Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘There is something,’ Lady Arek said, after thirteen hours of steadily refining our models and watching a faint but suggestive signal begin to rise from the noise background.

  ‘I thought so, but I didn’t want to pre-empt your judgement.’

  The localisation trace was hardly a bullseye: all it did was point to a density anomaly at a certain latitude, longitude and depth, with an error margin still taking up about six per cent of Charybdis’s surface area. But I had kept some missiles in reserve so that the acoustic net could be tightened.

  Was it real, or just a phantom of atmospheric physics? We would find out soon enough, once the missiles had repositioned. But if it was not the thing we sought then our remaining search options were rather limited. Faith won’t make it so, Lady Arek had said. But faith was starting to look like the last thing left in our arsenal.

  While we waited for the acoustic search to recommence, we busied ourselves with the final checks on the hypometric device.

  ‘How does it look to your eye?’

  ‘Perfectly hideous and terrifying, Warglass. It is perfectly wrong, by all that is sane. Perfectly perverse. Which is as it should be.’

  ‘Remind me to find another two travelling companions, if I ever get the chance,’ Pinky said.

  We were floating in vacuum suits, drifting through the narrow space between the outermost parts of the device and the bulb-shaped cavity that the ship had opened within itself. The device filled nearly the entire volume, fifteen metres across and twenty from end to end. No part of it looked like anything it was wise to be nearby, even before it had started to function. It was inert now, but as the light of our suits played across its numerous blade-like elements it was impossible to escape a sense of slow, slithering motion, as of a great coiled monster rousing from dormancy. Glass had made this device, or at least given permission for it to be birthed within her ship, but I was its inheritor and I was not so sure that I liked it.

  ‘Hypometric technology doesn’t belong to us,’ Lady Arek said. ‘It’s a fire that we stole – a fire that we haven’t earned, a fire that may yet scald us.’

  ‘Maybe have a word with the one who gave it to us,’ Pinky said.

  Lady Arek pressed on. ‘It served us temporarily, but we were never its master. I do not regret the means by which it came into our possession, nor that I was a conduit for that knowledge. Perhaps, without the advantages it gave us, we would not have reached the point where we have the means to go beyond it. But I hardly dare speculate what that stranger fire will do. I ask myself: are we right to do this, after all?’

  ‘Let me mull it over,’ Pinky said. ‘Extinction, or . . . not extinction? You know, call me rash, but I’m going with the not extinction option. And after all the shit we’ve been through, I think you should as well.’

  ‘My doubts were silent until this moment. But now that we have reached the cusp, now that the final step is upon us . . . I feel as if we are about to commit some grave, irrevocable act of harm against the universe itself. An act that may leave us wondering if extinction were not the better path after all. There may be stigmas we can never erase: a psychic stain on the conscience of a civilisation.’

  Pinky swept his arms magnanimously. ‘Then let it be all on me. My conscience is grubby enough as it is; a few more blemishes won’t show.’

  ‘My concerns are more pragmatic,’ I said. ‘Will it work? Will it accept the construction schedules for the Incantor, or spit them back at us? We’ve done the best we can, but is that enough? We’re off the map now. Frankly, we’re off all maps. The tests have only proved so much. We won’t know if it even functions as a hypometric device until we turn it on, and that still won’t be any guarantee that it’ll behave once we start asking it to work for us.’

  ‘I suspect,’ Lady Arek said, ‘that if something were to go wrong, we would make quite a pretty spectacle. My only regret would be not being around to witness the consequences our own magnificent folly. But at least we would have tried.’

  ‘It’s not going to get any less scary the more we look at it,’ Pinky said. ‘Start the damned thing rolling, I say.’

  ‘The readiness checks are all complete,’ Lady Arek said. ‘The order to commence spin-up may be issued at any time, by any one of us. Our command pathways are neurally addressed, Pinky, but I reserved a voice-only channel for you, just in case.’

  ‘What’s the word?’

  ‘Two words. Among equals.’

  Pinky drifted for a few seconds. ‘You’ve said them, but nothing’s begun.’

  ‘The words are for you alone. If you would rather some other ones, they may be arranged. But I thought they might be fitting. We would not have reached this point without you, but I do not always think you grasp how much we have depended on you. A tripod is a very stable structure, but if one leg is weaker than the others, it collapses.’

  ‘The words’ll do,’ Pinky said grudgingly, as bad at taking praise as he was at accepting criticism. ‘But I don’t suppose we want to be inside this room when baby wakes up.’

  ‘Spin-up will not be a rapid process. Besides, would it not be a shame to deny ourselves a little harmless spectacle, this late in the game?’

  ‘Fun,’ I said.

  ‘Indeed, Warglass. If of a very specific kind.’

  ‘You two are weird,’ Pinky said.

  ‘Yet you travel with us,’ Lady Arek said amusedly.

  Pinky was silent for a moment or two. Then he spoke firmly: ‘Among equals.’

  Nothing happened for a second or two. Nor was there any sound when the hypometric device did indeed begin to activate. But through vacuum and our suits we nonetheless felt some imagined protestation, some deep grinding groan as the vast components of our machine began, at last, to move against each other. Every part of the device mobilised with respect to every part: blades rotating and counter-rotating, blades interleaving, seeming to touch but never quite doing so, a sort of lethal, silent clockwork made of threshing metal. Only the shallows of hypometric physics were comprehensible to me, but I understood that these near-misses, blade surfaces kissing close but not quite contacting, was in service to the generation of microscopic slivers of Casimir potential, and that by the repeated conjuration and negation of these effects, a series of resonances built, a sort of harmonic song that the deeper mysteries of the engine would use to sing apart spacetime, unravelling it at Planck scales, as idle fingers messed with the broken weave of a carpet’s edge, and eventually teased it to ruination.

  The device quickened. It was a slow but steady acceleration, the machine self-checking its function at every stage. The blades whisked and danced. As they moved faster, the eye began to pick up secondary waves of motion, sinuous and corkscrewing, implying patterns of movement that seemed completely at odds with the static form of the device. As it spun ever faster, it was unshackling itself from the rational rules of geometry and mechanics. From the scanty technical documents Lady Arek had furnished Glass with, I knew that there would soon be a point where human recording systems were unable to obtain coherent snapshots of the whirling form. No matter how fine-grained our analysis, the device would always seem to have moved between two contradictory states, becoming – as Lady Arek described it – ‘weakly acausal’.

  Physics was turning uncanny in the vicinity of the device. It was starting not to recognise itself. It was starting to wonder whether it had other things to be doing.

  It was therefore time to be out of the chamber.

  The machinery was awake.

  By the time we returned to the command room, my missiles had converged on the refined search area and repeated the echolocation procedure. Their grid was tighter now, and concentrated at a lower level in the atmosphere. From orbit, the flashes were dimmer. They had a lot of overlaying gas to pass through before reaching us, and their energies looked paltry: meagre flickers limping up from the dark.

  But something was down there, beyond any doubt.

  ‘Scythe’s best guess is th
at our objective lies about three thousand kilometres beneath the outer cloud layer,’ I announced, primarily for Pinky’s benefit, since Lady Arek was more than capable of accessing and analysing the same data returns. ‘That is quite a bit deeper than the reach of any instruments on Sandra Voi, which is both good and bad news. Which would you like first?’

  ‘I’ve spent a lifetime wondering why people bother to ask that question,’ Pinky said.

  Lady Arek looked at him tolerantly. ‘The good news first, I think.’

  ‘Our objective must be extraordinarily robust for it to have survived at all, and for this long. That bodes well for it still containing the information we seek. I would be a lot more concerned if the acoustic net had picked up multiple returns, because then we would be looking at dispersed wreckage. But the floater must still be intact.’

  ‘We shall see. The bad news is self-evident: such a depth is at the very limits of our capabilities. Scythe’s existing cryo-arithmetic systems will help with the thermal load, but the pressures are far beyond anything the ship can tolerate. Or would be, if we did not have the Gideon stones.’

  ‘Good job we didn’t nearly lose one of them inside a star?’ Pinky said.

  ‘With nine, there’ll still be absolutely no margin of failure. But if one or other defence fails, then at least our deaths will be nearly instantaneous.’

  ‘You know, I was on board with that until the “nearly”.’ He gave a shrug. ‘Still, they got us through Bright Sun. I guess we weren’t planning on that test, but it’s nice to have it behind us. It can’t be any worse inside a planet, can it?’

  ‘It can indeed,’ Lady Arek said, with the sort of sadistic enthusiasm she could only have reserved for a friend. ‘The dynamic forces will be much less severe, that is true – we are not hitting a plasma at multiple Mach numbers, and the effect of gravity will never exceed one gee. But pressure and temperature will rise sharply: approaching three hundred thousand atmospheres, and three thousand kelvin respectively.’

  ‘You were blown off the hull inside the photosphere,’ Pinky said. ‘You lived.’

  ‘Indeed I did. But the thermal strain was much less problematic. I was inside a hot plasma, but it was also tenuous. Temperature depends on the kinetic energy of particle collisions – a room may be defined as hot if it only has a single atom in it. Heat capacity is a bulk property, and where we are going will be extremely hot and extremely dense. The cryo-arithmetic engines will cope, but of necessity we will be running close to some dangerous thresholds.’

  Pinky nodded. ‘I was wondering when the dangerous part was coming up, because it was all sounding safe until then.’

  ‘In addition,’ Lady Arek said patiently, ‘the armouring skein may be relied upon to have a thermal insulation effect, as a secondary property of its defensive membrane. But I am not minded to depend on it too thoroughly.’

  ‘Well, if I had multiple fingers I’d be crossing them.’ He looked at us both in turn. ‘We’re doing this, right? All of that was . . . just to make sure Pinky doesn’t get any unrealistic ideas about life expectancy?’

  ‘To make sure none of us do,’ I said. Then, with a decisive sweep to the controls: ‘The remaining missiles can keep refining the position while we commence our approach. There’s no logic in delaying now. If this return isn’t the floater, we’ll never find it. Buckle in; I’m preparing to take us into Charybdis.’

  Lady Arek was monitoring the hypometric device as it continued powering up. While she assured me that any accelerational forces we cared to impose on it were of no consequence to its safe functioning, I still kept Scythe from darting out of orbit too violently, and I made sure we met the ice giant’s upper atmosphere in as gentle a manner as possible, with a vertical descent rate of only one kilometre per second. Scythe was handling oddly, to begin with, and I had to continually remap the control parameters. The device in the bud of its tail was acting like an infernal gyroscope; one with only a disdainful regard for the conservation of angular momentum.

  Charybdis’s blue horizon flattened from an arc to a straight line. The ice giant’s face swallowed more and more of the sky, horizontal perspective foreshortening until the hazy stratification of water and methane-ice cloud layers became apparent. As useful as it might have seemed to time our expedition to coincide with day, the light now reaching Charybdis was destined to travel only a few hundred kilometres closer to the core. At the level of the floater, where those photons never reached, it would be as perpetually dark as the deepest marine trench.

  The ship syringed into the upper atmosphere without fuss. Gravity was close to a standard gee, for although Charybdis contained about seventeen Earth masses, it was also four times larger. This was the one aspect of our mission where I had over-compensated, working on the assumption that we might have to operate in a high-gee environment. Even if Warren’s old body had made it this far, he would not have found it troublesome, especially after the rejuvenation measures. But it was Glass’s body that carried us now, and one gee was beneath contempt.

  As we descended, maintaining the same sink-rate of one kilometre per second, the pressure climbed towards one atmosphere: about what Scythe had experienced before landing on Ararat. But it was still much colder, and the air around us was nothing that could have sustained life. Although we did not yet have need of them, I initialised the cryo-arithmetic engines and Gideon stones, warning them that they would soon be called upon and to verify their integration. Our experience in the photosphere was that the two systems needed to be meshed in harmony, or else one would exert a destabilising dominance over the other.

  Pressure and temperature rose with each kilometre of descent. At ten atmospheres we were already under a thick, ashen pall of overlying cloud, turning daylight into dusk.

  Beneath us, light billowed from the last of the acoustic probes. The localisation was complete now, and as accurate as it was going to get until Scythe was close enough to use its own sensors. The floater had been tracked down to a cubic volume about one hundred kilometres along a side, and the echo analysis pointed to a single solid form with a complicated asymmetric geometry, somewhere between ten and twenty kilometres in extent, orientated with its longest axis pointing down, like a dagger.

  By twenty atmospheres the last traces of daylight had surrendered their struggles to reach any deeper. It was as black as a crypt out there, with even Scythe’s false windows offering no hint as to what was up and what was down. The darkdrives were inefficient now, compared to cold gas thrusting, so gill-like ingestion intakes opened up along Scythe’s flanks and began to suck in atmosphere, before compressing and expelling it without combustion. Attitude control vanes sprung out of the hull, and my flight controls morphed into something more befitting a submarine.

  ‘This is a very capable ship,’ Lady Arek said, at one hundred atmospheres. ‘I think I might like one of my own, just like it.’

  ‘Save your praise: nothing has begun to test it so far. We might as well still be in vacuum, compared to what’s below.’

  ‘Does it help our chances, to constantly mention how terrible it is out there?’ Pinky asked. ‘Or could we, you know, take that as read?’

  I took my eyes off the controls for a second. ‘Would that make you happier, Pinky?’

  ‘Right now, you could drop an electrical probe into my pleasure centre and it wouldn’t cheer me up.’

  As the atmosphere warmed and thickened, it began to behave more like a warm fluid than a mixture of gases. Five hundred atmospheres came, then a thousand. Scythe was untroubled, but as the hull tightened and consolidated itself, dull clangs and groans sounded throughout the ship. I decided that calm reassurance was the last thing Pinky needed to hear from me, so I held my tongue.

  At ten thousand atmospheres, stress indices lit up in hues of mild concern. Now the medium being sucked through Scythe was more like a hot, sluggish lava than anything resembling air. It was time to turn to our augmentations, stabilising their influence before we really needed
it. I advanced the cryo-arithmetic cooling cycles in logarithmic steps, pausing at each interval to allow the Gideon stones to reach a temporary equilibrium. The armouring skein spread out from the nine nodes, merging and congealing into a sticky, closely adhering film, like the slippery slime covering a hagfish. Scythe’s sensors fogged over, then adjusted. They could still see through the skein, and by applying rapid selective dampening and re-establishment measures, the skein could be made to flicker on and off around certain critical parts of the ship, keeping the propulsion and steering functions operable. Provided this was done smartly, the atmosphere never had a chance to break through these weak zones.

  Long minutes of descent ensued. Since the blackness outside never changed, and there were no visual cues to indicate the increasing pressure and temperature, it was easy to imagine that we were inert, floating at a fixed level. But while our rate of descent had slowed – Scythe was now having to resist its buoyancy, fighting to get deeper – we were still moving at hundreds of metres per second. The hull’s pressure and temperature gauges were no longer reliable due to the influence of the skein, and all we could rely on were theoretical predictions based on our assumed motion. At fifty thousand atmospheres, any probe that Scythe attempted to extend beyond itself, pushing out through the skein like a snail’s antenna, was instantly consumed.

  The floater was still thousands of kilometres beneath us. A cold awe touched me. Not because I was impressed that an alien machine could withstand these conditions, but because the wreckage we had seen on Ararat attested to the fact that even that level of invulnerability was ultimately insufficient against the wolves and their weapons. Why were we so imbecilic as to think there might be something in the floater that could best the wolves, given the evidence that had already been presented to us?

  Because the Incantor is no ordinary weapon, and even the Nestbuilders shirked from using it, except as an absolute last resort.

  And I knew that . . . how, precisely?

  Again: because.