Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

by Alastair Reynolds

  “And absolutely none taken.” Trintignant gestured towards a vacant chair. “Come. Sit with us and join in the discussion. The topic, rather interestingly, is the dreams some of us experienced on the way here.”

  “Dreams…?” I said. “I thought it was just me. I wasn’t the only one?”

  “No,” Hirz said, “you weren’t the only one. I was on a moon in one of them. Earth’s, I think. And I kept on trying to get inside this alien structure. Fucking thing kept killing me, but I’d always keep going back inside, like I was being brought back to life each time just for that.”

  “I had the same dream,” I said, wonderingly. And there was another dream in which I was inside some kind of—” I halted, waiting for the words to assemble in my head. “Some kind of underground tomb. I remember being chased down a corridor by an enormous stone ball which was going to roll over me.”

  Hirz nodded. “The dream with the hat, right?”

  “My God, yes.” I grinned like a madman. “I lost my hat, and I felt this ridiculous urge to rescue it!”

  Celestine looked at me with something between icy detachment and outright hostility. “I had that one too.”

  “Me too,” Hirz said, chuckling. “But I said fuck the hat. Sorry, but with the kind of money Childe’s paying us, buying a new one ain’t gonna be my biggest problem.”

  An awkward moment followed, for only Hirz seemed at all comfortable about discussing the generous fees Childe had arranged as payment for the expedition. The initial sums had been large enough, but upon our return to Yellowstone we would all receive nine times as much; adjusted to match any inflation which might occur during the time—between sixty and eighty years—which Childe said the journey would span.

  Generous, yes.

  But I think Childe knew that some of us would have joined him even without that admittedly sweet bonus.

  Celestine broke the silence, turning to Hirz. “Did you have the one about the cubes, too?”

  “Christ, yes,” the infiltration specialist said, as if suddenly remembering. “The cubes. What about you, Richard?”

  “Indeed,” I answered, flinching at the memory of that one. I had been one of a party of people trapped inside an endless series of cubic rooms, many of which contained lethal surprises. “I was cut into pieces by a trap, actually. Diced, if I remember accurately.”

  “Yeah. Not exactly on my top ten list of ways to die, either.”

  Childe coughed. “I feel I should apologise for the dreams. They were narratives I fed into your minds—Doctor Trintignant excepted—during the transition to and from reefersleep.”

  “Narratives?” I said.

  “I adapted them from a variety of sources, thinking they’d put us all in the right frame of mind for what lies ahead.”

  “Dying nastily, you mean?” Hirz asked.

  “Problem-solving, actually.” Childe served pitch-black coffee as he spoke, as if all that was ahead of us was a moderately bracing stroll. “Of course, nothing that the dreams contained is likely to reflect anything that we’ll find inside the Spire…but don’t you feel better for having had them?”

  I gave the matter some thought before responding.

  “Not exactly, no,” I said.

  THIRTEEN HOURS LATER we were on the surface, inspecting the suits Forqueray had provided for the expedition.

  They were sleek white contraptions, armoured, powered and equipped with enough intelligence to fool a roomful of cyberneticians. They enveloped themselves around you, forming a seamless white surface which lent the wearer the appearance of a figurine moulded from soap. The suits quickly learned how you moved, adjusting and anticipating all the time like perfect dance partners.

  Forqueray told us that each suit was capable of keeping its occupant alive almost indefinitely; that the suit would recycle bodily wastes in a near-perfect closed cycle, and could even freeze its occupant if circumstances merited such action. They could fly and would protect their user against just about any external environment, ranging from a vacuum to the crush of the deepest ocean.

  “What about weapons?” Celestine asked, once we had been shown how to command the suits to do our bidding.

  “Weapons?” Forqueray asked blankly.

  “I’ve heard about these suits, Captain. They’re supposed to contain enough firepower to take apart a small mountain.”

  Childe coughed. “There won’t be any weapons, I’m afraid. I asked Forqueray to have them removed from the suits. No cutting tools, either. And you won’t be able to achieve as much with brute force as you would with an unmodified suit. The servos won’t allow it.”

  “I’m not sure I understand. You’re handicapping us before we go in?”

  “No—far from it. I’m just abiding by the rules that the Spire sets. It doesn’t allow weapons inside itself, you see—or anything else that might be used against it, like fusion torches. It senses such things and acts accordingly. It’s very clever.”

  I looked at him. “Is this guesswork?”

  “Of course not. Argyle already learned this much. No point making exactly the same mistakes again, is there?”

  “I still don’t get it,” Celestine said when we had assembled outside the shuttle, standing like so many white soap statuettes. “Why fight the thing on its own terms at all? There are bound to be weapons on Forqueray’s ship we could use from orbit; we could open it like a carcase.”

  “Yes,” Childe said, “and in the process destroy everything we came this far to learn?”

  “I’m not talking about blowing it off the face of Golgotha. I’m just talking about clean, surgical dissection.”

  “It won’t work. The Spire is a living thing, Celestine. Or at least a machine intelligence many orders of magnitude cleverer than anything we’ve encountered to date. It won’t tolerate violence being used against it. Argyle learned that much.

  “Even if it can’t defend itself against such attacks—and we don’t know that—it will certainly destroy what it contains. We’ll still have lost everything.”

  “But still…no weapons?”

  “Not quite,” Childe said, tapping the forehead region of his suit. “We still have our minds, after all. That’s why I assembled this team. If brute force would have been sufficient, I’d have had no need to scour Yellowstone for such fierce intellects.”

  Hirz spoke from inside her own, smaller version of the armoured suit. “You’d better not be taking the piss.”

  “FORQUERAY?” CHILDE SAID. “We’re nearly there now. Put us down on the surface two klicks from the base of the Spire. We’ll cross the remaining distance on foot.”

  Forqueray obliged, bringing the triangular formation down. Our suits had been slaved to his, but now we regained independent control.

  Through the suit’s numerous layers of armour and padding I felt the rough texture of the ground beneath my feet. I held up a thickly gauntleted hand and felt the breeze of Golgotha’s thin atmosphere caress my palm. The tactile transmission was flawless, and when I moved, the suit flowed with me so effortlessly that I had no sense of being encumbered by it. The view was equally impressive, with the suit projecting an image directly into my visual field rather than forcing me to peer through a visor.

  A strip along the top of my visual field showed a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view all around me, and I could zoom in on any part of it almost without thinking. Various overlays—sonar, radar, thermal, gravimetric—could be dropped over the existing visual field with the same ease. If I looked down I could even ask the suit to edit me out of the image, so that I could view the scene from a disembodied perspective. As we walked along the suit threw traceries of light across the scenery: an etchwork of neon which would now and then coalesce around an odd-shaped rock or peculiar pattern of ground markings. After several minutes of this I had adjusted the suit’s alertness threshold to what I felt was a useful level of protectivity, neither too watchful nor too complacent.

  Childe and Forqueray had taken the lead on the
ground. They would have been difficult to distinguish, but my suit had partially erased their suits, so that they seemed to walk unprotected save for a ghostly second skin. When they looked at me they would perceive the same consensual illusion.

  Trintignant followed a little way behind, moving with the automaton-like stiffness I had now grown almost accustomed to.

  Celestine followed, with me a little to her stern.

  Hirz brought up the rear, small and lethal and—now that I knew her a little better—quite unlike any of the few children I had ever met.

  And ahead—rising, ever rising—was the thing we had come all this way to best.

  It had been visible, of course, long before we set down. The Spire was a quarter of a kilometre high, after all. But I think we had all chosen to ignore it; to map it out of our perceptions, until we were much closer. It was only now that we were allowing those mental shields to collapse; forcing our imaginations to confront the fact of the tower’s existence.

  Huge and silent, it daggered into the sky.

  It was much as Childe had shown us, except that it seemed infinitely more massive; infinitely more present. We were still a quarter of a kilometre from the thing’s base, and yet the flared top—the bulb-shaped finial—seemed to be leaning back over us, constantly on the point of falling and crushing us. The effect was exacerbated by the occasional high-altitude cloud that passed overhead, writhing in Golgotha’s fast, thin jet-streams. The whole tower looked as if it were toppling. For a long moment, taking in the immensity of what stood before us—its vast age; its vast, brooding capacity for harm—the idea of trying to reach the summit felt uncomfortably close to insanity.

  Then a small, rational voice reminded me that this was exactly the effect the Spire’s builders would have sought.

  Knowing that, it was fractionally easier to take the next step closer to the base.

  “WELL,” CELESTINE SAID. “It looks like we’ve found Argyle.”

  Childe nodded. “Yes. Or what’s left of the poor bastard.”

  We had found several body parts by then, but his was the only one that was anywhere near being complete. He had lost a leg inside the Spire, but had been able to crawl to the exit before the combination of bleeding and asphyxiation killed him. It was here—dying—that he had been interviewed by Childe’s envoy, which had only then emerged from its hiding place.

  Perhaps he had imagined himself in the presence of a benevolent steel angel.

  He was not well-preserved. There was no bacterial life on Golgotha, and nothing that could be charitably termed weather, but there were savage dust-storms, and these must have intermittently covered and revealed the body, scouring it in the process. Parts of his suit were missing, and his helmet had cracked open, exposing his skull. Papery sheets of skin adhered to the bone here and there, but not enough to suggest a face.

  Childe and Forqueray regarded the corpse uneasily, while Trintignant knelt down and examined it in more detail. A float-cam belonging to the Ultra floated around, observing the scene with goggling arrays of tightly packed lenses.

  “Whatever took his leg off did it cleanly,” the doctor reported, pulling back the tattered layers of the man’s suit fabric to expose the stump. “Witness how the bone and muscle have been neatly severed along the same plane, like a geometric slice through a platonic solid? I would speculate that a laser was responsible for this, except that I see no sign of cauterisation. A high-pressure water-jet might have achieved the same precision of cut, or even an extremely sharp blade.”

  “Fascinating, Doc,” Hirz said, kneeling down next to him. “I’ll bet it hurt like fuck, too, wouldn’t you?”

  “Not necessarily. The degree of pain would depend acutely on the manner in which the nerve ends were truncated. Shock does not appear to have been the primary agent in this man’s demise.” Doctor Trintignant fingered the remains of a red fabric band a little distance above the end of the leg. “Nor was the blood loss as rapid as might have been expected given the absence of cauterisation. This band was most likely a tourniquet, probably applied from his suit’s medical kit. The same kit almost certainly included analgesics.”

  “It wasn’t enough to save him, though,” Childe said.

  “No.” Trintignant stood up, the movement reminding me of an escalator. “But you must concede that he did rather well, considering the impediments.”

  FOR MOST OF its height Blood Spire was no thicker than a few dozen metres, and considerably narrower just below the bulb-like upper part. But, like a slender chess piece, its lower parts swelled out considerably to form a wide base. That podium-like mass was perhaps fifty metres in diameter: a fifth of the structure’s height. From a distance it appeared to rest solidly on the base: a mighty obelisk requiring the deepest of foundations to anchor it to the ground.

  But it didn’t.

  The Spire’s base failed to touch the surface of Golgotha at all, but floated above it, spaced by five or six clear metres of air. It was as if someone had constructed a building slightly above the ground, kicked away the stilts, and it had simply stayed there.

  We all walked confidently towards the rim and then stopped; none of us were immediately willing to step under that overhang.

  “Forqueray?” Childe said.

  “Yes?”

  “Let’s see what that drone of yours has to say.”

  Forqueray had his float-cam fly under the rim, orbiting the underside of the Spire in a lazily widening spiral. Now and then it fingered the base with a spray of laser-light, and once or twice even made contact, skittering against the flat surface. Forqueray remained impassive, glancing slightly down as he absorbed the data being sent back to his suit.

  “Well?” Celestine said. “What the hell’s keeping it up?”

  Forqueray took a step under the rim. “No fields; not even a minor perturbation of Golgotha’s own magnetosphere. No significant alteration in the local gravitational vector, either. And—before we assume more sophistication than is strictly necessary—there are no concealed supports.”

  Celestine was silent for a few moments before answering, “All right. What if the Spire doesn’t weigh anything? There’s air here; not much of it I’ll grant you—but what if the Spire’s mostly hollow? There might be enough buoyancy to make the thing float, like a balloon.”

  “There isn’t,” Forqueray said, opening a fist to catch the cam, which flew into his grasp like a trained kestrel. “Whatever’s above us is solid matter. I can’t read its mass, but it’s blocking an appreciable cosmic-ray flux, and none of our scanning methods can see through it.”

  “Forqueray’s right,” Childe said. “But I understand your reluctance to accept this, Celestine. It’s perfectly normal to feel a sense of denial.”

  “Denial?’

  “That what we are confronting is truly alien. But I’m afraid you’ll get over it, just the way I did.”

  “I’ll get over it when I feel like getting over it,” Celestine said, joining Forqueray under the dark ceiling.

  She looked up and around, less in the manner of someone admiring a fresco than in the manner of a mouse cowering beneath a boot.

  But I knew exactly what she was thinking.

  In four centuries of deep space travel there had been no more than glimpses of alien sentience. We had long expected they were out there somewhere. But that suspicion had grown less fervent as the years passed; world after world had revealed only faint, time-eroded traces of cultures that might once have been glorious but which were now utterly destroyed. The Pattern Jugglers were clearly the products of intelligence, but not necessarily intelligent themselves. And—though they had been spread from star to star in the distant past—they did not now depend on any form of technology that we recognised. The Shrouders were little better: secretive minds cocooned inside shells of restructured spacetime.

  They had never been glimpsed, and their nature and intentions remained worryingly unclear.

  Yet Blood Spire was different.

&nbs
p; For all its strangeness; for all that it mocked our petty assumptions about the way matter and gravity should conduct themselves, it was recognisably a manufactured thing. And, I told myself, if it had managed to hang above Golgotha’s surface until now, it was extremely unlikely to choose this moment to come crashing down.

  I stepped across the threshold, followed by the others.

  “Makes you wonder what kind of beings built it,” I said. “Whether they had the same hopes and fears as us, or whether they were so far beyond us as to seem like gods.”

  “I don’t give a shit who built it,” Hirz said. “I just want to know how to get into the fucking thing. Any bright ideas, Childe?”

  “There’s a way,” he said.

  We followed him until we stood in a small, nervous huddle under the centre of the ceiling. It had not been visible before, but directly above us was a circle of utter blackness against the mere gloom of the Spire’s underside.

  “That?” Hirz said.

  “That’s the only way in,” Childe said. “And the only way you get out alive.”

  I said, “Roland—how exactly did Argyle and his team get inside?”

  “They must have brought something to stand on. A ladder or something.”

  I looked around. “There’s no sign of it now, is there?”

  “No, and it doesn’t matter. We don’t need anything like that—not with these suits. Forqueray?”

  The Ultra nodded and tossed the float-cam upwards.

  It caught flight and vanished into the aperture. Nothing happened for several seconds, other than the occasional stutter of red light from the hole. Then the cam emerged, descending again into Forqueray’s hand.

  “There’s a chamber up there,” Forqueray said.

  “Flat-floored, surrounding the hole. It’s twenty metres across, with a ceiling just high enough to let us stand upright. It’s empty. There’s what looks like a sealed door leading out of the chamber into the rest of the Spire.”

  “Can we be sure there’s nothing harmful in it?” I asked.