The Revelation Space Collection

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘There’s no sign of Celestine’s hand,’ I said. ‘Or Hirz’s suit.’

  ‘It pulled her apart,’ Childe said, his face drained of blood.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘It was very fast. There was just a . . . blur. It pulled her apart and then the parts disappeared into the walls. I don’t think she could have felt much.’

  ‘I hope to God she didn’t.’

  Doctor Trintignant stooped down and examined the pieces.

  EIGHT

  Outside, in the long, steely-shadowed light of what was either dusk or dawn, we found the pieces of Hirz for which the Spire had had no use.

  They were half-buried in dust, like the bluffs and arches of some ancient landscape rendered in miniature. My mind played gruesome tricks with the shapes, turning them from brutally detached pieces of human anatomy into abstract sculptures: jointed formations that caught the light in a certain way and cast their own pleasing shadows. Though some pieces of fabric remained, the Spire had retained all the metallic parts of her suit for itself. Even her skull had been cracked open and sucked dry, so that the Spire could winnow the few small precious pieces of metal she carried in her head.

  And what it could not use, it had thrown away.

  ‘We can’t just leave her here,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to do something, bury her . . . at least put up some kind of marker.’

  ‘She’s already got one,’ Childe said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Spire. And the sooner we get back to the shuttle, the sooner we can fix Celestine and get back to it.’

  ‘A moment, please,’ Trintignant said, fingering through another pile of human remains.

  ‘Those aren’t anything to do with Hirz,’ Childe said.

  Trintignant rose to his feet, slipping something into his suit’s utility belt pocket in the process.

  Whatever it had been was small; no larger than a marble or small stone.

  ‘I’m going home,’ Celestine said, when we were back in the safety of the shuttle. ‘And before you try and talk me out of it, that’s final.’

  We were alone in her quarters. Childe had just given up trying to convince her to stay, but he had sent me in to see if I could be more persuasive. My heart, however, was not in it. I had seen what the Spire could do, and I was damned if I was going to be responsible for any blood other than my own.

  ‘At least let Trintignant take care of your hand,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t need steel now,’ she said, stroking the glistening blue surgical sleeve which terminated her arm. ‘I can manage without a hand until we’re back in Chasm City. They can grow me a new one while I’m sleeping.’

  The Doctor’s musical voice interrupted us, Trintignant’s impassive silver mask poking through into Celestine’s bubbletent partition. ‘If I may be so bold . . . it may be that my services are the best you can now reasonably hope to attain.’

  Celestine looked at Childe, and then at the Doctor, and then at the glistening surgical sleeve.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Nothing. Only some news from home which Childe has allowed me to see.’ Uninvited, Trintignant stepped fully into the room and sealed the partition behind him.

  ‘What, Doctor?’

  ‘Rather disturbing news, as it happens. Not long after our departure, something upsetting happened to Chasm City. A blight which afflicted everything contingent upon any microscopic, self-replicating system. Nanotechnology, in other words. I gather the fatalities were numbered in the millions . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to sound so bloody cheerful about it.’

  Trintignant navigated to the side of the couch where Celestine was resting. ‘I merely stress the point that what we consider state-of-the-art medicine may be somewhat beyond the city’s present capabilities. Of course, much may change before our return . . .’

  ‘Then I’ll just have to take that risk, won’t I?’ Celestine said.

  ‘On your own head be it.’ Trintignant paused and placed something small and hard on Celestine’s table. Then he turned as if to leave, but stopped and spoke again. ‘I am accustomed to it, you know.’

  ‘Accustomed to what?’ I said.

  ‘Fear and revulsion. Because of what I have become, and what I have done. But I am not an evil man. Perverse, yes. Given to peculiar desires, most certainly. But emphatically not a monster.’

  ‘What about your victims, Doctor?’

  ‘I have always maintained that they gave consent for the procedures I inflicted -’ he corrected himself ‘- performed upon them.’

  ‘That’s not what the records say.’

  ‘And who are we to argue with records?’ The light played on his mask in such a fashion as to enhance the half-smile that was always there. ‘Who are we, indeed.’

  When Trintignant was gone, I turned to Celestine and said, ‘I’m going back into the Spire. You realise that, don’t you?’

  ‘I’d guessed, but I still hope I can talk you out of it.’ With her good hand, she fingered the small, hard thing Trintignant had placed on the table. It looked like a misshapen dark stone - whatever the Doctor had found amongst the dead - and for a moment I wondered why he had left it behind.

  Then I said, ‘I really don’t think there’s much point. It’s between me and Childe now. He must have known that there’d come a point when I wouldn’t be able to turn away.’

  ‘No matter what the costs?’ Celestine asked.

  ‘Nothing’s without a little risk.’

  She shook her head, slowly and wonderingly. ‘He really got to you, didn’t he.’

  ‘No,’ I said, feeling a perverse need to defend my old friend, even when I knew that what Celestine said was perfectly true. ‘It wasn’t Childe, in the end. It was the Spire.’

  ‘Please, Richard. Think carefully, won’t you?’

  I said I would. But we both knew it was a lie.

  NINE

  Childe and I went back.

  I gazed up at it, towering over us like some brutal cenotaph. I saw it with astonishing, diamond-hard clarity. It was as if a smoky veil had been lifted from my vision, permitting thousands of new details and nuances of hue and shade to blast through. Only the tiniest, faintest hint of pixelation - seen whenever I changed my angle of view too sharply - betrayed the fact that this was not quite normal vision, but a cybernetic augmentation.

  Our eyes had been removed, the sockets scrubbed and packed with far more efficient sensory devices, wired back into our visual cortices. Our eyeballs waited back at the shuttle, floating in jars like grotesque delicacies. They could be popped back in when we had conquered the Spire.

  ‘Why not goggles?’ I said when Trintignant had first explained his plans.

  ‘Too bulky, and too liable to be snatched away. The Spire has a definite taste for metal. From now on, anything vital had better be carried as part of us - not just worn, but internalised.’ The Doctor steepled his silver fingers. ‘If that repulses you, I suggest you concede defeat now.’

  ‘I’ll decide what repulses me,’ I said.

  ‘What else?’ Childe said. ‘Without Celestine we’ll need to crack those problems ourselves.’

  ‘I will increase the density of medichines in your brains,’ Trintignant said. ‘They will weave a web of fullerene tubes, artificial neuronal connections supplanting your existing synaptic topology. ’

  ‘What good will that do?’

  ‘The fullerene tubes will conduct nerve signals hundreds of times more rapidly than your existing synaptic pathways. Your neural computation rate will increase. Your subjective sense of elapsed time will slow.’

  I stared at the Doctor, horrified and fascinated at the same time. ‘You can do that?’

  ‘It’s actually rather trivial. The Conjoiners have been doing it since the Transenlightenment, and their methods are well documented. With them I can make time slow to a subjective crawl. The Spire may give you only twenty minutes to solve a room, but I can make it feel like several hours
; even one or two days.’

  I turned to Childe. ‘You think that’ll be enough?’

  ‘I think it’ll be a lot better than nothing, but we’ll see.’

  But it was better than that.

  Trintignant’s machines did more than just supplant our existing and clumsily slow neural pathways. They reshaped them, configuring the topology to enhance mathematical prowess, which took us onto a plateau beyond what the neural modifiers had been capable of doing. We lacked Celestine’s intuitive brilliance, but we had the advantage of being able to spend longer - subjectively, at least - on a given problem.

  And, for a while at least, it worked.

  TEN

  ‘You’re turning into a monster,’ she said.

  I answered, ‘I’m turning into whatever it takes to beat the Spire.’

  I stalked away from the shuttle, moving on slender, articulated legs like piston-driven stilts. I no longer needed armour now: Trintignant had grafted it to my skin. Tough black plaques slid over each other like the carapacial segments of a lobster.

  ‘You even sound like Trintignant now,’ Celestine said, following me. I watched her asymmetric shadow loom next to mine: she lopsided; me a thin, elongated wraith.

  ‘I can’t help that,’ I said, my voice piping from the speech synthesiser that replaced my sealed-up mouth.

  ‘You can stop. It isn’t too late.’

  ‘Not until Childe stops.’

  ‘And then? Will even that be enough to make you give up, Richard?’

  I turned to face her. Behind her faceplate I watched her try to conceal the revulsion she obviously felt.

  ‘He won’t give up,’ I said.

  Celestine held out her hand. At first I thought she was beckoning me, but then I saw there was something in her palm. Small, dark and hard.

  ‘Trintignant found this outside, by the Spire. It’s what he left in my room. I think he was trying to tell us something. Trying to redeem himself. Do you recognise it, Richard?’

  I zoomed in on the object. Numbers flickered around it. Enhancement phased in. Surface irregularity. Topological contours. Albedo. Likely composition. I drank in the data like a drunkard.

  Data was what I lived for now.

  ‘No.’

  ELEVEN

  ‘I can hear something.’

  ‘Of course you can. It’s the Spire, the same as it’s always been.’

  ‘No.’ I was silent for several moments, wondering whether my augmented auditory system was sending false signals into my brain.

  But there it was again: an occasional rumble of distant machinery, but one that was coming closer.

  ‘I hear it now,’ Childe said. ‘It’s coming from behind us. Along the way we’ve come.’

  ‘It sounds like the doors opening and closing in sequence.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘Something must be coming through the rooms towards us.’

  Childe thought about that for what felt like minutes, but was probably only a matter of actual seconds. Then he shook his head, dismissively. ‘We have eleven minutes to get through this door, or we’ll be punished. We don’t have time to worry about anything extraneous.’

  Reluctantly, I agreed.

  I forced my attention back to the puzzle, feeling the machinery in my head pluck at the mathematical barbs of the problem. The ferocious clockwork that Trintignant had installed in my skull spun giddily. I had never understood mathematics with any great agility, but now I sensed it as a hard grid of truth underlying everything: bones shining through the thin flesh of the world.

  It was almost the only thing I was now capable of thinking of at all. Everything else felt painfully abstract, whereas before the opposite had been the case. This, I knew, must be what it felt like to an idiot savant, gifted with astonishing skill in one highly specialised field of human expertise.

  I had become a tool shaped so efficiently for one purpose that it could serve no other.

  I had become a machine for solving the Spire.

  Now that we were alone - and no longer reliant on Celestine - Childe had revealed himself as a more than adequately capable problem-solver. Several times I had found myself staring at a problem, with even my new mathematical skills momentarily unable to crack the solution, when Childe had seen the answer. Generally he was able to articulate the reasoning behind his choice, but sometimes there was nothing for it but for me to either accept his judgement or wait for my own sluggard thought processes to arrive at the same conclusion.

  And I began to wonder.

  Childe was brilliant now, but I sensed there was more to it than the extra layers of cognitive machinery Trintignant had installed. He was so confident now that I began to wonder if he had merely been holding back before, preferring to let the rest of us make the decisions. If that was the case, he was in some way responsible for the deaths that had already happened.

  But, I reminded myself, we had all volunteered.

  With three minutes to spare, the door eased open, revealing the room beyond. At the same moment the door we had come through opened as well, as it always did at this point. We could leave now, if we wished. At this time, as had been the case with every room we had passed through, Childe and I made a decision on whether to proceed further or not. There was always the danger that the next room would be the one that killed us - and every second that we spent before stepping through the doorway meant one second less available for cracking the next problem.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  His answer came back, clipped and automatic. ‘Onwards.’

  ‘We only had three minutes to spare on this one, Childe. They’re getting harder now. A hell of a lot harder.’

  ‘I’m fully aware of that.’

  ‘Then maybe we should retreat. Gather our strength and return. We’ll lose nothing by doing so.’

  ‘You can’t be sure of that. You don’t know that the Spire will keep letting us make these attempts. Perhaps it’s already tiring of us.’

  ‘I still—’

  But I stopped, my new, wasp-waisted body flexing easily at the approach of a footfall.

  My visual system scanned the approaching object, resolving it into a figure, stepping over the threshold from the previous room. It was a human figure, but one that had, admittedly, undergone some alterations - although none that were as drastic as those that Trintignant had wrought on me. I studied the slow, painful way she made her progress. Our own movements seemed slow, but were lightning-fast by comparison.

  I groped for a memory; a name; a face.

  My mind, clotted with routines designed to smash mathematics, could not at first retrieve such mundane data.

  Finally, however, it obliged.

  ‘Celestine,’ I said.

  I did not actually speak. Instead, laser light stuttered from the mass of sensors and scanners jammed into my eyesockets. Our minds now ran too rapidly to communicate verbally, but, though she moved slowly herself, she deigned to reply.

  ‘Yes. It’s me. Are you really Richard?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I can hardly tell the difference between you and Childe.’

  I looked at Childe, paying proper attention to his shape for what seemed the first time.

  At last, after so many frustrations, Trintignant had been given free rein to do with us as he wished. He had pumped our heads full of more processing machinery, until our skulls had to be reshaped to accommodate it, becoming sleekly elongated. He cracked our ribcages open and carefully removed our lungs and hearts, putting these organs into storage. The space vacated by one lung was replaced by a closed-cycle blood oxygenating system of the kind carried in spacesuit backpacks, so that we could endure vacuum and had no need to breathe ambient air. The other lung’s volume was filled by a device which circulated refrigerated fluid along a loop of tube, draining the excess heat generated by the stew of neural machines filling our heads. Nutrient systems crammed the remaining thorac
ic spaces; our hearts were tiny fusion-powered pumps. All other organs - stomach, intestines, genitalia - were removed, along with many bones and muscles. Our remaining limbs were detached and put into storage, replaced by skeletal prosthetics of immense strength, but which could fold and deform to enable us to squeeze through the tightest door. Our bodies were encased in exoskeletal frames to which these limbs were anchored. Finally, Trintignant gave us whiplike counterbalancing tails, and then caused our skins to envelop our metal parts, hardening here and there in lustrous grey patches of organic armour, woven from the same diamond mesh that had been used to reinforce Hirz’s suit.

  When he was done, we looked like diamond-hided greyhounds.

  Diamond dogs.

  I bowed my head. ‘I am Richard.’

  ‘Then for God’s sake please come back.’

  ‘Why have you followed us?’

  ‘To ask you. One final time.’

  ‘You changed yourself just to come after me?’

  Slowly, with the stone grace of a statue, she extended a beckoning hand. Her limbs, like ours, were mechanical, but her basic form was far less canine.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘You know I can’t go back now. Not when I’ve come so far.’

  Her answer was an eternity arriving. ‘You don’t understand, Richard. This is not what it seems.’

  Childe turned his sleek, snouted face to mine.

  ‘Ignore her,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Celestine said, who must have also been attuned to Childe’s laser signals. ‘Don’t listen to him, Richard. He’s tricked and lied to you all along. To all of us. Even to Trintignant. That’s why I came back.’

  ‘She’s lying,’ Childe said.

  ‘No. I’m not. Haven’t you got it yet, Richard? Childe’s been here before. This isn’t his first visit to the Spire.’