Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Normally,” she said, leaning heavily on her stick, “this is the point where you apologise for not visiting us lately, and I gently chastise you about the fact that it’s been much longer than you think. Months when you think weeks, years when you think it only a matter of months.” But now her long, grave face found some rare humour. “I’d be wrong, though, wouldn’t I? It really hasn’t been more than weeks. What brings you back so swiftly, Tom?”

  “Do I need a reason to visit, Sister Catherine?”

  “No, and I’d rather this was the norm, instead of the exception.” Offering a guarded smile, she nonetheless beckoned him forward. “Come, anyway. You’re always welcome. We’ve forgiven you for that bit of unpleasantness last time.”

  “That’s good of you,” Dreyfus said.

  “I have some news about Valery, too. I think you’ll be pleased.”

  Dreyfus had learned not to raise his hopes. “I’m always keen to hear about progress.”

  “There has been real advancement, Tom. I sensed it before your last visit, but I didn’t want to jump to hasty conclusions. But I think she is making a concerted effort to find her way back to us. There is language inside her. I’m more convinced of that than ever. It just needs time, and persuasion, to achieve its full flowering.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Dreyfus said. “I’m truly grateful, Sister, for all your efforts.”

  “It’s not much to ask of us, Tom.”

  Dreyfus chose his words carefully. “Then I’m going to have to beg your indulgence with another favour.”

  Sister Catherine studied him with a guarded interest, conceding nothing. “Really?”

  “The bulk of your cases come through the incoming ships,” Dreyfus said. “The passengers who don’t respond well to reefersleep. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “You know us well by now.”

  “But there are also other cases that come your way. Like Valery. It wasn’t reefersleep that damaged her mind, but you’ve still taken her in, still given her kindness and support, and helped her find the path back.”

  “We’d be remiss if we didn’t extend our welcome to all needful cases, Tom.”

  Dreyfus looked back the way they had come, judging that they had given him enough time to prepare the ground. Here they came, walking slowly: Sparver on one side of their guest, Thalia on the other. Each supported an arm, guiding the man as if he were blind.

  “Now I understand why you came in a bigger ship than usual,” Sister Catherine said, with just the tiniest shading of displeasure, as if he should have been more forthright from the outset.

  “These are my friends,” Dreyfus said, indicating the two prefects. “Sparver Bancal and Thalia Ng. The man they’re helping is … well, I imagine I don’t need to tell you who he is.”

  “I recognise him,” she said, in a low and level voice. “But he seems different to the man who came here. There’s damage, obviously, or they wouldn’t need to help him like that. But he’s older.” Now her face turned to his with questioning severity. “Is it really him? No place for anything but the truth, Tom, when you petition our mercy.”

  “It’s Devon Garlin,” Dreyfus said. “But there’s another part to him that you didn’t see before. If and when he starts to regain powers of communication, he may think of himself as two different men. Which would be the more dominant, I can’t say. Or say for certain that there’s any chance for him to become more than he is now.” He glanced down, ashamed in some small way that he had gone to even the small deception of not mentioning this to her earlier. But it had seemed prudent to keep the arrangement as low-key as possible. “I just thought, if anyone could show him kindness, it would be the Hospice.”

  “And this fabled kindness of ours,” Sister Catherine said, her patience very clearly near its limit. “Is he deserving of it?”

  “Part of him is,” Dreyfus answered.

  She leaned even more heavily on the stick, shaking her head, some keen but weighty process of judgement occupying her thoughts. “I have always taken you as a man of your word, Tom. Please don’t give me cause to change that opinion.” She gave a quick, birdlike nod. “We’ll take him in. How could we refuse?” Then, to Sparver and Thalia: “Will you bring him the rest of the way, prefects? It’s quite a long walk, but you’d be made welcome at the other end of it.”

  “No,” Thalia said, eyeing Sparver, as if the two of them had already settled on their decision. “We’ll just go back to the ship, if that’s all right.”

  “I’ll take him the rest of the way,” Dreyfus said, reaching out his hand, allowing Thalia to guide the other man’s arm, until Devon Garlin’s fingers touched his own.

  “Good morning, Julius,” Marlon Voi said to his son, standing next to his bed with the robot immediately behind him. “You look rested. Stronger and healthier by the day.”

  There had been a fog of impressions as he surfaced to consciousness, but other than some faint, fading after-images, that confusion was lifting, banished by the light of day flooding into his bedroom.

  “I dreamed of Mother again,” he said.

  “That’s to be understood.” His father’s look was sympathetic, but not without the shadow of some subtle strain, borne longer than was fair. “It’s good that you keep a memory of her. She was kind to you and only wanted the best for you in your life beyond the Shell House.” He reached down and settled a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Be strong, Julius. She knew that you loved her.”

  He thought of the account he had been given of Aliya’s demise, of the tragic malfunction of her spacecraft as it returned to Yellowstone, burning up in the atmosphere like a gold-bannered comet, dripping sparks of itself across half the world, like an anointment.

  “I never got the chance to say goodbye. I mean, not properly.”

  “Nor did I,” his father said. “And we’ll carry that regret for the rest of our lives, Julius. A sadness lodged inside ourselves, that only we truly understand. But we mustn’t be beholden to it. Your mother would have wanted us to carry on, to honour her memory, but not be shaped by it. It’s enough to remember her, and know that she was a good woman.”

  He nodded, accepting this on the surface, but very far from internalising it. He felt sure that they had had this conversation, or some permutation of it, on several previous occasions. His father at his bedside, smiling benignly, Lurcher the robot there with him, the room swept by cleansing shafts of light. A new start to each day.

  “Join me for breakfast,” Father said.

  He washed and dressed, pausing only to touch the fading scar under his right eye, an area of pale roughness that he would doubtless have fixed when he moved into the world, but which in some curious, occult fashion seemed only to make the rest of his face seem more balanced, more handsomely proportioned.

  Perhaps he would think about keeping it.

  Downstairs in the Shell House they breakfasted and spoke largely of inconsequentialities. The son devoured news from the outside world, from Chasm City, Yellowstone, and the ten thousand artificial worlds of the Glitter Band. He would soon be a part of that domain and he desired to move confidently in it, ahead of all the latest gossip and fashions. But his father seemed to be closing in on himself, his interest in wider affairs dwindling. He rarely left the Shell House, content to oversee his diminishing fortune from within the dome.

  On the other hand, he did not deter the boy from his enquiries.

  “We hardly ever speak of the contingency these days,” he ventured, studying his father for hints as to his private feelings on that matter. “But it’s still expected of me, isn’t it?”

  His father feigned innocent interest.

  “The contingency, Julius?”

  “It was something I was meant to know about. A kind of … family secret.” He leaned in, added quickly: “But a good one. Not something bad. More like a duty, an obligation, that we carried. To help the world when it needed helping. To make a vote go one way, if it needed to.”

  His fa
ther’s face clouded. “Even if we had the means, Julius, such an intervention would be deeply unethical.”

  “We do have the means. I remember you showing us.”

  “You’ve mistaken one thing for something else, Julius. Perhaps we spoke about the good work of Sandra Voi, and how the Voi kernel underpinned all that we hold most dear. Perhaps I even showed you how it would feel to be a part of the outside world, when at last you move in those circles. To be immersed in abstraction, for every instant of your life.” He gave a sweet, tolerant smile. “But there was no more to it than that. We’re just a family, taking our turn to fade into history. There was never any contingency.”

  He nodded, looking down at his breakfast, certain nonetheless that he remembered things differently.

  “Perhaps it was just a dream.”

  “Perhaps it was,” Father said agreeably, reaching to pour himself some more grapefruit juice.

  “But there’s something else.”

  “Go on.”

  “I know it sounds silly, but when I was younger … was there ever another boy who used to come and visit us?”

  Father looked amused. “Another boy? I think I’d remember. No; you were schooled on your own, Julius. You were sensitive and seemed content with your own company. Your mother and I were both of the view that you had all that you needed for your development, and you never expressed any view to the contrary. You had Lurcher, you had free run of the house and the gardens … a kingdom for one boy.” He reached over and squeezed his son’s hand. “What more could you have wanted?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just keep remembering …”

  Father twisted around in his chair and called beyond the breakfast room. “Lurcher, would you come here for a moment?”

  “Good morning, Julius,” Father said to his son, standing next to his bed with Lurcher immediately behind him. “You look rested. Stronger and healthier by the day.”

  There had been a fog as he surfaced to consciousness, but other than some faint after-images that confusion was lifting, purged by the light of day.

  “I dreamed of her again,” he said, and smiled, because the memory was pleasing.

  One day the son found the white tree again.

  It was in a part of the grounds where Lurcher had been busy re-landscaping, tearing up old pathways, planting and transplanting over them, forging new routes through old growth. While Lurcher was elsewhere some buried impulse had driven him to explore, hacking through the wildening greenery until at last he reached a sort of secret clearing, a curtain of new growth hemming in the barren ground around a dead, white tree whose shape and presence induced in him a powerful sense of recognition.

  Confronted by the tree he stopped and stared for a long minute, transfixed by a sudden upwelling of forbidden memory. The tree’s roots, where they showed above ground, were a mazy, muscular tangle, like the limbs of some indolent sea monster. Between the roots were gaps and crawl-ways, allowing entry into the cool interior of the tree’s hollowed-out trunk.

  He advanced, resting a hand on the tree, the touch unloading an additional cargo of recollection. Of long afternoons spent avoiding lessons, of daydreams and the private games he had shared with another, quieter boy. He could see the two of them with perfect clarity, perched high in the tree’s upper levels, lords of their own creation. Trading stories, inventing games, plotting the future.

  Pocketing the knife he had used to fight through the densest vegetation, he crouched low at the roots, inspecting the gaps between them. He pushed a hand through some of the narrower points, feeling the space open up beyond, but if he had ever been able to squeeze through those constrictions he was too old now, with most of the height and broadness he would carry into adulthood.

  But there was still a gap that he could just about squeeze through. He struggled in, grunting with the effort, nearly jamming himself tight once or twice. Once he was through the worst of it, though, it was an easy wriggle into the main part of the trunk, hollow for the most part but still divided into a number of ascending chambers, each of which he had to contort himself into before proceeding to the next.

  At the top, six or seven metres from his starting point, the trunk flared into a kind of bowl, dead arms radiating out in all directions. He was unconcerned about squeezing back down through the trunk: he could easily climb down the outside, if he chose, and then jump the last few metres. But for now he was content to settle onto the natural seat formed by a wooden ledge inside the tree, feeling himself slot into the position like the last piece of a puzzle. He had been here before. He was certain of it, and his bones and muscles remembered, even if his conscious mind held no clear trace of the prior occasions.

  He thought of the other boy again. They were both sitting on the same ledge, but he was bigger, looking down on his slighter companion as he explained the terms of some new game he had just devised. The other boy was reluctant, needing persuasion.

  Now he noticed something.

  His fingers had picked up on it before his eyes did. A rough but deliberate pattern of scratches, on the inside of the trunk. Exactly at the level where a boy might carve something, on a boring afternoon.

  He shifted to move his own shadow out of the way, squinting and frowning as he made out the intent of the marks.

  I AM JULIUS

  I AM CALEB

  I AM JULIUS

  I AM CALEB

  He reached into his pocket for the knife, flicking out its ever-sharp blade, the blade that would cut any material but living tissue, and began to gouge out an addition to this series of inscriptions.

  I AM JULIUS

  I AM JULIUS

  I AM JULIUS

  He stopped, frowning deeper. There was an itch in his fingers. They wanted him to do something. There was another itch in his brain, faint but nagging.

  He scratched again.

  I AM CALEB

  I AM CALEB

  I AM CALEB

  Deeper and deeper, gouging the dead wood with increasing pressure, increasing fury. Each stroke, each whisker of wood flaking away, each new letter, only enflaming him further. Until the action became animalistic, a purposeless wounding.

  I AM CALEB

  I AM …

  I AM …

  I …

  I …

  Until he fumbled the knife, dropping it down the chambered labyrinth of the trunk, hearing the hollow reports as it clattered from level to level.

  He had been breathing hard, working himself into a frenzy. Almost shocked at himself, he slowed his inhalations until a fragile, tingling calm had returned. He was sweating, his hand shaking.

  Whatever the tree represented, whatever the significance of the messages it contained, he did not wish to be inside it any longer. Bracing with both arms, still trembling, he hauled himself out of the hollow top of the trunk. He balanced his feet on the thickest parts of two of the main branches, then began to descend, the dead wood creaking under the shifting load. He was nearly ready to drop to the ground when he heard something.

  He looked around, just in time to see Lurcher emerging into the clearing, the robot’s arms laden with gardening equipment. For an instant their eyes met: his own against the robot’s solitary, unblinking pupil. Then he chanced a drop the rest of the way, landing clumsily but avoiding twisting his ankles in the roots.

  He was confounded. He had broken no rule by visiting this tree, violated no directive, stated or implied. But still he felt ashamed that the robot had caught him here. Ashamed and obscurely certain that Lurcher read something in his face, some mute incriminating testimony that made explicit what he had experienced only a few minutes earlier.

  “I …” he began. Then trailed off, thinking of the knife he had dropped.

  The knife, he decided, could stay where it was.

  Late that evening, high in the Shell House, just before drowsiness snatched him to unconsciousness, he stirred from his bed and moved to the window. Fingers of light played through the shutters, sha
des of orange and russet, accompanied by a distant crackling and hissing that rose and fell in random, tide-like waves.

  Cautiously, struck by some faint sense of impropriety, he opened the shutters on the glassless window and took in a breath. The evening air flooded his lungs, sooty with combustion products. He coughed, a sudden human sound that seemed louder than it had any right to be. Then stifled any further coughing with his hand.

  Across the grounds, far from the Shell House—but still within the family dome, rather than beyond it, in the greater expanse of Chasm City—something was on fire.

  meet the author

  Photo Credit: Barbara Bella

  ALASTAIR REYNOLDS was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He studied at Newcastle and St. Andrews universities and has a PhD in astronomy. He stopped working as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency to become a full-time writer. Revelation Space and Pushing Ice were shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Revelation Space, Absolution Gap, and Century Rain were shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Award, and Chasm City won the British Science Fiction Award.

  www.alastairreynolds.com

  Also by Alastair Reynolds

  Revelation Space

  Chasm City

  Redemption Ark

  Absolution Gap

  Century Rain

  Pushing Ice

  The Prefect

  House of Suns

  Terminal World

  Blue Remembered Earth

  On the Steel Breeze

  Poseidon’s Wake

  The Medusa Chronicles (with Stephen Baxter)

  Revenger

  Praise for

  Alastair Reynolds’s Books

  “An adroit and fast-paced blend of space opera and police procedural, original and exciting, teeming with cool stfnal concepts. A real page turner. The prefect of this title is sort of a space cop, Sipowicz in a space suit, or maybe Dirty Harry with a whiphound.”

  —George R. R. Martin on The Prefect