The Revelation Space Collection

by Alastair Reynolds

  Idly, as my mind free-associated on Dominika’s couch, I thought of the refinements I might have introduced if it had been up to me. For a start, I would have made the implant very much harder to remove, putting in the deep neural connections Dominika had worried about, and then an anti-tamper system; something which would fry the brain of the subject if anyone tried removing the implant ahead of time. I would also make sure that the hunters carried their own implants, equally difficult to remove. I’d arrange for the two types of implant - hunter and hunted - to emit some kind of coded signal which each recognised. And when the parties approached each other within some predefined radius - say a city block, or less - I would arrange for both implants to inform their wearers of the proximity of the other, via the deep neural connections I had already sewn. I would cut the voyeurs out of the loop completely; let them track the game in their own fashion. Make the whole thing more private, and limit the number of hunters to a nice round number, like one. That way the whole thing would become infinitely more personal. And why limit the hunt to a mere fifty hours? In a city the size of this one, it struck me that the hunt could easily last tens of days, or longer, provided the target was allowed sufficient time to run and hide in the maze of the Mulch. For that matter, I saw no reason to limit the arena of play to the Mulch alone, or even to Chasm City. Why not every settlement on the planet, if they wanted a real challenge?

  Of course, there was no way they’d go for it. What they wanted was a quick kill; a night’s blooding, with as little expense, danger and personal involvement as possible.

  ‘Okay,’ Dominika said, pressing a sterilised pad against the side of my head. ‘You done now, Mister Mirabel.’ She held the implant between two fingers, glinting like a tiny grey jewel. ‘And if this not hunt implant, then Dominika skinniest woman in Chasm City.’

  ‘You never know,’ I said, ‘miracles do happen.’

  ‘Not to Dominika.’ Then she helped me from the couch. I felt a little light-headed, but when I fingered the head wound it felt tiny and there was no sign of infection or scarring. ‘You no curious?’ she asked, as I shrugged myself back into Vadim’s coat, anxious for the anonymity it afforded despite the heat and humidity.

  ‘No curious - I mean not curious - about what?’

  ‘I say I ask you questions about friend.’

  ‘Reivich? We’ve already covered that.’

  She began packing away her thimbles. ‘No. Mister Quirrenbach. Other friend, the one you with yesterday.’

  ‘Actually, Mister Quirrenbach and I were more acquaintances than friends. What was it anyway?’

  ‘He pay me not to tell you this, good money. So I say nothing. But you rich man now, Mister Mirabel. You make Mister Quirrenbach seem poor. You get Dominika’s drift?’

  ‘You’re saying Quirrenbach bribed you into secrecy, but if I top his bribe I can bribe you out of it?’

  ‘You smart cookie, Mister Mirabel. Dominika’s operations, they no give you brain damage.’

  ‘Enthralled to hear it.’ With a long-suffering sigh I reached into my pockets again and asked her to tell me what it was Quirrenbach had not wanted me to know. I was unsure exactly what it was I was expecting - very little, perhaps, since my mind had not really had time to dwell on the idea that Quirrenbach had ever had something to hide.

  ‘He come in with you,’ Dominika said. ‘Dressed like you, Mendicant clothes. Ask for implants out.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

  Dominika smiled then, a salacious smile, and I knew that whatever it was she was about to inflict on me, she was going to enjoy it.

  ‘He no have implants, Mister Mirabel.’

  ‘What do you mean? I saw him on your couch. You were operating on him. You’d shaved his hair.’

  ‘He tell me make it look good. Dominika, she no ask questions. Just do what client says. Client always right. ’Specially when client pay good, like Mister Quirrenbach. Client say fake surgery. Shave hair, go through motion. But I never open his head. No need. I scan him anyway - nothing in there. Him already clean.’

  ‘Then why the hell would—’

  And then suddenly it all made sense. Quirrenbach did not need to have his implants removed because - if he had ever had any to start with - they had been removed years earlier, during the plague. Quirrenbach was not from Grand Teton at all. He was not even from outside the system. He was local talent, and he had been recruited to follow me down and find out what was making me tick.

  He had been working for Reivich.

  Reivich had reached Chasm City ahead of me, travelling down while I was still having my memories reassembled by the Ice Mendicants. A few days’ lead was not much, but it had obviously been sufficient time to recruit some help. Quirrenbach might have been his first point of contact. And then Quirrenbach had returned to orbit and mingled with the immigrants who had just arrived from beyond the system. His mission would have been simple enough. Investigate the people revived from the Orvieto and find someone who might just possibly be a hired killer.

  I thought back to how it had all happened.

  First I had been accosted by Vadim in the commons of the Strelnikov. I had shrugged off Vadim, but a few minutes later I had seen him beating up Quirrenbach. I had crossed the commons sphere, forcing Vadim to give up on Quirrenbach, and then I had beaten up Vadim myself. I remembered well how it had been Quirrenbach who urged me not to kill him.

  At the time, I put it down to forgiveness on his part.

  Afterwards Quirrenbach and I had then crawled to Vadim’s quarters. I remembered again how Quirrenbach had at first seemed uneasy as we rifled through his belongings - Quirrenbach questioning the morality of what I was doing. I had argued with him, and then Quirrenbach had been forced to go along with the theft.

  All along, I hadn’t seen the obvious: that Quirrenbach and Vadim were working together.

  Quirrenbach had needed a way to get close to me without rousing my suspicions; a way to find out more about me. The two of them had set me up; Vadim undoubtedly hurting Quirrenbach in the commons, but only because they needed that realism. They must have known I would be unable to resist intervening, especially after my earlier brush with Vadim. Later, when we had been attacked in the carousel, I remembered how I had seen Quirrenbach standing to one side, restrained by the other man, while I took the brunt of Vadim’s punishment.

  I should have seen it then.

  Quirrenbach had latched onto me, which implied that he was very good at his job; that he had singled me out amongst all the passengers on the ship - but it was not necessarily like that. Reivich might have employed half a dozen other agents to tail other passengers, all using different strategems to get close to their targets. The difference was, the others were all shadowing the wrong person, and Quirrenbach - by luck or intuition or deduction - had hit the bullseye. But there was no way he could have known for sure. In all the conversations we had had, I had still been careful enough not to give away anything which would have established my identity as Cahuella’s security man.

  I tried to put myself in Quirrenbach’s position.

  It must have been very tempting for him and Vadim to kill me. But they could not do that; not until they had become totally certain that I was the real assassin. If they had killed me then, they would never know for sure that they had got the man they were after - and that doubt would always shadow them.

  So Quirrenbach had probably been planning to tail me for as long as it took; as long as it took to establish a pattern; that I was after a man called Reivich for some purpose unspecified. Visiting Dominika’s was an essential part of his disguise. He must not have realised that as a soldier I would lack implants and would therefore not require the good Madame’s talents. But he had taken it calmly - trusting me with his belongings while he was under the knife. Nice touch, Quirrenbach, I thought. The goods had served to reinforce his story.

  Except again, in hindsight, I should have realised. The broker had complained that Quirrenba
ch’s experientials were bootlegged; that they were copies of originals he had handled weeks earlier. And yet Quirrenbach said he had only just arrived. If I checked the manifests of lighthuggers arriving in the last week, would I even find that a ship had come in from Grand Teton? Perhaps, or perhaps not. It depended on how fastidious Quirrenbach had been in the manufacturing of his cover. I doubted that it went very deep, since he would have had only a day or two to manufacture the whole thing from scratch.

  All things considered, he hadn’t done an entirely bad job.

  It was sometime after noon, when I had finished with Dominika, that the next Haussmann episode happened. I was standing with my back against the wall of Grand Central Station, idly watching a skilled puppeteer entertain a small group of children. The puppeteer worked above a miniature booth, operating a tiny model of Marco Ferris, making the delicately jointed, spacesuited figurine descend a rockface formed from a heap of crumbled masonry. Ferris was supposed to be climbing into the chasm, because there was a pile of jewels at the base of the slope guarded by a fierce, nine-headed alien monster. The children clapped and screamed as the puppeteer made the monster lunge at Ferris.

  That was when my thoughts stalled and the episode inserted itself, fully-formed.

  Afterwards - when I’d had time to digest what had been revealed to me - I thought about the one that had come before it. The Haussmann episodes had begun innocently enough, reiterating Sky’s life according to the facts as I knew them. But they’d begun to diverge, at first in small details and then with increasing obviousness. The references to the sixth ship didn’t belong in any orthodox history that I’d ever heard of, and nor did the fact that Sky had kept alive the assassin who had murdered, or been given the means to murder, his father. But those were minor aspects of the story compared with the idea that Sky had actually murdered Captain Balcazar. Balcazar was just a footnote in our history; one of Sky’s predecessors - but no one had ever intimated that Sky had actually killed him.

  Clenching my fist, blood raining against the floor of the concourse, I began to wonder what I’d really been infected with.

  ‘There wasn’t anything I could do about it. He was sleeping there, not making a sound - I never suspected anything was wrong.’

  The two medics examining Balcazar had come aboard the instant the ship was secure, after Sky had raised the alarm about the old man. Valdivia and Rengo had closed the airlock behind them so that they had space to work. Sky watched them intently. They both looked weary and sallow, with bags under their eyes from overwork.

  ‘He didn’t cry out, gasp for air, anything like that?’ said Rengo.

  ‘No,’ Sky said. ‘Not a peep.’ He made a show of looking distraught, but was careful not to overdo it. After all, with Balcazar out of the way, the path to the Captaincy was suddenly much clearer than it had been before, as if a complicated maze had suddenly revealed itself to have a very simple route to its heart. He knew that; they knew it too - and it would have been even more suspicious if he had not tempered his grief with the merest hint of pleasure at his considerable good fortune.

  ‘I’ll bet those bastards on the Palestine poisoned him,’ Valdivia said. ‘I always was against him going over, you know.’

  ‘It was certainly a stressful meeting,’ Sky said.

  ‘That was probably all it took,’ Rengo said, scratching at the raw pink skin under his eye. ‘There’s no need to blame it on the others. He just couldn’t take the stress.’

  ‘There’s nothing I could have done, then?’

  The other medic was examining the prosthetic web across Balcazar’s chest, strapped on beneath the side-buttoned tunic which the men had now opened. Valdivia prodded the device doubtfully. ‘This should have given off an alarm. You didn’t hear one, I take it?’

  ‘As I said, not a peep.’

  ‘Damn thing must have broken down again. Listen, Sky,’ Valdivia said. ‘If a word of this gets out, we’re absolutely done for. That damn web was always breaking down, but the way Rengo and I have been over-stretched recently . . .’ He blew out air and shook his head in disbelief at the hours he had been working. ‘Well, I’m not saying we didn’t repair it, but obviously we couldn’t spend all our time nursing Balcazar to the exclusion of everyone else. I know they’ve got gear on the Brazilia better than this clapped-out rubbish, but what good does it do us?’

  ‘Very little,’ Sky said, nodding keenly. ‘Other people would have died if you had devoted too much attention to the old man. I understand perfectly.’

  ‘I hope you do, Sky - because there’s going to be one hell of a shitstorm once news of his death leaks out.’ Valdivia looked at the Captain again, but if he was hoping for a miraculous recovery, there was no sign of it. ‘We’re going to come under examination for the quality of our medical support. You’re going to be grilled about the way you handled the trip over to the Palestine. Ramirez and those other council bastards are going to try and say we screwed up. They’re going to try and say you were negligent. Trust me; I’ve seen it all before.’

  ‘We all know it wasn’t our fault,’ Sky said. He looked down at the Captain, the snail-trail of dried saliva still adorning his epaulette. ‘He was a good man; he served us well, long after he should have retired. But he was old.’

  ‘Yes, and he would have died in a year or so, no matter what happened. But try explaining that to the ship.’

  ‘We’ll just have to watch our backs, then.’

  ‘Sky . . . you won’t say a word, will you? About what we’ve told you?’

  Someone was banging on the airlock, trying to get into the taxi. Sky ignored the commotion. ‘What do you want me to say, exactly?’

  The medic drew in a breath. ‘You have to say the web gave you a warning. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t act on it. You couldn’t have - you didn’t have the resources or the expertise, and you were a long way from the ship.’

  Sky nodded, as if all this was perfectly reasonably and exactly what he would have suggested. ‘Just so long as I never imply that the prosthetic web never actually worked in the first place?’

  The two medics glanced at each other. ‘Yes,’ said the first. ‘That’s exactly it. No one will blame you, Sky. They’ll see that you did everything you could have done.’

  The Captain, now that Sky thought about it, looked very peaceful now. His eyes were shut - one of the medics had fingered down his eyelids to give the man some semblance of dignity in death. It was, as Clown had said, entirely possible to imagine that the man was dreaming of his boyhood. Never mind that the man’s childhood, aboard the ship, had been every bit as sterile and claustrophobic as Sky’s own.

  The knocking on the airlock had not stopped. ‘I’d better let that fellow in,’ Sky said.

  ‘Sky . . .’ the first medic said imploringly.

  He put a hand on the man’s forearm. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  Sky composed himself and palmed the door control. Behind, there were at least twenty people all wanting to be first into the cabin. They were all trying to get a look at the dead Captain, professing concern while secretly hoping this was not another false alarm. Balcazar had been in the distasteful habit of almost dying for several years now.

  ‘Dear God,’ said one of them, a woman from Propulsion Concepts. ‘It’s true, isn’t it . . . what in heaven’s name happened?’

  One of the medics started to speak, but Sky was faster. ‘His prosthetic web malfunctioned,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me. I was watching Balcazar the whole time. He was fine until his web started making an alarm sound. I opened his tunic and looked at the diagnostic readout. It said he was having a coronary.’

  ‘No . . .’ one of the medics said, but he might as well have been addressing an empty room.

  ‘And you’re sure he wasn’t having one?’ the woman said.

  ‘Hardly. He was talking to me at the time, quite lucidly. No sign of discomfort, just annoyance. Then the web told me it was
going to attempt defibrillation. Needless to say, he became quite agitated at that point.’

  ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘I started to try and remove the web, but with all the lines running into him, I realised it was going to be impossible in the seconds I had before the defib began. I had no choice but to get away from Balcazar. I might have been killed myself had I been touching him.’

  ‘He’s lying!’ the medic said.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Sky said placidly. ‘He’s bound to say that, isn’t he? I’m not saying this was deliberate . . .’ He allowed the word to linger, so that it would at least have time to settle in people’s imaginations before he moved on. ‘I’m not saying this was deliberate, just a terrible mistake due to overwork. Look at the two of them. These two men are close to nervous exhaustion. It’s no wonder they started making mistakes. We shouldn’t blame them too much for that.’

  There. When the conversation was replayed in people’s memories, what would stick out would not be Sky trying to weasel out of accepting the blame himself, but Sky being magnanimous in victory; even compassionate. They would see that and applaud, while at the same time conceding that some blame should still be apportioned to the sleepwalking medics. They would see no harm in that, Sky thought. A great and respected old man had died under regrettable circumstances. It was only right and proper that there should be some recrimination.

  He had covered himself well.

  An autopsy would establish that the Captain had indeed died from heart failure, although neither the autopsy nor the memory readout from the prosthetic web would ever quite elucidate the precise chronology of his death.