The Revelation Space Collection

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘You did very well,’ Clown said.

  True; but Clown deserved some credit as well. It was Clown who had told him to unbutton the tunic when Balcazar was asleep, and Clown who had shown him how to access the web’s private functions so that he could program it to deliver the defibrillating pulse even though the Captain was as well as he had ever been lately. Clown had been clever, even if on some level Sky knew that this knowledge had always been his. But Clown had dredged it from his memory, and for that he was thankful.

  ‘I think we make a good team,’ Sky said, under his breath.

  Sky watched the bodies of the men tumble into space.

  Valdivia and Rengo had died by the simplest means of execution available aboard a spacecraft: asphyxiation in an airlock, followed by ejection into the vacuum. The trial into the old man’s death had taken up two years of shiptime; grindingly slow as appeals were lodged, discrepancies found in Sky’s account. But the appeals had failed and Sky had managed to explain the discrepancies to almost everyone’s satisfaction. Now a retinue of senior ship’s officers crowded around the adjacent portholes, straining for a glimpse into the darkness. They had already heard the dying men thumping on the door of the airlock as the air was sucked from the chamber.

  Yes, it was a harsh punishment, he reflected - more so, given the already overstretched medical expertise aboard the ship. But such crimes could not be taken lightly. It hardly mattered that these men had not meant to kill Balcazar with their negligence - although that lack of intention itself was open to doubt. No; aboard a ship negligence was itself scarcely less a crime than mutiny. It would have been negligent, too, not to make examples of these men.

  ‘You murdered them,’ Constanza said, quietly enough so that only he heard it. ‘You may have convinced the others, but not me. I know you too well for that, Sky.’

  ‘You don’t know me at all,’ he said, his voice a hiss.

  ‘Oh, but I do. I’ve known you since you were a child.’ She smiled exaggeratedly, as if the two of them were sharing an amusing piece of smalltalk. ‘You were never normal, Sky. You were always more interested in twisted things like Sleek than real people. Or monsters like the infiltrator. You’ve kept him alive, haven’t you?’

  ‘Kept who alive?’ he said, his expression as strained as Constanza’s.

  ‘The infiltrator.’ She looked at him with narrow, suspicious eyes. ‘If it even happened that way. Where is he, anyway? There are a hundred places you could hide something like that aboard the Santiago. One day I’ll find out, you know, put an end to whatever sadistic little experiment you’re running. The same way I’ll eventually prove that you framed Valdivia and Rengo. You’ll get your punishment.’

  Sky smiled, thinking of the torture chamber where he kept Sleek and the Chimeric. The dolphin was several degrees less sane than he had ever been: an engine of pure hate that existed only to inflict pain on the Chimeric. Sky had conditioned Sleek to blame the Chimeric for his confinement, and now the dolphin had assumed the role of Devil against the God that Sky had become in the Chimeric’s eyes. It had been much easier to shape the Chimeric that way, giving him a figure to fear and despise as well as one to revere. Slowly but surely, the Chimeric was approaching the ideal Sky had always had in mind. By the time the Chimeric was needed - and that would not be for years to come - the work would be done.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.

  A hand rested on his shoulder. It was Ramirez, the leader of the executive council, the shipwide body with the power to elect someone to the vacant Captaincy. Ramirez, they were saying, was very likely to be Balcazar’s successor.

  ‘Monopolising him again, Constanza?’ the man said.

  ‘We were just going over old times,’ she answered. ‘Nothing that can’t wait, I assure you.’

  ‘He did us proud, don’t you think, Constanza? Other men might have been tempted to give those fellows the benefit of the doubt, but not our Sky.’

  ‘Not him, no,’ Constanza said, before turning away.

  ‘There’s no room for doubt in the Flotilla,’ Sky said, watching the two bodies dwindle. He nodded to the Captain, lying in state in his own cooled casket. ‘If there’s one lesson that dear old man taught me, it’s never to give any house room to uncertainty.’

  ‘That dear old man?’ Ramirez sounded amused. ‘Balcazar, you mean?’

  ‘He was like a father to me. We’ll never see his like again. If he were alive, these men would be lucky to get away with anything as painless as asphyxiation. Balcazar would have seen a painful death as the only valid form of deterrence.’ Sky looked at him intently. ‘You do agree, don’t you, sir?’

  ‘I . . . wouldn’t pretend to know.’ Ramirez seemed slightly taken aback, but he blinked and continued speaking, ‘I had no great insights into Balcazar’s mind, Haussmann. Word is, he wasn’t at his very sharpest towards the end. But I suppose you’d know all about that, having been his favourite.’ Again that hand on his shoulder. ‘And that means something to some of us. We trusted Balcazar’s judgement, just as he trusted Titus, your father. I’ll be frank: your name has been bandied about . . . what would you think to . . .’

  ‘The Captaincy?’ No sense in beating about the bush. ‘It’s a bit premature, isn’t it? Besides - someone with your own excellent record and depth of experience . . .’

  ‘A year ago, I might have agreed. I will probably take over, yes - but I’m not a young man, and I doubt that it’ll be very long before questions are being asked about my likely successor.’

  ‘You have years ahead of you, sir.’

  ‘Oh, I may live to see Journey’s End, but I’ll be in no position to oversee the difficult early years of the settlement. Even you will no longer be a young man when that happens, Haussmann . . . but you will be much younger than some of us. Importantly, I see you have nerve as well as vision . . .’ Ramirez glanced at Sky oddly. ‘Something’s troubling you, isn’t it?’

  Sky was watching the dots of the executed men dissolve into darkness, like two tiny spots of cream dropped into the blackest coffee imaginable. The ship was not under thrust, of course - it had been drifting for Sky’s entire life - which meant that the men were taking an eternity to fall away.

  ‘Nothing, sir. I was just thinking. Now that those two men have been ejected, and we don’t have to carry them with us any more, we’ll be able to decelerate just that little bit harder when it comes time to initiate the slow-down burn. That means we can stay in cruise mode a little longer, at our current speed. It means we’ll reach our destination sooner. Which means those men have, in some small, barely sufficient way, paid us back for their crimes.’

  ‘You do come out with the oddest things, Haussmann.’ Ramirez tapped him on the nose and leaned closer. There had never been any danger of the other officers overhearing the conversation, but now he was whispering. ‘Word of advice. I wasn’t joking when I said your name had been bandied about - but you aren’t the only candidate, and one wrong word from you could have a disastrous effect on your chances. Am I making myself clear?’

  ‘Crystal, sir.’

  ‘Good. Then watch your step, keep your head about you at all times, and you may be in with a chance.’

  Sky nodded. He imagined that Ramirez expected him to feel grateful for this titbit of confidentiality, but what Sky actually felt - and did his level best to hide - was unmitigated contempt. As if the wishes of Ramirez and his cronies in any way influenced him! As if they actually had any say in whether he became Captain or not. The poor, blind fools.

  ‘He’s nothing,’ Sky breathed. ‘But I’ve got to let him feel he is useful to us.’

  ‘Of course,’ Clown said, for Clown had never been far away. ‘It’s what I would do.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  After the episode had happened, I walked around the concourse until I found a tent where I could rent the use of a telephone for a few minutes. Everyone relied on phones now that the city’s original elegantly swift data networks had
stopped working. It was something of a comedown for a society whose machines had once elevated the art of communication into an effortless form of near-telepathy, but the phones had become a minor fashion accessory in their own right. The poor didn’t have them and so the rich flaunted them, the larger and more conspicuous the better. The phone I rented looked like a crude, military-hardened walkie-talkie: a bulky black handheld unit with a popup two-d screen and a matrix of scuffed push-buttons marked with Canasian characters.

  I asked the man renting the phone what I needed to do to reach both an orbital number and someone in the Canopy. He gave me a long and involved explanation about both, the details of which I struggled to hold in my head. The orbital number was easier since I already knew it - engraved onto the Mendicant business card which Sister Amelia had left me - but I had to get through four or five temperamental network layers before I reached it.

  The Mendicants conducted their business in an interesting manner. They maintained ties with many of their clients long after they had left Hospice Idlewild. Some of those clients, on ascending to positions of power in the system, returned favours to the Mendicants - donations which allowed them to keep their habitat solvent. But it went beyond that. The Mendicants relied on their clients returning to them for additional services - information and the something which could only be described as the politest kind of espionage, so it was always in their interests to be in easy reach.

  I had to walk out of the station, into the rain, before the phone was able to hook into any of the city’s surviving data systems. Even then it took many seconds of stuttering attempts before an informational route was established to the Hospice, and once our conversation began it was punctuated by significant timelags and dropouts as data packets ricocheted around near-Yellowstone space, occasionally arcing off on parabolas which never returned.

  ‘Brother Alexei of the Ice Mendicants, how may I serve God through you?’

  The face which had appeared on the screen was gaunt and lantern-jawed, the man’s eyes gleaming with calm benevolence, like an owl. One of the eyes, I noticed, was surrounded by a deep purple bruise.

  ‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘Brother Alexei. How nice. What happened? Fell on your trowel?’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow you, friend.’

  ‘Well, I’ll jog your memory for you. My name is Tanner Mirabel. I came through the Hospice a few days ago, from the Orvieto.’

  ‘I’m . . . not sure I recall you, brother.’

  ‘Funny. Don’t you remember how we exchanged vows in the cave?’

  He gritted his teeth, all the while maintaining that benevolent half-smile. ‘No . . . sorry. Drawing a blank there. But please continue. ’

  He was wearing an Ice Mendicant smock, hands clasped across his stomach. Behind him, I was afforded a view of climbing stepped vineyards which rose up and up until they curved overhead, bathed in the mirrored light of the habitat’s sunscreens. Little chalets and rest places dotted the steps, blocks of cool white amidst the overwhelmingly florid green, like icebergs on a briny sea.

  ‘I need to speak to Sister Amelia,’ I said. ‘She was very kind to me during our stay and she dealt with my personal affairs. I seem to remember you and she are acquainted?’

  The look of placidity did not diminish. ‘Sister Amelia is one of our kindest souls. It does not surprise me that you wish to show your gratitude. But I am afraid she is indisposed in the cryocrypts. Perhaps I can - in my own way - at least be of service, even if my own ministerings can not even begin to approximate the degree of devotion tended you by the divine Sister Amelia?’

  ‘Have you hurt her, Alexei?’

  ‘God forgive you.’

  ‘Cut the pious act. I’ll break your spine if you’ve hurt her. You realise that, don’t you? I should have done it while I had the chance.’

  He chewed on that for a few moments before responding, ‘No, Tanner . . . I haven’t hurt her. Does that satisfy you?’

  ‘Then get me Amelia.’

  ‘Why is it so urgent that you speak to her, and not me?’

  ‘I know from the conversations we had that Sister Amelia dealt with a lot of newcomers coming through the Hospice, and I’d like to know if she ever remembered dealing with a Mister . . .’ I started saying Quirrenbach, then bit my tongue.

  ‘Sorry, didn’t quite catch the name.’

  ‘Never mind. Just put me through to Amelia.’

  He hesitated, then asked me to repeat my own name again. ‘Tanner,’ I said, gritting my teeth.

  It was like we had only just been introduced. ‘Just a moment of your - um - patience, brother.’ The look was still in place, but his voice had an edge of strain to it now. He lifted one sleeve of his frock, exposing a bronze bracelet into which he spoke, very softly and possibly in a tongue specific only to the Mendicants. I watched an image appear on the bracelet, but it was far too small for me to identify anything other than a pink blur which might have been a human face, and which might also have been Sister Amelia. There was a pause of five or six seconds before Alexei lowered the sleeve of his smock.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I cannot reach her immediately, brother. She is tending to the slush . . . to the sick, and one would be sorely inadvised to interrupt her when she is so engaged. But I have been informed that she has been seeking you as much as you seek her.’

  ‘Seeking me?’

  ‘If you would care to leave a message where Amelia may reach you . . .’

  I killed the connection to the Hospice before Alexei had completed his sentence. I imagined him standing in the vineyard, staring glumly down at whichever deadened screen he had been addressing, his words trailing off. He had failed. He had failed to trace me, as must have been his intention. Reivich’s people, it appeared, had also reached and infiltrated the Mendicants. They had been waiting for me to resume contact, hoping that by some indiscretion I would reveal my location.

  It had almost worked.

  It took me a few minutes to find Zebra’s number, remembering that she had called herself Taryn before revealing the name used by her contacts in the sabotage movement. I had no idea if Taryn was a common first name in Chasm City, but for once luck was on my side - there were less than a dozen people with that as first name. There was no need to phone them all, since the phone showed me a map of the city and only one number was anywhere near the chasm. The connection was much swifter than the one to the Hospice, but it was far from instantaneous, and still plagued by episodes of static, as if the signal had to worm along a continent-spanning telegraphic cable, rather than jump through a few kilometres of smog-laden air.

  ‘Tanner, where are you? Why did you leave?’

  ‘I . . .’ I paused, on the verge of telling her I was near Grand Central Station, if that was not adequately obvious from the view behind me. ‘No, I’d better not. I think I trust you, Zebra, but you’re too close to the Game. It’s better if you don’t know.’

  ‘You think I’d betray you?’

  ‘No, although I wouldn’t blame you if you did. But I can’t risk anyone finding out via you.’

  ‘Who’s left to find out? You did a fairly comprehensive job on Waverly, I hear.’ Her striped face filled the screen, monochrome skin tone offset by the bloodshot pink of her eyes.

  ‘He played the Game from both sides. He must have known it would get him killed sooner or later.’

  ‘He may have been a sadist, but he was one of us.’

  ‘What was I supposed to do - smile nicely and ask them to desist?’ A warm squall of harder rain lashed out of the sky, and I moved under the ledged side of a building for protection, cupping my hand over the phone, Zebra’s image dancing like a reflection in water. ‘I had nothing personal against Waverly, in case you wondered. Nothing that a warm bullet wouldn’t have fixed.’

  ‘You didn’t use a bullet, from what I heard.’

  ‘He put me in a position where killing him was my only option. And I did it efficiently, in case you were wondering.’ I sp
ared her the details of what I had found when I caught up with Waverly on the ground; it would not change anything to know he had been harvested by the Mulch.

  ‘You’re quite capable of looking after yourself, aren’t you? I began to wonder when I found you in that building. Mostly, they don’t even make it that far. Certainly not if they’ve been shot. Who are you, Tanner Mirabel?’

  ‘Someone trying to survive,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about what I took from you. You took care of me, and I’m grateful, and if I can find a way of repaying you for that and the things I took, I will.’

  ‘You didn’t have to go anywhere,’ Zebra said. ‘I said I’d offer you sanctuary until the Game was over.’

  ‘I’m afraid I had business I had to attend to.’ It was a mistake; the last thing Zebra needed to know about was the business with Reivich, but now I had invited her to speculate about just what it would take to bring a man out of hiding.

  ‘The odd thing is,’ she said, ‘I almost believe you when you say you’ll pay me back. I don’t know why, but I think you’re a man of your word, Tanner.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘And I think one day it’ll be the death of me.’

  ‘What’s that meant to mean?’

  ‘Never mind. Is there a hunt tonight, Zebra? I thought you might know, if anyone would.’

  ‘There is,’ she said, after consideration. ‘But I don’t see how it concerns you, Tanner. Haven’t you learned your lesson yet? You’re lucky to be alive.’

  I smiled. ‘I guess I’m just not sick enough of Chasm City yet.’

  I returned the rented phone to its owner and considered my options. Zebra’s face and the timbre of her voice lurked behind every conscious thought. Why had I called her? There had been no reason for it, except to apologise, and even that was pointless; a gesture more aimed at ameliorating my conscience than aiding the woman from whom I had stolen. I had been well aware how much my betrayal would hurt her, and well aware that I was not going to be able to pay her back at any point in the foreseeable future. Yet something had made me make that call, and when I tried to pare away my superficial motives to find what really lay below them, all I found was a mélange of emotions and impulses: her smell; the sound of her laugh, the curve of her hips and the way the stripes on her back had contorted and released when she rolled aside from me after our lovemaking. I did not like what I found, so I slammed the lid on those thoughts just as if I had opened a box of vipers . . .