‘Then it won’t take much of your time.’
He smiled through the fog of tiredness. For the second time in a day he had been awakened by her guards, dragged in a state of semi-consciousness and disorientation from his room. He still smelt Pascale, her scent cloaking him, and wondered if she was still sleeping in her own cell somewhere across Mantell. As lonely as he now felt, the feeling was tempered by the gladdening news that she was alive and unharmed. They had told him as much in the days before their meeting, but he had had no reason to believe Sluka’s people were telling the truth. What use, after all, was Pascale to the True Pathers? Even less than he - and it was already clear enough that Sluka had been debating the value of retaining him alive.
Yet now, perceptibly, things were changing. He had been allowed time with Pascale, and he believed that this would not be the only occasion. Did this development stem from some basic humanity on Sluka’s behalf, or did it imply something entirely different - perhaps that she might have need of one of them in the near future, and that now was the time when she had to begin winning favour?
Sylveste swigged the coffee, blasting away his residual tiredness. ‘All I’ve heard is that there may be visitors. From then on I drew my own conclusions.’
‘Which I presume you’d care to share with me.’
‘Perhaps we could discuss Pascale for a moment?’
She peered at him over the rim of her cup, before nodding with the delicacy of a clockwork marionette. ‘You’re venturing an exchange of knowledge in return for - what? Certain relaxations in the regime under which you’re held?’
‘That wouldn’t be unreasonable, I feel.’
‘It would all depend on the quality of your speculations.’
‘Speculations?’
‘As to who these visitors might be.’ Sluka glanced towards the slatted rising sun, eyes narrowed against the ruby-red glare. ‘I value your point of view, though heaven knows why.’
‘First you’d have to tell me what it is you know.’
‘We’ll come to that.’ Sluka bit on a smile. ‘First I should admit that I have you at something of a disadvantage.’
‘In what way?’
‘Who are these people, if they aren’t Remilliod’s crew?’
Her remark meant that his conversations with Pascale - and by implication everything that had gone on between them - had been monitored. The knowledge shocked him less than he would have expected. He had obviously suspected it must be so the whole time, but perhaps he had preferred to ignore his own qualms.
‘Very good, Sluka. You ordered Falkender to mention the visitors, didn’t you? That was quite clever of you.’
‘Falkender was just doing his job. Who are they, then? Remilliod already has experience trading with Resurgam. Wouldn’t it make sense for him to return here for a second bite?’
‘Much too soon. He’ll have barely had time to reach another system, let alone anything with trading prospects.’ Sylveste freed himself of the chair’s embrace, strolling to the slatted window. Through the iron jalousies he watched the northerly faces of the nearest mesas radiate cool orange, like stacked books on the point of bursting into flame. The thing he noticed now was the bluer tone of the sky; no longer crimson. That was because megatonnes of dust had been removed from the winds; replaced with water vapour. Or maybe it was a trick of his impaired colour perception.
Fingering the glass, he said, ‘Remilliod would never return so quickly. He’s among the shrewdest of traders, with very few exceptions.’
‘Then who is it?’
‘It’s the exceptions I’m bothered about.’
Sluka called an aide to remove the coffee. With the table bare, she invited Sylveste back to his seat. Then she printed a document from the table and offered it to him.
‘The information you’re about to see reached us three weeks ago, from a contact in the East Nekhebet flare-watch station.’
Sylveste nodded. He knew about the flare-watches. He had pushed to set them up himself; small observatories dotted around Resurgam, monitoring the star for evidence of abnormal emission.
Reading was too much like trying to decipher Amarantin script: creeping letter by letter along a word until the meaning snapped into his mind. Cal had known that much of reading boiled down to mechanics - the physiology of eye movement along the line. He had built routines into Sylveste’s eyes to accommodate this need, but it had not been within Falkender’s gift to restore everything.
Still, this much was clear:
The flare-watch in East Nekhebet had picked up an energy pulse, much brighter than anything seen previously. Briefly, there was the worrying possibility that Delta Pavonis was about to repeat the flare which had wiped out the Amarantin: the vast coronal mass ejection known as the Event. But closer examination revealed that the flare did not originate from the star, but rather from something several light-hours beyond it, on the edge of the system.
Analysis of the spectral pattern of the gamma-ray flash indicated that it was subject to a small but measurable Doppler shift; a few per cent of the speed of light. The conclusion was inescapable: the flash originated from a ship, on the final phase of deceleration from interstellar cruising speed.
‘Something happened,’ Sylveste said, absorbing the news of the ship’s demise with calm neutrality. ‘Some kind of malfunction in the drive.’
‘That was our guess as well.’ Sluka tapped the paper with her fingernail. ‘A few days later we knew it couldn’t possibly be the case. The thing was still there - faint, but unmistakable.’
‘The ship survived the blast?’
‘Whatever it was. By then we were getting a detectable blueshift off the drive flame. Deceleration was continuing normally, as if the explosion had never happened.’
‘You’ve got a theory for this, I presume.’
‘Half of one. We think the blast originated from a weapon. What kind, we haven’t a clue. But nothing else could have liberated so much energy.’
‘A weapon?’ Sylveste tried to keep his voice completely calm, allowing only natural curiosity to show, purging it of the emotions he really felt, which were largely variations on pure dread.
‘Odd, don’t you think?’
Sylveste leant forwards, a damp chill along his spine.
‘These visitors - whoever they are, I presume they understand the situation here.’
‘The political picture, you mean? Unlikely.’
‘But they’d have attempted contact with Cuvier.’
‘That’s the funny thing. Nothing from them. Not a squeak.’
‘Who knows this?’
His voice by now was almost inaudible, even to himself, as if someone were standing on his windpipe.
‘About twenty people on the colony. People with access to the observatories, a dozen or so of us here; somewhat fewer in Resurgam City . . . Cuvier.’
‘It isn’t Remilliod.’
Sluka let the paper be reabsorbed by the table, its sensitive content digested away.
‘Then do you have any suggestions as to who it might be?’
Sylveste wondered how close to hysteria his laugh sounded. ‘If I’m right about this - and I’m not often wrong - this isn’t just bad news for me, Sluka. This is bad news for all of us.’
‘Go on.’
‘It’s a long story.’
She shrugged. ‘I’m not going anywhere in a hurry. Nor are you.’
‘Not for now, certainly.’
‘What?’
‘Just a suspicion of my own.’
‘Stop playing games, Sylveste.’
He nodded, knowing there was no real point in holding back. He had shared the deepest of his fears with Pascale already, and for Sluka it would now be just a case of filling in the gaps; things which were unobvious from her eavesdropping. If he resisted, he knew, she would find a way to learn what she wished, either from him or - worse - Pascale.
‘It goes back a long way,’ he said. ‘Way back, to the time when I’d just returned to Yellows
tone from the Shrouders. You recall that I disappeared back then, don’t you?’
‘You always denied anything had happened.’
‘I was kidnapped by Ultras,’ Sylveste said, not waiting to observe her reaction. ‘Taken aboard a lighthugger in orbit around Yellowstone. One of their number was injured, and they wanted me to . . . “repair” him, I suppose.’ ‘Repair him?’
‘The Captain was an extreme chimeric.’
Sluka shivered. It was clear that - like most colonialists - her experience with the radically altered fringes of Ultra society had been confined largely to lurid holo-dramas.
‘They were not ordinary Ultras,’ Sylveste said, seeing no reason not to play on Sluka’s phobias. ‘They’d been out there too long; too long away from what we’d think of as normal human existence. They were isolated even by normal Ultra standards; paranoid; militaristic . . .’
‘But even so . . .’
‘I know what you’re thinking - that, even if these were some outlandish offshoot culture, how bad could they be?’ Sylveste deployed a supercilious smile and shook his head. ‘That’s exactly what I thought, at first. Then I found out more about them.’
‘Such as?’
‘You mentioned a weapon? Well, they have them. They have weapons which could comfortably dismantle this planet, should they wish.’
‘But they wouldn’t use them without reason.’
Sylveste smiled. ‘We’ll find out when they reach Resurgam, I think.’
‘Yes . . .’ Sluka said this last word on a falling note. ‘Actually, they’re already here. The explosion happened three weeks ago, but the - um - significance of it was not immediately clear. In the meantime they’ve decelerated and assumed orbit around Resurgam. ’
Sylveste took a moment to regulate his breathing, wondering just how deliberate Sluka’s piecewise revelation was. Had she really neglected to mention this detail - or had she spared it, disclosing the facts in a manner calculated to keep him permanently disorientated?
If so, she was succeeding admirably.
‘Wait a minute,’ Sylveste said. ‘Just now you said only a few people knew about this. But how easy would it be to miss a lighthugger orbiting a planet?’
‘Easier than you imagine. Their ship’s the darkest object in the system. It radiates in the infrared, of course - it must do - but it seems able to tune its emissions to the frequencies of our atmospheric vapour bands; the frequencies which don’t penetrate down to the surface. If we hadn’t spent the last twenty years putting so much water into the atmosphere . . .’ Sluka shook her head ruefully. ‘In any case, it doesn’t matter. Right now, no one’s paying much attention to the sky. They could have arrived lit up in neon and no one would have noticed.’
‘But instead they haven’t even announced their presence.’
‘Worse than that. They’ve done everything possible not to let us know they’re here. Except for that damn weapon blast . . .’ For a moment she trailed off, looking towards the window, before snapping her attention back to Sylveste. ‘If these people are who you think, you must have an idea what it is they want.’
‘That’s easy enough, I think. What they want is me.’
Volyova listened intently to the rest of Sajaki’s report from the surface. ‘Very little information had reached Yellowstone from Resurgam; even less after the first mutiny. We now know that Sylveste survived the mutiny, but was ousted in a coup ten years later; ten years ago from the present date. He was imprisoned - in some luxury, I might add - at the expense of the new regime, who saw him as a useful political tool. Such a situation would have suited us extremely well, since Sylveste’s whereabouts would have been easy to deduce. We would also have been in the fortunate position of being able to negotiate with people who might have had few qualms about turning him over to us. Now, however, the situation is immeasurably more complex.’
Sajaki paused at this point, and Volyova noticed that he had turned slightly, bringing a new background into view behind him. Their angle of sight was altering as they passed overhead and to the south, but Sajaki was aware of this and was making the necessary adjustments in his position to keep his face in view of the ship at all times. To an observer on one of the other mesas he would have looked strange indeed: a silent figure facing the horizon, whispering unguessable incantations, slowly pivoting on his heels with almost watchlike precision. No one could have guessed that he was engaged in one-way communication with an orbiting spacecraft, rather than lost in the observances of some private madness.
‘As we ascertained as soon as we were in scan range, the capital Cuvier has been gutted by a number of large explosions. As we were also able to deduce by examining the degree of reconstruction, these events happened very recently on the colonial timescale. My investigations here have established that the second coup - when these weapons were used - took place barely eight months ago. However, the coup was not entirely successful. The old regime still control what remains of Cuvier, though their leader - Girardieau - was killed during the disturbance. The True Path Inundationists - those responsible for the attacks - control many of the outlying settlements, but they seem to lack cohesion, and may even have fallen into factional squabbles. In the week in which I have been here there have been nine attacks against the city, and some suspect internal saboteurs: True Path infiltrators working from within the ruins.’ Sajaki collected his thoughts at this point, and Volyova wondered if he felt some distant kinship with the infiltrators he had mentioned. If so, there was not a hint of it in his expression.
‘Concerning my own actions, my first task, of course, was to order the suit to dismantle itself. It would have been tempting to use it to make the journey overland to Cuvier, but the risk would have been excessive. Yet the journey was easier than I had feared, and on the outskirts I hitched a ride with a gang of pipeline technicians returning from the north, using them as cover to enter Cuvier. They were suspicious at first, but the vodka soon persuaded them to take me aboard their vehicle. I told them we distilled it in Phoenix, the settlement where I said I’d come from. They’d never heard of Phoenix, but they were more than happy to drink to it.’
Volyova nodded. The vodka - along with a satchel-full of trinkets - had been manufactured aboard ship shortly before Sajaki’s departure.
‘People mostly live underground now, in catacombs which were dug fifty or sixty years ago. Of course, the air is tolerably adapted for breathing, but you have my assurance that the procedure is not exactly comfortable, and one is never far away from the onset of hypoxia. The exertion which was required to reach this mesa was considerable.’
Volyova smiled to herself. If Sajaki even admitted such a thing, his ascent of the mesa must have been close to torture.
‘They say that the True Pathers have access to Martian genetic technology,’ he continued, ‘which facilitates easier breathing, though I’ve seen nothing to prove this. My pipeline friends helped me find a room in a hostel used by miners from beyond the city, which of course fitted in perfectly with my cover story. I wouldn’t describe the accommodation as salubrious, but it suited my purpose well enough, which was of course to gather data. In the course of my enquiries,’ Sajaki added, ‘I learnt much that was contradictory, or at best vague.’
Sajaki had now turned almost from horizon to horizon. The sun was now beyond his right shoulder, making his image increasingly difficult to interpret. The ship, of course, would simply switch to infrared, reading Sajaki’s speech in the shifting blood-patterns of his face.
‘Eyewitnesses say Sylveste and his wife managed to escape the assassination attempt which killed Girardieau, but they have not resurfaced since. That was eight months ago. The people I have spoken to, and the covert data sources I have intercepted, lead me to one conclusion. Sylveste is someone’s prisoner again, except this time he is being held outside the city, probably by one of the True Path cells.’
Volyova was tense now. She could see where all this was leading: there had always been a kind of i
nevitability to it. The only difference was that in this case it stemmed from what she knew about Sajaki, rather than the man he sought.
‘It would be futile to negotiate with the official powers here - whoever they are,’ Sajaki said. ‘I doubt that they could give us Sylveste even if they wanted to hand him over, which of course they wouldn’t. Which unfortunately leaves us only one option.’
Volyova bridled. Here it was.
‘We must arrange things so that it is in the best interests of the colony as a whole to give us Sylveste.’ Sajaki smiled again, teeth flashing against the shadow of his face. ‘Needless to say, I have already begun laying the necessary groundwork.’ And now he really was addressing her directly, no doubt about it. ‘Volyova; you may make the necessary formal overtures at your discretion.’
Ordinarily she might have felt some consolatory pleasure at having judged Sajaki’s intentions so accurately. Not now. All she felt was a slow-burning horror, the realisation that, after all this time, he was going to ask her to do it again. And the worst component of her horror stemmed from the realisation that she would probably do what he wanted.
‘Go on,’ Volyova said. ‘It won’t bite.’
‘I do know suits, Triumvir.’ Khouri paused, and took a step into the room’s whiteness. ‘It’s just I didn’t think I’d see one again. Let alone get to actually wear the bastard.’
The four waiting suits rested against the wall in the oppressively white storage room, six hundred levels below the bridge, adjacent to Chamber Two, where the training session would take place.
‘Listen to her,’ one of the two other women present said. ‘Talking as if she’s going to do more than just wear the damn thing for a few minutes. It’s not like you’re going down with us, Khouri, so don’t wet yourself.’
‘Thanks for the advice, Sudjic - I’ll bear it it in mind.’
Sudjic shrugged - a sneer would have been too much of an emotional expenditure, Khouri figured - and stepped towards her designated suit, followed by her companion, Sula Kjarval. Preparing to welcome their occupants, the suits resembled frogs which had been exsanguinated, eviscerated, dissected, stretched and pinned out on a vertical table. In their current configurations the suits were at their most androform, with well-defined legs and outstretched arms. There were no fingers on the ‘hands’ - for that matter, no obvious hands at all, simply streamlined flippers - although at the user’s wish the suits could extrude the necessary manipulators and digits.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 34