The Revelation Space Collection

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying that with fanatics on both sides, you and I are beginning to look like distinct moderates. Depressing thought, isn’t it?’

  ‘Out-radicalised on both fronts, you mean.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  They emerged through the black, graven wall of the city-shell into a small crowd of media types who were running through last-minute preparations for the event. Reporters wore buff-coloured float-cam glasses, choreographing the cams which hovered around them like drab party balloons. One of Janequin’s genetically engineered peacocks was pecking around the group, its tail hissing behind it. Two security officers stepped forwards garbed in black with gold Inundationist sigils on their shoulders, surrounded by flocks of deliberately threatening entoptics. Servitors loitered behind them. They ran full-spectrum ident scans on Sylveste and Girardieau, then motioned them to a small temporary structure which had been placed near a nestlike froth of Amarantin dwellings.

  The inside was almost bare, apart from a table and two skeletal chairs. There was a bottle of Amerikano red wine on the table, next to a pair of wine goblets, engraved with frosted-glass landscapes.

  ‘Sit down,’ Girardieau said. He swaggered around the table and decanted measures of wine into both glasses. ‘I don’t know why you’re so damned nervous. It isn’t as if this is your first time.’

  ‘My fourth, actually.’

  ‘All Stoner ceremonies?’

  Sylveste nodded. He thought of the first two: small-scale affairs, to minor-league Stoner women, the faces of whom he could almost not separate in his memory. Both had withered under the glare of publicity that the family name attracted. By contrast, his marriage to Alicia - his last wife - had been sculpted as a publicity move from the onset. It had focused attention on the upcoming Resurgam expedition, giving it the final monetary push it needed. The fact that they had been in love had been almost inconsequential, merely a happy addendum to the existing arrangement.

  ‘That’s a lot of baggage to be carrying around in your head now,’ Girardieau said. ‘Don’t you ever wish you could be rid of the past each time?’

  ‘You find the ceremony unusual.’

  ‘Perhaps I do.’ Girardieau wiped a red smear of wine from his lips. ‘I was never part of Stoner culture, you see.’

  ‘You came with us from Yellowstone.’

  ‘Yes, but I wasn’t born there. My family were from Grand Teton. I only arrived on Yellowstone seven years before the Resurgam expedition departed. Not really enough time to become culturally adapted to Stoner tradition. My daughter, on the other hand . . . well, Pascale’s never known anything but Stoner society. Or at least the version of it we imported when we came here.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You must have the vial with you now, I suppose. May I see it?’

  ‘I could hardly refuse you.’

  Sylveste reached in his pocket and removed the little glass cylinder he had been carrying with him all day. He passed it to Girardieau, who nervously tinkered with it, tipping it this way and that. He watched the bubbles within, slipping to and fro as if in a spirit level. Something darker hung within the fluid, fibrous and tendrilled.

  He placed the vial down; it made a delicate glassy chime as it settled on the tabletop. Girardieau studied it with barely masked horror.

  ‘Was it painful?’

  ‘Of course not. We’re not sadists, you know.’ Sylveste smiled, secretly enjoying Girardieau’s discomfort. ‘Would you rather we exchanged camels, perhaps?’

  ‘Put it away.’

  Sylveste slipped the vial back into his pocket. ‘Now tell me who’s the nervous one, Nils.’

  Girardieau poured himself another measure of wine. ‘Sorry. Security are edgy as hell. Don’t know what’s got them so bothered, but it’s rubbing off on me, I suppose.’

  ‘I didn’t notice anything.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’ Girardieau shrugged; a bellows-like movement that began somewhere below his abdomen. ‘They claim everything’s normal, but after twenty years I read them better than they imagine.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry. Your police are very efficient people.’

  Girardieau shook his head briefly, as if he had taken a bite from a particularly sour lemon. ‘I don’t expect the air between us to ever be completely cleared, Dan. But you could at least give me the benefit of the doubt.’ He nodded towards the open door. ‘Didn’t I give you complete access to this place?’

  Yes, and all that had done was to replace a dozen questions with a thousand more. ‘Nils . . .’ he began, ‘how are the colony’s resources these days?’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘I know things have been different since Remilliod came through. Things which would have been unthinkable in my day . . . could be done now, if the political will was there.’ ‘What kinds of things?’ Girardieau asked dubiously.

  Sylveste reached into his jacket again, but this time, instead of the vial, he removed a piece of paper which he spread before Girardieau. The paper was marked with complex circular figures.

  ‘You recognise these marks? We found them on the obelisk and all over the city. They’re maps of the solar system, made by the Amarantin.’

  ‘Somehow, having seen this city, I find that easier to believe now than I once did.’

  ‘Good, then hear me out.’ Sylveste drew his finger along the widest circle. ‘This represents the orbit of the neutron star, Hades.’

  ‘Hades?’

  ‘That was the name it was given when they first surveyed the system. There’s a lump of rock orbiting it, too - about the size of a planetary moon. They called it Cerberus.’ Then he brushed his finger across the cluster of graphicforms attending the neutron star/planet double system. ‘Somehow, this was important to the Amarantin. And I think it might have some bearing on the Event.’

  Girardieau buried his head in his hands theatrically, then looked back at Sylveste. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Carefully - never allowing his gaze to move from Girardieau’s eyes - he folded away the paper and replaced it in his pocket. ‘We have to explore it, and find out what killed the Amarantin. Before it kills us as well.’

  When Sajaki and Volyova came to Khouri’s quarters, they told her to put on something warm. Khouri noticed that they were both wearing heavier than usual shipwear - Volyova in a zipped-up flying jacket, Sajaki in muffled, high-collared thermals, quilted in a mosaic of nova-diamond patches.

  ‘I’ve screwed up, haven’t I?’ Khouri said. ‘This is where I get the airlock treatment. My scores in the combat simulations haven’t been good enough. You’re going to ditch me.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Sajaki said, only his nose and forehead protruding above the furline of his collar. ‘If we were going to kill you, do you think we’d worry about you catching a chill?’

  ‘And,’ Volyova said, ‘your indoctrination finished weeks ago. You’re now one of our assets. To kill you now would be a form of treason against ourselves.’ Beneath the bill of her cap only her mouth and chin were visible; she exactly complemented Sajaki, the two of them forming one bland composite face.

  ‘Nice to know you care.’

  Still unsure of her position - the possibility that they might be planning something nasty was still looming large - she dug through what passed for her belongings until she found a thermal jacket. Manufactured by the ship, it was similar to Sajaki’s harlequin job, except that it fell almost to her knees.

  An elevator journey took them into an unexplored region of the ship - at least, well away from what Khouri considered known territory. They had to change elevators several times, walking through interconnecting tunnels which Volyova said were necessary because of virus damage taking out large sections of the transit system. The décor and technological level of the walk-through areas was always subtly different, suggesting to Khouri that whole districts of the ship had been left fallow at different stages over the last few centuries. She remained nervous, b
ut something in Sajaki and Volyova’s demeanour told her that what they had in mind was more akin to an initiation ceremony than a cold execution. They reminded her of children embarked on some piece of malicious tomfoolery - Volyova at least, though Sajaki looked and acted a good deal more authoritarian, like a functionary carrying out a grim civic duty.

  ‘Since you’re part of us now,’ he said, ‘it’s time you learnt a little more about the set-up. You might also appreciate knowing our reason for going to Resurgam.’

  ‘I assumed it was trade.’

  ‘That was the cover story, but let’s face it, it was never very convincing. Resurgam doesn’t have much in the way of an economy - the purpose of the colony is pure research - and it certainly lacks the resources to buy much from us. Of course, our data on the colony is necessarily old, and once we’re there we’ll trade what we can, but that could never be the sole reason for our voyage there.’

  ‘So what is?’

  The lift they were in was decelerating. ‘The name Sylveste mean anything to you?’ Sajaki asked.

  Khouri did her best to act normally, as if the question were reasonable, and not one which had gone off in her cranium like a magnesium flare.

  ‘Well, of course. Everyone on Yellowstone knew about Sylveste. Guy was practically a god to them. Or maybe the devil.’ She paused, hoping her reactions sounded normal. ‘Wait though; which Sylveste are we talking about here? The older one, the guy who botched up those immortality experiments? Or his son?’

  ‘Technically speaking,’ Sajaki said, ‘both.’

  The lift thundered to a halt. When the doors opened it was like being slapped in the face with a cold wet cloth. Khouri was glad for the advice about the warm clothes, although she still felt mortally chilled. ‘Thing was,’ she continued, ‘they weren’t all bastards. Lorean was the old guy’s father, and he was still some kind of a folk hero, even after he died, and the old guy - what was his name again?’

  ‘Calvin.’

  ‘Right. Even after Calvin killed all those people. Then Calvin’s son came along - Dan, that would have been - and he tried to make amends, in his own way, with the Shrouder thing.’ Khouri shrugged. ‘I wasn’t around then, of course. I only know what people told me.’

  Sajaki led them through gloomy grey-green lit corridors, huge and perhaps mutant janitor-rats scrabbling away as their footfalls neared. What he took them into resembled the inside of a choleraic’s trachea - corridors thick and glutinous with dirty carapacial ice; venous with buried tentacular ducts and power lines, slick with something nastily like human phlegm. Ship-slime, Volyova called it - an organic secretion caused by malfunctioning biological recycler systems on an adjacent level.

  Mostly, though, it was the cold of which Khouri took heed.

  ‘Sylveste’s part in things is rather complex,’ Sajaki said. ‘It’ll take a while to explain. First, though, I’d like you to meet the Captain.’

  Sylveste walked around himself, checking that nothing was seriously out of place. Satisfied, he cancelled the image and joined Girardieau in the pre-fab’s ante-room. The music reached a crescendo, then settled into a burbling refrain. The pattern of lights altered, voices dropping to a hush.

  Together, they stepped into the glare, into the basso sound-field of the organ’s drone. A meandering path led to the central temple, carpeted for the occasion. Chime-trees lined it, cased in protective domes of clear plastic. The chime-trees were spindly, articulated sculptures, their many arms tipped with curved, coloured mirrors. At odd times, the trees would click and reconfigure themselves, moved by what seemed to be million-year-old clockwork buried in pedestals. Current thinking had it that the trees were elements of some city-wide semaphore system.

  The organ’s noise magnified as they stepped into the temple. Its egg-shaped dome was permeated by petal-shaped expanses of elaborate stained-glass, miraculously intact despite the slow predations of time and gravity. Filtered through the toplights, the air in the temple seemed suffused with a calming pink radiance. The central portion of the enormous room was taken up by the rising foundation of the spire which rose above the temple; wide and flared like the base of a sequoia. Temporary seating for a hundred top-level Cuvier dignitaries bowed out in a fan-shape from one side of the pillar; easily accommodated by the building, despite its one-quarter scale. Sylveste scanned the racks of watchers, recognising about a third of them. Perhaps a tenth had been his allies before the coup. Most of them wore heavy outer garments, plump with furs. He recognised Janequin amongst them, sagelike with his smoke-white goatee and long silvery hair waterfalling from his bald pate. He looked more simian than ever. Some of his birds were in the hall, released from a dozen bamboo boxes. Sylveste had to admit that they were now strikingly good facsimiles, even down to the bobbed crest and the speckle-shimmer of their turquoise plumage. They had been adapted from chickens by careful manipulation of homeobox genes. The audience, many of whom had not seen the birds before today, applauded. Janequin turned the colour of bloodied snow, and seemed anxious to sink into his brocade overcoat.

  Girardieau and Sylveste reached a sturdy table at the focus of the audience. The table was ancient: its woodwork eagle and Latinate inscriptions dated back to the Amerikano settlers on Yellowstone. Its corners were chipped. A varnished mahogany box sat on the table, sealed by delicate gold clasps.

  A woman of serious demeanour stood behind the table, dressed in an electric-white gown. The gown’s clasp was a complex dual sigil, combining the Resurgam City/Inundationist governmental seal with the emblem of the Mixmasters: two hands holding a cat’s cradle of DNA. She was, Sylveste knew, not a true Mixmaster. The Mixmasters were a cliquish guild of Stoner bioengineers and geneticists, and none of their sanctum had journeyed to Resurgam. Yet their symbol - which had travelled - denoted general expertise in life-sciences: genesculpting, surgery or medicine.

  Her unsmiling face was sallow in the stained light, hair collected in a bun, pierced by two syringes.

  The music quietened.

  ‘I am Ordinator Massinger,’ she said, voice ringing out across the chamber. ‘I am empowered by the Resurgam expeditionary council to marry individuals of this settlement, unless such union conflicts with the genetic fitness of the colony.’

  The Ordinator opened the mahogany box. Just below the lid lay a leather-bound object the size of a Bible. She removed it and placed it on the table, then folded it open with a creak of leather. The exposed surfaces were matt grey, like wet slate, glistening with microscopic machinery.

  ‘Place one hand each on the page nearest you, gentlemen.’

  They placed their palms on the surface. There was a fluorescent sweep as the book took their palm-prints, followed by a brief tingle as biopsies were taken. When they were done, Massinger took the book and pressed her own hand against the surface.

  Massinger then asked Nils Girardieau to state his identity to the gathered. Sylveste watched faint smiles ghost the audience. There was something absurd about it, after all, though Girardieau made no show of this himself.

  Then she asked the same of Sylveste.

  ‘I am Daniel Calvin Lorean Soutaine-Sylveste,’ he said, using the form of his name so rarely employed that it almost took an effort of memory to bring it to mind. He went on, ‘The only biological son of Rosalyn Soutaine and Calvin Sylveste, both of Chasm City, Yellowstone. I was born on the seventeenth of January, in the hundred and twenty-first standard year after the resettlement of Yellowstone. My calendrical age is two hundred and twenty-three. Allowing for medichine programs, I have a physiological age of sixty, on the Sharavi scale.’

  ‘How do you knowingly manifest?’

  ‘I knowingly manifest in one incarnation only, the biological form now speaking.’

  ‘And you affirm that you are not wittingly manifested via alpha-level or other Turing-capable simulacra, in this or any other solar system?’

  ‘None of which I am aware.’

  Massinger made small annotations in the book using a pre
ssure stylus. She had asked Girardieau precisely the same questions: standard parts of the Stoner ceremony. Ever since the Eighty, Stoners had been intensely suspicious of simulations in general, particularly those that purported to contain the essence or soul of an individual. One thing they especially disliked was the idea of one manifestation of an individual - biological or otherwise - making contracts to which the other manifestations were not bound, such as marriage.

  ‘These details are in order,’ Massinger said. ‘The bride may step forward.’

  Pascale moved into the roseate light. She was accompanied by two women wearing ash-coloured wimples, a squad of float-cams and personal security wasps and a semi-transparent entourage of entoptics: nymphs, seraphim, flying-fish and hummingbirds, star-glitter dew-drops and butterflies, in slow cascade around her wedding dress. The most exclusive entoptic designers in Cuvier had created them.

  Girardieau raised his thick, hauserlike arms and bid his daughter forward.

  ‘You look beautiful,’ he murmured.

  What Sylveste saw was beauty reduced to digital perfection. He knew that Girardieau saw something incomparably softer and more human, like the difference between a swan and a hard glass sculpture of a swan.

  ‘Place your hand on the book,’ the Ordinator said.

  An imprint of moisture from Sylveste’s hand was still visible, like a wider shoreline around Pascale’s island of pale flesh. The Ordinator asked her to verify her identity, in the same manner as she had asked Girardieau and Sylveste. Pascale’s task was simple enough: not only had she been born on Resurgam, but she had never left the planet. Ordinator Massinger delved deeper into the mahogany box. While she did so, Sylveste’s eyes worked the audience. He saw Janequin, looking paler than ever, fidgety. Deep within the box, polished to a bluish antiseptic lustre, lay a device like a cross between an old-style pistol and a veterinarian’s hypodermic.

  ‘Behold the wedding gun,’ the Ordinator said, holding the box aloft.