The Revelation Space Collection

by Alastair Reynolds

  Celestine carried Childe, tucked under her arm. What remained of him was very light, she said, and he was able to cling to her with his undamaged forepaws. I felt a spasm of horror every time I saw how little of him there was, while shuddering to think how much more intense that spasm would have been were I not already numbed by the medichines.

  We had made it back through perhaps one-third of the rooms when he slithered from her grip, thudding to the floor.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Celestine asked.

  ‘What do you think?’ He supported himself by his forelimbs, his severed trunk resting against the ground. The wound had begun to close, I saw, his diamond skin puckering tight to seal the damage.

  Before very long he would look as if he had been made this way.

  Celestine took her time before answering, ‘Quite honestly, I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘I’m going back. I’m carrying on.’

  Still propping myself against a wall, I said, ‘You can’t. You need treatment. For God’s sake; you’ve been cut in half.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Childe said. ‘All I’ve done is lose a part of me I would have been forced to discard before very long. Eventually the doors would have been a tight squeeze even for something shaped like a dog.’

  ‘It’ll kill you,’ I said.

  ‘Or I’ll beat it. It’s still possible, you know.’ He turned around, his rear part scraping against the floor, and then looked back over his shoulder. ‘I’m going to retrace my steps back to the room where this happened. I don’t think the Spire will obstruct your retreat until I step - or crawl, as it may be - into the last room we opened. But if I were you, I wouldn’t take too long on the way back.’ Then he looked at me, and again switched on the private frequency. ‘It’s not too late, Richard. You can still come back with me.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re wrong. It’s much too late.’

  Celestine reached out to help me make my awkward way to the next door. ‘Leave him, Richard. Leave him to the Spire. It’s what he’s always wanted, and he’s had his witnesses now.’

  Childe eased himself onto the lip of the door leading into the room we had just come through.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘She’s right. Whatever happens now, it’s between you and the Spire. I suppose I should wish you the best of luck, except it would sound irredeemably trite.’

  He shrugged; one of the few human gestures now available to him. ‘I’ll take whatever I can get. And I assure you that we will meet again, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said, while knowing it would never be the case. ‘In the meantime, I’ll give your regards to Chasm City.’

  ‘Do that, please. Just don’t be too specific about where I went.’

  ‘I promise you that. Roland?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think I should say goodbye now.’

  Childe turned around and slithered into the darkness, propelling himself with quick, piston-like movements of his forearms.

  Then Celestine took my arm and helped me towards the exit.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘You were right,’ I told her as we made our way back to the shuttle. ‘I think I would have followed him.’

  Celestine smiled. ‘But I’m glad you didn’t.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask something?’

  ‘As long as it isn’t to do with mathematics.’

  ‘Why did you care what happened to me, and not Childe?’

  ‘I did care about Childe,’ she said firmly. ‘But I didn’t think any of us were going to be able to persuade him to turn back.’

  ‘And that was the only reason?’

  ‘No. I also thought you deserved something better than to be killed by the Spire.’

  ‘You risked your life to get me out,’ I said. ‘I’m not ungrateful.’

  ‘Not ungrateful? Is that your idea of an expression of gratitude?’ But she was smiling, and I felt a faint impulse to smile as well. ‘Well, at least that sounds like the old Richard.’

  ‘There’s hope for me yet, then. Trintignant can put me back the way I should be, after he’s done with you.’

  But when we got back to the shuttle there was no sign of Doctor Trintignant. We searched for him, but found nothing; not even a set of tracks leading away. None of the remaining suits were missing, and when we contacted the orbiting ship they had no knowledge of the Doctor’s whereabouts.

  Then we found him.

  He had placed himself on his operating couch, beneath the loom of swift, beautiful surgical machinery. And the machines had dismantled him, separating him into his constituent components, placing some pieces of him in neatly labelled fluid-filled flasks and others in vials. Chunks of eviscerated bio-machinery floated like stinger-laden jellyfish. Implants and mechanisms glittered like small, precisely jewelled ornaments.

  There was surprisingly little in the way of organic matter.

  ‘He killed himself,’ Celestine said. Then she found his hat - the homburg - which he had placed at the head of the operating couch. Inside, tightly folded and marked in precise handwriting, was what amounted to Trintignant’s suicide note.

  My dear friends, he had written.

  After giving the matter no little consideration, I have decided to dispose of myself. I find the prospect of my own dismantling a more palatable one than continuing to endure revulsion for a crime I do not believe I committed. Please do not attempt to put me back together; the endeavour would, I assure you, be quite futile. I trust, however, that the manner of my demise - and the annotated state to which I have reduced myself - will provide some small amusement to future scholars of cybernetics.

  I must confess that there is another reason why I have chosen to bring about this somewhat terminal state of affairs. Why, after all, did I not end myself on Yellowstone?

  The answer, I am afraid, lies as much in vanity as anything else.

  Thanks to the Spire - and to the good offices of Mister Childe - I have been given the opportunity to continue the work that was so abruptly terminated by the unpleasantness in Chasm City. And thanks to yourselves - who were so keen to learn the Spire’s secrets - I have been gifted with subjects willing to submit to some of my less orthodox procedures.

  You in particular, Mister Swift, have been a Godsend. I consider the series of transformations I have wrought upon you to be my finest achievement to date. You have become my magnum opus. I fully accept that you saw the surgery merely as a means to an end, and that you would not otherwise have consented to my ministrations, but that in no way lessens the magnificence of what you have become.

  And therein, I am afraid, lies the problem.

  Whether you conquer the Spire or retreat from it - assuming, of course, that it does not kill you - there will surely come a time when you will desire to return to your prior form. And that would mean that I would be compelled to undo my single greatest work.

  Something I would rather die than do.

  I offer my apologies, such as they are, while remaining -

  Your obedient servant,

  T

  Childe never returned. After ten days we searched the area about the Spire’s base, but there were no remains that had not been there before. I supposed that there was nothing for it but to assume that he was still inside; still working his way to whatever lay at the summit.

  And I wondered.

  What ultimate function did the Spire serve? Was it possible that it served none but its own self-preservation? Perhaps it simply lured the curious into it, and forced them to adapt - becoming more like machines themselves - until they reached the point when they were of use to it.

  At which point it harvested them.

  Was it possible that the Spire was no more purposeful than a flytrap?

  I had no answers. And I did not want to remain on Golgotha pondering such things. I did not trust myself not to return to the Spire. I still felt its feral pull.

  So we left.

  �
��Promise me,’ Celestine said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That whatever happens when we get home - whatever’s become of the city - you won’t go back to the Spire.’

  ‘I won’t go back,’ I said. ‘And I promise you that. I can even have the memory of it suppressed, so it doesn’t haunt my dreams.’

  ‘Why not,’ she said. ‘You’ve done it before, after all.’

  But when we returned to Chasm City we found that Childe had not been lying. Things had changed, but not for the better. The thing that they called the Melding Plague had plunged our city back into a festering, technologically decadent dark age. The wealth we had accrued on Childe’s expedition meant nothing now, and what small influence my family had possessed before the crisis had diminished even further.

  In better days, Trintignant’s work could probably have been undone. It would not have been simple, but there were those who relished such a challenge, and I would probably have had to fight off several competing offers: rival cyberneticists vying for the prestige of tackling such a difficult project. Things were different. Even the crudest kinds of surgery were now difficult or impossibly expensive. Only a handful of specialists retained the means to even attempt such work, and they were free to charge whatever they liked.

  Even Celestine, who had been wealthier than me, could only afford to have me repaired, not rectified. That - and the other matter - almost bankrupted us.

  And yet she cared for me.

  There were those who saw us and imagined that the creature with her - the thing that trotted by her like a stiff, diamond-skinned, grotesque mechanical dog - was merely a strange choice of pet. Sometimes they sensed something unusual in our relationship - the way she might whisper an aside to me, or the way I might appear to be leading her - and they would look at me, intently, before I stared into their eyes with the blinding red scrutiny of my vision.

  Then they would always look away.

  And for a long time - until the dreams became too much - that was how it was.

  Yet now I pad into the night, Celestine unaware that I have left our apartment. Outside, dangerous gangs infiltrate the shadowed, half-flooded streets. They call this part of Chasm City the Mulch and it is the only place where we can afford to live now. Certainly we could have afforded something better - something much better - if I had not been forced to put aside money in readiness for this day. But Celestine knows nothing of that.

  The Mulch is not as bad as it used to be, but it would still have struck the earlier me as a vile place in which to exist. Even now I am instinctively wary, my enhanced eyes dwelling on the various crudely fashioned blades and crossbows that the gangs flaunt. Not all of the creatures who haunt the night are technically human. There are things with gills that can barely breathe in open air. There are other things that resemble pigs, and they are the worst of all.

  But I do not fear them.

  I slink between shadows, my thin, doglike form confusing them. I squeeze through the gaps in collapsed buildings, effortlessly escaping the few who are foolish enough to chase me. Now and then I even stop and confront them, standing with my back arched.

  My red gaze stabs through them.

  I continue on my way.

  Presently I reach the appointed area. At first it looks deserted - there are no gangs here - but then a figure emerges from the gloom, trudging through ankle-deep caramel-brown floodwater. The figure is thin and dark, and with each step it makes there is a small, precise whine. It comes into view and I observe that the woman - for it is a woman, I think - is wearing an exoskeleton. Her skin is the black of interstellar space, and her small, exquisitely featured head is perched above a neck that has been extended by several vertebrae. She wears copper rings around her neck, and her fingernails - which I see clicking against the thighs of her exoskeleton - are as long as stilettos.

  I think she is strange, but she sees me and flinches.

  ‘Are you . . . ?’ she starts to say.

  ‘I am Richard Swift,’ I answer.

  She nods almost imperceptibly - it cannot be easy, bending that neck - and introduces herself. ‘I am Triumvir Verika Abebi, of the lighthugger Poseidon. I sincerely hope you are not wasting my time.’

  ‘I can pay you, don’t you worry.’

  She looks at me with something between pity and awe. ‘You haven’t even told me what it is you want.’

  ‘That’s easy,’ I say. ‘I want you to take me somewhere.’

  TURQUOISE DAYS

  ‘Set sail in those Turquoise Days’

  Echo and the Bunnymen

  ONE

  Naqi Okpik waited until her sister was safely asleep before she stepped onto the railed balcony that circled the gondola.

  It was the most perfectly warm and still summer night in months. Even the breeze caused by the airship’s motion was warmer than usual, as soft against her cheek as the breath of an attentive lover. Above, yet hidden by the black curve of the vacuum-bag, the two moons were nearly at their fullest. Microscopic creatures sparkled a hundred metres under the airship, great schools of them daubing galaxies against the profound black of the sea. Spirals, flukes and arms of luminescence wheeled and coiled as if in thrall to secret music.

  Naqi looked to the rear, where the airship’s ceramic-jacketed sensor pod carved a twinkling furrow. Pinks and rubies and furious greens sparkled in the wake. Occasionally they darted from point to point with the nervous motion of kingfishers. As ever, she was alert to anything unusual in movements of the messenger sprites, anything that might merit a note in the latest circular, or even a full-blown article in one of the major journals of Juggler studies. But there was nothing odd happening tonight, no yet-to-be catalogued forms or behaviour patterns, nothing that might indicate more significant Pattern Juggler activity.

  She walked around the airship’s balcony until she had reached the stern, where the submersible sensor pod was tethered by a long fibre-optic dragline. Naqi pulled a long hinged stick from her pocket, flicked it open in the manner of a courtesan’s fan and then waved it close to the winch assembly. The default watercoloured lilies and sea serpents melted away, replaced by tables of numbers, sinuous graphs and trembling histograms. A glance established that there was nothing surprising here either, but the data would still form a useful calibration set for other experiments.

  As she closed the fan - delicately, for it was worth almost as much as the airship itself - Naqi reminded herself that it was a day since she had gathered the last batch of incoming messages. Rot had taken out the connection between the antenna and the gondola during the last expedition, and since then collecting the messages had become a chore, to be taken in turns or traded for less tedious tasks.

  Naqi gripped a handrail and swung out behind the airship. Here the vacuum-bag overhung the gondola by only a metre, and a grilled ladder allowed her to climb around the overhang and scramble onto the flat top of the bag. She moved gingerly, bare feet against rusting rungs, doing her best not to disturb Mina. The airship rocked and creaked a little as she found her balance on the top and then was again silent and still. The churning of its motors was so quiet that Naqi had long ago filtered the sound from her experience.

  All was calm, beautifully so.

  In the moonlight the antenna was a single dark flower rising from the broad back of the bladder. Naqi started moving along the railed catwalk that led to it, steadying herself as she went but feeling much less vertigo than would have been the case in daylight.

  Then she froze, certain that she was being watched.

  Just within Naqi’s peripheral vision appeared a messenger sprite. It had flown to the height of the airship and was now shadowing it from a distance of ten or twelve metres. Naqi gasped, delighted and unnerved at the same time. Apart from dead specimens this was the first time Naqi had ever seen a sprite this close. The organism had the approximate size and morphology of a terrestrial hummingbird, yet it glowed like a lantern. Naqi recognised it immediately as a long-range packet carrier. It
s belly would be stuffed with data coded into tightly packed wads of RNA, locked within microscopic protein capsomeres. The packet carrier’s head was a smooth teardrop, patterned with luminous pastel markings, but lacking any other detail save for two black eyes positioned above the midline. Inside the head was a cluster of neurones, which encoded the positions of the brightest circumpolar stars. Other than that, sprites had only the most rudimentary kind of intelligence. They existed to shift information between nodal points in the ocean when the usual chemical signalling pathways were deemed too slow or imprecise. The sprite would die when it reached its destination, consumed by microscopic organisms that would unravel and process the information stored in the capsomeres.

  And yet Naqi had the acute impression that it was watching her: not just the airship, but her, with a kind of watchful curiosity that made the hairs on the back of her neck bristle. And then - just at the point when the feeling of scrutiny had become unsettling - the sprite whipped sharply away from the airship. Naqi watched it descend back towards the ocean and then coast above the surface, bobbing now and then like a skipping stone. She remained still for several more minutes, convinced that something of significance had happened, though aware too of how subjective the experience had been; how unimpressive it would seem if she tried to explain it to Mina tomorrow. Anyway, Mina was the one with the special bond with the ocean, wasn’t she? Mina was the one who scratched her arms at night; Mina was the one who had too high a conformal index to be allowed into the swimmer corps. It was always Mina.