‘I’m sure it’s nothing serious,’ the official said, sincerity chiselled into his face. ‘We frequently experience conflict between our records and those of the rest of the system; it’s to be expected after the recent unpleasantness.’
Recent unpleasantness. He was talking about the plague.
‘I’m sure the matter can be resolved with a slightly more thorough examination, a few physiological cross-checks; nothing too complicated.’
I bridled. ‘What kind of physiological cross-check, exactly?’
‘A retinal scan, that kind of thing.’ The official was snapping his fingers at something or someone beyond our view. Almost immediately another robot entered the airlock, a dove-grey sphere politely devoid of any nasty weapons, bearing the Mixmaster sigil.
‘I’m not submitting to a retinal scan,’ I said, as reasonably as I could. I knew it wouldn’t take a machine to spot the oddity of my eyes. A human barely had to glance at me in the right light to see there was something strange about the way I looked back at them.
My remark had the same effect on the official as a slap across the cheek, causing an almost tangible blanching. ‘I’m sure we can come to some kind of arrangement…’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I very much doubt that, I’m afraid.’
‘Then I’m afraid—’
Quirrenbach stepped between us. ‘Let me handle this,’ he mouthed, before speaking aloud to the man. ‘Excuse my colleague; he’s a little nervous around officialdom. There’s been an honest mistake, as I’m sure you appreciate. Will you accept the word of Argent Reivich?’
The man looked flustered. ‘Of course… provided I have his guarantees… and that it’s in person…’
He hadn’t needed to ask who Argent Reivich was, I noticed.
Quirrenbach snapped his fingers at me. ‘Stay here; I’ll square things with him. It shouldn’t take more than half an hour.’
‘You’re going to ask Reivich to sign me in?’
‘Yeah,’ Quirrenbach said, without a hint of humour. ‘Ironic, isn’t it.’
I didn’t have to wait long.
Reivich appeared on a screen in the holding pen where the Refuge officials held those pending a decision on entry. It was not too much of a shock to see his face, since I had already met Voronoff, who looked exactly the same. But there was something unique about the real Reivich; some essence Voronoff had not succeeded in capturing. It was nothing I could quite place. I suppose it was just the difference between someone playing a game — however earnestly — and someone whose intentions are deadly serious.
‘This is quite a turn-up,’ Reivich said. He looked pale but healthy, a white tunic with a high collarless neck his only visible item of clothing. He was backdropped by a mural of interlocking algebraic symbols, denoting part of the mathematic theory of Transmigration. ‘You asking me for entry, and me agreeing to it.’
‘You let Tanner in,’ I said. ‘Are you sure that was wise?’
‘No, but I’m sure it’ll prove interesting. Assuming he’s who you say he is, and you’re who you say you are.’
‘One or both of us might want to kill you.’
‘Do you?’
It was an admirable question; straight to the point. I gave him the dignity of appearing to think it over before answering. ‘No, Argent. I did once, but that was before I knew who I was. Finding out you’re not who you think you are does rather change one’s priorities.’
‘If you’re Cahuella, then my men killed your wife.’ His voice was thin and reedy, like a child’s. ‘I’d have thought you were even more keen to have me killed.’
‘Tanner killed Cahuella’s wife,’ I said. ‘The fact that he thought he was going to save her doesn’t really alter things.’
‘Are you Cahuella or not, in that case?’
‘I might have been, once. Now Cahuella doesn’t exist.’ I looked hard into the screen. ‘And frankly, I don’t think anyone’s going to mourn him, are they?’
Reivich pursed his lips distastefully. ‘Cahuella’s weapons butchered my family,’ he said. ‘He sold arms which murdered my loved ones. For that I could gladly have tortured him.’
‘If you’d killed Gitta, that would have been more torture than you could ever have inflicted on him with knives and electrodes.’
‘Would it? Did he really love her that much?’
I examined my memories, in the hope of answering him. In the end all I could offer was, ‘I don’t know. He was a man capable of a lot of things. All I do know is that Tanner loved her at least as much as Cahuella.’
‘But Gitta did die. What did that do to Cahuella?’
‘It made him very hateful,’ I said, thinking back to the white room, which still lingered slightly beyond recall, like a nightmare not quite brought to mind after waking. ‘But he took that hatred out on Tanner.’
‘Tanner lived though, didn’t he?’
‘Some part of him,’ I said. ‘Not necessarily any part we’d call human.’
Reivich was silent for a minute, the difficulty of our meeting obviously weighing hard on him. Finally he said, ‘Gitta. She was the only innocent in any of this, wasn’t she? The only one who didn’t deserve any of it.’
There was no arguing with that.
The hollow interior of Refuge was locked in perpetual gloom, like a city in blackout. Unlike the gloom of Chasm City, this was deliberate; a state of affairs willed into being by the groups which claimed tenancy here. There was nothing resembling a native ecology. The interior was unpressurised apart from trace gases, and every square inch of the walls was occupied by sealed, windowless structures, linked by an intestinal tangle of transit tubes. The dimly glowing tubes were the only source of illumination, which wasn’t saying much — and if it had not been for the enhanced biology of my eyes, I doubted that I’d have been able to see anything at all.
Yet the place hummed with a sense of barely managed power; a constant subliminal rumble which transmitted itself into the bones. The balcony we stood on was sheeted over with airtight glass, but even so I had the feeling that I was standing in the corner of a vast, shadowy turbine room in which every generator was spinning at full tilt.
Reivich had given the authorisation for Refuge security to let me in, provided my party were escorted to him. I had misgivings about this — it was too much out of my control — but we had absolutely no choice but to comply with Reivich’s wishes. This was where the chase ended — on his territory. And by sleight of hand, it was no longer Reivich who was being chased.
It might have been Tanner.
Maybe it was me.
Refuge was sufficiently small that there was no real drawback in walking from point to point within its interior; a fact aided by the relatively weak artificial gravity which the habitat’s lazy spin imparted. We were led into one of the connecting tunnels: a three-metre-wide tube fashioned from thick smoky glass, with intermittent glass irises spaced along its length, dilating open and shut to allow us passage and to make abundantly clear the fact that we were being shepherded, like food passing along the gullet. The walk took us further along the main axis of the spindle, gravity rising as we descended from the endcap, but never reaching anything like one gee. The unlit structures of Refuge towered over us like canyon walls at night, and there was no sense whatsoever that anyone else inhabited the place. The truth was that the kind of clientèle which Refuge serviced were the kind of people who demanded absolute discretion, even from others like themselves.
‘Has Reivich been mapped yet?’ I asked, realising that it was an obvious question which so far hadn’t occurred to me. ‘After all, that’s why he’s here.’
‘Not yet,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘There are all sorts of physiological tests which need to be made first, to ensure that the mapping is optimised — cell membrane chemistry, neurotransmitter properties, glial cell structure, blood-brain volume, that kind of thing. You only get one shot at it, you see.’
‘Reivich’s going for the full destructive scan?’
/>
‘Something very close to it. It’s still the way to get the best resolution, they say.’
‘Once he’s scanned, he won’t have to worry about an irritation like Tanner.’
‘Not unless Tanner follows him.’
I laughed — before I realised that Quirrenbach wasn’t making a joke.
‘Where do you think Tanner’s now?’ Zebra said, walking to my left, her heels clicking on the floor, her elongated reflection like dancing scissors in the wall’s reflection.
‘Somewhere Reivich has his eye on him,’ I said. ‘Along with Amelia, I hope.’
‘Is she really to be trusted?’
‘She might be the only person who hasn’t betrayed one of us,’ I said. ‘At least not intentionally. But I’m sure of one thing. Tanner’s stringing her along only until she ceases to be of use to him. Once that moment comes — and it might be soon — she’ll be in very great danger.’
Chanterelle said, ‘You came here to save her?’
For a moment I wanted to answer in the affirmative; to dredge up some tiny crumb of self-respect and pretend that I was a human being capable of something other than wickedness. And maybe it wouldn’t have been entirely untrue — maybe Amelia was a large part of the reason I’d come here, knowing it was everything that Tanner wanted. But she wasn’t the largest part, and the last thing I felt like doing was lying any more, least of all to myself.
‘I came here to end what Cahuella started,’ I said. ‘It’s as simple as that.’
The smoked-glass tunnel wound its way up again, towards the far endcap of Refuge, and then punched its way into the lightless side of one of the looming airtight structures. At the end of this particular stretch of tunnel was another iris, currently sealed. But this one was gloss-black, and it was impossible to see what lay beyond it.
I walked up to it and pressed my cheek against the unyielding metal, straining to hear something.
‘Reivich?’ I called. ‘We’re here! Open up!’
The door irised open, more ponderously than those we’d passed through earlier on.
Cool green light streamed through the opening arcs, bathing us in its insipidity. Suddenly the fact that I didn’t have a weapon — that none of us were armed — hit home. I might die in a second, I thought — and probably not even know it when it happened. I had allowed myself to be admitted into the lair of a man who had everything to fear from me, and no reason in the universe to trust me. Did that make Reivich or myself the bigger fool? I couldn’t begin to guess. All I knew was that I wanted to get out of Refuge as quickly as possible.
The door opened fully, revealing a bronze-walled antechamber, with vivid green lamps hanging from the ceiling. Bas-relief gold symbols scurried around the walls, iterating similar mathematical statements to those I had seen when I’d spoken to Reivich; the incantations which could shatter a mind into ones and zeros; pure number.
There was no doubt that he was here.
The door closed behind us and another irised ahead, revealing a much larger space, like the inside of a cathedral. The room was bathed in golden light, yet its extremities were so far away that they were lost in shadow. I could see the slight curvature of Refuge’s floor, an effect accentuated by the interlocking bronze and silver chevrons which patterned the floor.
The air smelled of incense.
A man sat in the distance, in the middle of a pool of brighter light shafting from a stained-glass window far above. He sat facing away from us, in a high-backed chair of ornate construction, wreathed in gold. A trio of slender bipedal servitors stood a few metres from the chair, presumably awaiting instructions. I studied the shape of his head, almost lost in shadow itself, and knew that I was standing behind Reivich.
I remembered when I thought I had seen him, near the immortal fish in Chasm City. How quickly I had reacted, slipping out my gun and chasing around the fish tank to confront and kill him. I was sure that I would have done so if Voronoff had not been a second faster than I.
Now I didn’t feel any pressing need to kill him.
A voice, like sandpaper rasping against sandpaper, said, ‘Turn me around so that I may face my guests, please.’ The statement itself was a laboured thing, punctuated by wheezes and words less spoken than whispered.
One of the servitors stepped forward, treading with the inhuman silence of their kind, and swivelled Reivich around.
What faced us was not what I was expecting.
It was not possible…
Reivich looked like a corpse: a cadaver briefly animated by the application of electrical puppetry. He did not look like anything living. He did not look like anything which had a right to speak, or to be able to curve his mouth in the semblance of a smile.
He reminded me of a less healthy version of Marco Ferris. We could see only his head and the tips of his fingers. The rest of him was lost beneath a thick quilted blanket, from which trailed medical feedlines, curving around into a compact life-support module clamped to one arm of the chair, a smaller version of the cuirass which I had used to keep Gitta ‘alive’ while I returned her body to the Reptile House. His head was little more than a skull around which skin had been draped; skin which was mottled black where it wasn’t already a shade of bruised purple. His eyesockets had been enucleated; fine cables trailed from the darkness between his lids, running into the same life-support module. There were only a few wisps of hair left on his crown, like the few trees which will always remain standing directly under an airblast. His jaw hung slackly open, his tongue a black slug filling his mouth.
He raised a hand. Apart from a few liver spots, it was that of a much younger man.
‘I see you’re disturbed,’ Reivich said.
I realised now that the voice didn’t come from him at all, but from the life-support module. It still sounded feeble. Presumably even the act of subvocalising was an effort to him.
‘You did it,’ Quirrenbach said, stepping closer to the man he still worked for. ‘You took the scan.’
‘Either that or I didn’t get enough sleep last night,’ Reivich said, his voice like wind. ‘On balance I’m inclined to think the former.’
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘What went wrong?’
‘Nothing went wrong.’
‘You shouldn’t look like this,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘You look like a man on the edge of death.’
‘Perhaps because I am.’
‘The scan failed?’ Zebra said.
‘No, Taryn, it didn’t. The scan was a complete success, I’m told. My neural structure was acquired flawlessly.’
‘You did it too soon,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘That’s right, isn’t it? You couldn’t wait for all the medical checks. And this is what it did to you.’
Reivich’s head approximated a nod. ‘People like myself, and Tanner — and yourself,’ he said, directing his gaze at me, ‘lack medichines. Almost no one on Sky’s Edge has it in their cells, except for the very few who were able to afford the services of the Ultras. And even those that could often chose some other kind of longevity procedure.’
‘We had other things to concern us,’ I said.
‘Of course we did. Which is why we dispensed with such luxuries. The trouble was, I’d need medichines to protect my cells against the effect of the scan.’
‘The old style? Hard and fast?’ I said.
‘The best, if you listen to the theorists. Everything else is a compromise. The simple fact is that if you want to get your soul into the machine — and not just some blurred impression — you have to die in the process. Or at least suffer what would ordinarily be lethal injury.’
‘So why didn’t you protect yourself with medichines?’ Quirrenbach said.
‘There wasn’t time to do it properly. Medichines have to be carefully matched to the user, and introduced into the body slowly. Otherwise the effect is massive toxic shock. You die before the medichines can aid you.’
‘If you used Sylveste’s equipment,’ I said carefully, remembering what I’d
been told of those experiments, ‘you shouldn’t even be breathing.’
‘It was an updated process, based on Sylveste’s original work. But you’re right — even allowing for technical refinements, I should be quite dead. As it happens, I was administered with enough broad-spectrum medichinery to survive the scan — at least temporarily.’ He waved his hand at the life-support module and the three attendant servitors. ‘Refuge supplies these machines. They’re trying to stabilise the cellular damage and introduce more refined variants of medichines, but I suspect they’re only doing it out of obligation.’
‘You think you’re going to die?’ I said.
‘I feel it in my bones.’
I tried to imagine what it would have been like for him; that agonising instant of neural capture, like being caught in the glare of the brightest flare imaginable; a radiance which shone beneath the skin, into the marrow itself, turning him into a smoky glass sculpture of himself, for that piercing instant.
The rapid analytic beams of the scan, focused down to cellular-resolution, would have swept through his brain at a speed only fractionally faster than the speed of synaptic impulses, keeping slightly ahead of the cortical messages proclaiming the havoc spreading through his mind. By the time the scan reached his brain-stem, no information would have yet reached that part regarding the disruption being suffered by the layers of his mind situated above. Because of that slight edge, the overall snapshot of his brain would have been completely normal, apart from the slight blurring caused by the finite spatio-temporal resolution of the process. The scan would have been finished before Reivich had recognised that it had begun — and by the time his mind began to keel over under the shock of the procedure, whole neural routines crashing into coma, it would not matter at all.
He would have been captured.
And even the damage should not have mattered; should not have been anything which the medichines could not have repaired, almost as swiftly as the injuries took place. Like shelling a building, dislodging bricks, but with a team of fanatical builders inside, putting right the harm before the next shell arrived…
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 139