Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

by Alastair Reynolds

  “As an upper limit? In the region of twenty-eight minutes.”

  “That’s nowhere near enough time,” I said. “We’d better retreat and come back.”

  “No,” Childe said.

  “Not until we’re injured.”

  “You’re insane,” Celestine said.

  But Childe ignored her. He just stepped through the door, into the next room. Behind us the exit door slammed shut.

  “Not insane,” he said, turning back to us. “Just very eager to continue.”

  IT WAS NEVER the same thing twice.

  Celestine made her selection as quickly as she could, every muscle tense with concentration, and that gave us—by Trintignant’s estimation—five or six clear minutes before the Spire would demand an answer.

  “We’ll wait it out,” Childe said, eyeing us all to see if anyone disagreed. “Celestine can keep checking her results. There’s no sense in giving the fucking thing an answer before we have to; not when so much is at stake.”

  “I’m sure of the answer,” Celestine said, pointing to the part of the frame she would eventually palm.

  “Then take five minutes to clear your head. Whatever. Just don’t make the choice until we’re forced into it.”

  “If we get through this room, Childe…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m going back. You can’t stop me.”

  “You won’t do it, Celestine, and you know it.”

  She glared at him, but said nothing. I think what followed was the longest five minutes in my life. None of us dared speak again, unwilling to begin anything—even a word—for fear that something like the ball would return. All I heard for five minutes was our own breathing; backgrounded by the awful slow thrumming of the Spire itself.

  Then something slithered out of one wall.

  It hit the floor, writhing. It was an inch-thick, three-metre-long length of flexible metal.

  “Back off…” Childe told us.

  Celestine looked over her shoulder. “You want me to press this, or not?”

  “On my word. Not a moment before.”

  The cable continued writhing: flexing, coiling and uncoiling like a demented eel. Childe stared at it, fascinated. The writhing grew in strength, accompanied by the slithering, hissing sounds of metal on metal.

  “Childe?” Celestine asked.

  “I just want to see what this thing actually—”

  The cable flexed and writhed, and then propelled itself rapidly across the floor in Childe’s direction. He hopped nimbly out of the way, the cable passing under his feet. The writhing had become a continuous whipcracking now, and we all pressed ourselves against the walls. The cable—having missed Childe—retreated to the middle of the room and hissed furiously. It looked much longer and thinner than it had a moment ago, as if it had elongated itself.

  “Childe,” Celestine said, “I’m making the choice in five seconds, whether you like it or not.”

  “Wait, will you?”

  The cable moved with blinding speed now, rearing up so that its motion was no longer confined to a few inches above the floor. Its writhing was so fast that it took on a quasi-solidity: an irregularly shaped pillar of flickering, whistling metal. I looked at Celestine, willing her to palm the frame, no matter what Childe said. I appreciated his fascination—the thing was entrancing to look at—but I suspected he was pushing curiosity slightly too far.

  “Celestine…” I started saying.

  But what happened next happened with lightning speed: a silver-grey tentacle of the blur—a thin loop of the cable—whipped out to form a double coil around Celestine’s arm. It was the one Trintignant had already worked on. She looked at it in horror; the cable tightened itself and snipped the arm off. Celestine slumped to the floor, screaming.

  The tentacle tugged her arm to the centre of the room, retreating back into the hissing, flickering pillar of whirling metal.

  I dashed for the door, remembering the symbol she pressed. The whirl reached a loop out to me, but I threw myself against the wall and the loop merely brushed the chest of my suit before flicking back into the mass. From the whirl, tiny pieces of flesh and bone dribbled to the ground. Then another loop flicked out and snared Hirz, wrapping around her midsection and pulling her towards the centre.

  She struggled—cartwheeling her arms, her feet skidding against the floor—but it was no good. She started shouting, and then screaming.

  I reached the door.

  My hand hesitated over the markings. Was I remembering accurately, or had Celestine intended to press a different solution? They all looked so similar now.

  Then Celestine, who was still clutching her ruined arm, nodded emphatically.

  I palmed the door.

  I stared at it, willing it to move. After all this, what if her choice had been wrong? The Spire seemed to draw out the moment sadistically while behind me I continued to hear the frantic hissing of the whirling cable. And something else, which I preferred not to think about.

  Suddenly the noise stopped.

  In my peripheral vision I saw the cable retreating back into the wall, like a snake’s tongue laden with scent.

  Before me, the door began to open.

  Celestine’s choice had been correct. I examined my state of mind and decided that I ought to be feeling relief. And perhaps, distantly, I did. At least now we would have a clear route back out of the Spire. But we would not be going forward, and I knew not all us would be leaving.

  I turned around, steeling myself against what I was about to see.

  Childe and Trintignant were undamaged.

  Celestine was already attending to her injury, fixing a tourniquet from her medical kit above the point where her arm ended. She had lost very little blood, and did not appear to be in very much discomfort.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “I’ll make it out, Richard.” She grimaced, tugging the tourniquet tighter. “Which is more than can be said for Hirz.”

  “Where is she?”

  “It got her.”

  With her good hand, Celestine pointed to the place where the whirl had been only moments before. On the floor—just below the volume of air where the cable had hovered and thrashed—lay a small, neat pile of flailed human tissue.

  “There’s no sign of Celestine’s hand,” I said. “Or Hirz’s suit.”

  “It pulled her apart,” Childe said, his face drained of blood.

  “Where is she?”

  “It was very fast. There was just a…blur. It pulled her apart and then the parts disappeared into the walls. I don’t think she could have felt much.”

  “I hope to God she didn’t.”

  Doctor Trintignant stooped down and examined the pieces.

  EIGHT

  OUTSIDE, IN THE long, steely-shadowed light of what was either dusk or dawn, we found the pieces of Hirz for which the Spire had had no use.

  They were half-buried in dust, like the bluffs and arches of some ancient landscape rendered in miniature. My mind played gruesome tricks with the shapes, turning them from brutally detached pieces of human anatomy into abstract sculptures: jointed formations that caught the light in a certain way and cast their own pleasing shadows. Though some pieces of fabric remained, the Spire had retained all the metallic parts of her suit for itself. Even her skull had been cracked open and sucked dry, so that the Spire could winnow the few small precious pieces of metal she carried in her head.

  And what it could not use, it had thrown away.

  “We can’t just leave her here,” I said. “We’ve got to do something, bury her…at least put up some kind of marker.”

  “She’s already got one,” Childe said.

  “What?”

  “The Spire. And the sooner we get back to the shuttle, the sooner we can fix Celestine and get back to it.”

  “A moment please,” Trintignant said, fingering through another pile of human remains.

  “Those aren’t anything to do with Hirz,” Childe sa
id.

  Trintignant rose to his feet slipping something into his suit’s utility belt pocket in the process.

  Whatever it had been was small; no larger than a marble or small stone.

  “I’M GOING HOME,” Celestine said, when we were back in the safety of the shuttle. “And before you try and talk me out of it, that’s final.”

  We were alone in her quarters. Childe had just given up trying to convince her to stay, but he had sent me in to see if I could be more persuasive. My heart, however, was not in it. I had seen what the Spire could do, and I was damned if I was going to be responsible for any blood other than my own.

  “At least let Trintignant take care of your hand,” I said.

  “I don’t need steel now,” she said, stroking the glistening blue surgical sleeve which terminated her arm. “I can manage without a hand until we’re back in Chasm City. They can grow me a new one while I’m sleeping.”

  The doctor’s musical voice interrupted us, Trintignant’s impassive silver mask poking through into Celestine’s bubble-tent partition. “If I may be so bold…it may be that my services are the best you can now reasonably hope to attain.”

  Celestine looked at Childe, and then at the doctor, and then at the glistening surgical sleeve.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. Only some news from home which Childe has allowed me to see.” Uninvited, Trintignant stepped fully into the room and sealed the partition behind him.

  “What, Doctor?”

  “Rather disturbing news, as it happens. Not long after our departure, something upsetting happened to Chasm City. A blight which afflicted everything contingent upon any microscopic, self-replicating system. Nanotechnology, in other words. I gather the fatalities were numbered in the millions…”

  “You don’t have to sound so bloody cheerful about it.”

  Trintignant navigated to the side of the couch where Celestine was resting. “I merely stress the point that what we consider state of the art medicine may be somewhat beyond the city’s present capabilities. Of course, much may change before our return…”

  “Then I’ll just have to take that risk, won’t I?” Celestine said.

  “On your own head be it.” Trintignant paused and placed something small and hard on Celestine’s table. Then he turned as if to leave, but stopped and spoke again. “I am accustomed to it, you know.”

  “Used to what?” I said.

  “Fear and revulsion. Because of what I have become, and what I have done. But I am not an evil man. Perverse, yes. Given to peculiar desires, most certainly. But emphatically not a monster.”

  “What about your victims, Doctor?”

  “I have always maintained that they gave consent for the procedures I inflicted”—he corrected himself—“performed upon them.”

  “That’s not what the records say.”

  “And who are we to argue with records?” The light played on his mask in such a fashion as to enhance the half-smile that was always there. “Who are we, indeed.”

  WHEN TRINTIGNANT WAS gone, I turned to Celestine and said, “I’m going back into the Spire. You realise that, don’t you?”

  “I’d guessed, but I still hope I can talk you out of it.” With her good hand, she fingered the small, hard thing Trintignant had placed on the table. It looked like a misshapen dark stone—whatever the doctor had found amongst the dead—and for a moment I wondered why he had left it behind.

  Then I said, “I really don’t think there’s much point. It’s between me and Childe now. He must have known there’d come a point when I wouldn’t be able to turn away.”

  “No matter what the costs?” Celestine asked.

  “Nothing’s without a little risk.”

  She shook her head, slowly and wonderingly. “He really got to you, didn’t he.”

  “No,” I said, feeling a perverse need to defend my old friend, even when I knew that what Celestine said was perfectly true. “It wasn’t Childe, in the end. It was the Spire.”

  “Please, Richard. Think carefully, won’t you?”

  I said I would. But we both knew it was a lie.

  NINE

  CHILDE AND I went back.

  I gazed up at it, towering over us like some brutal cenotaph. I saw it with astonishing, diamond-hard clarity. It was as if a smoky veil had been lifted from my vision, permitting thousands of new details and nuances of hue and shade to blast through. Only the tiniest, faintest hint of pixelation—seen whenever I changed my angle of view too sharply—betrayed the fact that this was not quite normal vision, but a cybernetic augmentation.

  Our eyes had been removed, the sockets scrubbed and packed with far more efficient sensory devices, wired back into our visual cortices. Our eyeballs waited back at the shuttle, floating in jars like grotesque delicacies. They would be popped back in when we had conquered the Spire.

  “Why not goggles?” I said when Trintignant had first explained his plans.

  “Too bulky, and too liable to be snatched away. The Spire has a definite taste for metal. From now on, anything vital had better be carried as part of us—not just worn, but internalised.” The doctor steepled his silver fingers. “If that repulses you, I suggest you concede defeat now.”

  “I’ll decide what repulses me,” I said.

  “What else?” Childe said. “Without Celestine we’ll need to crack those problems ourselves.”

  “I will increase the density of medichines in your brains,” Trintignant said. “They will weave a web of fullerene tubes, artificial neuronal connections supplanting your existing synaptic topology.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “The fullerene tubes will conduct nerve signals hundreds of times more rapidly than your existing synaptic pathways. Your neural computation rate will increase. Your subjective sense of elapsed time will slow.”

  I stared at the doctor, horrified and fascinated at the same time. “You can do that?”

  “It’s actually rather trivial. The Conjoiners have been doing it since the Transenlightenment, and their methods are well documented. With them I can make time slow to a subjective crawl. The Spire may give you only twenty minutes to solve a room, but I can make it feel like several hours; even one or two days.”

  I turned to Childe. “You think that’ll be enough?”

  “I think it’ll be a lot better than nothing, but we’ll see.”

  But it was better than that.

  Trintignant’s machines did more than just supplant our existing and clumsily slow neural pathways. They reshaped them, configuring the topology to enhance mathematical prowess, which took us onto a plateau beyond what the neural modifiers had been capable of doing. We lacked Celestine’s intuitive brilliance, but we had the advantage of being able to spend longer—subjectively, at least—on a given problem.

  And, for a while at least, it worked.

  TEN

  “YOU’RE TURNING INTO a monster,” she said.

  I answered, “I’m turning into whatever it takes to beat the Spire.”

  I stalked away from the shuttle, moving on slender, articulated legs like piston-driven stilts. I no longer needed armour now: Trintignant had grafted it to my skin. Tough black plaques slid over each other like the carapacial segments of a lobster.

  “You even sound like Trintignant now,” Celestine said, following me. I watched her asymmetric shape loom next to mine: she lopsided; me a thin, elongated wraith.

  “I can’t help that,” I said, my voice piping from the speech synthesiser that replaced my sealed-up mouth.

  “You can stop. It isn’t too late.”

  “Not until Childe stops.”

  “And then? Will even that be enough to make you give up, Richard?”

  I turned to face her. Behind her faceplate I watched her try to conceal the revulsion she obviously felt.

  “He won’t give up,” I said.

  Celestine held out her hand. At first I thought she was beckoning me, but then I saw
there was something in her palm. Small, dark and hard.

  “Trintignant found this outside, by the Spire. It’s what he left in my room. I think he was trying to tell us something. Trying to redeem himself. Do you recognise it, Richard?”

  I zoomed in on the object. Numbers flickered around it. Enhancement phased in. Surface irregularity. Topological contours. Albedo. Likely composition. I drank in the data like a drunkard.

  Data was what I lived for now.

  “No.”

  ELEVEN

  “I CAN HEAR something.”

  “Of course you can. It’s the Spire, the same as it’s always been.”

  “No.” I was silent for several moments, wondering whether my augmented auditory system was sending false signals into my brain.

  But there it was again: an occasional rumble of distant machinery, but one that was coming closer.

  “I hear it now,” Childe said. “It’s coming from behind us. Along the way we’ve come.”

  “It sounds like the doors opening and closing in sequence.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Something must be coming through the rooms towards us.”

  Childe thought about that for what felt like minutes, but was probably only a matter of actual seconds. Then be shook his head, dismissively. “We have eleven minutes to get through this door, or we’ll be punished. We don’t have time to worry about anything extraneous.”

  Reluctantly, I agreed.

  I forced my attention back to the puzzle, feeling the machinery in my head pluck at the mathematical barbs of the problem. The ferocious clockwork that Trintignant had installed in my skull spun giddily. I had never understood mathematics with any great agility, but now I sensed it as a hard grid of truth underlying everything: bones shining through the thin flesh of the world.

  It was almost the only thing I was now capable of thinking of at all. Everything else felt painfully abstract, whereas before the opposite had been the case. This, I knew, must be what it felt like to an idiot savant, gifted with astonishing skill in one highly specialised field of human expertise.