The Revelation Space Collection

by Alastair Reynolds

  The particle beam fired for less than a tenth of a second, although the ion trail lingered long after, in addition to the track it had seared on my vision. Cahuella fell to the ground in front of me, like a sack of corn dropped from the ceiling.

  And so did Gitta, with a hole bored neatly in her forehead, her eyes still open and seemingly alert, and the blood still oozing from the partial throat-wound.

  I had missed.

  There was no avoiding that; no softening or sweetening of that one acidic message. I had meant to save her, but intention meant nothing. What mattered was the red weal above her eyes where I had hit her, meaning to hit the man holding a knife to her throat.

  The beam had missed him completely.

  I had failed. In the one moment where failure mattered most; in the one moment of my life where I actually thought I could win - I had failed. Failed myself, and Cahuella, by betraying the terrible burden of trust he had implicitly placed in me, without saying a word. His wound was serious, but with the proper attention, I had had little doubt that he would live.

  But there was no saving Gitta. I wondered who was the luckier.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Zebra asked. ‘Tanner, what’s wrong? Don’t look at me like that, please. I’m beginning to think you might actually do it.’

  ‘Can you give me a good reason why I shouldn’t?’

  ‘Only the truth.’

  I shook my head minutely. ‘Sorry, but you’ve just given it to me, and it wasn’t anywhere near enough.’

  ‘It wasn’t everything.’ Her voice was quiet and somehow relieved. ‘I’m not working for him any more, Tanner. He thinks I am, but I’ve betrayed him.’

  ‘Reivich?’

  She nodded, face down, so that I could barely see her eyes. ‘Once you stole from me, I knew you were the man Reivich was running from. I knew you were the assassin.’

  ‘It didn’t take a great deal of deduction, did it?’

  ‘No, but it was important to be sure. Reivich wanted the man isolated and removed from the picture. Killed, not to put too fine a point on it.’

  I nodded. ‘That would make sense.’

  ‘I was meant to do it as soon as I had definite evidence you were the killer. That way Reivich would be able to put the matter out of his mind for good - he wouldn’t have to worry that the wrong man had been killed and that the real assassin was still out there somewhere.’

  ‘You had more than a few opportunities to kill me.’ My hand softened on the gun now. ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘I almost did.’ Zebra was talking quicker now, voice hushed even though no one was remotely within earshot. ‘I could have done it in the apartment, but I hesitated. You can’t blame me. So then I let you take the gun and the car, knowing I could trace either.’

  ‘I should have realised. It seemed easy at the time.’

  ‘Credit me with more sense than to let that happen by accident. Of course, there was another way to trace you if that failed. You still had the Game implant.’ She paused. ‘But then you crashed the car, had the implant taken out. That only left the gun, and I wasn’t getting a very clear trace from it. Maybe you damaged it in the car crash.’

  ‘Than I called you from the station, after I’d visited Dominika.’

  ‘And told me where you’d be later on. I hired Pransky to help me. He’s good, don’t you think? Admittedly his socials skills could use a little work, but you don’t pay people like that for their charm and diplomacy.’ Zebra took a breath and wiped a film of accumulated rain from her brows, exposing a strip of clean flesh beneath the caul of sooty water. ‘Not as good as you, though. I saw you attack the Gamers - the way you injured three of them and then kidnapped the fourth, the woman. I had you targeted the whole time that was happening. I could have opened your cranium from a kilometre away, and you wouldn’t have felt an itch before your brains hit the street. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just kill you like that. And that’s when I betrayed Reivich.’

  ‘I felt someone watching me. I never guessed it was you.’

  ‘And even if you had, would you have guessed I was a twitch of an eyelid away from killing you?’

  ‘Eyelid-triggered sniper’s rifle? Now what would a nice girl like you be doing with something like that?’

  ‘What now, Tanner?’

  I withdrew my empty hand from my pocket, like a conjuror whose trick had gone spectacularly wrong.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But it’s wet out here and I need a drink.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  Methuselah looked very much the same as when I had last seen him, floating in his tank like a monstrous piscine iceberg. There was a small crowd around him, just as before - people who would linger for a few minutes at the marvel of the age before realising that, really, all it was was a large old fish, and that, size apart, there was really nothing about Methuselah which was intrinsically more interesting than the younger, leaner, nimbler koi which thrived in the ponds. Worse than that, in fact, since the one thing I noticed was that no one turned away from Methuselah looking quite as happy as when they had arrived. Not only was there something disappointing about the fish, there was something ineluctably sad as well. Maybe they were too scared that in Methuselah they glimpsed the inert grey hulk of their own futures.

  Zebra and I drank tea, and no one paid us any attention.

  ‘The woman you met - what was her name again?’

  ‘Chanterelle Sammartini,’ I said.

  ‘Pransky never explained what happened to her. Were you together when he found you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We’d argued.’

  Zebra did a creditable double-take. ‘Wasn’t arguing part of the bargain? I mean, if you kidnap someone, don’t you generally assume that there’s going to be some arguing?’

  ‘I didn’t kidnap her, no matter what you think. I invited her to take me to the Canopy.’

  ‘With a gun.’

  ‘She wasn’t going to accept the invitation otherwise.’

  ‘Good point. And did you keep this gun on her the whole time you were up here?’

  ‘No,’ I said, not entirely comfortable with this line of debate. ‘No, not at all. It turned out not be necessary. We found we could tolerate each other’s company without it.’

  Zebra arched an eyebrow. ‘You and the Canopy rich kid actually hit it off?’

  ‘After a fashion,’ I said, feeling oddly defensive.

  From across the atrium, Methuselah flicked a pelvic fin and the suddenness of the gesture - no matter how feeble or involuntary - generated a mild frisson amongst the onlookers, as if a statue had just twitched. I wondered what kind of synaptic process had triggered that gesture, whether there was any intention behind it, or whether - like the creaking of an old house - Methuselah occasionally just moved, no closer to thought than wood.

  ‘Did you sleep with her?’ Zebra asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but there just wasn’t time.’

  ‘You’re not comfortable talking about this, are you?’

  ‘Would you be?’ I shook my head, as much to clear it of confusion as to deny anything deeper about my relationship with Chanterelle. ‘I expected to hate her for what she did; the way she played the game. But as soon as I started talking to her I realised it wasn’t that simple. From her point of view there was nothing barbaric about it at all.’

  ‘Nice and convenient, that.’

  ‘I mean she didn’t realise - or believe - that the victims were not the kind of people she’d been told they were.’

  ‘Until she met you.’

  I nodded carefully. ‘I think I gave her pause for thought.’

  ‘You’ve given us all pause for thought, Tanner.’ And then Zebra drank what remained of her tea in silence.

  ‘You again,’ the Mixmaster said, in a tone which conveyed neither pleasure nor disappointment, but a highly refined amalgam of the two. ‘I had imagined that I had answered all your questions satisfactorily during your last vi
sit. Evidently I was mistaken.’ His heavy-lidded gaze alighted on Zebra, a twinge of non-recognition disturbing the genetically enhanced placidity of his expression. ‘Madame, I see, has had a considerable makeover since the last occasion.’

  It had been Chanterelle, of course, but I decided to let the bastard have his amusement.

  ‘She had the number of a good bloodcutter,’ I said.

  ‘And you emphatically didn’t,’ the Mixmaster said, sealing the outer door of his parlour against other visitors. ‘I’m talking about the eyework, of course,’ he said, ensconcing himself behind his floating console while the two of us stood. ‘But why don’t we dispense with the lie that this work had any connection with bloodcutters?’

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ Zebra asked, entirely with justification.

  ‘A small internal matter,’ I said.

  ‘This gentleman,’ the Mixmaster said, with laboured emphasis on the last word, ‘visited me a day ago, to discuss some genetic and structural anomalies in his eyes. At the time he claimed that the anomalies were the result of inferior intervention by bloodcutters. I was even prepared to believe him, though the edited sequences bore none of the usual signatures of bloodcutter work.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I believe that the changes were done by another faction entirely. Shall I spell it out?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘The work bears certain signatures which suggest that the sequences were inserted using the genetics techniques common to Ultras. Neither more nor less advanced than bloodcutter or Mixmaster work - just different, and highly individual. I should have realised much sooner.’ He allowed himself a smile, obviously impressed by his own deductive skills. ‘When Mixmasters perform a genetic service, it’s essentially permanent, unless the client specifies otherwise. That doesn’t mean that the work isn’t reversible, in most cases - it just means that the genetic and physiological changes will be stable against reversion to the older form. Bloodcutter work is the same, for the simple reason that bloodcutter sequences are generally bootlegged from Mixmasters, and the ’cutters haven’t the ingenuity to embed obsolescence into those same sequences. They steal code, but they don’t hack it. But Ultranauts do things rather differently.’ The Mixmaster cradled his long and elegant fingers before his chin. ‘Ultras sell their services with an in-built obsolescence; a mutational clock if you will. I’ll spare you the details; suffice to say that, within the viral and enzymic machinery which mediates the expression of the new genes inserted into your own DNA, there is a time-keeping mechanism, a clock which functions by counting the accumulation of randomness in a strand of foreign reference DNA. Needless to say, once these errors exceed a pre-defined limit, cellular machinery is unshackled which suppresses or corrects the altered genes.’ Again the Mixmaster smiled. ‘Of course, I’m simplifying tremendously. For a start, the clocks are set to trigger gradually, so that production of the new proteins and the division of cells into new types doesn’t cease suddenly. Otherwise it could be fatal - especially if the changes allowed you to live in an otherwise hostile environment, like oxygenated water or an ammonia atmosphere.’

  ‘You’re saying Tanner’s eyes were touched by Ultras?’

  ‘You catch on extraordinarily swiftly. But there’s rather more to it than that.’

  ‘There generally is,’ I said.

  The Mixmaster danced his hands over the console, fingers plucking at invisible harp strings, causing reams of genetics data to spring into the air, particular sequences of Ts and As and Gs and Cs highlighted and cross-linked to a series of physiological and functional maps of the human eye and the associated brain regions of visual comprehension. He looked like a wizard suddenly accompanied by ghostly - and gory - familiars.

  ‘Something very odd has happened here,’ the man said, his fingers ceasing their too-dexterous dance. He sketched a particular block of base-pairs, the cross-linking rungs of DNA. ‘These are the pairs which are allowed to grow progressively more random; the internal clock.’ His finger moved to another highlighted block which looked superficially identical. ‘And this is the reference map, the unmutated DNA. It’s by comparing these - by noting the number of mutational changes - that the clock is driven.’

  ‘There don’t seem to be very many changes,’ Zebra said.

  ‘A few statistically minor point deletions or frame shifts,’ the Mixmaster said. ‘But nothing significant.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ I asked.

  ‘Meaning that the clock has not had very long to run. The two sets of DNA have hardly begun to diverge.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘That means that the work was done very recently; definitely within the last year, and perhaps only a few months ago.’

  ‘Why is that a problem?’ Zebra asked.

  ‘Because of this.’ Now his finger moved across a densely tangled blob, rendered in lilac. ‘This is a transcription factor; a protein that regulates the expression of a particular set of genes. It is not, however, a normally occurring human protein. Its only function - and it has been engineered for this purpose - is to suppress the newly inserted genes in your eye. It should not be present in large quantities until the mutational clock has been triggered. Yet I found it in abundance.’

  ‘Could the Ultras have deceived Tanner?’

  The Mixmaster shook his head. ‘Not likely. There’d be no economic gain in doing so. The genetics changes would still have been made, so it’s not as if it would be cheaper for them to reset the clock. In fact it would harm their longterm profits, because Tanner - if that’s your name - would have sought the services of another crew.’

  ‘I take it you have an alternative explanation?’

  ‘I do, but you may not like it.’ Once again he delivered a smile of utter salaciousness. ‘It would be exceedingly difficult to reset the mutational clock to zero without triggering all sorts of secondary anti-tamper safeguards. Even for a Mixmaster. I could do it, but it would be far from trivial work. But the opposite procedure would be considerably simpler.’

  ‘The opposite procedure?’ I leaned forward, feeling that some kind of fundamental revelation was almost within my grasp. It wasn’t a feeling I much enjoyed.

  ‘Setting the clock forward, so that the new genes are switched off.’ He said that, and then allowed himself a moment’s contemplative silence, spinning the projected eyeball with the tip of one finger, a singularly macabre globe. ‘It would be simpler because there would be no safeguards. It would never occur to the Ultras to protect against that kind of tampering, because it would only harm the client. Which is not to say it would be easy. It would, however, be an order of magnitude easier than setting the clock back. It could be attempted by any bloodcutter who understood the problem.’

  ‘Go on.’

  His voice took on a gravitas it had lacked a moment earlier, as if he had triggered his own mutational change to deepen the response of his larynx. ‘For some reason, someone set your clock forward, Tanner.’

  Zebra looked at me.

  ‘You mean Tanner’s changes are fading?’ she asked. I realised that she still had no idea what form these changes took.

  ‘That was probably the intention,’ the Mixmaster said. ‘Whoever did it was not entirely lacking in competence. Once the clock had been wound, the cells in your eye would have begun manufacturing normal human proteins, cell division following the normal blueprint.’ He sighed. ‘But whoever did it was either sloppy or hasty or both. They reset only a fraction of the clocks, and then imperfectly. There’s a small war going on in your eye, between different components of the Ultra genetics machinery. Whoever tried to reset the clock thought they were turning the machine off, but all they really did was throw a spanner in its works.’ A note of sorrow entered his voice. ‘Such haste. Such dreadful haste. Of course, whoever it was more than deserved to fail. The question is why they thought it was worth doing in the first place.’ His eyes opened in expectation, and I realised he thought I was going to give him an answer.

  But I sa
w no sense in giving him that pleasure, much as I would have liked to. Instead I said, ‘I want a scan. A full-body scan. You can do that, can’t you?’

  ‘It depends what you want it for; the kind of resolution you want me to achieve.’

  ‘Nothing too fine. I just want you to look for something. Tissue damage. Internal. Wounds which may or may not have healed.’

  ‘I can but try,’ the man said, gesturing to the couch, a skatelike scanning device already gliding down from the ceiling.

  It did not take very long. In all honesty, I would have been surprised if the Mixmaster scan had revealed anything other than what I was dreading and expecting. It was just a question of seeing it revealed in the cold indices of a readout; just a question of finally burying any residual traces of denial - and, for that matter, hope, which might have remained.

  The skate imaged my body core, learning my inner secrets via a manifold of sensory techniques. The machine was really just a highly modified form of trawl, adjusted to cope with the cellular and genetic structure of the whole body, rather than the specialised flavours of neural tissue alone. Given time, it could resolve matter down to the atomic level; right to the border of quantum fuzziness, but there was no need for such precision now, and the scan was commensurately rapid.

  And what it showed chilled me to the core. Something which should have been there was missing.

  Something which should have been missing was there.

  THIRTY-TWO

  ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Zebra said.

  She had forced me to sit down in the atrium and drink something hot and sweet and nondescript.

  ‘You can’t begin to imagine.’

  ‘What was so bad, Tanner? It must have been something you were expecting, or you wouldn’t have asked the Mixmaster to give you the scan.’