He looked down, imagining how it would feel. In a moment it would be over save for the slow, elegant playing out of gravity and mass. He would have become no more than an exercise in ballistics. No more capacity for pain; no more hunger for redemption.
A woman’s voice cut across the night. ‘No, H!’
He did not look around, but remained poised on the edge. The mesmeric city still pulled him towards itself.
She crossed the balcony, her heels clicking. He felt her arm slip around his waist. Gently, lovingly, she pulled him back from the edge.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘This is not how it ends. Not here, not now.’
TWENTY-FOUR
‘There’s the getaway car,’ said the swarthy little man, nodding at the solitary vehicle parked on the street.
Thorn observed the slumped shadow behind the car’s window. ‘The driver looks asleep.’
‘He’s not.’ But to be on the safe side, Thorn’s driver pulled up next to the other car. The two vehicles were identical in shape, conforming to the standard government-sponsored design. But the getaway car was older and drabber, the rain matt against irregular patches of repaired bodywork. His driver got out and trudged through puddles to the other car, rapping smartly on the window. The other driver wound down his window and the two of them spoke for a minute or so, Thorn’s driver reinforcing his points with many hand gestures and facial expressions. Then he came back and got in with Thorn, muttering under his breath. He released the handbrake and their own car eased away with a hiss of tyres.
‘There aren’t any other vehicles parked on this street,’ Thorn said. ‘It looks conspicuous, waiting there like that.’
‘Would you rather there was no car, on a piss-poor night like this?’
‘No. But just make sure the lazy sod has a good story in case Vuilleumier’s goons decide to have a nice little chat with him.’
‘He’s got an explanation, don’t worry about that. Thinks his missis is cheating on him. See that residential apartment over there? He’s watching it in case she shows up when she’s supposed to be working nights.’
‘Maybe he should wake up a bit, then.’
‘I told him to look lively.’ They sped around a corner. ‘Relax, Thorn. You’ve done this a hundred times, and we’ve run a dozen local area meetings in this part of Cuvier. The reason you have me work for you is so you don’t have to worry about details.’
‘You’re right,’ Thorn said. ‘I suppose it’s just the usual nerves.’
The man laughed at this. ‘You, nervous?’
‘There’s a lot at stake. I don’t want to let them down. Not after we’ve come so far.’
‘You won’t let them down, Thorn. They won’t let you. Don’t you realise it yet? They love you.’ The man flicked a switch on the dashboard, making the windscreen wipers pump with renewed vigour. ‘Fucking terraformers, eh? Like we haven’t had enough rain lately. Still, it’s good for the planet, or so they say. Do you think the government is lying, by the way?’
‘About what?’ Thorn said.
‘That weird thing in the sky.’
Thorn followed the organiser into the designated building. He was led through a brief series of unlit corridors until he reached a large windowless room. It was full of people, all of whom were seated facing a makeshift stage and podium. Thorn walked amongst them, stepping nimbly on to the stage. There was quiet applause, respectful without being ecstatic. He looked down at the people and established that there were about forty of them, as he had been promised.
‘Good evening,’ Thorn said. He planted both hands on the podium and leaned forward. ‘Thank you for coming here tonight. I appreciate the risks that you have all taken. I promise you that it will be worth it.’
His followers were from all walks of Resurgam life except the very core of government. It was not that government workers did not sometimes attempt to join the movement, nor that they weren’t occasionally sincere. But it was too much of a security risk to allow them in. They were screened out long before they ever got near Thorn. Instead there were technicians, cooks and truck drivers, farmers, plumbers and teachers. Some of them were very old, and had adult memories of life in Chasm City before the Lorean had brought them to Resurgam. Others had been born since the Girardieau regime, and to them that period — barely less squalid than the present — was the ‘good old days’, as difficult as that was to believe. There were few like Thorn who had only childhood memories of the old world.
‘Is it true, then?’ a woman asked from the front row. ‘Tell us, Thorn, now. We’ve all heard the rumours. Put us out of our misery.’
He smiled, patient despite the woman’s lack of respect for his script. ‘What rumour would that be, exactly?’
She stood up, looking around before speaking. ‘That you’ve found them — the ships. The ones that are going to get us off this planet. And that you’ve found the starship too, and it’s going to take us back to Yellowstone.’
Thorn didn’t answer her directly. He looked over the heads of the audience and spoke to someone at the back. ‘Could I have the first picture, please?’ Thorn stepped aside so that he did not block the projection thrown on to the chipped and stained rear wall of the room.
‘This is a photograph taken exactly twenty days ago,’ he said. ‘I won’t say where it was taken from just yet. But you can see for yourselves that this is Resurgam and that the picture must be quite recent — see how blue the sky is, how much vegetation there is in the foreground? You can tell that it’s low ground, where the terraforming programme’s been the most successful.’
The flat-format picture showed a view down into a narrow canyon or defile. Two sleek metallic objects were parked in the shadows between the rock walls, nose to nose.
‘They’re shuttles,’ Thorn said. ‘Large surface-to-orbit types, each with a capacity of around five hundred passengers. You can’t judge size very well from this view, but that small dark aperture there is a door. Next, please.’
The picture changed. Now Thorn himself stood beneath the hull of one of the shuttles, peering up at the formerly tiny-looking door.
‘I climbed down the slope. I didn’t believe they were real myself until I got close. But there they are. So far as we can tell they are perfectly functional, as good as the day they came down.’
‘Where are they from?’ another man asked.
‘The Lorean,’ Thorn said.
‘They’ve been down here all that time? I don’t believe it.’
Thorn shrugged. ‘They’re built to keep themselves in working order. Old tech, self-regenerating. Not like the new stuff we’ve all grown used to. These shuttles are relics from a time when things didn’t break down or wear out or become obsolescent. We have to remember that.’
‘Have you been inside? The rumours say you’ve been inside, even got the shuttles to come alive.’
‘Next.’
The picture showed Thorn, another man and a woman on the flight deck of the shuttle, all of them smiling into the camera, the instrumentation lit up behind them.
‘It took a long time — many days — but we finally got the shuttle to talk to us. It wasn’t that it didn’t want to deal with us, simply that we’d forgotten all the protocols that its builders had assumed we’d know. But as you can see, the ship is at least nominally functional.’
‘Can they fly?’
Thorn looked serious. ‘We don’t know for sure. We have no reason to assume that they can’t, but so far we’ve only scratched the surface of those diagnostic layers. We have people there now who are learning more by the day, but all we can say at the moment is that the shuttles should fly, given everything that we know about Belle Époque machinery.’
‘How did you find them?’ asked another woman.
Thorn lowered his eyes, marshalling his thoughts. ‘I have been looking for a way off this planet my entire life,’ he said.
‘That isn’t what I asked. What if those shuttles are a government trap? What if they
planted the clues that led you to them? What if they’re designed to kill you and your followers, once and for all?’
‘The government knows nothing about any way to leave this planet,’ Thorn told her. ‘Trust me on that.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Next.’
Thorn now showed them a picture of the thing in the sky, waiting while the projector lurched in and out of focus. He studied the reaction of his audience. Some of them had seen this image before; some had seen pictures that showed the same thing but with much less resolution; some had seen it with their own eyes, as a faint ochre smudge in the sky chasing the setting sun like a malformed comet. He told them that the picture was the latest and best image available to the government, according to his sources.
‘But it isn’t a comet,’ Thorn said. ‘That’s the government line, but it isn’t true. It isn’t a supernova either, or any of the other rumours they’ve put about. They’ve been able to get away with those lies because not many people down here know enough about astronomy to realise what that thing is. And those that do have been too intimidated to speak out, since they know that the government is lying for a reason.’
‘So what is it?’ someone asked.
‘While it doesn’t have anything like the right morphology to be a comet, it isn’t something outside our solar system either. It moves against the stars, a little each night, and it’s sitting in the ecliptic along with the other planets. There’s an explanation for that, quite an obvious one, really.’ He looked them all up and down, certain that he had their attention. ‘It is a planet, or rather what used to be one. The smudge is where there used to be a gas giant, the one we call Roc. What we’re seeing is Roc’s disembowelled corpse. The planet is being pulled apart, literally dismantled.’ Thorn smiled. ‘That’s what the government doesn’t want you to know, because there’s nothing they can do about it.’
He nodded towards the back. ‘Next.’
He showed them how it had begun, over a year earlier.
‘Three medium-sized rocky worlds were dismantled first, ripped apart by self-replicating machines. Their rubble was collected, processed and boosted across the system to the gas giant. Other machines were already waiting there. They turned three of Roc’s moons into colossal factories, eating megatonnes of rubble by the second and spewing out highly organised mechanical components. They spun an arc of matter around the gas giant, a vast metallic ring, unbelievably dense and strong. You can see it here, very faintly, but you’ll have to take my word that it’s more than a dozen kilometres thick. At the same time they were threading tubes of similar material down into the atmosphere itself.’
‘Who?’ another man asked. ‘Who is doing this, Thorn?’
‘Not who,’ he said. ‘What. The machines aren’t of human origin. The government’s pretty certain about that. They have a theory, too. It was something Sylveste did. He set off some kind of trigger that brought them here.’
‘Just like the Amarantin must have done?’
‘Perhaps,’ Thorn said. ‘There’s certainly speculation along those lines. But there’s no sign that any major planets have ever been dismantled in this system before, no resonance gaps in orbits where a Jovian would have belonged. But then again, it was a million years ago. Maybe the Inhibitors tidied up after they’d done their dirty work.’
‘Inhibitors?’ asked a bearded man whom Thorn recognised as an unemployed palaeobotanist.
‘That’s what the government calls the alien machines. I don’t know why, but it seems as good a name as any.’
‘What will they do to us?’ asked a woman who had exceptionally bad teeth.
‘I don’t know.’ Thorn tightened his fingers around the edge of the podium. He had felt the mood of the room change within the last minute. It always happened this way, when they saw what was happening. Those who knew of the thing in the sky had viewed it with alarm from the moment the rumours began. For most of the year it had not been visible at all from Cuvier’s latitude, where most of the citizenry still lived. But no one had been of the opinion that it was likely to be a good omen. Now it had hoved into the evening sky, unignorable.
The government’s experts had their own ideas about what was going on around the giant. They had correctly deduced that the activities could only be the result of intelligent forces, rather than some outlandish astronomical cataclysm, although that had, for a while, been considered. A minority considered it likely that the agency behind the destruction was human: the Conjoiners, perhaps, or a new and belligerent group of Ultras. A smaller and less credible minority thought that the Triumvir herself, Ilia Volyova, had to have something to do with it. But the majority had correctly deduced that alien intervention was the most likely explanation, and that it was in some way a response to Sylveste’s investigations.
But the government’s experts had access only to the sketchiest of data. They had not glimpsed the alien machinery in close-up, as Thorn had.
Volyova and Khouri had their own theories.
As soon as the arc was finished, as soon as the giant had been girdled, there had been a dramatic change in the properties of the planet’s magnetosphere. An intense quadrupole field had been set up, orders of magnitude more intense than the planet’s natural field. Loops of magnetic flux curled between lines of latitude from equator to pole, ramming far out of the atmosphere. The field was clearly artificial, and it could only have been produced by current flow along conductors laid along those lines of latitude, great metallic loops wound around the planet like motor windings.
That was the process Thorn and Khouri had observed with their own eyes. They had watched the loops being laid, spooled deep into the atmosphere. But they had no idea how deep they had gone. The windings must have sunk far into the metallic hydrogen ocean, deep enough to achieve some kind of torque coupling with the planet’s shrivelled yet immensely metal-rich rocky kernel. An exterior acceleration force transmitted to the windings would be transferred to the planet itself.
Meanwhile, around the planet, the orbital arc generated a pole-to-pole current flow, passing through the giant and returning to the arc via the magnetospheric plasma. The charge elements in the ring reacted against the field in which they were embedded, forcing a tiny change in angular momentum in the motor windings.
Imperceptibly at first, the gas giant began to rotate faster.
The process had continued for most of a year. The effect had been catastrophic: as the planet had spun faster and faster, so it had been pushed closer and closer towards the critical break-up velocity when its own gravity could no longer stop it from flying apart. Within six months, half the mass of the planet’s atmosphere had been flung into space, ejected into the half-beautiful, half-repulsive new circum-planetary nebula that was visible from Resurgam as a thumb-sized smudge in the evening sky. Now most of the atmosphere was gone. Relieved of the compressive weight of the overlying layers, the liquid-hydrogen ocean had returned to the gaseous state, liberating squalls of energy that had been pumped smoothly back into the spin-up machinery. The metallic-hydrogen ocean had undergone a similar but even more convulsive state change. That too had been part of the plan, for the great process of dismantling had not faltered once.
Now all that remained was a husk of tectonically unstable core matter spinning close to its own fragmentation speed. The machines were surrounding it even as Thorn spoke, processing and refining. In the nebula, revealed as shadowy knots of coherent shape and density, other structures were taking shape, larger than worlds in their own right.
Thorn said again, ‘I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t think anyone does. But I do have an idea. What they’ve done so far has been very hierarchical. The machines are awesome, but they have limitations. Matter has to come from somewhere, and they couldn’t immediately start smashing apart the gas giant. They had to make the tools to do that, and that meant smashing three smaller worlds first. They need raw material, you see. Energy doesn’t seem to be a problem — mayb
e they can draw it directly from the vacuum — but they obviously can’t condense it back down into matter with any precision or efficiency. So they have to work in stages, one step at a time. Now they’ve ripped apart a gas giant, liberating perhaps one-tenth of one per cent of the entire useful mass in this system. Based on what we’ve seen so far, that liberated mass will be used to make something else. What, I don’t know. But I’m willing to hazard a guess. There’s only one place to go now, only one hierarchy above a gas giant. It has to be the sun. I think they’re going to take it apart.’
‘You’re not serious,’ someone said.
‘I wish I wasn’t. But there has to be a reason why they haven’t smashed Resurgam yet. I think it’s obvious: they don’t have to. In a while, perhaps much sooner than we’d like, there won’t be any need for them to worry about it. It’ll be gone. They’ll have ripped this solar system apart.’
‘No…’ someone exclaimed.
Thorn started to answer, ready to work on their understandable doubts. He had been through this before, and he knew the truth took a while to sink in. That was why he told them about the shuttles first, so that there would be something they could pin their hopes on. It was the end of the world, he would say, but that didn’t mean they all had to die. There was an escape route. All anyone needed was the courage to trust him, the courage to follow him.
But then Thorn realised that the person had said ‘no’ for an entirely different reason. It had nothing to do with his presentation.
It was the police. They were coming through the door.
Act as you would if you thought your life was in danger, Khouri had told him. It has to look totally credible. If this is going to work — and it has to work, for all our sakes — they have to believe that you’ve been arrested without any foreknowledge of what was going on. You had better struggle, Thorn, and be prepared to get hurt.
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 193