ‘No. Why would you think I was?’

  ‘Glass said that Rose was probably coming down to see me.’

  ‘That’s not what she said, no and no. Yes. She would have said Probably Rose is coming to see you.’

  ‘Then you are . . . Probably Rose.’ I nodded, as if all this made instant sense. ‘Of course. How silly of me to have called you by completely the wrong name.’

  She was middle-aged, by my reckoning, with a narrow chin, pointed nose and a lick of black hair combed across her brow. In place of her left eye there was a pattern of star-shaped stitches, drawing her skin drum-tight over an underlying emptiness. She wore an austere grey outfit of tunic and trousers, with her hands gloved. She wheeled the trolley to my side and whisked away a green covering, revealing racks of medical equipment a
nd drugs, nothing of which I had seen before but nothing of which looked entirely alien and unfamiliar.

  ‘Roll up your sleeve.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So we can tell who you are, yes.’

  ‘I know who I am,’ I said patiently, as Probably Rose prepared a syringe, her hands shaking more than I might have expected. ‘Nothing you can do or say will change it.’

  She lifted the syringe up to her eye, the needle wavering perilously close.

  ‘They don’t care.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I’m saying, yes, they don’t care what you think you are, so long as, yes, they know, yes and verily, that you are what they think you are, yes and yes.’ Still holding the syringe, she used her other hand to slap the side of her head palm first, not violently, but in the form of some mild personal chastisement. ‘Yes and verily! Yes, yes! Your sleeve.’

  I rolled up my sleeve.

  ‘Why wouldn’t they care?’

  ‘Because, yes, you’re useful to them regardless of what you think you are. Yes and verily!’ Curiously, her hand became steadier as she advanced the needle towards my arm. She drew a small quantity of blood, efficiently and nearly painlessly, and then injected the syringe’s contents into some kind of analysis device on the trolley. Machinery hummed and whirred, a centrifugal separator making the trolley wobble and the other items on it clink together. ‘But you will remember, yes. You’re the one, yes. Yes, yes and yes.’ A string of lights was appearing on the analysis device, illuminating it from left to right. ‘See it, yes? Genetic correlation. Clavain left samples on Ararat. Close familial cross-match. Definitely you.’

  ‘I’m not . . .’

  Probably Rose took a tissue scraping from inside my mouth ‘Almost redundant. High statistical significance from the blood alone. But blood can be swapped, so need to be sure, yes and yes.’ Her hands were again shaking as she dipped the sample into another analysis receptacle, but they had been steady enough when she was extracting the tissue. ‘From this, just this alone, yes, high likelihood you were born on Earth, Northern Europe, natural conception and parental gene mixing, early-mid twenty-second. Which would make you . . . yes, seven hundred years old, calendrical, yes and verily.’