The Revelation Space Collection

by Alastair Reynolds

  He would have to play things very carefully indeed until he understood the dynamics of the current crew. Assuming they gave him the luxury of time . . .

  Pascale knelt down next to her husband. They had both removed their masks now, but only Pascale had removed her dust-goggles. ‘We’re in a lot of danger, aren’t we? If Sajaki decides he can’t use you . . .’

  ‘He’ll return us to the surface unharmed.’ Sylveste took Pascale’s hands. Ranks of empty suits towered around them, as if the two of them were unwanted despoilers in an Egyptian tomb and the suits were mummies. ‘Sajaki can’t ever rule out my being useful to him again, in the future.’

  ‘I hope you’re right . . . because that was quite a risk you took.’ She looked at him now with an expression he had rarely seen before. It was one of quiet, calm warning. ‘With my life as well.’

  ‘Sajaki isn’t my master. I just had to remind him of that; to let him know no matter how clever he gets, I’ll always be ahead of him.’

  ‘But he is your master now, don’t you understand? He may not have the sim, but he’s got you. That still puts him ahead in my book.’

  Sylveste smiled and reached for an answer that was both true and exactly what Sajaki would expect of him. ‘But not as far as he thinks.’

  Sajaki and the other woman came back less than an hour later, accompanied by a huge chimeric. Sylveste recognised the man from his previous trip aboard as Triumvir Hegazi, but only just. Hegazi had always been an extreme example of his kind - almost as comprehensively cyborgised as his Captain - but in the intervening time, Hegazi had further submerged his core humanity in machine supplements, exchanging various prosthetic parts for newer or more elegant substitutes, and had gained a whole new entourage of entoptics, most of which were designed to interact with the motion of his body parts, creating an off-spilling cascade of rainbow-coloured ghost limbs which lingered in the air for a second or so before fading. Sajaki wore unassuming shipboard clothes devoid of rank or ornamentation, emphasising the lightness of his build. But Sylveste was wise enough not to judge the man by his lack of bulk and absence of obvious weapons prosthetics. Machines undoubtedly seethed beneath his skin, giving him inhuman speed and strength. He was at least as dangerous as Hegazi and a good deal quicker, Sylveste knew.

  ‘I can’t exactly say it’s entirely a pleasure,’ Sylveste said, addressing Hegazi. ‘But I admit to experiencing a mild frisson of surprise at the fact that you haven’t imploded under the weight of your prosthetics, Triumvir.’

  ‘I suggest you take that as a compliment,’ Sajaki said to the other Triumvir. ‘It’s the closest you’ll get from Sylveste.’

  Hegazi fingered the moustache which he still cultivated, despite the encroaching prosthetics which cased his skull.

  ‘Let’s see how witty he sounds when you’ve shown him the Captain, Sajaki-san. That’ll wipe the smile off his face.’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Sajaki said. ‘And talking of faces, why don’t you show us a little more of yours, Dan?’ Sajaki fingered the haft of a gun resting in a hip-holster.

  ‘Gladly,’ Sylveste said. He reached up and pulled away the dust-goggles. He let them clatter to the floor, watching the expressions - or what passed for expressions - on the faces of the people who had taken him prisoner. For the first time they were seeing what had become of his eyes. Perhaps they knew already, but the shock of seeing Calvin’s handiwork could never be underestimated. His eyes were not sleek improvements on the originals, but brutalist substitutes which only approximated the functionality of the human eye. There were more sophisticated things in ancient medical textbooks . . . not far removed from wooden legs. ‘You knew that I lost my sight, of course?’ he said, examining each of them in turn with his blank, eyeless gaze. ‘It’s common knowledge on Resurgam . . . hardly even worth mentioning.’

  ‘What kind of resolution do you get out of those?’ Hegazi said, with what sounded like genuine interest. ‘I know they’re not completely state-of-the-art, but I bet you’ve got full EM sensitivity from the IR into the UV, right? Maybe even acoustic imaging? Got a zoom capability?’

  Sylveste looked at Hegazi long and hard before answering. ‘You need to understand one thing, Triumvir. In the right light, when she’s not standing too far away, I can just about recognise my wife.’

  ‘That good . . .’ Hegazi kept looking at him, fascinated.

  They were escorted deeper into the ship. The last time he had been aboard, they had taken him straight to the medical centre. The Captain had been more or less capable of walking then, at least for short distances. But they were not taking him anywhere he recognised now. Which was not necessarily to say that he was far from the medical centre, for the ship was as intricate as a small city and as difficult to memorise, even though he had once spent nearly a month aboard it. But he sensed that this was entirely new territory; that he was passing through regions of the ship - what Sajaki and the crew called districts - which he had never been shown before. If his reckoning was good, the elevator was carrying them away from the ship’s sleek prow, down to where the conic hull broadened to its maximum width.

  ‘Minor technical defects in your eyes don’t concern me,’ Sajaki said. ‘We can repair them easily enough.’

  ‘Without a working version of Calvin? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then we rip out your eyes and replace them with something better.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that. Besides . . . you still wouldn’t have Calvin, so what good would it do you?’

  Sajaki said something beneath his breath and the elevator crawled to a halt. ‘So you never believed me when I said we had a back-up? Well, you’re right, of course. Our copy had some strange flaws in it. Became quite useless long before we asked anything of it.’

  ‘That’s software for you.’

  ‘Yes . . . perhaps I may kill you after all.’ With one smooth movement he drew the gun from his holster, giving Sylveste time enough to notice the bronze snake which spiralled around the barrel. The weapon’s mode of killing was not at all obvious; it might have been a beam or projectile gun, but he had no doubts that he was comfortably within its lethal range.

  ‘You wouldn’t kill me now; not after all the time you spent looking for me.’

  Sajaki’s finger tightened on the trigger. ‘You underestimate my propensity for acting on a whim, Dan. I might kill you just for the sheer cosmic perversity of the act.’

  ‘Then you’d have to find someone else to heal the Captain.’

  ‘What would I have lost?’ Under the snake’s jaw, a status light flicked from green to red. Sajaki’s finger whitened.

  ‘Wait,’ Sylveste said. ‘You don’t have to kill me. Do you honestly think I’d have destroyed the only copy of Cal left in existence?’

  Sajaki’s relief was evident. ‘There’s another?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sylveste nodded towards his wife. ‘And she knows where to find it. Don’t you, Pascale?’

  Some hours later Cal said, ‘I always knew you were a cold, calculating bastard, son.’

  They were near the Captain. Sajaki had taken Pascale away, but now she was back again - along with all the other crew-members Sylveste knew about, and the apparition he had hoped never to see again. ‘An insufferable, treacherous . . . nonentity.’ The apparition was speaking quite calmly, like an actor running through lines purely to judge the timing, without imparting any actual emotion. ‘You unthinking rat.’

  ‘From nonentity to rat, eh?’ Sylveste said. ‘From some perspectives, that’s almost an improvement.’

  ‘Don’t believe it, son.’ Calvin leered at him, stretching forward from the seat which held him. ‘Think you’re so intolerably clever, don’t you? Well now I’ve got you by the balls; assuming you have any. They told me what you did. How you killed me purely on the pretext of ruining their plans.’ He raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘I mean, what a pathetic justification for patricide! I’d have at least thought you’d do me the courtesy of killing me for a halfway decent reason.
But no. That would have been asking too much. I’d almost say I was disappointed, except that would imply I once had higher expectations.’

  ‘If I’d actually killed you,’ Sylveste said, ‘this conversation would pose certain ontological problems. Besides, I always knew there was another copy of you.’

  ‘But you murdered one of me!’

  ‘Sorry, but that’s a category mistake if ever I heard one. You’re just software, Cal. Being copied and erased is your natural state of being.’ Sylveste steeled himself for another protest from Cal, but for the moment he was silent. ‘I didn’t do it to ruin Sajaki’s plans. I need his . . . co-operation as much as he needs mine.’

  ‘My co-operation?’ The Triumvir’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘We’ll get to that. All I’m saying is that when I destroyed the copy, I knew another existed and that you’d soon force me into revealing its whereabouts.’

  ‘So the act was pointless?’

  ‘No; not at all. For a while I had the pleasure of seeing you imagine your plans in ruins, Yuuji-san. The risk was worth it for that glimpse into your soul. It wasn’t a pretty sight, either.’

  ‘How did you . . . know?’ Cal said. ‘How did you know I’d been copied?’

  ‘I thought you couldn’t copy him,’ said the woman he had been introduced to as Khouri. She was small and foxlike, but perhaps, like Sajaki, not entirely to be trusted. ‘I thought they had spoilers . . . copy-protection . . . that kind of shit.’

  ‘That’s alpha-level simulations, dear,’ Calvin said. ‘Which - for better or for worse - I happen not to be. No; I’m just a lowly beta-level. Capable of passing all the standard Turings, but not - from a philosophical standpoint - actually capable of consciousness. Hence, no soul. And therefore no ethical problems about there being more than one of me. However . . .’ He drew in breath, filling the silence which someone else might have been tempted to fill with their own thoughts ‘. . . I no longer believe any of that neuro-cognitive rubbish. I can’t speak for my alpha-level self, since my alpha-level self disappeared some two centuries ago, but for whatever reason, I am now fully conscious. Perhaps all beta-levels are capable of this, or perhaps my sheer connectional complexity ensured that I exceeded some state of critical mass. I have no idea. All I know is that I think, and therefore I’m exceedingly angry.’

  Sylveste had heard all this before. ‘He’s a Turing-compliant beta-level. They’re meant to say this sort of thing. If they didn’t claim to be conscious, they’d automatically fail the standard Turings. But that doesn’t mean that what he says - the noises he makes . . . the noises it makes - have any validity.’

  ‘I could apply the same reasoning to you,’ Calvin said. ‘And where it’s leading to, dear son, is this: since I can’t speculate about the alpha, I have to assume that I’m all that remains. Now, this may be hard for you to understand, but the mere fact that I’m something precious and unique makes me object even more strenuously to the idea of anyone making a copy of me. Every act of copying me cheapens what I am. I am reduced to a mere commodity; something to be created, duplicated and disposed of whenever I happen to fit someone else’s inadequate notion of usefulness.’ He paused. ‘So - while I’m not saying I wouldn’t take steps to increase my likelihood of survival - I would not willingly have consented to be copied by anyone.’

  ‘But you did. You allowed Pascale to copy you into Descent into Darkness.’ She had been clever about it, too; for years he had never suspected a thing. He had given her access to Calvin to assist with the construction of the biography. She had allowed him to return to the object of his obsession, the Amarantin, with access to research tools and his dwindling network of sympathisers.

  ‘It was his idea,’ Pascale said.

  ‘Yes . . . I admit that much.’ Cal drew in a lungful of breath, appearing to take stock before his next utterance, despite the fact that the Calvin simulation ‘thought’ far more rapidly than unaugmented humans. ‘Those were dangerous times - no worse than now, of course, from what I’ve gathered since my reawakening - but hazardous all the same. It seemed prudent to ensure some part of me would survive my original’s destruction. I wasn’t thinking of a copy, though - more a sketch, a likeness; perhaps not even fully Turing-compliant.’

  ‘What made you change your mind?’ Sylveste said.

  ‘Pascale began to embed parts of me in the biography over a period of time - months, in fact. The encryption was very subtle. But once she had copied enough of the original for the copied parts to start interacting, they - or rather me - became rather less enthralled by the notion of committing cybernetic suicide just to prove a point. In fact I felt rather more alive - more myself - than I ever had before.’ He vouchsafed his audience a smile. ‘Of course, I soon realised why this was the case. Pascale had copied me into a more powerful computer system; the governmental core in Cuvier, where Descent was being assembled. The system was connected to more archives and networks than you ever allowed me, even back in Mantell. For the first time I actually had something to justify the attentions of my massive intellect.’ He held their gaze for a moment before adding, very softly: ‘That’s a joke, by the way.’

  ‘Copies of the biography were freely available,’ Pascale said. ‘Sajaki had already obtained one without even realising it contained a version of Calvin. How did you know he was in it, though?’ She was looking at Sylveste now. ‘Did the copied version of Cal tell you?’

  ‘No, and I’m not even sure he would have wanted to if a way had existed. I figured it out for myself. The biography was too large for the amount of simulational data it contained. Oh, I know you’d been clever - encoding Cal into least significant digits of data files - but there was just too much of Cal to hide away that easily. Descent was fifteen per cent longer than it should have been. For months I thought there had to be a whole hidden layer of scenarios; aspects of my life not supposedly documented but which you’d put in anyway, for anyone persistent enough to find them. But finally I realised that the missing capacity was enough to store a copy of Cal, and then it made sense. Of course I could never be completely sure . . .’ He looked at the projected image. ‘Though I suppose you’d say you’re the real Cal now and what I erased was just a copy?’

  Cal raised a hand from the armrest, disputatiously. ‘No; that would be much too simplistic a version of things. After all, I was that copy, once. But what I was then - and what the copy remained, until you killed it - was just a shadow of what I am now. Let’s just say I had a moment of epiphany, shall we, and leave it at that?’

  ‘So . . .’ Sylveste stepped forward, finger tapping against his lip. ‘In that case, I never really killed you, did I?’

  ‘No,’ Calvin said, with deceptive placidity. ‘You didn’t. But it’s what you might have been doing that counts. And on that score, dear boy, I’m afraid you’re still a callous, patricidal bastard.’

  ‘Touching, isn’t it?’ Hegazi said. ‘Nothing I like better than a good old family reunion.’

  They proceeded to the Captain. Khouri had been here before, but despite her minor familiarity with the place, she still felt unnerved; obtrusively aware of the contaminating matter which was only barely contained by the envelope of cold which been caulked around the man.

  ‘I think I should know what you want from me,’ Sylveste said.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Sajaki said. ‘Do you think we went to all this trouble just to ask you how you were doing these days?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past you,’ Sylveste said. ‘Your behaviour never made much sense to me in the past, so why should it start doing so now? And besides, let’s not deceive ourselves that what went on back there was everything it seemed.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Khouri asked.

  ‘Oh, don’t tell me you haven’t figured it out yet?’

  ‘Figured what out?’

  ‘That it never actually happened.’ Sylveste fixed her with the blank depths of his eyes; a scrutiny which felt more like the scanning of a mindless automa
tic surveillance system than any human apperception. ‘Or perhaps not,’ he added. ‘Perhaps you haven’t actually figured it out yet. Who are you anyway?’

  ‘You’ll get your chance to ask all the questions you want,’ Hegazi said, edgy now that they were within a stone’s throw of the Captain.

  ‘No,’ Khouri said. ‘I want to know. What do you mean, none of that actually happened?’

  Sylveste’s voice was slow and calm. ‘I’m talking about that business with the settlement Volyova wiped out.’

  Khouri stepped ahead of the entourage, blocking their progress. ‘You’d better explain that.’

  ‘That can wait,’ Sajaki said, stepping forward to push her aside. ‘Certainly until you’ve explained your role in things to my complete satisfaction, Khouri.’ The Triumvir was eyeing her suspiciously all the time now, convinced that the two deaths in her presence had to be more than coincidence. With Volyova out of the way - and the Mademoiselle silent - she had no one to shelter her. It would be only a matter of time before Sajaki acted on his suspicions and did something drastic.

  But Sylveste said, ‘No. Why need it wait? I think we should all be absolutely clear about what’s going on here. Sajaki; you didn’t go down to Resurgam just to obtain a copy of the biography, did you? What would have been the point? You had no knowledge that Descent contained a copy of Cal until I told you. You only picked up the biography because it might have come in useful in your negotiations with me. But it wasn’t the reason you went down there. That was something else entirely.’