Felka agreed. ‘The Triumvirate ran simulations. Under certain assumptions, we can always outrun the pursuing ships - at least in our reference frame - for as long as you care to specify. We just have to keep crawling closer and closer to the speed of light. But that isn’t much of a solution in my book.’
‘It isn’t in mine either.’
‘Anyway, it doesn’t happen to be practical. We do need to stop to make repairs, and sooner rather than later. That’s why we woke you, Clavain.’
Clavain walked back to the tree stumps. He lowered himself on to his with a crick of leg joints. ‘If there’s a decision to be taken, there must be some choices on the table. Is that the case?’
‘Yes.’
He waited patiently, listening to the soothing white-noise hiss of the waterfall. ‘Well?’
Felka spoke with a reverent hush. ‘We’re a long way out, Clavain. The Resurgam system is nine light-years behind us and there isn’t another settled colony for fifteen light-years in any direction. But there’s a solar system dead ahead of us. Two cool stars. It’s a wide binary, but one of the stars has formed planets in stable orbits. They’re mature, at least three billion years old. There’s one world in the habitable zone that has a couple of small moons. Indications are that it has an oxygen atmosphere and a lot of water. There are even chlorophyll bands in the atmosphere.’
Clavain asked, ‘Human terraforming?’
‘No. There’s no sign of human presence ever having established itself around these stars. Which leaves only one possibility, I think.’
‘The Pattern Jugglers.’
She was evidently pleased that it did not need to be spelled out. ‘We always knew we’d stumble on more Juggler worlds as we moved further out into the galaxy. We shouldn’t be surprised to find one now.’
‘Dead ahead, just like that?’
‘It isn’t dead ahead, but it’s close enough. We can slow down and reach it. If it’s anything like the other Juggler worlds there may even be dry land; enough to take a few settlers.’
‘How many is a few?’
Felka smiled. ‘We won’t know until we get there, will we?’
Clavain made his decision - it was, in truth, little more than a blessing on the obvious choice - and then returned to sleep. There were few medics amongst his crew, and almost none of them had received formal training beyond a few hasty memory uploads. But he trusted them when they said that he could not expect to survive more than one or two further cycles of freezing and thawing.
‘But I’m an old man,’ he told them. ‘If I stay warm, I probably won’t survive that way either.’
‘It’ll have to be your choice,’ they told him, unhelpfully.
He was getting old, that was all. His genes were very antiquated, and though he had been through several rejuvenation programmes since leaving Mars, they had only reset a clock which then proceeded to start ticking again. Back on the Mother Nest they could have given him another half-century of virtual youth, had he wished . . . but he had never taken that final rejuvenation. The will had never been there after Galiana’s strange return and her even stranger half-death.
He did not even know if he regretted it now. If they had been able to limp to a fully equipped colony world, somewhere that hadn’t yet been ravaged by the Melding Plague, there might have been hope for him. But what difference would it have made? Galiana was still gone. He was still old inside his skull, still seeing the world through eyes that were yellow and weary with four hundred years of war. He had done what he could, and the emotional burden had cost him terribly, and he did not think he had the energy to do it one more time. It was enough that he had not totally failed this time.
And so he submitted to the reefersleep casket for the final time.
Just before he went under, he authorised a tight-beam laser transmission back to the dying Resurgam system. The message was one-time-pad coded for Zodiacal Light. If the other ship hadn’t been totally destroyed, there was a chance it would intercept and decode the signal. It would never be seen by the other Conjoiner ships, and even if Skade’s forces had somehow managed to sow receivers through Resurgam space, they would not be able to crack the encryption.
The message was very simple. It told Remontoire, Khouri, Thorn and the others that had gone with them that they were to slow and stop in the Pattern Juggler system; they would wait there for twenty years. That was enough time to allow Zodiacal Light to rendezvous with them; it was also enough time to establish a self-sustaining colony of a few tens of thousands of people, a hedge against any future catastrophe that might befall the ship.
Knowing this, feeling that in some small but significant way he had put his affairs in order, Clavain slept.
He woke to find that Nostalgia for Infinity had changed itself without consulting anyone.
No one knew why.
The changes were not at all apparent from within; it was only from the outside - seen from an inspection shuttle - that they became manifest. The changes had happened during the slow-down phase as the great ship was decelerating into the new system. With the inching speed of land erosion, the rear of the ship’s conic hull, normally a smaller inverted cone in its own right, had become flattened, like the base of a chess piece. No control over this transformation had been possible, and indeed, much of it had already taken place before anyone had noticed. There were vaults of the great ship that were only visited by humans once or twice a century, and much of the rear of the hull fell into that category. The machinery that lurked there had been surreptitiously dismantled or relocated further up the hull, in other disused spaces. Ilia Volyova might have noticed sooner than anyone - not much had ever escaped Ilia Volyova - but she was gone now, and the ship had new tenants who were not yet as devoutly familiar with its territory.
The changes were neither life-threatening nor injurious to the ship’s performance, but they remained puzzling, and further evidence - if any were needed - that the Captain’s psyche had not completely vanished, and could be expected to surprise them still further at times in the future. There appeared little doubt that the Captain had played some role in the reshaping of the ship he had become. The question of whether the reshaping had been consciously driven, or had merely sprung from some irrational dreamlike whim, was much harder to answer.
So for the time being, because there were other things to worry about, they ignored it. Nostalgia for Infinity fell into tight orbit around the watery world and probes were sent arcing into the atmosphere and the vast turquoise oceans that nearly enclosed the world from pole to pole. Creamy cloud patterns had been dabbed on it in messy, exuberant swirls. There were no large landmasses; the visible ocean was unmarred except for a few carelessly tossed archipelagos of islands, splashes of ochre paint against corneal blue-green. The closer they had come, the more nearly certain it became that this was a Juggler World, and the indications turned out to be correct. Continental rafts of living biomass stained swathes of the ocean grey-green. The atmosphere could be breathed by humans, and there were enough trace elements in the soils and bedrocks of the islands to support self-sustaining colonies.
It wasn’t perfect, by any means. Islands on Juggler worlds had a habit of vanishing under tsunamis mediated by the great semi-sentient biomass of the oceans themselves. But for twenty years, it would suffice. If the colonists wanted to stay, they’d have time to build pontoon cities floating on the sea itself.
A chain of islands - northerly, cold, but predicted to be tectonically stable - was selected.
‘Why there, in particular?’ Clavain asked. ‘There are other islands at the same latitude, and they can’t be any less stable.’
‘There’s something down there,’ Scorpio told him. ‘We keep getting a faint signal from it.’
Clavain frowned. ‘A signal? But no one’s ever supposed to have been here.’
‘It’s just a radio pulse, very weak,’ Felka said. ‘But the modulation is interesting. It’s Conjoiner code.’
‘We p
ut a beacon down here?’
‘We must have, at some point. But there’s no record of any Conjoiner ship ever coming here. Except . . .’ She paused, unwilling to say what had to be said.
‘Well?’
‘It probably doesn’t mean anything, Clavain. But Galiana could have come here. It’s not impossible, and we know she would have investigated any Juggler worlds she came across. Of course, we don’t know where her ship went before the wolves found her, and by the time she made it back to the Mother Nest all on-board records were lost or corrupted. But who else could have left a Conjoiner beacon?’
‘Anyone who was operating covertly. We don’t know everything that the Closed Council got up to, even now.’
‘I thought it was worth mentioning, that’s all.’
He nodded. He had felt a great crescendo of hope, and then a wave of sadness that was made all the deeper by what had preceded it. Of course she had not been here. It was stupid of him even to entertain the thought. But there was something down below that merited investigation, and it was sensible to locate their settlement near the item of interest. He had no problem with that.
Detailed plans for settlement were quickly drawn up. Tentative surface camps were established a month after their arrival.
And that was when it happened. Slowly, unhurriedly, as if this were the most natural thing in the world for a four-kilometre-long space vessel, Nostalgia for Infinity began to lower its orbit, spiralling down into the thin upper reaches of the atmosphere. By then it had slowed itself, too, braking to sub-orbital velocity so that the friction of re-entry did not scald away the outer layer of its hull. There was panic aboard from some quarters, for the ship was acting outside of human control. But there was also a more general feeling of quiet, calm resignation about whatever was about to happen. Clavain and the Triumvirate did not understand their ship’s intentions, but it was unlikely that it meant them harm, not now.
And so it proved. As the great ship fell out of orbit it tilted, bringing its long axis into line with the vertical defined by the planet’s gravitational field. Nothing else was possible; the ship would have snapped its spine had it come in obliquely. But provided it did descend vertically, lowering down through the clouds like the detached spire of a cathedral, it would suffer no more structural stress than was imposed by normal one-gee starflight. Aboard, it even felt normal. There was only the dull roar of the motors, normally unheard, but now transmitted back through the hull via the surrounding medium of air, a ceaseless, distant thunder that became louder as the ship approached the ground.
But there was no ground below. Though the landing site it had selected was close to the target archipelago where the first camps had already been sited, the ship was lowering itself towards the sea.
My God, Clavain thought. Suddenly he understood why the ship had remade itself. It - or whatever part of the Captain remained in charge - must have had this descent in mind from the moment the nature of the watery planet became clear. It had flattened the spike of its tail to allow itself to rest on the seabed. Down below, the sea began to boil away under the assault of the drive flames. The ship descended through mountains of steam, billowing tens of kilometres into the stratosphere. The sea was a kilometre deep under the touchdown point, for the bed sloped sharply away from the archipelago’s edge. But that kilometre hardly mattered. When Clavain felt the ship keel, coming to rest with a tremendous deep groan, most of it was still above the surface of the roiling waves.
On a nameless waterlogged world on the ragged edge of human space, under dual suns, Nostalgia for Infinity had landed.
EPILOGUE
For days after the landing the hull creaked and echoed from the lower depths as it adjusted to the external pressure of the ocean. Now and then, without human bidding, servitors scurried into the bilges to repair hull leaks where the seawater was surging in. The ship rocked ominously from time to time, but gradually anchored itself until it began to feel less like a temporary addition to the landscape than a weirdly hollowed-out geological feature: a sliver-thin stack of morbidly weathered pumice or obsidian; an ancient natural sea-tower wormed with man-made tunnels and caverns. Overhead, silver-grey clouds only occasionally ripped apart to reveal pastel-blue skies.
It was a week before anyone left the ship. For days, shuttles wheeled around it, circling it like nervous seabirds. Although not all the docking bays had been submerged, no one was yet willing to attempt a landing. Contact was however re-established with the teams who had already landed on the Juggler world, and who had made the descent from the surface. Makeshift boats were sent across the water from the nearest island - a distance of fifteen kilometres only - until they kissed against the sheer-sided cliff of the ship. Depending on tidal conditions it was possible to reach a small human-only airlock.
Clavain and Felka were in the first boat to make it back to the island. They said nothing during the crossing as they slid through wet grey mist. Clavain felt cold and despondent as he watched the black wall of the ship fall back into the fog. The sea here was soup-thick with floating micro-organisms - they were on the very fringes of a major Juggler biomass focus - and the organisms had already begun to plaster themselves against the side of the ship above the waterline. There was a scabby green accretion, a little like verdigris, which made the ship look like it had been here for centuries. He wondered what would happen if they could not persuade Nostalgia for Infinity to take off again. They had twenty years to talk it into leaving, but if the ship had already made up its mind that it wanted to stay rooted here, he doubted very much that they would be able to persuade it otherwise. Perhaps it wanted a final resting place, where it could become a memorial to its crime and the redemptive act that had followed.
‘Clavain . . .’ Felka said.
He looked at her. ‘I’m all right.’
‘You look tired. But we need you, Clavain. We haven’t even begun the struggle yet. Don’t you understand? All that’s happened so far is only the beginning. We have the weapons now . . .’
‘A handful of them. And Skade still wants them.’
‘Then she’ll have to fight us for them, won’t she? She won’t find that as easy as she imagines.’
Clavain looked back, but the ship was hidden. ‘If we’re still here, there won’t be a lot we can do to stop her.’
‘We’ll have the weapons themselves. But Remontoire will have returned by then, I’m sure of it. And he’ll have Zodiacal Light with him. The damage wasn’t fatal; a ship like that can repair itself.’
Clavain tightened his lips and agreed. ‘I suppose so.’
She held his hand as if to warm it. ‘What’s wrong, Clavain? You brought us so far. We followed you. You can’t give up now.’
‘I’m not giving up,’ he said. ‘I’m just ... tired. It’s time to let someone else carry on the fight. I’ve been a soldier too long, Felka.’
‘Then become something else.’
‘That’s not quite what I meant.’ He tried to force some cheer into his voice. ‘Look, I’m not going to die tomorrow, or next week. I owe it to everyone to get this settlement off the ground. I just don’t think I’ll necessarily be here when Remontoire makes it back. But who knows? Time has a nasty way of surprising me. God knows I’ve learned that often enough.’
They continued in silence. The crossing was choppy, and now and then the boat had to steer itself past huge seaweedlike concentrations of ropy biomass, which shifted and reacted to the boat’s presence in an unnervingly purposeful way. Presently Clavain sighted land, and shortly after that the boat skidded to a halt in a few feet of water, bottoming out on rock.
They had to get out and wade the rest of the way to dry land. Clavain was shivering by the time he squelched out of the last inch of water. The boat looked a long way away, and Nostalgia for Infinity was nowhere to be seen at all.
Antoinette Bax came to meet them, picking her way carefully across a field of rockpools that gleamed like a tessellation of perfect grey mirrors. Behind he
r, on a higher rising slope of land, was the first encampment: a hamlet of bubbletents stapled into rock.
Clavain wondered how it would look in twenty years.
More than one hundred and sixty thousand people were aboard Nostalgia for Infinity, far too many to place on one island. There would be a chain of settlements, instead - as many as fifty, with a few hubs on the larger, drier nubs of land. Once those settlements were established, work could begin on the floating colonies that would provide long-term shelter. There would be enough work here to keep anyone busy. He felt an obligation to be part of it, but no sense that it was anything he had been born to do.
He felt, in fact, that he had done what he was born to do.
‘Antoinette,’ he said, knowing that Felka would not have recognised the woman without his help, ‘how are things on dry land?’
‘There’s shit brewing already, Clavain.’
He kept his eyes on the ground, for fear of tripping. ‘Do tell.’
‘A lot of people aren’t happy with the idea of staying here. They bought into Thorn’s exodus because they wanted to go home, back to Yellowstone. Being stuck on an uninhabited piss-ball for twenty years wasn’t quite what they had in mind.’
Clavain nodded patiently. He steadied himself against Felka, using her as a walking stick. ‘And did you impress on these people the fact that they’d be dead if they hadn’t come with us?’
‘Yes, but you know what it’s like. No pleasing some people, is there?’ She shrugged. ‘Well, just thought I’d cheer you up with that, in case you thought it was all going to be plain sailing from now on.’
‘For some reason, that thought never crossed my mind. Now, can someone show us around the island?’
Felka helped him pick his way on to smoother ground. ‘Antoinette, we’re cold and wet. Is there somewhere we can get warm and dry?’
‘Just follow me. We’ve even got tea on the go.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 224