Future histories obey differing degrees of consistency. At the soft extreme you have something like the Star Trek universe, in which the writers have been perfectly willing to go back and re-imagine certain details, even if that means contradicting data in earlier episodes. At the harder extreme, which I’d guess is almost exclusively the purview of written fiction, you have writers who maintain a furious lock-hold on consistency. Their published stories are only the iceberg’s tip of a vast private archive of background data, and no new story can be written without the monkish consultation of that hidden bible. I admire anyone with that degree of dedication to the art, but it’s not my approach. My stories fit together like a badly made jigsaw. Some of the pieces don’t even seem to come from quite the same puzzle. You probably need to file down a few corners and press hard to make them fit. My bible consists of one small Word file containing a sketchy chronology, and the written works themselves. If I’m writing a story and a detail comes up that may refer to something I think I might possibly have written in Chasm City, I’ll try to find the relevant page in CC. But I won’t kill myself if I don’t find it. In this approach I’m in the good company of John Varley, who refused to go back and read any of his ‘Eight Worlds’ stories before writing Steel Beach.
I’ve arranged the stories, as near as I can, in chronological order: ‘Great Wall of Mars’ is set barely two hundred years from now, while the last story, ‘Galactic North’, encompasses most of the future history and slingshots into the deep, distant future. But chronological order has little to do with the order in which the pieces were written. The earliest published story in this collection, ‘Dilation Sleep’, is a case in point. It was sold in 1989 and published in 1990, a full ten years before my first novel. It has roots that go back another ten years: in my teens I wrote two novels (A Union World and Dominant Species, since you asked) and a slew of stories set against an unashamedly Nivenesque background, in which a United Nations-dominated humanity makes contact with a zoo-load of alien races and obtains the secret of faster-than-light travel. Although I never tried to publish any of that stuff (which isn’t to say I didn’t inflict it on my long-suffering friends) it was a valuable learning experience. Because I’d written two moderately long novels by the time I was eighteen, I wasn’t intimidated by the idea of doing it again, and to this day I’ve maintained a good track record of finishing projects once I start them: good practice, I think, for any budding writer.
But by the time I finished the second novel, I was already growing dissatisfied with all the unquestioned assumptions that had gone into the melting pot. I vowed that the next novel I wrote would take a more rigorous approach, eschewing such easy cop-outs as humanoid aliens, conveniently Earth-like planets and magic faster-than-light travel. It would owe less to ideas gleaned from media SF and more to what I was reading, including scientific non-fiction by the likes of Paul Davies, John Gribbin and Carl Sagan. But those early books and stories weren’t completely wasted. Some of the locations, terminology and characters in them have cropped up again in the ‘Revelation Space’ universe, sometimes transformed, sometimes not. Yellowstone and Chasm City, which feature as background detail in ‘Dilation Sleep’, go right back to that first unpublished novel.
‘Dilation Sleep’ itself is an example of the kind of story that - if I were to take a scrupulous approach - really ought not to be in this collection. It’s that wrong jigsaw piece: a story written before I had all the large-scale details of the history nailed down. That’s more or less exactly why I wanted to include it, though. I think it’s of interest for the details it does share with the other stories, not the points of deviation. It’s got the notion of colony worlds linked by slower-than-light spacecraft; it’s got Yellowstone and the Melding Plague; it even has a reference to the Sylveste family (and yes, I did already know that they had an influential and ambitious scion named Dan, who’d go on to cause a bit of trouble). I could have tinkered with the story to remedy some of the more egregious points of inconsistency (change ‘spacers’ to ‘Ultras’, that kind of thing) but in the end I decided, not without misgivings, to let it stand unaltered.
The curious reader might wonder why I failed to return to the RS universe for another seven years after the publication of ‘Dilation Sleep’. It wasn’t for want of trying. I did write other stories, but they were never good enough to get published, even when I was selling other material. The strongest ideas from these dead stories were eventually salvaged and incorporated into later pieces, not all of them within the RS universe. In any case, ‘Dilation Sleep’ was part of a batch of stories I wrote before moving to the Netherlands and getting my first paid job. Settling into a new country inevitably placed constraints on my writing activities, and when I did manage to free up some time, I decided I’d be better off investing my energies in a novel.
By the time I came to write ‘A Spy in Europa’ and ‘Galactic North’, both of which were written in parallel with work on both Revelation Space and Chasm City, I was beginning to get a feel for the large-scale architecture of the future history. Here’s a shocking confession: I stole a lot of good ideas from other writers.I’ve already mentioned Niven and Varley, but I owe an equally obvious debt to Bruce Sterling, whose ‘Shaper/Mechanist’ sequence blew my mind on several levels. Sterling’s future history, even though it consists of only a single novel and a handful of stories, still feels utterly plausible to me twenty years after I first encountered it. Part of me wishes Sterling would write more ‘Shaper/ Mechanist’ stories; another part of me admires him precisely for not doing so. Read Schismatrix if you haven’t already done so: it will melt your face.
Much of the hard SF furniture of my universe - slower-than-light travel, coldsleep, machine intelligences - draws from ideas and motifs in the work of Gregory Benford, especially his ‘Galactic Centre’ sequence, beginning with In the Ocean of Night and Across the Sea of Suns. My fascination with cyborg spacers (and the baroque trappings of space opera in general) stems from early exposure to Samuel R. Delaney’s seminal Nova.
The Demarchists, the faction that plays a central role in much of the history, is not my invention. Joan D. Vinge wrote about a demarchist society in her enjoyable pacey novel The Outcasts of Heaven Belt. It’s a real political term, derived from democratic anarchy, but I hadn’t encountered it before reading Vinge’s book. Vinge’s demarchists used computer networks to facilitate their real-time democratic processes; mine use neural implants, enabling the decision-making process to become rapid and subliminal.
Nor is one of my other factions, the Conjoiners, an entirely new conception. I suspect I was thinking a little of the Comprise, the human hive-mind culture from Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers. I tried to get inside the heads of my Conjoiners in the early Clavain stories featured here, and to suggest the inner workings of a realistic hive mind. Most of the Conjoiner characters I’ve sketched in any detail are, like Clavain himself, tainted by some residual connection back to baseline humanity. The Conjoiners are my attempt to portray a hive mind as not necessarily an evil thing.
The Ultras, the cyborg crews who control most of the starships featured in the sequence, are, I suppose, what Star Trek’s Borg would be like if the Borg took an unhealthy interest in Goth subculture. I got the idea of sleek, streamlined starships from Marshall T. Savage’s book The Millennial Project, which is a non-fiction treatise on galactic colonisation. I don’t know whether Savage’s arguments really stack up (I suspect not), but I did like the idea of inverting that classic SF trope of the ‘ship designed only for the forgiving environment of vacuum’. In any case, even if streamlining doesn’t make much sense (even if it would look wicked cool), you’d still want to make your collision cross-section as small as possible, methinks, which suggests that any future starship will tend to be considerably longer than it’s wide. Savage’s wonderful and frightening vision of far-future solar systems transformed into countless sun-englobing asteroid habitats, each of which would be filled with sun-filtering foliag
e (thereby rendering starlight green), also crops up in ‘Galactic North’ and Absolution Gap. As for ship names, I bow to no one in my admiration of Iain M. Banks. But let the record show that the unwieldy names of my ships were a direct pinch from M. John Harrison’s The Centauri Device, not the Culture.
Okay: I don’t want to give anyone the idea that I stole everything. But debts must be acknowledged, and there are too many to mention here. I cannot omit Paul McAuley and Stephen Baxter, two writers who have both perpetrated future histories of their own, and who both showed great generosity to me when I was starting out. It was their short stories in the British SF magazine Interzone (stories with spaceships in: very much against the grain of what Interzone was generally publishing at the time) that encouraged me to try submitting my own material. But it was David Pringle who actually bought my earliest stories - including ‘Dilation Sleep’ and two of the other stories included here (‘A Spy in Europa’ and ‘Galactic North’) - and it’s to him that I dedicate this book. Without those early sales, I’m not at all sure that I would have persevered in my efforts to become an SF writer, so in that sense I owe David and the rest of the Interzone team for everything that’s followed. Interzone, incidentally, is still going strong: if you like short fiction (and if you don’t, what are you doing reading this?) then you could do worse than take out a subscription.
To finish, all I can say is that if you have enjoyed my stories, and you like the form of the future history, there is a mountain of good stuff out there by other writers. I hope you have as much fun discovering it as I’ve had.
Enjoy your futures.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contents
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
To my Mum and Dad,
for forty years of love and encouragement.
CHAPTER 1
Thalia Ng felt her weight increasing as the elevator sped down the spoke from the habitat’s docking hub. She allowed herself to drift to the floor, trying to judge the point at which the apparent force reached one standard gee. Thalia hoped this was not one of those habitats that insisted on puritanically high gravity, as if it was somehow morally improving to stagger around under two gees. Her belt, with her whiphound and polling-core-analysis tools, already weighed heavily on her hips.
‘Thalia,’ Dreyfus said quietly as the elevator slowed to a halt, ‘try not to look so nervous.’
She tugged down the hem of her tunic. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘You’re going to do fine.’
‘I wish there’d been more time, sir. To read up on House Perigal, I mean.’
‘You were informed of our destination as soon as we left Panoply.’
‘That was only an hour ago, sir.’
He looked at her, his lazy right eye nearly closed. ‘What’s your speed-reading index?’
‘Three, sir. Nothing exceptional.’
Dreyfus took a sip from the bulb of coffee he’d carried with him from the ship. Thalia had conjured it for him: black as tar, the way her boss liked it. ‘I suppose it was quite a long summary file.’
‘More than a thousand paragraphs, sir.’
‘Well, there’s nothing you need to know that wasn’t covered in training.’
‘I hope so. All the same, I couldn’t help noticing . . .’
‘What?’ Dreyfus asked mildly.
‘Your name’s all over the summary file, sir.’
‘Caitlin Perigal and I’ve had our fair share of run-ins.’ He smiled tightly. ‘As I’m sure she’ll be at pains to remind me.’
‘Count on it,’ said Sparver, the other deputy field on the lockdown party.
Dreyfus laid a thick-fingered hand on Thalia’s shoulder. ‘Just remember you’re here to do one thing - to secure evidence. Sparver and I’ll take care of any other distractions.’
When the elevator doors puckered open, a wave of heat and humidity hit like a hard, wet slap. Steam billowed in the air as far as Thalia could see. They were standing at the entrance to an enormous cavern hewn into the rocky torus of the wheel’s rim. Much of the visible surface consisted of pools of water arranged on subtly different levels, connected by an artful system of sluices and channels. People were bathing or swimming, or playing games in the water. Most of them were naked. There were baseline humans and people very far from human. There were sleek, purposeful shapes that might not have been people at all.
Dreyfus pulled a pair of bulbous glasses from his tunic pocket and rubbed the condensation from the dark lenses onto his sleeve. Thalia followed his cue and slipped on her own glasses, taking note of the changes she saw. Many of the apparently naked people were now masked or clothed, or at least partly hidden behind shifting blocks of colour or mirage-like plumage. Some of them had changed size and shape. A few had even become invisible, although the shades provided a blinking outline to indicate their true presence. Luminous branching structures - Thalia couldn’t tell if they were sculptures or some form of data visualisation related to an ongoing mindgame - loomed over the complex of pools.
‘Here comes the welcome,’ Dreyfus said.
Something strode towards them, following a dry path that wound between the bathing pools. A pair of shapely, stockinged female legs rose to support a flat tray arrayed with drinks. High heels clicked as the legs approached, placing one foot before the other with neurotic precision. The fluid in the glasses remained rock steady.
Thalia’s hand moved to her belt.
‘Steady,’ Dreyfus breathed.
The servitor halted before them. ‘Welcome to House Perigal, Prefects,’ it said in a squeaky voice. ‘Would you care for a drink?’
‘Thanks,’ Thalia said, ‘but we should—’
Dreyfus put down the coffee bulb and dithered his hand over the tray. ‘What do you recommend?’
‘The red’s acceptable.’
‘Red it is, then.’ He took a glass and lifted it towards his lips, just close enough to sniff the aroma. Thalia took a glass for herself. Only Sparver abstained: his metabolism couldn’t cope with alcohol.
‘Follow me, please. I’ll take you to the matriarch.’
They followed the legs through the cavern, winding between the pools. If their arrival had gone apparently unnoticed, that luxury had passed. Thalia could feel the back of her neck prickling from the uneasy attention they were now warranting.
They climbed to one of the highest pools, where four ornamental iron fish vomited water from their gaping mouths. Three adults were floating in the water, up to their chests in perfumed froth. Two were men. The third was Caitlin Perigal, her face recognisable from the summary file. Her muscular shoulders and arms tapered to elegant webbed hands with acid-green fingernails. A peacock’s feather adorned her hair. Green nymphs and satyrs buzzed around her head.
‘Prefects,’ she said, with all the warmth of superfluid helium.
‘Matriarch Perigal,’ Dreyfus said, standing with his feet a few centimetres from the edge of the pool. ‘My companions are Deputy Field Prefects Sparver Bancal and Thalia Ng. We’ve met, of course.’
Perigal turned languidly to
her two companions. ‘The sleepy-looking fat one is Tom Dreyfus,’ she explained.
One of them - an aristocratic man with long, white hair - examined Dreyfus through clinical grey eyes. His plumage rendered him in impressionist brushstrokes. ‘Your paths have crossed before, Caitlin?’
Perigal stirred, breaking the water with the muscular fluked tail that had been grafted on in place of her legs. Thalia touched the stud on the side of her shades to verify that the tail was real, not a hallucination.
‘Dreyfus’s function in life seems to be finding obscure legal channels through which to harass me,’ Perigal said.
Dreyfus looked unimpressed. ‘I just do my job. It’s not my fault that you keep being a part of it.’
‘And I do, don’t I?’
‘So it seems. Nice tail, by the way. What happened to the legs?’
Perigal nodded at the walking tray. ‘I keep them around as a conversation piece.’
‘Each to their own.’
‘Yes, that’s the general principle.’ Perigal leaned forward in the pool, her voice hardening. ‘Well, pleasantries over with. Make your inspection, do whatever you have to do, then get the hell off my habitat.’
‘I haven’t come to inspect the habitat,’ Dreyfus said.
Thalia tensed despite herself. This was the moment she had been both dreading and quietly anticipating.
‘What, then?’ Perigal asked.
Dreyfus removed a card from his tunic pocket and held it up to his face, squinting slightly. He glanced briefly at Thalia and Sparver before reading, ‘Caitlin Perigal, as matriarch of this habitat, you are hereby charged with a category-five infringement of the democratic process. It is alleged that you tampered with the polling apparatus, to the intended benefit of your house.’
Perigal stuttered something, her cheeks flushing with indignation, but Dreyfus held up a silencing hand and continued with his statement.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 373