‘It was,’ Felka said. Remontoire saw something move in her hand and realised that she had brought a mouse into the privy chamber. ‘Wasn’t it, Skade?’
Skade sneered. [There’s no need to talk aloud. It takes too long. She can hear our thoughts as well as any of us.]
‘But if you were to hear my thoughts, you’d probably all go mad,’ Felka said. The way she smiled was all the more chilling, Remontoire thought, because what she said was probably true. ‘So rather than risk that…’ She looked down, the mouse chasing its tail around her hand.
[You have no right to be here.]
‘But I do, Skade. If I wasn’t recognised as a Closed Council member, the privy chamber wouldn’t have admitted me. And if I wasn’t a Closed Council member, I’d hardly be in a position to talk about Exordium, would I?’
The man who had first mentioned the codeword spoke aloud, his voice high and trembling. ‘So my guess was correct, was it, Skade?’
[Ignore anything she says. She knows nothing about the programme.]
‘Then I can say what I like, can’t I, and none of it will matter. Exordium was an experiment, Remontoire, an attempt to achieve unification between consciousness and quantum superposition. It happened on Mars; you can verify that much for yourself. But Galiana got far more than she bargained for. She curtailed the experiments, frightened at what she had invoked. And that should have been the end of it.’ Felka looked directly at Skade, tauntingly. ‘But it wasn’t, was it? The experiments were begun again, about a century ago. It was an Exordium message that made us stop making ships.’
‘A message?’ Remontoire said, perplexed.
‘From the future,’ Felka said, as if this should have been obvious from the start.
‘You’re not serious.’
‘I’m perfectly serious, Remontoire. I should know — I took part in one of the experiments.’
Skade’s thoughts scythed across the room. [We’re here to discuss Clavain, not this.]
Felka continued to speak calmly. She was, Remontoire thought, the only one in the room who was unfazed by Skade, including himself. Felka’s head already held worse horrors than Skade could imagine. ‘But we can’t discuss one without discussing the other, Skade. The experiments have continued, haven’t they? And they have something to do with what’s happening now. The Inner Sanctum’s learned something, and they’d rather the rest of us didn’t know anything about it.’
Skade clenched her jaw again. [The Inner Sanctum has identified a coming crisis.]
‘What kind of crisis?’ asked Felka.
[A bad one.]
Felka nodded sagely and pushed a strand of lank black hair from her eyes. ‘And Clavain’s role in all this — where does he come in?’
Skade’s pain was almost tangible. Her thoughts arrived in clipped packets, as if, between her utterances, she was waiting for a silent speaker to offer her guidance. [We need Clavain to help us. The crisis can be… lessened… with Clavain’s assistance.]
‘What kind of assistance did you have in mind, exactly?’ Felka persisted.
A tiny vein twitched in Skade’s brow. Jarring colour waves chased each other along her crest, like the patterns in a dragonfly’s wing. [A long time ago, we lost some objects of value. Now we know exactly where they are. We want Clavain to help us get them back.]
‘And these “objects”,’ Felka said. ‘They wouldn’t by any chance be weapons, would they?’
The Inquisitor said farewell to the driver who had brought her to Solnhofen. She had slept for five or six hours clean through on the drive, offering the driver ample opportunity to rifle her belongings or strand her in the middle of nowhere. But everything was intact, including her gun. The driver had even left her with the newspaper clipping, the one about Thorn.
Solnhofen itself was every bit as miserable and squalid as she had suspected it would be. She only had to wander around the centre for a few minutes before she found what passed for the settlement’s heart: an apron of ground surrounded by two slovenly-looking hostels, a couple of drab administrative structures and a motley assortment of drinking establishments. Looming beyond the centre were the hulking repair sheds that were Solnhofen’s reason for existence. Far to the north, vast terraforming machines worked to speed the conversion of Resurgam’s atmosphere into a fully human-breathable form. These atmospheric refineries had functioned perfectly for a few decades, but now they were becoming old and unreliable. Keeping them working was a major drain on the planet’s centrally managed economy. Communities like Solnhofen made a precarious living from servicing and crewing the terraforming rigs, but the work was hard and unforgiving, and required — demanded — a certain breed of worker.
The Inquisitor remembered that as she stepped into the hostel. She had expected it to be quiet at this time of day, but when she shoved open the door it was like stepping into a party that had only just passed its peak. There was music and shouting and laughter, hard, boisterous laughter that reminded her of barracks rooms on Sky’s Edge. A few drinkers had already passed out, huddled over their mugs like pupils guarding homework. The air was clotted with chemicals that made her eyes sting. She clenched her teeth against the noise and swore softly. Trust Four to pick a dump like this. She remembered the first time they had met. It had been in a bar in a carousel orbiting Yellowstone, probably the worst dive she had ever been in. Four had many talents, but selecting salubrious meeting places was not one of them.
Fortunately no one had noticed the Inquisitor’s arrival. She pushed past some semi-comatose bodies to what passed for the bar: a hole punched through one wall, ragged brickwork at the edges. A surly woman pushed drinks through like prison rations, snatching back money and spent glasses with almost indecent haste.
‘Give me a coffee,’ the Inquisitor said.
‘There isn’t any coffee.’
‘Then give me the nearest fucking equivalent.’
‘You shouldn’t speak like that.’
‘I’ll speak any fucking way I want to. Especially until I get a coffee.’ She leant on the plastic lip of the serving hatch. ‘You can get me one, can’t you? I mean, it’s not like I’m asking for the world.’
‘You government?’
‘No, just thirsty. And a tiny bit irritable. It’s morning, you see, and I really don’t do mornings.’
A hand landed on her shoulder. She twisted around sharply, her own hand instinctively reaching for the haft of the boser-pistol.
‘Causing trouble again, Ana?’ said the woman behind her.
The Inquisitor blinked. She had rehearsed this moment many times since she had left Cuvier, but still it felt unreal and melodramatic. Then Triumvir Ilia Volyova nodded at the woman behind the hatch.
‘This is my friend. She wants a coffee. I suggest you give her one.’
The serving woman squinted at her, then grunted something and vanished from view. She reappeared a few moments later with a cup of something that looked as if it had just been drained from the main axle bearing of an overland cargo hauler.
‘Take it, Ana,’ Volyova said. ‘It’s about as good as it gets.’
The Inquisitor took the coffee, her hand trembling faintly. ‘You shouldn’t call me that,’ she whispered.
Volyova steered her towards a table. ‘Call you what?’
‘Ana.’
‘But it’s your name.’
‘Not any more, it isn’t. Not here. Not now.’
The table that Volyova had found was tucked into a corner, half-hidden by several stacked beer crates. Volyova swept her sleeve across the surface, brushing detritus on to the floor. Then she sat, placing both elbows on the table’s edge and locking her fingers under her chin. ‘I don’t think we need worry about anyone recognising you, Ana. No one’s given me more than a second glance and, with the possible exception of Thorn, I’m the most wanted person on the planet.’
The Inquisitor, who had once called herself Ana Khouri, sipped experimentally at the treaclelike concoction that passed for c
offee. ‘You’ve had the benefit of some expert misdirection, Ilia…’ She paused and looked around, realising as she did so how suspicious and theatrical she must look. ‘Can I call you Ilia?’
‘That’s what I call myself. Best leave off the Volyova part for the time being, though. No sense in pushing our luck.’
‘None at all. I suppose I should say…’ Again, she looked around. She could not help herself. ‘It’s good to see you again, Ilia. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.’
‘I’ve missed your company, too. Odd to think we once started out almost killing each other. All water under the bridge now, of course.’
‘I began to worry. You hadn’t been in touch for so long…’
‘I had good reasons to keep a low profile, didn’t I?’
‘I suppose so.’
For several minutes neither of them said anything. Khouri, for that was how she was daring to think of herself again, found herself recalling the origin of the audacious game the two of them were playing. They had devised it themselves, amazing each other with their nerve and ingenuity. Together, they made a very resourceful pair indeed. But for maximum usefulness they found that they had to work alone.
Khouri broke the silence, unable to wait any longer. ‘What is it, Ilia? Good news or bad?’
‘Knowing my track record, what do you think?’
‘A wild stab in the dark? Bad news. Very bad news indeed.’
‘Got it in one.’
‘It’s the Inhibitors, isn’t it?’
‘Sorry to be so predictable, but there you are.’
‘They’re here?’
‘I think so.’ Volyova’s voice had dropped low now. ‘Something is happening, anyway. I’ve seen it myself.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Volyova’s voice, if anything, became quieter still. Khouri had to strain to hear it. ‘Machines, Ana, huge black machines. They’ve entered the system. I never saw them actually arrive. They were just… here.’
Khouri had tasted the minds of those machines briefly, feeling the furious predatory chill of ancient recordings. They were like the minds of pack animals, ancient and patient and drawn to the dark. Their minds were mazes of instinct and hungry intelligence, utterly unencumbered by sympathy or emotion. They howled across the silent steppes of the galaxy to each other, summoning themselves in great numbers when the bloody stench of life again troubled their wintry sleep.
‘Dear God.’
‘We can’t say we weren’t expecting them, Ana. From the moment Sylveste started fiddling around with things he didn’t understand, it was only a matter of when and where.’
Khouri stared at her friend, wondering why the temperature in the room appeared to have dropped ten or fifteen degrees. The feared and hated Triumvir looked small and faintly grubby, like a bag lady. Volyova’s hair was a close-cropped greying thatch above a round, hard-eyed face which betrayed remote Mongol ancestry. She did not look like a very convincing herald of doom.
‘I’m scared, Ilia.’
‘I think you have excellent reason to be scared. But try not to show it, will you? We don’t want to terrify the locals just yet.’
‘What can we do?’
‘Against the Inhibitors?’ Volyova squinted through her glass, frowning slightly, as if this was the first time she had given the subject any serious consideration. ‘I don’t know. The Amarantin didn’t have a lot of success in that department.’
‘We’re not flightless birds.’
‘No, we’re humans — the scourge of the galaxy… or something like that. I don’t know, Ana. I really don’t. If it was just you and I, and if we could persuade the ship, the Captain, to come out of his shell, we could at least consider running away. We could even contemplate using the weapons, if that would help matters.’
Khouri shuddered. ‘But even if it did, and even if we could make a getaway, it wouldn’t help Resurgam much, would it?’
‘No. And I don’t know about you, Ana, but my conscience isn’t exactly whiter-than-white as it is.’
‘How long do we have?’
‘That’s the odd thing. The Inhibitors could have destroyed Resurgam already, if that was all they intended to do — it’s within even our technology to do that much, so I very much doubt that it would trouble them particularly.’
‘So maybe they haven’t come to kill us after all.’
Volyova tipped back her drink. ‘Or maybe… just maybe… they have.’
In the swarming heart of the black machines, processors that were not themselves sentient determined that an overseer mind must be quickened to consciousness.
The decision was not taken lightly; most cleansings could be performed without raising the spectre of the very thing that the machines had been made to suppress. But this system was problematic. Records showed that an earlier cleansing had been performed here, a mere four and half thousandths of a Galactic Turn ago. The fact that the machines had been called back showed that additional measures were clearly necessary.
The overseer’s task was to deal with the specifics of this particular infestation. No two cleansings were ever quite the same, and it was a regrettable fact of life that the best way to annihilate intelligence was with a dose of intelligence itself. But once the cleansing was over, the immediate outbreak traced back to source and its daughter spores sanitised — which might take another two-thousandths of a Galactic Turn, half a million years — the overseer would be dumbed down, its self-awareness packed away until it needed it again.
Which might be never.
The overseer never questioned its work. It knew only that it was acting for the ultimate good of sentient life. It was not at all concerned that the crisis it was acting to avert, the crisis that would become an unmanageable cosmic disaster if intelligent life was permitted to spread, lay a total of thirteen Turns — three billion years — in the future.
It did not matter.
Time meant nothing to the Inhibitors.
SEVEN
[Skade? I’m afraid there’s been another accident.]
What kind of accident?
[A state-two excursion.]
How long did it last?
[Only a few milliseconds. It was enough, though.]
The two of them — Skade and her senior propulsion technician — were crouched in a black-walled space near Nightshade’s stern, while the prototype was berthed in the Mother Nest. They were squeezed into the space with their backs arched and their knees pressed against their chests. It was unpleasant, but after her first few visits Skade had blanked out the sensation of postural discomfort, replacing it with a cool Zenlike calm. She could endure days squashed into inhumanly small hideaways — and she had. Beyond the walls, secluded in numerous cramped openings, were the intricate and perplexing elements of the machinery. Direct control and fine-tuning of the device was only possible here, where there were only the most rudimentary links to the normal control network of the ship.
Is the body still here?
[Yes.]
I’d like to see it.
[There isn’t an awful lot left to see.]
But the man unplugged his compad and led the way, shuffling sideways in a crablike manner. Skade followed him. They moved from one hideaway to another, occasionally having to inch through constrictions caused by protruding elements of the machinery. It was all around them, exerting its subtle but undeniable effect on the very space-time in which they were embedded.
No one, not even Skade, really understood quite how the machinery worked. There were guesses, some of them very scholarly and plausible, but at heart there remained a gaping chasm of conceptual ignorance. Much of what Skade knew about the machinery consisted only of documented cause and effect, with little understanding of the physical mechanisms underpinning its behaviour. She knew that when the machinery was functioning it tended to settle into several discrete states, each of which was associated with a measurable change in the local metric… but the states were not rigidly isolated, and it
had been known for the device to oscillate wildly between them. Then there was the associated problem of the various field geometries, and the tortuously complex way they fed back into the state stability…
State two, you said? Exactly what mode were you in before the accident?
[State one, as per instructions. We were exploring some of the nonlinear field geometries.]
What was it this time? Heart failure, like the last one?
[No, at least, I don’t think heart failure was the main cause of death. Like I said, there isn’t much left to go on.]
Skade and the technician pushed ahead, wriggling through a tight elbow between adjoining chunks of the machinery. The field was in state zero at the moment, for which there were no measurable physiological effects, but Skade could not entirely shake a feeling of wrongness, a nagging sense that the world had been skewed minutely away from normality. It was illusory; she would have needed highly sensitive quantum-vacuum probes to detect the device’s influence. But the feeling was there all the same.
[Here we are.]
Skade looked around. They had emerged into one of the larger open spaces in the bowels of the device. It was a scalloped black-walled chamber just large enough to stand up in. Numerous compad input sockets woodwormed the walls.
This is where it happened?
[Yes. The field shear was at its highest here.]
I’m not seeing a body.
[You’re just not looking closely enough.]
She followed his gaze. He was focusing on a particular part of the wall. Skade moved over and touched the wall with the gloved tips of her fingers. What had looked like the same gloss-black as the rest of the chamber revealed itself to be scarlet and cloying. There was perhaps a quarter of an inch of something glued to most of the wall on one side of the chamber.
Please tell me this isn’t what I think it is.
[I’m afraid it’s exactly what you think it is.]
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 154