It was into this customer care void that the Ice Mendicants came, establishing chapters in dozens of systems and offering help to those sleepers whose revival had not gone as smoothly as might have been wished. It was not just starship passengers they tended to, for much of their work concerned people who had been asleep in cryocrypts for decades, skipping through economic recessions or periods of political turmoil. Often those people would waken with their savings wiped out, their personal possessions sequestered and their memories damaged.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I guess now you’re going to tell me the catch.’
‘There’s one thing you need to understand from the outset,’ Amelia said. ‘There is no catch. We care for you until you’re well enough to leave. If you want to leave sooner than that, we won’t stop you - and if you want to stay longer, we can always use an extra pair of hands in the fields. Once you’ve left the Hospice, you won’t owe us anything or hear from us again, unless you wish it.’
‘How do you make something like this pay, in that case?’
‘Oh, we manage. A lot of our clients do make voluntary donations once they’re healed - but there’s no expectation on our part that they will. Our running costs are remarkably low, and we’ve never been in hock to anyone for the construction of Idlewild.’
‘A habitat like this couldn’t have come cheap, Amelia.’ Everything cost something; even matter that had been shaped by droves of mindless, breeding robots.
‘It was a lot cheaper than you’d think, even if we had to accept some compromises in the basic design.’
‘The spindle shape? I wondered about that.’
‘I’ll show you when you’re a bit better. Then you’ll understand.’ She paused and had the robot dispense some water into a little glass. ‘Drink this. You must be parched. I imagine you want to know a little more about yourself. How you got here and where here is, for instance.’
I took the glass and drank gratefully. The water had a foreign taste to it, but it wasn’t unpleasant.
‘I’m not in the Sky’s Edge system, obviously. And this must be near one of the main centres of traffic, or you wouldn’t have built the place in the first place.’
‘Yes. We’re in the Yellowstone system - around Epsilon Eridani.’ She seemed to observe my reaction. ‘You don’t seem too surprised. ’
‘I knew it had to be somewhere like that. What I don’t remember is what made me come here.’
‘That’ll come back. You’re fortunate, in a way. Some of our clients are perfectly well, but they’re just too poor to afford immigration into the system proper. We allow them to earn a small wage here until they can at least afford the cost of a ship to take them to the Rust Belt. Or we arrange for them to spend a period in indentured servitude for some other organisation - quicker, but usually a lot less pleasant. But you won’t have to do either, Tanner. You seem to be a man of reasonable means, judging by the funds you arrived with. And mystery, too. It may not mean very much to you, but you were quite a hero when you left Sky’s Edge.’
‘I was?’
‘Yes. There was an accident, and you were implicated in the saving of more than a few lives.’
‘I don’t remember, I’m afraid.’
‘Not even Nueva Valparaiso? That’s where it happened.’
It did, faintly, mean something - like a half-familiar reference stirring memories of a book or play experienced years earlier. But the plot and principal protagonists - not to mention the outcome - remained resolutely unclear. I was staring into fog.
‘I’m afraid it’s still not there. Tell me how I got here, anyway. What was the name of the ship?’
‘The Orvieto. She would have left your system about fifteen years ago.’
‘I must have had a good reason for wanting to be on her. Was I travelling alone?’
‘As near as we can tell, yes. We’re still processing her cargo. There were twenty thousand sleepers aboard her, and only a quarter of them have been warmed yet. There’s no great hurry, when you think about it. If you’re going to spend fifteen years crossing space, a few weeks’ delay at either end isn’t worth worrying about.’
It was odd, but though I couldn’t put my finger on it, I did feel that there was something that needed to be done urgently. The feeling it reminded me of was waking from a dream, the details of which I didn’t recall, but which nonetheless put me on edge for hours afterwards.
‘So tell me what you know about Tanner Mirabel.’
‘Nowhere near as much as we’d like. But that in itself shouldn’t alarm you. Your world is at war, Tanner - has been for centuries. Records are hardly less confused than our own, and the Ultras aren’t particularly interested in who they carry, provided they pay.’
The name felt comfortable, like an old glove. A good combination, too. Tanner was a worker’s name; hard and to the point; someone who got things done. Mirabel, by contrast, had faint aristocratic pretensions.
It was a name I could live with.
‘Why are your own records confused? Don’t tell me you had a war here as well?’
‘No,’ Amelia said, guardedly. ‘No; it was something quite different to that. Something quite different indeed. Why? For a moment you almost sounded pleased.’
‘Perhaps I used to be a soldier,’ I said.
‘Escaping with the spoils of war, after committing some unspeakable atrocity?’
‘Do I look like someone capable of atrocities?’
She smiled, but there was a decided lack of humour in her expression. ‘You wouldn’t credit it, Tanner, but we get all sorts through here. You could be anything or anyone, and looks would have very little to do with it.’ Then she opened her mouth slightly. ‘Wait. There’s no mirror in the house, is there? Have you seen yourself since you woke?’
I shook my head.
‘Then follow me. A little walk will do you the power of good.’
We left the chalet and followed an ambling path into the valley, Amelia’s robot scooting ahead of us like an excited puppy. She was at ease with the machine, but the robot left me feeling intimidated; the way I would have felt if she had walked around with a poisonous snake. I recalled my reaction when the robot had first appeared: an involuntary reaching for a weapon. Not just a theatrical gesture, but an action which felt well-rehearsed. I could almost feel the heft of the gun I lacked, the precise shape of its grip under my palm, a lattice of ballistics expertise lurking just below consciousness.
I knew guns, and I didn’t like robots.
‘Tell me more about my arrival,’ I said.
‘As I said, the ship which brought you here was the Orvieto,’ Amelia said. ‘She’s in-system, of course, since she’s still being unloaded. I’ll show her to you, if you like.’
‘I thought you were going to show me a mirror.’
‘Two birds with one stone, Tanner.’
The path descended deeper, winding down into a dark, shadowed cleft overhung with a canopy of tangled greenery. This must have been the small valley I had seen below the chalet.
Amelia was right: it had taken me years to reach this place, so a few days spent regaining my memory was an inconsequential burden. But the last thing I felt was patient. Something had been straining at me ever since I had awakened; the feeling that there was something I had to do; something so urgent that even now, a few hours could make all the difference between success and failure.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘Somewhere secret. Somewhere I shouldn’t really take you, but I can’t resist. You won’t tell, will you?’
‘Now I’m intrigued.’
The shadowed cleft took us to the valley floor; to a point maximally distant from the axis of Hotel Amnesia. We were at the rim where the two conic ends of the habitat were joined to each other. It was here that gravity was highest, and I felt the extra effort required to move around.
Amelia’s robot came to a halt ahead of us, pivoting around to present its blank ovoid face to us.
�
��What’s up with it?’
‘It won’t go any further. Programming won’t allow it.’ The machine was blocking our path, so Amelia took a step off the trail, wading into knee-high grass. ‘It won’t want us to pass for our own safety, but on the other hand, it won’t actively stop us if we make an effort to go around it. Will you, good boy?’
I stepped gingerly past the robot.
‘You said something about me being a hero.’
‘You saved five lives when the bridge at Nueva Valparaiso came down. The fall of the bridge was all over the news nets, even here.’
As she spoke, I felt like I was being reminded of something told to me before; that I was always only an instant away from remembering it all myself. The bridge had been severed some way up its length by a nuclear explosion, causing the thread below the cut to fall back to ground while the part above the cut whiplashed lethally. The official explanation was that a rogue missile had been responsible; some aspirant military faction’s test firing which had gone badly awry and shimmied through the protective screen of anti-missiles around the bridge, but - though I couldn’t easily explain it - I had the insistent feeling that there was more to it than that; that my being on the bridge at the same time was not just ill fortune.
‘What exactly happened?’
‘The car you were in was above the cut. It came to a halt on the thread, and would have been safe there except that there was another car racing up from below. You realised that and persuaded the people with you that their only hope of surviving was to jump into space.’
‘Doesn’t sound like much of an alternative, even with suits on.’
‘No, it didn’t - but you knew they’d still stand a chance of surviving. You were quite a long way above the top atmosphere. You had more than eleven minutes to fall before you hit it.’
‘Great. What good is an extra eleven minutes if you’re going to die anyway?’
‘Another eleven minutes of God-given life, Tanner. And it also happened to be enough time for rescue ships to pick you up. They had to skim the atmosphere to grab you all, but they got everyone in the end - even the man who had already died.’
I shrugged. ‘I was probably only thinking of my own self-preservation. ’
‘Perhaps - but only a real hero would even admit to thinking that way. That’s why I think you might really be Tanner Mirabel.’
‘Hundreds of people must have died anyway,’ I said. ‘Not much of a heroic effort, was it?’
‘You did what you could.’
We continued in silence for a few more minutes, the track becoming increasingly overgrown and sketchy until the ground jogged downwards even more, below the level of the valley floor. The extra energy required to move around was sapping my strength.
I was leading now and for a moment Amelia lingered behind me, as if expecting someone else. Then she caught up with me and moved in front. Above, plants arched over, gradually closing off into a dark, verdant tunnel. We pushed on into what was not quite absolute darkness, Amelia more surefooted than I. When it became very dark she turned on a little penlight and poked its thin beam ahead of her, but I suspected the light was more for my benefit than hers. Something told me that she had come down here often enough to know every triphole in the flooring and how to step past it. Eventually, however, the torch became almost superfluous: there was a milky light ahead of us, periodically dimming then returning perhaps once every minute.
‘What is this place?’ I asked.
‘An old construction tunnel, dating from when Idlewild was built. They filled in most of them, but they must have forgotten this one. I come down here a lot on my own when I need to think.’
‘You’re showing quite some trust by bringing me down here, then.’
She looked back at me, her face almost lost in the gloom. ‘You’re not the only one I’ve brought down here. But I do trust you, Tanner. That’s the odd thing. And it’s got very little to do with your being a hero. You seem like a kind man. There’s an aura of calm about you.’
‘They say the same thing about psychopaths.’
‘Well, thank you for that pearl of wisdom.’
‘Sorry. I’ll shut up now.’
We walked on in mutual silence for a few more minutes, but before very long the tunnel opened out into a cavelike chamber with an artificially flat floor. I took a cautious step onto its glossy surface, and then looked down. The floor was glass, and things were moving beneath it.
Stars. And worlds.
Once every rotation, a beautiful yellow-brown planet hove into view, accompanied by a much smaller reddish moon. Now I knew where the periodic light had come from.
‘That’s Yellowstone,’ Amelia said, pointing to the larger world. ‘The moon with the big chain of craters on it? That’s Marco’s Eye, named after Marco Ferris, the man who discovered the chasm on Yellowstone.’
Some impulse made me kneel down to get a better look.
‘We’re pretty close to Yellowstone, then.’
‘Yes. We’re at the trailing Lagrange point of the moon and the planet; the gravitational balance point sixty degrees behind Marco’s Eye in its orbit. This is where most of the big ships are parked.’ She waited a moment. ‘Look; here they come now.’
A vast conglomeration of ships came into view: sleek and jewelled as ceremonial daggers. Each ship, sheathed in diamond and ice, was as large as a small city - three or four kilometres long - but rendered tiny by the sheer number and distance of them, like a shoal of brilliant tropical fish. They were clustered around another habitat, smaller ships docked around the habitat’s rim like sea-urchin spines. The whole ensemble must have been two or three hundred kilometres away. Already it was passing out of sight as the carousel spun, but there was time enough for Amelia to point out the ship which had brought me here.
‘There. That one on the edge of the parking swarm is the Orvieto, I think.’
I thought of that ship slamming through the interstellar void, cruising just below light for nearly fifteen years, and for a moment I had a visceral grasp of the immensity of space which I had crossed from Sky’s Edge, compressed into a subjective instant of dreamless sleep.
‘There’s no going back now, is there?’ I said. ‘Even if one of those ships were going back to Sky’s Edge, and even if I had the means to get aboard, I wouldn’t be returning home. I’d be a hero from thirty years in the past - probably long forgotten. Someone born after me might have decided to classify me as a war criminal and order my execution the instant I was awakened.’
Amelia nodded slowly. ‘Most people never go home again, that’s true enough. Even if there isn’t a war, too much will have changed. But most people have already resigned themselves to that before they leave.’
‘You’re saying I didn’t?’
‘I don’t know, Tanner. You do seem different, that’s for sure.’ Suddenly her tone of voice changed. ‘Ah, look! There’s one of the sloughed hulls!’
‘One of the what?’
But I followed her gaze all the same. What I saw was an empty conic shell, looking as huge as one of the ships in the parking swarm, though it was hard to be sure. She said, ‘I don’t know much about those ships, Tanner, but I know that they’re almost alive, in some ways - capable of altering themselves, improving themselves over time, so that they never end up obsolete. Sometimes the changes are all inside, but sometimes they affect the whole shape of the ship - making it larger, for instance. Or sleeker, so it can go closer to the speed of light. Usually when they do that, it’s cheaper for the ship to discard its old diamond armour rather than tear it down and rebuild it piece by piece. They call it sloughing - it’s like a lizard shedding its skin.’
‘Ah.’ I understood. ‘And I presume they were prepared to sell that armour at a knock-down price?’
‘They didn’t even sell it - just left the blessed thing lying in orbit, waiting to be rammed into by something. We took it over, stabilised its spin and lined it with rock tailings from Marco’s Eye. We had
to wait a long time for another piece that matched, but eventually we had two shells we could join together to make Idlewild.’
‘Cheap at the price.’
‘Oh, it was still a lot of work. But the design works quite well for us. For a start, it takes a lot less air to fill a habitat of this shape than a cylindrical one of the same length. And as we get older and frailer and less able to take care of our duties near the point where the shells were married together, we can spend more and more time working in the low-gravity highlands, gradually approaching the endpoints - closer to heaven, as we say.’
‘Not too close, I hope.’
‘Oh, it’s not so bad up there.’ Amelia smiled. ‘The old dears can look down on the rest of us, after all.’
There was a sound from behind us; soft footfalls. I tensed, and once again my hand seemed to twitch in expectation of a weapon. A figure, barely visible, stole into the cave. I saw Amelia tense. For a moment the figure waited, its breathing the only sound. I said nothing, but waited patiently for the world to come around again and throw some light on the stranger.
He spoke. ‘Amelia, you know you shouldn’t come down here. It’s not allowed.’
‘Brother Alexei,’ she said. ‘You should know that I’m not alone.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 76