He walked around the perimeter. He could not say that he enjoyed being in the room, but everything he felt — a mild sense of panic, a mild sense of presence — could have been psychosomatic. ‘What happened?’ he asked.
H spoke from the door. ‘There was an accident in this room, involving only Sukhoi’s project. Sukhoi was injured, but not critically, and she soon made a good recovery.’
‘And none of the other people in Sukhoi’s team were injured?’
‘That was the odd thing. There were no other people — Sukhoi had always worked alone. We had no other victims to worry about. The technology was slightly damaged, but soon showed itself to be capable of limited self-repair. Sukhoi was conscious and coherent, so we assumed that when she was on her feet again she would go back down to the basement.’
‘And?’
‘She asked a strange question. One that, if you will pardon the expression, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.’
Clavain rejoined H near the door. ‘Which was?’
‘She asked what had happened to the other experimenter.’
‘Then there was some neurological damage. False memories.’ Clavain shrugged. ‘Hardly surprising, is it?’
‘She was quite specific about the other worker, Mr Clavain. Even down to his name and history. She said that the man had been called Yves, Yves Mercier, and that he had been recruited from the Rust Belt at the same time that she had.’
‘But there was no Yves Mercier?’
‘No one of that name, or any name like it, had ever worked in the Château. As I said, Sukhoi had always tended to work alone.’
‘Perhaps she felt the need to attach the blame for the accident to another person. Her subconscious manufactured a scapegoat.’
H nodded. ‘Yes, we thought that something like that might have happened. But why transfer blame for a minor incident? No one had been killed, and no equipment had been badly damaged. As a matter of fact, we had learned much more from the accident that we had with weeks of painstaking progress. Sukhoi was blameless, and she knew it.’
‘So she made up the name for another reason. The subconscious is an odd thing. There doesn’t have to be a perfectly obvious rationale for anything she said.’
‘That’s precisely what we thought, but Sukhoi was adamant. As she recovered, her memories of working with Mercier only sharpened. She recalled the minutest details about him — what he had looked like, what he had liked to eat and drink, his sense of humour, even his background; what he had done before he came to the Château. The more we tried to convince her that Mercier had not been real, the more hysterical she became.’
‘She was deranged, then.’
‘Every other test said she wasn’t, Mr Clavain. If she had a delusional system, it was focused solely on the prior existence of Mercier. And so I began to wonder.’
Clavain looked at H and nodded for him to continue.
‘I did some research,’ H added. ‘It was easy enough to dig into Rust Belt records — those that had survived the plague, anyway. And I found that certain aspects of Sukhoi’s story checked out with alarming accuracy.’
‘Such as?’
‘There had been someone named Yves Mercier, born in the same carousel that Sukhoi claimed.’
‘It can’t be that unusual a name amongst Demarchists.’
‘No, probably not. But in fact there was only one. And his date of birth accorded precisely with Sukhoi’s recollections. The only difference was that this Mercier — the real one — had died many years earlier. He had been killed shortly after the Melding Plague destroyed the Glitter Band.’
Clavain forced a shrug, but with less conviction that he would have wished. ‘A coincidence, then.’
‘Perhaps. But you see, this particular Yves Mercier was already a student at the time. He was well advanced on studies into exactly the same quantum-vacuum phenomena that would, according to Sukhoi, eventually bring him into my orbit.’
Clavain no longer wanted to be in the room. He stepped up, back into the blue-lanterned corridor. ‘You’re saying her Mercier really existed?’
‘Yes, I am. At which point I found myself faced with two possibilities. Either Sukhoi was somehow aware of the dead Mercier’s life story, and for one reason or another chose to believe that he had not in fact died, or that she was actually telling the truth.’
‘But that isn’t possible.’
‘I rather think it may be, Mr Clavain. I think everything Pauline Sukhoi told me may have been the literal truth; that in some way we can’t quite comprehend, Yves Mercier never died for her. That she worked with him, here in the room you have just left, and that Mercier was present when the accident happened.’
‘But Mercier did die. You’ve seen the records for yourself.’
‘But suppose he didn’t. Suppose that he survived the Melding Plague, went on to work on general quantum-vacuum theory, and eventually attracted my attention. Suppose also that he ended up working with Sukhoi, together on the same experiment, exploring the less stable state transitions. And suppose then that there was an accident, one that involved a shift to a very dangerous state indeed. According to Sukhoi, Mercier was much closer to the field generator than she was when it happened.’
‘It killed him.’
‘More than that, Mr Clavain. It made him cease to have existed.’ H watched Clavain and nodded with tutorly patience. ‘It was as if his entire life story, his entire world-line, had been unstitched from our reality, right back to the point when he was killed during the Melding Plague. That, I suppose, was the most logical point at which he could have died in our mutual world-line, the one you and I share.’
‘But not for Sukhoi,’ Clavain said.
‘No, not for her. She remembered how things had been before. I suppose she was close enough to the focus that her memories were entangled, knotted-up with the prior version of events. When Mercier was erased, she nonetheless retained her memories of him. So she was not mad at all, not remotely delusional. She was merely the witness to an event so horrific that it transcends all understanding. Does it chill you, Mr Clavain, to think that an experiment could have this outcome?’
‘You already told me it was dangerous.’
‘More than we ever realised at the time. I wonder how many world-lines were wrenched out of existence before there was ever a witness close enough to feel the change?’
Clavain said, ‘What exactly was it that these experiments were related to, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘That’s the interesting part. State transitions, as I have said — exploring the more exotic quantum-vacuum manifolds. We can suck some of the inertia out of matter, and depending on the field state we can keep sucking it out until the matter’s inertial mass becomes asymptotic with zero. According to Einstein, matter with no mass has no choice but to travel at the speed of light. It will have become photonic, light-like.’
‘Is that what happened to Mercier?’
‘No — not quite. In so far as I understood Sukhoi’s work, it appeared that the zero-mass state would be very difficult to realise physically. As it neared the zero-mass state, the vacuum would be inclined to flip to the other side. Sukhoi called it a tunnelling phenomenon.’
Clavain raised an eyebrow. ‘The other side?’
‘The quantum-vacuum state in which matter has imaginary inertial mass. By imaginary I mean in the purely mathematical sense, in the sense that the square root of minus one is an imaginary number. Of course, you immediately see what that would imply.’
‘You’re talking about tachyonic matter,’ Clavain said. ‘Matter travelling faster than light.’
‘Yes.’ Clavain’s host seemed pleased. ‘It appears that Mercier and Sukhoi’s final experiment concerned the transition between tardyonic — the matter we are familiar with — and tachyonic matter states. They were exploring the vacuum states that would allow the construction of a faster-than-light propulsion system.’
‘That’s simply not p
ossible,’ Clavain said.
H put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Actually, I don’t think that is quite the right way to think about it. The grubs knew, of course. This technology had been theirs, and yet they chose to crawl between the stars. That should have told us all we needed to know. It is not that it is impossible, merely that it is very, very inadvisable.’
For a long time they stood in silence, on the threshold of the bleak room where Mercier had been unthreaded from existence.
‘Has anyone attempted those experiments again?’ Clavain asked.
‘No, not after what happened to Mercier. Quite frankly, no one was very keen to do any further work on the grub machinery. We’d learned enough as it was. The basement was evacuated. Almost no one ever comes down here these days. Those who do sometimes say they see ghosts; perhaps they’re the residual shadows of all those who suffered the same fate as Mercier. I’ve never seen the ghosts myself, I have to say, and people’s minds do play tricks on them.’ He forced false cheer into his voice, an effort that had the opposite effect to that intended. ‘One mustn’t credit such things. You don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Mr Clavain?’
‘I never used to,’ he said, wishing devoutly to be somewhere other than in the basement of the Château.
‘These are strange times,’ H said, with no little sympathy. ‘I sense that we live at the end of history, that great scores are soon to be settled. Difficult choices must soon be made. Now, shall we go and see the people I mentioned earlier on?’
Clavain nodded. ‘I can’t wait.’
Antoinette left the rim train at the station closest to the rented repair shop. Something about Xavier’s attitude had struck her as unusual, but it was nothing she could quite put her finger on. With some trepidation she checked out the repair shop’s waiting area and business desk. Nothing doing there, just a ‘closed for business’ sign on the door. She double-checked that the repair bay was pressurised and then pushed through to the interior of the bay itself. She took the nearest connecting catwalk, never looking down. The air in the bay was heady with aerosols. She was sneezing by the time she reached the ship’s own airlock, and her eyes were itching.
‘Xavier…’ she called.
But if he was deep inside Storm Bird he would never hear her. She would either have to find him or wait until he came out. She had told him she would arrive in twenty minutes.
She went through into the main flight deck. Everything looked normal. Xavier had called up some of the less commonly used diagnostic read-outs, some of which were sufficiently obscure that even Antoinette viewed them with mild incomprehension. But that was exactly what she would have expected when Xavier had half the ship’s guts out on the table.
‘I’m really, really sorry.’
She looked around, seeing Xavier standing behind her with an expression on his face that meant he was begging forgiveness for something. Behind him were two people she did not recognise. The taller of the two strangers indicated that she should follow them back into the lounge area aft of the main bridge.
‘Please do as I tell you, Antoinette,’ the man said. ‘This shouldn’t take long.’
Xavier said, ‘I think you’d better do it. I’m sorry I made you come here, but they said they’d start trashing the ship if I didn’t.’
Antoinette nodded, stooping back along the connecting corridor. ‘You did right, Xave. Don’t eat yourself up over it. Well, who are these clowns? Have they introduced themselves?’
‘The tall one’s Mr Clock. The other one, the pig, he’s Mr Pink.’
The two of them nodded in turn as Xavier spoke their names.
‘But who are they?’
‘They haven’t said, but here’s a wild stab in the dark. They’re interested in Clavain. I think they might possibly be spiders, or working for the spiders.’
‘Are you?’ Antoinette asked.
‘Hardly,’ Remontoire said. ‘And as for my friend here…’
Mr Pink shook his gargoylelike head. ‘Not me.’
‘I’d let you examine us if the circumstances were more amenable,’ Remontoire continued. ‘I assure you there are no Conjoiner implants in either of us.’
‘Which doesn’t mean you aren’t spider stooges,’ Antoinette said. ‘Now, what do I need to do in order for you to get the fuck off my ship?’
‘As Mr Liu correctly judged, we’re interested in Nevil Clavain. Have a seat…’ The one called Clock said it with steely emphasis this time. ‘Please, let’s be civil.’
Antoinette folded out a chair from the wall and parked herself in it. ‘I’ve never heard of anyone called Clavain,’ she said.
‘But your partner has.’
‘Yeah. Nice one, Xave.’ She gave him a look. Why couldn’t he have just pleaded ignorance?
‘It’s no good, Antoinette,’ Clock said. ‘We know that you brought him here. We are not in any way angry with you for doing that — it was the human thing to do, after all.’
She folded her arms. ‘And?’
‘All you have to do is tell us what happened next. Where Clavain went once you brought him to Carousel New Copenhagen.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So he just magically disappeared, is that it? Without a word of thanks, or any indication of what he was going to do next?’
‘Clavain told me the less I knew the better.’
Clock looked at the pig for a moment. Antoinette decided that she had scored a point. Clavain had wanted her to know as little as possible. It was only through her own efforts that she had found out a little more, but Clock did not have to know that.
She added, ‘Of course, I kept asking him. I was curious about what he was doing here. I knew he was a spider, too. But he wouldn’t tell me. Said it was for my own good. I argued, but he stuck to his guns. I’m glad he did now. There’s nothing you can force me to tell you because I simply don’t know.’
‘So just tell us exactly what happened,’ Clock said soothingly. ‘That’s all you have to do. We’ll work out what Clavain had in mind, and then we’ll be on our way. You’ll never hear from us again.’
‘I told you, he just left. No word of where he was going, nothing. Goodbye and thanks. That was all he said.’
‘He wouldn’t have had documentation or money,’ Clock said, as if to himself, ‘so he couldn’t have got far without a little help from you. If he didn’t ask for money, he’s probably still on Carousel New Copenhagen.’ The thin, deathly pale man leaned toward her. ‘So tell me. Did he ask for anything?’
‘No,’ she said, with just the tiniest hesitation.
‘She’s lying,’ the pig said.
Clock nodded gravely. ‘I think you’re right, Mr Pink. I hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but there you have it. Needs must, as they say. Do you have the item, Mr Pink?’
‘The item, Mr Clock? You mean…’
Between the pig’s feet was a perfectly black box, like an oblong of shadow. He pushed it forwards, leaned down and touched some hidden mechanism. The box shuffled open to reveal many more compartments than appeared feasible from its size. Each held a piece of polished silver machinery nesting in precisely shaped cushioning foam. Mr Pink took out one of the pieces and held it up for scrutiny. Then he took out another piece and connected the two together. Despite the clumsiness of his hands he worked with great care, his eyes focused sharply on the work in progress.
‘He’ll have it ready in a jiffy,’ Clock said. ‘It’s a field trawl, Antoinette. Of spider manufacture, I’m obliged to add. Do you know a great deal about trawls?’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you anyway. It’s perfectly safe, isn’t it, Mr Pink?’
‘Perfectly safe, Mr Clock.’
‘Or at least, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be. But field trawls are a different matter, aren’t they? They’re not nearly as proven as the larger models. They have a much higher probability of leaving the subject with neural damage. Even death isn’t entirely unheard of, is it, Mr Pi
nk?’
The pig looked up from his activities. ‘One hears things, Mr Clock. One hears things.’
‘Well, I’m sure the detrimental effects are exaggerated… but nonetheless, it’s not at all advisable to use a field trawl when there are alternative procedures available.’ Clock made eye contact with Antoinette again. His eyes were sunk deep inside their sockets and his appearance made her want to look away. ‘Are you quite sure Clavain didn’t say where he was going?’
‘I told you, he didn’t…’
‘Continue, Mr Pink.’
‘Wait,’ Xavier said.
They all looked at him, even the pig. Xavier started to say something else. And then the ship began to shake, quite without warning, yawing and twisting against its docking constraints. Its chemical thrusters were firing, loosing pulses of gas in opposing directions, the din of it like a cannonade.
The airlock behind Antoinette closed. She grabbed at a railing for support, and then tugged a belt across her waist.
Something was happening. She had no idea what, but it was definitely something. Through the nearest window she saw the repair bay choking in dense orange propellant fumes. Something broke free with a screech of severed metal. The ship lurched even more violently.
‘Xavier…’ she mouthed.
But Xavier had already got himself into a seat.
And they were falling.
She watched the pig and Clock scramble for support. They folded down their own seats and webbed themselves in. Antoinette seriously doubted that they had much more of an idea than she did about what was going on. Equally, they were smart enough not to want to be untethered aboard a ship that gave every indication that it was about to do something violent.
They hit something. The collision compressed every bone in her spine. The repair bay door, she thought — Xavier had pressurised the well so he and his monkeys could work without suits. The ship had just rammed into the door.
The ship rose again. She felt the lightness in her belly.
And then it dropped.
This time there was only a muffled bump as they hit the door. Through the window Antoinette saw the orange smoke vanish in an instant. The repair bay had just lost all its air. The walls slid past as the ship pushed its way into space.
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 189