Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

by Alastair Reynolds

  It understood our fragility.

  As if wishing to reward Forqueray for his observation, the next room contained a substantially thicker atmosphere than any of its predecessors, and was also much warmer. It was not yet capable of supporting life, but one would not have died instantly without the protection of a suit.

  The challenge that the room held was by far the hardest, even by Celestine’s reckoning. Once again the essence of the task lay in the figures marked on either side of the door, but now these figures were linked by various symbols and connecting loops, like the subway map of a foreign city. We had encountered some of these hieroglyphics before—they were akin to mathematical operators, like the addition and subtraction symbol—but we had never seen so many. And the problem itself was not simply a numerical exercise, but—as far as Celestine could say with any certainty—a problem about topological transformations in four dimensions.

  “Please tell me you see the answer immediately,” Childe said.

  “I…” Celestine trailed off. “I think I do. I’m just not absolutely certain. I need to think about this for a minute.”

  “Fine. Take all the time you want.”

  Celestine fell into a reverie which lasted minutes, and then tens of minutes. Once or twice she would open her mouth and take a breath of air as if in readiness to speak, and on one or two other occasions she took a promising step closer to the door, but none of these things heralded the sudden, intuitive breakthrough we were all hoping for. She always returned to same silent, standing posture. The time dragged on; first an hour and then the better part of two hours.

  All this, I thought, before even Celestine had seen the answer.

  It might take days if we were all expected to follow her reasoning.

  Finally, however, she spoke. “Yes, I see it.”

  Childe was the first to answer. “Is it the one you thought it was originally?”

  “No.”

  “Great,” Hirz said.

  “Celestine…” I said, trying to defuse the situation. “Do you understand why you made the wrong choice originally?”

  “Yes. I think so. It was a trick answer; an apparently correct solution which contained a subtle flaw. And what looked like the clearly wrong answer turned out to be the right one.”

  “Right. And you’re certain of that?”

  “I’m not certain of anything, Richard. I’m just saying this is what I believe the answer to be.”

  I nodded. “I think that’s all any of us can honestly expect. Do you think there’s any chance of the rest of us following your line of argument?”

  “I don’t know. How much do you understand about Kaluza-Klein spaces?”

  “Not a vast amount, I have to admit.”

  “That’s what I feared. I could probably explain my reasoning to some of you, but there’d always be someone who didn’t get it—” Celestine looked pointedly at Hirz. “We could be in this bloody room for weeks before any of us grasp the solution. And the Spire may not tolerate that kind of delay.”

  “We don’t know that,” I cautioned.

  “No,” Childe said. “On the other hand, we can’t afford to spend weeks solving every room. There’s going to have to come a point where we put our faith in Celestine’s judgment. I think that time may have come.

  I looked at him, remembering that his mathematical fluency had always been superior to mine. The puzzles I had set him had seldom defeated him, even if it had taken weeks for his intensely methodical mind to arrive at the solution. Conversely, he had often managed to beat me by setting a mathematical challenge of similar intricacy to the one now facing Celestine. They were not quite equals, I knew, but neither were their abilities radically different. It was just that, thanks to her experiences with the Pattern Jugglers, Celestine would always arrive at the answer with the superhuman speed of a savant.

  “Are you saying I should just press it, with no consultation?” Celestine said.

  Childe nodded. “Provided everyone else agrees with me…”

  It was not an easy decision to make, especially after having navigated so many rooms via such a ruthlessly democratic process. But we all saw the sense, even Hirz coming around to our line of thinking in the end.

  “I’m telling you,” she said. “We get through this door, I’m out of here, money or not.”

  “You’re giving up?” Childe asked.

  “You saw what happened to those poor bastards outside. They must have thought they could keep on solving next test.”

  Childe looked sad, but said, “I understand perfectly. But I trust you’ll reassess your decision as soon as we’re through?”

  “Sorry, but my mind’s made up. I’ve had enough of this shit.” Hirz turned to Celestine. “Put us all out of our misery, will you? Make the choice.”

  Celestine looked at each of us in turn. “Are you ready for this?”

  “We are,” Childe said, answering for the group. “Go ahead.”

  Celestine pressed the symbol. There was the usual yawning moment of expectation; a moment that stretched agonisingly. We all stared at the door, willing it to begin sliding open.

  This time nothing happened.

  “Oh God…” Hirz began.

  Something happened then, almost before she had finished speaking, but it was over almost before we had sensed any change in the room. It was only afterwards—playing back the visual record captured by our suits—that we were able to make any sense of events.

  The walls of the chamber—like every room we had passed through, in fact—had looked totally seamless. But in a flash something emerged from the wall: a rigid, sharp-ended metal rod spearing out at waist-height. It flashed through the air from wall to wall, vanishing like a javelin thrown into water. None of us had time to notice it, let alone react bodily. Even the suits—programmed to move out of the way of obvious moving hazards—were too slow. By the time they began moving, the javelin had been and gone. And if there had been only that one javelin, we might have missed it happening at all.

  But a second emerged, a fraction of a second after the first, spearing across the room at a slightly different angle.

  Forqueray happened to be standing in the way.

  The javelin passed through him as if he were made of smoke; its progress was unimpeded by his presence. But it dragged behind it a comet-tail of gore, exploding out of his suit where he had been speared, just below the elbow. The pressure in the room was still considerably less than atmospheric.

  Forqueray’s suit reacted with impressive speed, but it was still sluggish compared to the javelin.

  It assessed the damage that had been inflicted on the arm, aware of how quickly its self-repair systems could work to seal that inch-wide hole, and came to a rapid conclusion. The integrity could be restored, but not before unacceptable blood and pressure loss. Since its duty was always to keep its wearer alive, no matter what the costs, it opted to sever the arm above the wound; hyper-sharp irised blades snicked through flesh and bone in an instant.

  All that took place long before any pain signals had a chance to reach his brain. The first thing Forqueray knew of his misfortune was when his arm clanged to his feet.

  “I think—” he started saying. Hirz dashed over to the Ultra and did her best to support him.

  Forqueray’s truncated arm ended in a smooth silver iris.

  “Don’t talk,” Childe said.

  Forqueray, who was still standing, looked at his injury with something close to fascination. “I—”

  “I said don’t talk.” Childe knelt down and picked up the amputated arm, showing the evidence to Forqueray. The hole went right through it, as cleanly bored as a rifle barrel.

  “I’ll live,” Forqueray managed.

  “Yes, you will,” Trintignant said. “And you may also count yourself fortunate. Had the projectile pierced your body, rather than one of its extremities, I do not believe we would be having this conversation.”

  “You call this fortunate?”

&nbs
p; “A wound such as yours can be made good with only trivial intervention. We have all the equipment we need aboard the shuttle.”

  Hirz looked around uneasily. “You think the punishment’s over?”

  “I think we’d know if it wasn’t,” I said. “That was our first mistake, after all. We can expect things to be a little worse in future, of course.”

  “Then we’d better not make any more screw-ups, had we?” Hirz was directing her words at Celestine.

  I had expected an angry rebuttal. Celestine would have been perfectly correct to remind Hirz that—had the rest of us been forced to make that choice—our chances of hitting the correct answer would have been a miserable one in six.

  But instead Celestine just spoke with the flat, soporific tones of one who could not quite believe she had made such an error.

  “I’m sorry…I must have…”

  “Made the wrong decision. Yes.” I nodded. “And there’ll undoubtedly be others. You did your best, Celestine—better than any of us could have managed.”

  “It wasn’t good enough.”

  “No, but you narrowed the field down to two possibilities. That’s a lot better than six.”

  “He’s right,” Childe said. “Celestine, don’t cut yourself up about this. Without you we wouldn’t have got as far as we did. Now go ahead and press the other answer—the one you settled on originally—and we’ll get Forqueray back to base camp.”

  The Ultra glared at him. “I’m fine, Childe. I can continue.”

  “Maybe you can, but it’s still time for a temporary retreat. We’ll get that arm looked at properly, and then we’ll come back with lightweight suits. We can’t carry on much further with these, anyway—and I don’t particularly fancy continuing with no armour at all.”

  Celestine turned back to the frame. “I can’t promise that this is the right one, either.”

  “We’ll take that chance. Just hit them in sequence—best choice first—until the Spire opens a route back to the start.”

  She pressed the symbol that had been her first choice, before she had analysed the problem more deeply and seen a phantom trap.

  As always, Blood Spire did not oblige us with an instant judgement on the choice we had made. There was a moment when all of us tensed, expecting the javelins to come again…but this time we were spared further punishment.

  The door opened, exposing the next chamber.

  We did not step through, of course. Instead, we turned around and made our way back through the succession of rooms we had already traversed, descending all the while, almost laughing at the childish simplicity of the very earliest puzzles compared to those we had faced before the attack.

  As the doors opened and closed in sequence, the air thinned out and the skin of Blood Spire became colder, less like a living thing, more like an ancient, brooding machine. But still that distant, throbbing respiratory vibration rattled the floors, lower now, and slower: the Spire letting us know it was aware of our presence and, perhaps, the tiniest bit disappointed at this turning back.

  “All right, you bastard,” Childe said. “We’re retreating, but only for now. We’re coming back, understand?”

  “You don’t have to take it personally,” I said.

  “Oh, but I do,” Childe said. “I take it very personally indeed.”

  We reached the first chamber, and then dropped down through what had been the entrance hole. After that, it was just a short flight back to the waiting shuttle.

  It was dark outside.

  We had been in the Spire for more than nineteen hours.

  FOUR

  “IT’LL DO,” FORQUERAY said, tilting his new arm this way and that.

  “Do?” Trintignant sounded mortally wounded. “My dear fellow, it is a work of exquisite craftsmanship; a thing of beauty. It is unlikely that you will see its like again, unless of course I am called upon to perform a similar procedure.”

  We were sitting inside the shuttle, still parked on Golgotha’s surface. The ship was a squat, aerodynamically blunt cylinder which had landed tail-down and then expanded a cluster of eight bubbletents around itself: six for our personal quarters during the expedition, one commons area, and a general medical bay equipped with all the equipment Trintignant needed to do his work. Surprisingly—to me, at least, who admitted to some unfamiliarity with these things—the shuttle’s fabricators had been more than able to come up with the various cybernetic components that the doctor required, and the surgical tools at his disposal—glistening, semi-sentient things which moved to his will almost before they were summoned—were clearly state of the art by any reasonable measure.

  “Yes, well, I’d have rather you’d reattached my old arm,” Forqueray said, opening and closing the sleek metal gauntlet of his replacement.

  “It would have been almost insultingly trivial to do that,” Trintignant said. “A new hand could have been cultured and regrafted in a few hours. If that did not appeal to you, I could have programmed your stump to regenerate a hand of its own accord; a perfectly simple matter of stemcell manipulation. But what would have been the point? You would be very likely to lose it as soon as we suffer our next punishment. Now you will only be losing machinery—a far less traumatic prospect.”

  “You’re enjoying this,” Hirz said, “aren’t you?”

  “It would be churlish to deny it,” Trintignant said. “When you have been deprived of willing subjects as long as I have, it’s only natural to take pleasure in those little opportunities for practice that fate seems fit to present.”

  Hirz nodded knowingly. She had not heard of Trintignant upon our first meeting, I recalled, but she had lost no time in forming her subsequent opinion of the man. “Except you won’t just stop with a hand, will you? I checked up on you, Doc—after that meeting in Childe’s house. I hacked into some of the medical records that the Stoner authorities still haven’t declassified, because they’re just too damned disturbing. You really went the whole hog, didn’t you? Some of the things I saw in those files—your victims—they stopped me from sleeping.”

  And yet still she had chosen to come with us, I thought. Evidently the allure of Childe’s promised reward outweighed any reservations she might have had about sharing a room with Trintignant. But I wondered about those medical records. Certainly, the publicly released data had contained more than enough atrocities for the average nightmare. It chilled the blood to think that Trintignant’s most heinous crimes had never been fully revealed.

  “Is it true?” I said. “Were there really worse things?”

  “That depends,” Trintignant said. “There were subjects upon whom I pushed my experimental techniques further than is generally realised, if that is what you mean. But did I ever approach what I considered were the true limits? No. I was always hindered.”

  “Until, perhaps, now,” I said.

  The rigid silver mask swivelled to face us all in turn. “That is as may be. But please give the following matter some consideration. I can surgically remove all your limbs now, cleanly, with the minimum of complications. The detached members could be put into cryogenic storage, replaced by prosthetic systems until we have completed the task that lies ahead of us.”

  ‘Thanks…” I said, looking around at the others. “But I think we’ll pass on that one, Doctor.”

  Trintignant offered his palms magnanimously. “I am at your disposal, should you wish to reconsider.”

  WE SPENT A full day in the shuttle before returning to the Spire. I had been mortally tired, but when I finally slept, it was only to submerge myself in yet more labyrinthine dreams, much like those Childe had pumped into our heads during the reefersleep transition. I woke feeling angry and cheated, and resolved to confront him about it.

  But something else snagged my attention. There was something wrong with my wrist. Buried just beneath the skin was a hard rectangle, showing darkly through my flesh. Turning my wrist this way and that, I admired the object, acutely—and strangely conscious of its rectilinear
ity. I looked around me, and felt the same visceral awareness of the other shapes which formed my surroundings. I did not know whether I was more disturbed at the presence of the alien object under my flesh, or my unnatural reaction to it.

  I stumbled groggily into the common quarters of the shuttle, presenting my wrist to Childe, who was sitting there with Celestine.

  She looked at me before Childe had a chance to answer. “So you’ve got one too,” she said, showing me the similar shape lurking just below her own skin. The shape rhymed—there was no other word for it—with the surrounding panels and extrusions of the commons. “Um, Richard?” she added.

  “I’m feeling a little strange.”

  “Blame Childe. He put them there. Didn’t you, you lying rat?”

  “It’s easily removed,” he said, all innocence. “It just seemed more prudent to implant the devices while you were all asleep anyway, so as not to waste any more time than necessary.”

  “It’s not just the thing in my wrist,” I said, “whatever it is.”

  “It’s something to keep us awake,” Celestine said, her anger just barely under control. Feeling less myself than ever, I watched the way her face changed shape as she spoke, conscious of the armature of muscle and bone lying just beneath the skin.

  “Awake?” I managed.

  “A…shunt, of some kind,” she said. “Ultras use them, I gather. It sucks fatigue poisons out of the blood, and puts other chemicals back into the blood to upset the brain’s normal sleeping cycle. With one of these you can stay conscious for weeks, with almost no psychological problems.”

  I forced a smile, ignoring the sense of wrongness I felt. “It’s the almost part that worries me.”

  “Me too.” She glared at Childe. “But much as I hate the little rat for doing this without my permission, I admit to seeing the sense in it.”

  I felt the bump in my wrist again. “Trintignant’s work, I presume?”

  “Count yourself lucky he didn’t hack your arms and legs off while he was at it.”