The Revelation Space Collection

by Alastair Reynolds

  This was it, he knew: the crux moment. If nothing happened - if the ship did not immediately signal its intentions by making the dust point unambiguously to one letter or other, he was over. No matter how much he wanted to see things through, he would have made a mockery of himself. But Clavain had never shirked from these moments. His whole life had lurched from one point of maximum crisis to another.

  Scorpio looked up. The dust was beginning to run out.

  ‘Your call, John.’

  Hela, 2727

  At night, in her room, the voice returned. It always waited until Rashmika was alone, until she was away from the garret. She had hoped, the first time, that it might turn out to be some temporary delusion, the effect, perhaps, of Quaicheist viral agents somehow entering her system and playing havoc with her sanity. But the voice was too rational for that, entirely too quiet and calm, and what it said was specifically directed at Rashmika and her predicament, rather than some ill-defined generic host.

  [Rashmika,] it said, [listen to us, please. The time of crisis grows near, in more ways than one.]

  ‘Go away,’ she said, burying her head in the pillow.

  [We need your help now,] the voice said.

  She knew that if she did not answer the voice it would keep pestering her, its patience endless. ‘My help?’

  [We know what Quaiche intends to do with this cathedral, how he plans to drive it over the bridge. He won’t succeed, Rashmika. The bridge won’t take the Lady Morwenna. It wasn’t ever meant to take something like a cathedral.]

  ‘And you’d know, would you?’

  [The bridge wasn’t made by the scuttlers. It’s a lot more recent than that. And it won’t withstand the Lady Mor.]

  She sat up in her narrow cot of a bed and turned the shutters to admit stained-glass light. She felt the rumble and sway of the cathedral’s progress, the distant churning of engines. She thought of the bridge, shining somewhere ahead, delicate as a dream, oblivious to the vast mass sliding slowly towards it.

  What did the voice mean, that it was a lot more recent?

  ‘I can’t stop it,’ she said.

  [You don’t have to stop it. You just have to get us to safety, before it’s too late.]

  ‘Ask Quaiche.’

  [Don’t you think we’ve tried, Rashmika? Don’t you think we’ve spent hours trying to persuade him? But he doesn’t care about us. He’d rather we didn’t exist. Sometimes, he even manages to convince himself that we don’t. When the cathedral falls from the bridge, or the bridge collapses, we’ll be destroyed. He’ll let that happen, because then he doesn’t have to think about us any more.]

  ‘I can’t help you,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to help you. You scare me. I don’t even know what you are, or where you’ve come from.’

  [You know more than you imagine,’ the voice said. ‘You came here to find us, not Quaiche.]

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  [We know who you are, Rashmika, or rather we know who you aren’t. That machinery in your head, remember? Where did all that come from?]

  ‘I don’t know about any machinery.’

  [And your memories - don’t they sometimes seem to belong to someone else? We heard you talking to the dean. We heard you talk about the Amarantin, and your memories of Resurgam.]

  ‘It was a slip,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean ...’

  [You meant every word of it, but you just don’t realise it yet. You are vastly more than you think, Rashmika. How far back do your memories of life on Hela really stretch? Nine years? Not much more, we suspect. So what came before?]

  ‘Stop talking like that,’ she said.

  The voice ignored her. [You aren’t what you seem. These memories of life on Hela are a graft, nothing more. Beneath them lies something else entirely. For nine years they’ve served you well, allowing you to move amongst these people as if born to them. The illusion was so perfect, so seamless, that you didn’t even suspect it yourself. But all along your true mission was at the back of your mind. You were waiting for something: some conjunction of events. It brought you from the badlands, down to the Permanent Way. Now, nearing the end of your quest, you are coming out of the dream. You are starting to remember who you really are, and it thrills and terrifies you in equal measure.]

  ‘My mission?’ she asked, almost laughing at the absurdity of it.

  [To make contact with us,] the voice said, [the shadows. Those you were sent to negotiate with.]

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked quietly. ‘Please tell me.’

  [Go to sleep, little girl. You’ll dream of us, and then you’ll know everything.]

  Rashmika went to sleep. She dreamed of shadows, and more. She dreamed the kinds of dream she had always associated with shallow sleep and fever: geometric and abstract, highly repetitious, filled with inexplicable terrors and ecstasies. She dreamed the dream of a hunted people.

  They were far away, so far away that the distance separating them from the familiar universe - in both space and time - was incomprehensibly large, beyond any sensible scheme of measurement. But they were people, of a kind. They had lived and dreamed, and they had a history that was itself a kind of dream: unimaginably far-reaching, unimaginably complex, an epic now grown too long for the telling. All that it was necessary for her to know - all that she could know, now - was that they had reached a point where their memory of interstellar colonisation on the human scale was so remote, so faded and etiolated by time, that it almost seemed to merge with their earliest prehistory, barely separable from a faint ancestral recollection of fire-making and the bringing down of game.

  They had colonised a handful of stars, and then they had colonised their galaxy, and then they had colonised much more than that, leap-frogging out into ever-larger territories, dancing from one hierarchical structure to the next. Galaxies, then groups of galaxies, then sprawling superclusters of tens of thousands of galaxy-groups, until they called across the starless voids between superclusters - the largest structures in creation - like apes howling from one tree-top to the next. They had done wonderful and terrible things. They had reshaped themselves and their universe, and they had made plans for eternity.

  They had failed. Across all that dizzying history, from one leap of scale to the next, there had never been a time when they were not running from something. It wasn’t the Inhibitors, or anything very like them. It was a kind of machinery, but this time more like a blight, a transforming, ravening disease that they themselves had let loose. The dream’s details were vague, but what she understood was this: in their very earliest history they had made something, a tool rather than a weapon, its intended function peaceful and utilitarian, but which had slipped from their control.

  The tool neither attacked the people nor showed any great evidence of recognising them. What it did - with the mindless efficiency of wildfire - was rip matter apart, turning worlds into floating clouds of rubble, shells of rock and ice surrounding entire stars. Mirrors in the swarms of machinery gathered starlight, focusing life-giving energy on to the grains of rubble; transparent membranes trapped that energy around each grain and allowed tiny bubble-like ecologies to grow. Within these warm emerald-green pockets the people were able to survive, if they chose. But that was their only choice, and even then only a certain kind of existence was possible. Their only other option was flight: they could not stop the advancement of the transforming machines, only keep running from the leading edge of the wave. They could only watch as the transforming fire swept through their vast civilisation in a mere flicker of cosmic time, as the great swarms of machine-stimulated living matter turned stars into green lanterns.

  They ran, and they ran. They sought solace in satellite galaxies, and for a few million years they thought they were safe. But the machines eventually reached the satellites, and began the same grindingly slow process of stellar consumption. The people ran again, but it was never far enough, never fast enough. No weapons worked: they either did more damage than the blight, or helped spread
it faster. The transforming machines evolved, becoming steadily more agile and clever. Yet one thing never changed: their central task remained the smashing of worlds, and the remaking of them into a billion bright-green shards.

  They had been created to do something, and that was what they were going to do.

  Now, at the tail end of their history, the people had run as far as it was possible to run. They had exhausted every niche. They could not go back, could not make an accommodation with the machines. Even the transformed galaxies were now uninhabitable, their chemistries poisoned, the ecological balance of stellar life and death upset by the swarming industry of the machines. Out-of-control weapons, designed originally to defeat the machines, were themselves now as much of a hazard as the original problem.

  So the people turned elsewhere. If they were being squeezed out of their own universe, then perhaps it was time to consider moving to another.

  Fortunately, this was not as impossible as it sounded.

  In her dream, Rashmika learned about the theory of braneworlds. There was a hallucinatory texture to it: velvety curtains of light and darkness rippled in her mind with the languor of auroral storms. What she understood was this: everything in the visible universe, everything that she saw - from the palm of her hand to the Lady Morwenna, from Hela itself out to the furthest observable galaxy - was necessarily trapped on one brane, like a pattern woven into a sheet of fabric. Quarks and electrons, photons and neutrinos - everything that constituted the universe in which she lived and breathed, including herself, was forced to travel along the surface of this one brane alone.

  But the brane itself was only one of many parallel sheets floating in the higher-dimensional space that was called the bulk. The sheets were stacked closely together; were even, perhaps, joined at their edges, like the folded musical programme of some vast cosmic orchestrion. Some of the sheets had very different properties from others: although the same fundamental rules of nature applied in each, the strengths of the coupling constants - and hence the properties of the macroscopic universe - depended on where a particular brane lay within the bulk. Life within those distant branes was bizarre and strange, assuming that the parochial physics even allowed anything as complex as life. Elsewhere, some sheets were brushing against each other, the glancing impact of their collisions generating primordial events in each brane that looked very much like the Big Bangs of traditional cosmology.

  If the local brane was connected to another, then the fold point - the crease - lay at a cosmological distance beyond even the Hubble length scale. But there was nothing to prevent matter and radiation making the journey around that fold, given time. If one travelled far enough along the surface of one of these connected branes - through countless megaparsecs, far enough through the conventional universe of matter and light - one would eventually end up on the next closest brane in the multidimensional void of the bulk.

  Rashmika could not see the topological relationship between her brane and the brane of the shadows. Were they joined, or separate? Were the shadows deliberately withholding this information, or was it just not known to them?

  It probably didn’t matter.

  What did matter - the only thing that mattered - was that there was a way to signal across the bulk. Gravity was not like the other elements of her universe: it was only imperfectly bound to a particular brane. It could take the long way around - oozing along an individual brane like a slowly spreading wine stain - but it could also leak through, taking the short cut across the bulk.

  The people - the shadows, she now realised - had used gravity to send messages across the bulk, from brane to brane. And with their usual patience - for they were nothing if not patient - they had waited until someone answered.

  Finally, someone had. They were the scuttlers: a starfaring species in their own right. Their history was much shorter than that of the shadows; only a few million years had passed since they had emerged from their birth world, in some lost corner of the galaxy. They were a peculiar species, with their strange habit of swapping body parts and their utter abhorrence of similarity and duplication. Their culture was impenetrably weird: nothing about it made any sense to any other species that the scuttlers ever met. Because of this they had established few trading partners, made few allegiances, and accumulated very little knowledge from other societies. They lived on cold worlds, favouring the moons of gas giants. They kept themselves to themselves, and had no ambitions beyond the modest settlement of a few hundred systems in their local galactic sector. Because of their solitary habits, it took them a while to draw down the attentions of the Inhibitors.

  It made no difference. The Inhibitors didn’t distinguish between the meek and aggressive: the rules applied equally to all. By the time the scuttlers had made contact with the shadows, they had been pushed to the edge of extinction. They were, needless to say, ready to consider anything.

  The shadows learned of the scuttlers’ travails. They listened, amused, at the stories of entire species being wiped out by the swarming black machines.

  We can help, they said.

  At that time, all they could do was transmit messages across the bulk, but with the co-operation of the scuttlers, they could do much more than that: the vast gravitational signal receiver constructed by the scuttlers to collect the shadows’ messages had the potential to allow physical intervention. At its heart was a mass-synthesiser, a machine capable of constructing solid objects according to transmitted blueprints. Like the receiver itself, the mass-synthesiser was old galactic-level technology. It fed itself on the metal-rich remains of the gas-giant planet that had been stripped apart to make the receiver in the first place. But for all its simplicity, the mass-synthesiser was versatile. It could be programmed to build receptacles for the shadows: vacant, near-immortal machine bodies into which they could transmit their personalities. For the shadows, already embodied in machines on their side of the bulk, it was no great sacrifice.

  But the scuttlers - nothing if not a cautious species - had installed clever safeguards, mindful of the danger in permitting physical intervention from one brane to another. The mass-synthesiser couldn’t be activated remotely, from the shadows’ side of the bulk. Only the scuttlers could turn it on, and allow the shadows to start colonising this side of the bulk. The shadows weren’t interested in taking over the entire galaxy, or so they said, merely in establishing a small, independent community away from the dangers that were making their own braneworld uninhabitable.

  In return, they promised, they would supply the scuttlers with the means to defeat the Inhibitors.

  All the scuttlers had to do was turn on the mass-synthesiser and allow the shadows to reach across the bulk.

  Rashmika awoke. It was bright daylight outside, and the stained-glass window threw tinted lozenges across the damp hummock of her pillow. For a moment she lay there, anointed in colours, lulled by the sway of the Lady Morwenna. She felt as if she had been deeply asleep, but at the same time she also felt drained, in desperate need of a few hours of dreamless oblivion. The voice was gone now, but she did not doubt that it would return. Nor was there any doubt in her mind that the voice had been real, and its story essentially true.

  Now, at least, she understood a little more. The scuttlers had been offered a chance to escape extinction, but the price of that deal had been opening the door to the shadows. They had come so very close to doing it, too, but at the final moment they had not been able to make that leap of faith. The shadows had remained on their side of the bulk; the scuttlers had been wiped out.

  With that realisation she felt a groaning sense of failure. She had been wrong to doubt that the scuttlers were destroyed by the Inhibitors. Everything she had worked for over the last nine years, every pious certainty she had allowed herself to indulge in, had been undermined by that one revelatory dream. The shadows had put her right. What did her opinions matter, when set against actual testimony from another alien intelligence?

  She had already considered the
alternative: that the shadows had wiped out the scuttlers. But that made even less sense than the Inhibitor hypothesis. If the scuttlers had let the shadows through, and if the shadows had organised themselves enough to do that much damage, then where were they now? It was unthinkable that they would have pulverised Hela, wiping out the scuttlers, and then crawled quietly back into their own universe. Nor was it likely that they had crossed the gap, done that damage, and then vanished into some solitary corner of this one, because - or so the voice had told her - they still needed to make the crossing. That was why they were speaking to her.

  They wanted humanity to have the courage that the scuttlers had lacked.

  Haldora, she now understood, was the signalling mechanism: the great receiver that the scuttlers had built. They had taken the former gas giant, smashed it down to its essentials and woven the remains into a world-sized gravitational antenna with a mass-synthesiser at its heart.

  What the Observers saw when they looked into the sky - the illusion of Haldora - was just a form of projected camouflage. The scuttlers were gone, but their receiver remained. And now and then, for a fraction of a second, the camouflage failed. In the vanishings, what the Observers glimpsed was not some shining citadel of God but the mechanism of the receiver itself.

  A door in the sky, waiting to be unlocked.

  That only left one question. It was, perhaps, the hardest of all. If everything the shadows had told her was true, then she also had to accept what the shadows told her about herself.

  That she wasn’t who she thought she was.

  Interstellar space, 2675

  Five days later, technicians plumbed Scorpio into the reefersleep casket. It was a surgical procedure: a ritual of incisions and catheters, anaesthetic swabs, sterilising balms.