The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space)

by Alastair Reynolds

  The words seemed to take an eternity to arrive. Spoken language was horridly slow and linear after centuries of neural linkage, even if the syntax and grammar were familiar.

  She made the intention to speak, and heard her own amplified voice ring out. ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ll come to that.’

  ‘Where am I? Who are you?’

  ‘You’re safe and sound. You’re home; back in the Mother Nest. We recovered your ship and revived you. My name’s Skade.’

  Galiana had been aware only of dim shapes looming around her, but now the room brightened. She was lying on her back, canted at an angle to the horizontal. She was inside a casket very much like a reefersleep casket but with no lid, so that she was exposed to the air. She saw things in her peripheral vision, but she could not move any part of her body, not even her eyes. A blurred figure came into focus before her, leaning over the open maw of the casket.

  ‘Skade? I don’t remember you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ the stranger replied. ‘I didn’t become one of the Conjoined until after your departure.’

  There were questions — thousands of questions — that needed to be asked. But she could not ask all of them at once, most especially not via this clumsy old way of communicating. So she had to begin somewhere. ‘How long have I been away?’

  ‘One hundred and ninety years, almost to the month. You left in…’

  ‘2415,’ Galiana said promptly.

  ‘… Yes. And the present date is 2605.’

  There was much that Galiana did not properly remember, and much that she did not think she wanted to remember. But the essentials were clear enough. She had led a trio of ships away from the Mother Nest, into deep space. The intention was to probe beyond the well-mapped frontier of human space, exploring previously unvisited worlds, looking for complex alien life. When rumours of war reached the three vessels, one ship had turned back home. But the other two had carried on, looping through many more solar systems.

  As much as she wanted to, she could not quite recall what had happened to the other ship that had continued the search. She felt only a shocking sense of loss, a screaming vacuum inside her head that should have been filled with voices.

  ‘My crew?’

  ‘We’ll come to that,’ Skade said again.

  ‘And Clavain and Felka? Did they make it back, after all? We said goodbye to them in deep space; they were supposed to return to the Mother Nest.’

  There was a terrible, terrible pause before Skade answered. ‘They made it back.’

  Galiana would have sighed if sighing were possible. The feeling of relief was startling; she had not realised how tense she had been until she learned that her loved ones were safe.

  In the calm, blissful moments that followed, Galiana looked more closely at Skade. In certain respects she looked exactly like a Conjoiner from Galiana’s era. She wore a plain outfit of pyjamalike black trousers and loosely cinched black jacket, fashioned from something like silk and devoid of either ornamentation or any indication of allegiance. She was ascetically thin and pale, to the point where she looked on the ravenous edge of starvation. Her facial tone was waxy and smooth — not unattractive, but lacking the lines and creases of habitual expression. And she had no hair on either her scalp or her face, lending her the look of an unfinished doll. So far, at least, she was indistinguishable from thousands of other Conjoiners: without mind-to-mind linkage, and devoid of the usual cloud of projected phantasms that lent them individuality, they could be difficult to tell apart.

  But Galiana had never seen a Conjoiner who looked anything like Skade. Skade had a crest — a stiff, narrow structure that began to emerge from her brow an inch above her nose, before curving back along the midline of her scalp. The narrow upper surface of the crest was hard and bony, but the sides were rilled with beautifully fine vertical striations. They shimmered with diffraction patterns: electric blues and sparkling oranges, a cascade of rainbow shades that shifted with the tiniest movement of Skade’s head. There was more to it than that, however: Galiana saw fluidlike waves of different colours pump along the crest even when there was no change in its angle.

  She asked, ‘Were you always like that, Skade?’

  Skade touched her crest gently. ‘No. This is a Conjoiner augmentation, Galiana. Things have changed since you left us. The best of us think faster than you imagined possible.’

  ‘The best of you?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to put it quite that way. It’s just that some of us have hit the limitations of the basic human bodyplan. The implants in our heads enable us to think ten or fifteen times faster than normal, all the time, but at the cost of increased thermal dissipation requirements. My blood is pumped through my crest, and then into the network of rills, where it throws off heat. The rills are optimised for maximum surface area, and they ripple to circulate air currents. The effect is visually pleasing, I’m told, but that’s entirely accidental. We learned the trick from the dinosaurs, actually. They weren’t as stupid as you’d think.’ Skade stroked her crest again. ‘It shouldn’t alarm you, Galiana. Not everything has changed.’

  ‘We heard there’d been a war,’ Galiana said. ‘We were fifteen light-years out when we picked up the reports. First there was the plague, of course… and then the war. The reports didn’t make any sense. They said we were going to war against the Demarchists, our old allies.’

  ‘The reports were true,’ Skade said, with a trace of regret.

  ‘In God’s name, why?’

  ‘It was the plague. It demolished Demarchist society, throwing open a massive power vacuum around Yellowstone. At their request, we moved in to establish an interim government, running Chasm City and its satellite communities. Better us than another faction, was the reasoning. Can you imagine the mess that the Ultras or the Skyjacks would have made? Well, it worked for a few years, but then the Demarchists started regaining some of their old power. They didn’t like the way we’d usurped control of the system, and they weren’t prepared to negotiate a peaceful return to Demarchist control. So we went to war. They started it; everyone agrees about that.’

  Galiana felt some of her elation slipping away. She had hoped that the rumours would turn out to be exaggerations. ‘But we won, evidently,’ she said.

  ‘… No. Not as such. The war’s still happening, you see.’

  ‘But it’s been…’

  ‘Fifty-four years.’ Skade nodded. ‘Yes. I know. Of course, there’ve been lapses and lulls, ceasefires and brief interludes of détente. But they haven’t lasted. The old ideological schisms have opened up again, like raw wounds. At heart they’ve never trusted us, and we’ve always regarded them as reactionary Luddites, unwilling to face the next phase of human transcendence.’

  Galiana felt, for the first time since waking, an odd migrainous pressure somewhere behind her eyes. With the pressure came a squall of primal emotions, howling up from the oldest part of her mammalian brain. It was the awful fear of being pursued, of sensing a host of dark predators coming closer.

  Machines, said a memory. Machines like wolves, which came out of interstellar space and locked on to your exhaust flame.

  You called them wolves, Galiana.

  Them.

  Us.

  The odd moment abated.

  ‘But we worked together so well, for so long,’ Galiana said. ‘Surely we can find common ground again. There are more things to worry about than some petty power struggle over who gets to run a single system.’

  Skade shook her head. ‘It’s too late, I’m afraid. There have been too many deaths, too many broken promises, too many atrocities. The conflict has spread to other systems, wherever there are Conjoiners and Demarchists.’ She smiled, though the smile looked forced, as if her face would instantly spring back to its neutral state the moment she relaxed her muscles. ‘Things aren’t quite as desperate as you’d imagine. The war is turning in our favour, slowly but surely. Clavain returned twenty-two years ago, and immediately began
to make a difference. Until his return we had been on the defensive, falling into the trap of acting like a true hive mind. That made our movements very easy for the enemy to predict. Clavain snapped us out of that prison.’

  Galiana tried to force the memory of the wolves from her mind, thinking back to the time she had first met Clavain. It had been on Mars, when he had been fighting against her, a soldier in the Coalition for Neural Purity. The Coalition opposed her mind-augmenting experiments and saw the utter annihilation of the Conjoiners as the only tolerable outcome.

  But Clavain had seen the larger picture. First, as her prisoner, he had made her realise how terrifying her experiments had seemed to the rest of the system. She had never really grasped that until Clavain patiently explained it to her, over many months of incarceration. Later, when he had been freed and terms of cease-fire were being negotiated, it was Clavain who had brought in the Demarchists to act as a neutral third party. The Demarchists had drawn up the cease-fire document and Clavain had pushed Galiana until she signed it. It had been a masterstroke, cementing an alliance between the Demarchists and the Conjoiners that would endure for centuries, until the Coalition for Neural Purity barely merited a footnote in history. Conjoiners continued with their neurological experiments, which were tolerated and even encouraged provided they made no attempts to absorb other cultures. Demarchists made use of their technologies, brokering them to other human factions.

  Everyone was happy.

  But at heart, Skade was right: the union had always been an uneasy one. A war, at some point, was almost inevitable — especially when something like the Melding Plague came along.

  But fifty-four damned years? Clavain would never have tolerated that, she thought. He would have seen the terrible waste in human effort that such a war entailed. He would either have found a way to end it decisively, or he would have sought a permanent cease-fire.

  The migrainelike pressure was still with her, now a little more intense than before. Galiana had the disturbing sense that something was peering through her eyes from inside her skull, as if she was not its only tenant.

  We narrowed the distance to your two ships, with the unhurried lope of ancient killers who had no racial memory of failure. You sensed our minds: bleak intellects poised on the dangerous verge of intelligence, as old and cold as the dust between the stars.

  You sensed our hunger.

  ‘But Clavain…’ she said.

  ‘What about Clavain?’

  ‘He would have found a way to end this, Skade, one way or another. Why hasn’t he?’

  Skade looked away for an instant, so that her crest was a narrow ridge turned edge-on. When she turned back she was attempting to shape a very odd expression on to her face.

  You saw us take your first ship, smothering it in a caulk of inquisitive black machines. The machines gnawed the ship apart. You saw it detonate: the explosion etched a pink swan-shape on to your retina, and you felt a net of minds being ripped away, like the loss of a thousand children.

  You tried to get further away, but by then it was too late.

  When we reached your ship we were more careful.

  ‘This isn’t easy, Galiana.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘It’s about Clavain.’

  ‘You said he returned.’

  ‘He did. And so did Felka. But I’m sorry to tell you that they both died.’ The words arrived one after another, slow as breaths. ‘It was eleven years ago. There was a Demarchist attack, a lucky strike against the Nest, and they both died.’

  There was only one rational response: denial. ‘No!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I wish there was some other way…’ Skade’s crest flashed ultramarine. ‘I wish it had never happened. They were valuable assets to us…’

  ‘“Assets”?’

  Skade must have sensed Galiana’s fury. ‘I mean they were loved. We grieved their loss, Galiana. All of us.’

  ‘Then show me. Open your mind. Drop the barricades. I want to see into it.’

  Skade lingered near the side of the casket. ‘Why, Galiana?’

  ‘Because until I can see into it, I won’t know whether you’re telling the truth.’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ Skade said softly. ‘But I can’t allow our minds to talk. There is something inside your head, you see. Something we don’t understand, other than that it is probably alien and probably hostile.’

  ‘I don’t believe…’

  But the pressure behind her eyes suddenly became acute. Galiana experienced a vile sense of being shoved aside, usurped, crushed into a small ineffectual corner of her own skull. Something inexpressibly sinister and ancient now had immediate tenancy, squatting behind her eyes.

  She heard herself speak again.

  ‘Me, do you mean?’

  Skade seemed only mildly taken aback. Galiana admired the other Conjoiner her nerve.

  ‘Perhaps. Who would you be, exactly?’

  ‘I don’t have a name other than the one she gave me.’

  ‘“She”?’ Skade asked amusedly. But her crest was flickering with nervous pale greens, showing terror even though her voice was calm.

  ‘Galiana,’ the entity replied. ‘Before I took her over. She called us — my mind — the wolves. We reached and infiltrated her ship, after we had destroyed the other. We didn’t understand much of what they were at first. But then we opened their skulls and absorbed their central nervous systems. We learned much more then. How they thought; how they communicated; what they had done to their minds.’

  Galiana tried to move, even though Skade had already placed her in a state of paralysis. She tried to scream, but the Wolf — for that was exactly what she had called it — had complete control of her voice.

  It was all coming back now.

  ‘Why didn’t you kill her?’ Skade said.

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ the Wolf chided. ‘The question you should be asking is a different one: why didn’t she kill herself before it came to this? She could have, you know; it was within her power to destroy her entire ship and everyone inside it simply by willing it.’

  ‘So why didn’t she?’

  ‘We came to an arrangement, after we had killed her crew and left her alone. She would not kill herself provided we allowed her to return home. She knew what it meant: I would invade her skull, rummage through her memories.’

  ‘Why her?’

  ‘She was your queen, Skade. As soon as we read the minds of her crew, we knew she was the one we really needed.’

  Skade was silent. Aquamarines and jades chased each other in slow waves from brow to nape. ‘She would never have risked leading you here.’

  ‘She would, provided she thought the risk was outweighed by the benefit of an early warning. It was an accommodation, you see. She gave us time to learn, and the hope of learning more. Which we have, Skade.’

  Skade touched a finger to her upper lip and then held it before her as if testing the direction of the wind. ‘If you truly are a superior alien intelligence, and you knew where we were, you’d already have come to us.’

  ‘Very good, Skade. And you’re right, in a sense. We don’t know exactly where Galiana has brought us. I know, but I can’t communicate that knowledge to my fellows. But that won’t matter. You are a starfaring culture — fragmented into different factions, it is true — but from our perspective those distinctions do not matter. From the memories we drank, and the memories in which we still swim, we know the approximate locus of space that you inhabit. You are expanding, and the surface area of your expansion envelope grows geometrically, always increasing the likelihood of an encounter between us. It has already happened once, and it may have happened elsewhere, at other points on the sphere’s boundary.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ Skade asked.

  ‘To frighten you. Why else?’

  But Skade was too clever for that. ‘No. There’s got to be another reason. You want to make me think you might be useful, don’t you?’

&n
bsp; ‘How so?’ the voice of the Wolf purred amusedly.

  ‘I could kill you here and now. After all, the warning has already been delivered.’

  Had Galiana been able to move, or even just blink, she would have signalled an emphatic ‘yes’. She did want to die. What else had she to live for, now? Clavain was gone. Felka was gone. She was sure of that, as sure as she was that no amount of Conjoiner ingenuity would ever free her of the thing inside her head.

  Skade was right. She had served her purpose, performed her final duty to the Mother Nest. It knew that the wolves were out there, were, in all likelihood, creeping closer, scenting human blood.

  There was no reason to keep her alive a moment longer. The Wolf would always be looking for a chance to escape her head, no matter how vigilant Skade was. The Mother Nest might learn something from it, some marginal hint of a motive or a weakness, but against that had to be set the awful consequences of its escape.

  Galiana knew. Just as the Wolf had access to her memories, so, by some faint and perhaps deliberate process of back-contamination, she sensed some of its own history. There was nothing concrete; almost nothing that she could actually put into words. But what she sensed was an aeons-old litany of surgical xenocide; of a dreadful process of cleansing waged upon emergent sentient species. The memories had been preserved with grim bureaucratic exactitude across hundreds of millions of years of Galactic time, each new extinction merely an entry in the ledger. She sensed the occasional frenzied cleansing — a cull that had been initiated later than was desirable. She even sensed the rare instance of brutal intercession where an earlier cull had not been performed satisfactorily.

  But what she did not sense, ever, was ultimate failure.

  Suddenly, shockingly, the Wolf eased aside. It was letting her speak.

  ‘Skade,’ Galiana said.