Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  Because. Because. Because.

  ‘You are mumbling to yourself, Warglass,’ Lady Arek said. ‘It is rarely a good habit, and especially not now.’

  ‘Is the hypometric device behaving itself?’

  ‘Indeed it is. Spin-up confirmed. It is . . . pensive, you might almost say. It knows that it is a maker, rather than a weapon. Now it has an almost insatiable need to know what to make. It grows fidgety. We should not deny it fulfilment for too long, or else—’ Lady Arek stopped, frowning slightly, the first distant intimation of concern beginning to cloud her features.

  ‘I know that look,’ Pinky said. ‘It bothers me.’

  ‘It’s the monitors that we left around Charybdis, on our approach. They have signalled. Warglass would have noticed, if she were not preoccupied with Scythe.’

  I had noticed, and only a second or two after Lady Arek. But I felt chastened: a second or two was a lazy afternoon, by the standards of Conjoiners. ‘That does not augur well.’

  ‘It most certainly does not.’

  Pinky growled: ‘There’s a third person on this ship, in case you’d forgotten.’

  ‘If we had forgotten you, Pinky, we would have taken our conversation entirely off-line. The monitors have detected wolf activity.’

  ‘Fine, my day needed livening up.’

  The ship could handle itself for a few moments, I decided. Quickly Lady Arek and I assessed the intelligence fragments beaming into Charybdis from the monitors, squirted through the black ceiling above us via neutrino.

  The wolf elements were stirring from hiding places around the rings and moons, as well as drifting in from further out. The numbers were large enough to be troubling, without approaching the concentrations we had seen around Yellowstone. What we were seeing – if the monitors’ initial summaries were accurate – was a relatively small aggregation, the sort that the wolves could be expected to seed around any system that might at some point be of interest to humans. The only thing that had spared us such attention around Sun Hollow was the evident madness of trying to live there in the first place. Even the wolves knew better than to spread their eyes and ears too thinly.

  ‘While I would not describe this development as welcome—’ Lady Arek began.

  ‘You can stop there,’ Pinky said. ‘Because I can just feel one of your “nonethelesses” coming along.’

  ‘Lady Arek would be right,’ I said. ‘From a practical standpoint, the emergence doesn’t change anything, except to throw the consequences of failure into sharper focus. Now failure won’t be some distant extinction fifty years or a hundred from now: death will be ours to face as soon as we leave Charybdis. I don’t know if they’ll attempt to follow us into the atmosphere, but I know this: we have to have made the Incantor before we leave.’

  ‘I am glad that they are here,’ Lady Arek said. ‘The sooner we show how far we are prepared to go to, the sooner the message will spread among them.’

  ‘I don’t know how they saw us. We were so quiet coming in, and our search was risky, but didn’t trigger their interest.’

  ‘We were cautious, Warglass,’ she agreed consolingly, as if I carried some guilt about me. ‘It is inescapable that their emergence coincides with the activation of the hypometric device. I think it likely that the wolves may have become sensitised to the signatures given off by such technology: the local metric perturbation, the daughter events of causal breakdown.’

  ‘Then whenever one of our allies receives the construction templates for an Incantor, they’ll need to act on it very quickly. The instant they start to make the precursor device, any wolves nearby will sniff it out and move in to pounce.’

  ‘A certain boldness will be necessary,’ Lady Arek agreed. ‘The blade, once tempered, must be used without compunction. Without mercy and without hesitation. As I know it shall.’

  Pinky scratched his snout. ‘Is there a place to get a drink on this ship?’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Not long after that the monitors went silent. It was perhaps for the best. Knowing what the wolves were up to, and how much interest they were taking in us, would not assist in any way. There was only one objective, and only one way of getting to it, and however much time we needed when we got there was entirely out of our control. If the breath of wolves was already on our necks, no good came from glancing behind.

  One hundred thousand atmospheres came, and then two hundred thousand. The black stillness descended with us. For the most part the cryo-arithmetic engines and Gideon stones were meshing agreeably. Now and then a flutter of instability would need to be damped before it got out of hand, by altering one or more control parameters. But if all those systems did was bicker and tussle with each other, I was content.

  It was as hot as the surface of a star outside now – admittedly a rather cool star – but a star nonetheless. All this energy had been trapped in the ice giant since its formation, bleeding slowly out into space across billions of years. I tried not to take it personally, that we had to suffer for our share of it. The universe was not trying to be cruel or difficult; it was just massively, magnificently indifferent.

  ‘The gravitometer is reading something,’ Lady Arek said.

  It was. The gravitometer was a passive detector, emitting nothing, so safe to use. But until now it had been confused by the strange emissions boiling out of the hypometric device, unable to identify a signal above an elevated background noise. Now, it seemed, we were near enough to the floater to begin to feel its effect.

  Floater, I decided, was not quite the right word. If the object was in equilibrium with the fluid-like atmosphere it would be displacing exactly the same mass of hydrogen-helium as itself, and would therefore be invisible to the gravitometer. But it was much heavier than the volume of gas that it had pushed aside. It ought to be sinking: ought, indeed, to have sunk long ago, until perhaps it ended up bobbing along somewhere within the transition zone between atmosphere and the truly liquid mantle, still far below.

  The gravitometer sketched a form in red vector graphics overlaid with green technical summaries: a sharpening of the impression already gleaned from the acoustic probes.

  The floater was fifteen and a half kilometres from top to bottom, and widest near the top. It tapered down with increasing depth, but not with any regularity. It had a lopsided, crudely chiselled form, as if parts of it had already broken away. Down near the bottom there was not one point of culmination, but several: jagged fingers grasping for the core of Charybdis.

  A many-spired castle, inverted.

  The going was now very sluggish and the fluid-intake drives were reaching their operable limit. I had no choice but to re-engage the darkdrives. They produced thrust, but no detectable emissions. The downside was the increased thermal load they placed on the ship, necessitating a higher toll on the cryo-arithmetics. This pushed them closer to the brink of runaway algorithmic cycles, and also generated more conflict with the Gideon stones. I imagined myself a hunter with two fine but unruly hounds, slathering and yelping at each other. They were loyal to me, but perfectly ready to rip each other’s throats out.

  This was going to be delicate.

  ‘If Scythe can take it,’ Lady Arek said, ‘we should loop around and under, conducting a thorough examination. There may be an obvious point of entry that we won’t see from this approach angle.’

  ‘If you’re expecting a front door with a doorbell, you might need to downgrade your expectations,’ Pinky said.

  ‘We won’t be ringing any doorbells,’ I replied.

  The hull creaked and groaned as we descended the last few tens of kilometres to the uppermost level of the floater. These complaints were no indication of the actual forces assaulting the ship: they were merely the distant echoes of the tiny residual stresses that were not quite fully neutralised by the armouring skein. The skein was generated by the stones attached to Scythe’s hull, but under normal operation it formed its own cagelike tensile field, absorbing the crush forces but not transm
itting them. But at a third of a million atmospheres, even the skein was approaching its limits.

  ‘I forgot to mention that I never did find that drink,’ Pinky said.

  I smiled: he had not even gone looking.

  We sank slowly, at a few metres per second. Nothing was out there except a curtain of absolute black. Scythe’s floodlights were at maximum illumination, blasting through the pearly filter of the skein, but since there was nothing larger than an ice-grain for them to scatter against, they might as well have been switched off. Until the moment when something rose from the depths. My hands stiffened on the attitude controls. I had been ready for this moment of contact, but it still surprised me.

  ‘Large,’ Lady Arek said drily.

  If the Nestbuilder spacecraft had some preferred orientation, a front and a back, a top or a bottom, it was beyond our means to judge. We had only ever seen the wreckage of their endeavours. All we could say about the floater was that the thick end, the roots or foundations of that many-spired palace, was the highest and widest point. The floodlights only picked out the nearest few hundred metres of it: the rest was still swallowed in the dark crush of Charybdis.

  From what we could see it was clear that the structure was not a continuous form, but a fluted, piped, densely packed assemblage of many conch-like sub-elements, arranged at every conceivable angle. The forms had either grown together, been fused, or were conceivably only the remnants of some mountainous solid mass that had been sculpted nearly hollow. By extrapolation from the small part that we could see, the entire vessel must have been made up of tens of thousands of conches, fixed into a vast barnacled and sea-shelled mass like some mad architect’s dream of a cathedral. There were passages between the conches: deep black fissures leading hundreds or even thousands of metres into the interior. Lady Arek had been sensible to suggest that we looked for a door, but even a cursory mapping of the outside form would take many hours. To map the innards would be the work of weeks or months.

  Instantly a panic of confinement rose within me. To be lost in that maze, in a slowly overheating, buckling ship, fighting to find a way out of one darkness into the vaster one beyond if . . .

  ‘My missiles won’t survive at these depths,’ I said, in case there was any doubt. ‘And even if we could use them to scout for us, I’d like to keep some behind for later.’

  ‘I should insist on it, Warglass,’ Lady Arek said, resting a hand on mine, where it still gripped the attitude tiller. ‘You have done well to bring us here. We have done well, merely to have made it this far. Nevil Clavain would be astonished, I think.’

  I felt a prickle of negation inside me. ‘Astonished that it took us so long.’

  ‘The old man could have saved us all a great deal of trouble by mentioning this place to someone before he died,’ Pinky said. ‘He wouldn’t thank me for saying that, but it’s still true.’

  ‘He could not have grasped its ultimate significance,’ Lady Arek said. ‘None of us could. Even now, it has taken leaps of imagination. Were it not for Glass, none of us would have guessed to look here for an Incantor. Or even considered that an Incantor might exist.’

  She was valorising Glass, not Warglass, so I made no comment. If I was not to be bound by her misdeeds, then equally I could take no praise for her insights.

  Scythe tracked slowly down the tapering form of the floater, keeping within a few tens of metres of its side. Conches, pressed into steps, terraces, spires, turrets, ascended past us. Some jagged out like bowsprits; others were attached to angled arms like down-pointing candelabra. Now and then our lights excavated a rugged-outlined cleft in the ship, as if some large part of it had been blasted away. It was a reminder, if any were needed, that the Nestbuilders had never overcome their enemies: they had merely evolved strategies that minimised the likelihood of an interaction.

  Fifteen kilometres of additional depth was a scratch compared to the distance we had already travelled into Charybdis, but all our systems were now being pressed to their limits. The cryo-arithmetic engines were fighting heat flowing in from outside and heat emanating from the darkdrives, a war on two fronts. The Gideon stones were picking up on the elevated algorithmic cycling of the engines, crimping and buckling the skein around these vortexes of anti-entropic activity, as if they considered them a form of threat, needing to be contained or even neutralised. We could go deep enough to survey the floater, but anything deeper than that would be taking Scythe into treacherous waters, beyond the comfort of anything we had already experienced or simulated.

  It was a relief when the lowest parts of the floater, the spirelike tips of its down-pointing conches, passed above us.

  We swept slowly back up to the level of the base, spiralling around the floater to achieve the most efficient mapping. We had seen no door, no docking port: at least none that was recognisable to us.

  We would just have to make one of our own.

  Consulting with Lady Arek and Pinky, I selected an area of the ship about halfway down the taper: a wartlike outgrowth of twenty or so interlinked conches, at least two kilometres beneath any obvious sign of damage. I did not want to go into one of the damaged zones. The architecture of these ships was cellular, divided into independent volumes by bulkheads of conch matter. Even if part of the ship had ruptured, allowing Charybdis’s atmosphere to flood in, an adjoining part might still be at the normal pressure tolerated by Nestbuilders.

  I orientated Scythe vertically, then brought it in slowly until the dorsal airlock was about a metre away from the convex surface of one of the conch outgrowths. Scythe laser-mapped the contour of this area very precisely, then adjusted the form of the airlock to provide an exact counterpart, a pair of opposing surfaces that would kiss together with barely an atom’s worth of disagreement. I then completed the closure, narrowing the distance until the skein dimpled inwards against contact with the floater. Initially it resisted any further movement, until I increased the pressure from the thrusters and forced the skein to snap onto the floater, becoming surface-conformal. Now the skein had the topological form of a bag with an out-puckering mouth, enclosing Scythe but pressing its lips against the convex skin of the conch. It was stable and provided a form of anchorage, enabling me to reduce the output of the darkdrives. Now the floater was doing most of the work of holding us at depth.

  ‘Very good, Warglass.’

  I took my hands off the attitude controls. They were slippery with sweat.

  ‘Thank you, Lady Arek.’

  Scythe took a few minutes to reorganise its internal layout to provide a convenient route to the suiting room and the dorsal lock. It was useful, to have those minutes. We all needed time to compose our thoughts and compartmentalise accordingly. One step at a time.

  We got into our suits, nervously and silently, as if we were dressing for an execution. For now, the tools, weapons and sensor instruments of the suits would be all we took with us.

  Scythe’s airlock was pressed hard against the opposing surface. It detected no pressure on the other side, nor any toxicity or radiation that we needed to be concerned about.

  We cycled the airlock down to vacuum. Without a word I opened the outer door. It irised back to disclose the off-white, faintly translucent sheen of conch material. We had all seen and touched it before, but never in its intended application as part of a ship that had still had some functionality. The shards and hulks of conch that we found on Ararat were, by definition, damaged specimens. Even then, it had been astonishingly difficult to work with the conch material.

  ‘Where shall we begin?’ Lady Arek said. ‘Lasers, bosers, pressure cutters?’

  I dabbed my hands against the surface. I made a series of precise gestural strokes, using the heels of my palms to imitate the narrow but elongated contact area of a Nestbuilder secondary appendage. I worked quickly, since I had to emulate the effect of four limbs with only two of my own. Lady Arek and Pinky looked on, wisely saying nothing. The surface blistered and darkened in definite geometric patches,
indicating a query as to my credentials and intentions. It was no small thing to demand admittance to a Nestbuilder ship, even in the language of their kind. I composed replies in the same speedy fashion, asserting my authority with politeness and confidence.

  The surface formed an opening. It began as black dot and swelled wide, becoming a circular aperture about a metre and a half across, stopping before it reached the border defined by our own airlock. Beyond was a dark space of indeterminate size. The wall of the conch, where it had peeled back, was no thicker than a fingernail. I shivered at the thought of what that material was resisting, beyond the immediate boundary of the lock and the portion of the skein that had attached to the ship.

  ‘We can go through now,’ I said.

  ‘There might not be another human who has thought as long and hard about the Nestbuilders as I have done,’ Lady Arek said. ‘Nor one who has gathered and assimilated so many scraps of lore about them. Apart from you, Warglass. But even you cannot have learned their language. No records or traces were ever found . . .’

  ‘Then I must have been spectacularly lucky,’ I said, showing the lead by clambering through the opening. ‘Please, let’s not delay. The door recognises my authority, but it might close as soon as I’m inside.’

  ‘Just checking that it’s too late to go back for that drink?’

  ‘Too late for most things, Pinky.’ But I needed to assuage his nerves. ‘About two hundred years ago Glass came across a codex for a subset of Nestbuilder gestural commands. Until now, it was largely untested. Glass didn’t want to raise our hopes beforehand. If it hadn’t worked, we would have resorted to mass-energy, or even a limited use of the hypometric device in its weapons-instantiation.’

  ‘Just me, or is she getting more disturbing by the minute?’

  ‘Yet, indisputably, she has opened the door. Go through, Pinky. I am right behind.’

  I stopped on the other side of the opening, reaching out a hand to help Pinky and Lady Arek. Besides the glow from Scythe’s lock, the only light was that provided by our suits. My suit radar-pulsed the space we were in and came back with a smooth-surfaced volume about sixty metres across. I turned up my suit’s helmet light until a faint milky reflection bounced back from the continuous curving wall enclosing us. There was a floor beneath my feet, but it was really only a sill projecting a few metres inward from the opening. Beyond it, the level dropped away sharply.