Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

by Alastair Reynolds

  “It’s come from the future,” I said.

  “I got that as well.”

  “They sent it here. They sent it here to carry a message to us.”

  I knew these things with an unimpeachable certainty, but I had no additional context for the knowledge. What future, by whom? From how far ahead, and to what purpose? What message? How had it arrived?

  I couldn’t stand not knowing. Now that I knew part of the truth, I needed the rest.

  I reached out my hand again, caressed the wall. It hit me harder this time, but the instinct to flinch away, the instinct to close my mind, was not as strong. I gasped at the crystalline rush. There couldn’t be room in my head for all that was being pumped into it, and yet it continued without interruption. Layers of wisdom poured into me, cooling and stratifying like ancient rock. My head felt like a boulder perched on my shoulders. I laughed: it was the only possible response, other than screaming terror. The flow continued, increasing in pressure.

  This much I understood:

  The Matryoshka was a complex machine with a simple purpose. Its layered structure was borne of necessity; the way it had to be in order to complete its mission. Each layer was a form of armour or camouflage or passkey, evolved organically to enable it to slip through the threshing clockwork of a cosmic time machine. That time machine was older than Earth. It had been constructed by alien minds and then added to and modified by successive intelligences. It was as far beyond the Matryoshka as the Matryoshka was beyond the Soyuz.

  The time machine had been waiting in a state of dormancy, for more than a billion years. Then humanity, or what had become of humanity, chanced upon it.

  It took a little while to understand its nature.

  At its ticking, whirling core lay a necklace of neutron stars. It had been known since our own era that a sufficiently long, dense, and fast-rotating cylinder had the property of twisting spacetime around itself until a path into the past became possible. Such a path—a mathematical trajectory in space, like an orbit—offered a means of conveying a signal or object to any previous point in time, provided it was no earlier than the moment of the time machine’s construction.

  Constructing such a machine was anything but child’s play.

  A single neutron star could be made to have the requisite density and spin, but it lacked the necessary axial elongation. To overcome this, the machine’s builders had approximated a cylinder by stringing four hundred and forty-one neutron stars together until they were almost touching, like beads on a wire. An open-ended string would have collapsed under its own appalling self-gravity, so the ends had been bent around and joined, with the entire ensemble revolving fast enough to stabilise the neutron stars against falling inward. It still wasn’t a cylinder, but locally—as far as a photon or vehicle near the necklace was concerned—it might as well have been.

  If it had taken a while to understand the time machine, it had taken even longer to engineer a vehicle capable of traversing it. The construction of the Matryoshka was the last great enterprise of a waning civilisation.

  The machine had catapulted the Matryoshka into the prehuman past of our galaxy. The insertion into time-reversed flight, the passage through the various filters and barriers installed to prevent illicit use of the ancient machinery, the exit back into normal timeflow, had caused eleven additional layers of shell to be sacrificed. What we saw of the Matryoshka was merely the scarred kernel of what had once been a much larger entity.

  But it had survived. It had come through, albeit overshooting its target era by many millions of years. Yet that had been allowed for; it was easier to leap back into the deep past and crawl forward in time than to achieve a bullseye into a relatively recent era. The emergence event was indeed the opening of a local wormhole throat, but only so that the Matryoshka (which incorporated wormhole-manipulating machinery in Shells 1 and 2) could complete the last leg of its journey.

  How far downstream had it come? A hundred years? A thousand years? Five thousand?

  I couldn’t tell. The knowledge told me everything, but not all of that wisdom was framed in terms I could readily decode. But I could sense a thread, a sense of connectedness between the era of the Matryoshka and our own. They knew a lot about us.

  Enough to know that we were on the wrong path.

  At last I jerked my hand away from the wall. The urge to return it was almost overwhelming, but I could only take so much in one go.

  “Dimitri?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I thought you were gone for a while there.”

  I turned to face my comrade. Against the vastness I had been shown, the cosmic scale of the history I had almost glimpsed, Galenka appeared no more substantial than a paper cut-out. She was just a human being, translucent with her own insubstantiality, pinned in this one moving instant like dirt on a conveyor belt. It took moments for my sense of scale to normalise; to realise that, for all that the machine had shown me, I was no different.

  “They sent it back for us,” I said. The words came out in a rush, and yet at the same time each syllable consumed an eternity of time and effort. “To show us how we’ve gone wrong. There’s history here—lots of it. In these walls. Mountains, chasms, of data.”

  “You need to slow your breathing. That silver stuff that got into us—it’s primed us in some way, hasn’t it? Rewired our minds so that the Matryoshka can get into them?”

  “I think—maybe. Yes.”

  “Get a grip, Dimitri. We still need to get home.”

  I made to touch the wall again. The urge was still there, the hunger—the vacuum in my head—returning. The Matryoshka still had more to tell me. It was not done with Dimitri Ivanov.

  “Don’t,” Galenka said, with a firmness that stopped my hand. “Not now. Not until we’ve seen the rest of this place.

  At her urging I resisted. I found that if kept to the middle of the corridor, it wasn’t as bad. But the walls were still whispering to me, inviting me to stroke my hand against them.

  “The Second Soviet,” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “It falls. Fifty years from now, maybe sixty. Somewhere near the end of the century. I saw it in the history.” I paused and swallowed hard. “This road we’re on—this path. It’s not the right one. We took a wrong turn, somewhere between the first and second apparitions. But by the time we realise it, by the time the Soviet falls, it’s too late. Not just for Russia, but for Earth. For humankind.”

  “It came from our future. Even I felt that, and I only touched it briefly. If we sent it, then things can’t be all bad.”

  “It’s the wrong future,” I said. “The Matryoshka is almost the last thing they do. They’ve been on the wrong path, doomed, from the outset. We turned away from space—that’s the mistake. There’s a darkness between then and now, and when it comes we aren’t ready.”

  We were still walking, following the arcing downslope of the corridor, towards the silver-blue radiance at its end. “The Second Soviet is the only political organisation still doing space travel. If anything we’re the ones holding the candle.”

  “It’s not enough. Now that the other nations have abandoned their efforts, we have to do more than just subsist. And if we are holding the candle, it won’t be for much longer.”

  “I don’t understand how the choices we make here and now can make that much of a difference, however many years from now.”

  “Evidently they can, or our descendants wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble. Look, we’re both smart enough to understand that small changes in initial conditions can feed into a chaotic system in highly unpredictable ways. What is history but a chaotic system?”

  “The Second Soviet won’t like being told it’s a mistake of history, Dimitri.”

  There was a fierce dryness in my throat. “It can’t ignore the message in the Matryoshka. Not now.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about that. But you know something?”

  “What?”

&
nbsp; “If this thing is from the future—from our future—then maybe it’s Russian as well. Or sent back to meet Russians. Which might mean that Nesha Petrova was right after all.”

  “They should tell her.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be the first thing on their minds, after they’ve spent all these years crushing and humiliating her.” Galenka fell silent for a few paces. “It’s like they always knew, isn’t it.”

  “They couldn’t have.”

  “But they knew enough to want her to be wrong. A message from the future, intended for us? What could we possibly need to hear from our descendants, except their undying gratitude?”

  “Everything we say is being logged on our suit recorders,” I said. “Logged and compressed and stored, so that it can be sent back to the Soyuz and then back to the Tereshkova, and then back to Baikonur.”

  “Right now, comrade, there are few things I give less of a damn about than some arsehole of a party official listening to what I have to say.”

  I smiled, because that was exactly how I felt as well.

  In sixty years the Second Soviet was dust. The history I had absorbed told me that nothing could prevent that. Accelerate it, yes—and maybe the arrival of the Matryoshka would do just that—but not prevent it. They could crucify us and it wouldn’t change anything.

  It was a crumb of consolation.

  The corridor widened, the intricate walls flanking away on either side, until we reached a domed room of cathedral proportions. The chamber was round, easily a hundred metres across, with a domed ceiling. I saw no way in or out other than the way we had come. There was a jagged design in the floor, worked in white and black marble—rapier-thin shards radiating from the middle.

  The music intensified—rising in pitch, rising in speed. If there was a tune there it was almost on the point of being comprehensible. I had a mental image of a rushing winter landscape, under white skies.

  “This is it, then,” Galenka said. “An empty fucking room. After all this.” She took a hesitant step towards the middle, then halted.

  “Wait,” I said.

  Something was happening.

  The black and white shards were pulling back from the middle, sliding invisibly into the floor’s circular border, a star-shaped blackness opening up in the centre. It all happened silently, with deathly slowness. Galenka stepped back, the two of us standing side by side. When the star had widened to ten or twelve metres across, the floor stopped moving. Smoothly, silently, something rose from the darkness. It was a plinth, and there was a figure on the plinth, lying with his face to the domed ceiling. Beneath the plinth, icy with frost, was a thick tangle of pipes and coiling, intestinal machinery. We stood and watched it in silence, neither of us ready to make the first move. There was a tingle in my head that was not quite a headache just now, but which promised to become one.

  The floor began to slide back into place, the jagged blades locking into place beneath the plinth. There was now an uninterrupted surface between the resting figure and us. Galenka and I glanced at each other through our visors, then began a slow, measured walk. The slope-sided plinth rose two metres from the floor, putting the reclining figure just above our heads. It hadn’t moved, or shown the least sign of life, since emerging through the floor.

  We reached the plinth. There was a kind of ledge or step in the side, allowing us to bring our heads level with the figure. We stood looking at it, saying nothing, the silence only punctuated by the laboured, bellows-like sound of our air circulators.

  That it was human had been obvious from the moment the plinth rose. The shape of the head, the ribbed chest, the placement and articulation of the limbs—it was all too familiar to be alien. Anyway, I knew that something descended from us—something essentially human—had sent back the Matryoshka. My bright new memories told me now that I was seeing the pilot, the navigator that had steered the artefact through the vicious barbs of the booby-trapped time machine, and then up through time, skipping through a cascade of wormholes, to our present era. The pilot was ghostly pale, wraithe-thin and naked, lying on a white metallic couch or rack that at first glance appeared to be an apparatus of torture or savage restraint. But then I decided that the apparatus was merely the control and life-support interface for the pilot. It was what had kept him alive, and what had given him the reins of the vast, layered machine it was his duty to steer and safeguard.

  I sensed that the journey had not been a short one. In the Matryoshka’s reference frame, it had consumed centuries of subjective time. The pilot, bio-modified for longevity and uninterrupted consciousness, had experienced every howling second of his voyage. That had always been the intention.

  But something had gone wrong. A miscalculation, a problem with the injection into the time machine. Or the emergence event, or the wormhole skip. Something I couldn’t grasp, except in the nature of its outcome. The journey wasn’t supposed to have taken this long.

  “The pilot went mad.”

  “You know this for a fact,” Galenka said.

  “You’d think this was a punishment—to be put inside the Matryoshka, alone, hurled back in time. But in fact it was the highest honour imaginable. They glorified him. He was entrusted with a mission of unimaginable importance.”

  “To change their past?”

  “No. They were stuck with what they already had. You can change someone else’s past, but not your own. That’s how time travel works. We have a different future now—one that won’t necessarily include the people who built the Matryoshka. But they did it for us, not themselves. To redeem one possible history, even if they couldn’t mend their own. And he paid for that with his sanity.”

  Galenka was silent for long moments. I surveyed the figure, taking in more of the details. Had he been standing, he would have towered over both of us. His arms were by his sides—his hands were small and boyish, out of proportion to the rest of him. His fists were clenched. The emaciated form was partly machine. The couch extended parts of itself into his body. Glowing blue lines slipped into orifices and punctured his flesh at a dozen points. Hard, non-biological forms bulged under drum-tight flesh. His eye sockets were stuffed with faceted blue crystals, radiating a spray of glowing fibres. There was something not quite right about the shape of his skull, as if some childhood deformity had never healed in the right way. It was hairless, papered over with translucent, finely veined skin. His lips were a bloodless gash.

  “The music,” Galenka said, breaking the reverence. “You think it’s coming from his head, don’t you.”

  “I think music must have comforted him during his journey. Somewhere along the way, though, it swallowed him up. It’s locked in a loop, endlessly repeating. He’s like a rat in a wheel, going round and round. By the time he came out of the wormhole, there couldn’t have been enough left of him to finish the mission.”

  “He made the Matryoshka sing.”

  “It might have been the last thing he did, before the madness took over completely. The last message he could get through to us. He knew how alien the artefact would have appeared to us, with its shells of camouflage and disguise. He made it sing, thinking we’d understand. A human signal, a sign that we shouldn’t fear it. That no matter how alien it appeared on the outside, there was something human at the heart. A message for the species, a last chance not to screw things up.”

  “Would it have killed him to use radio?”

  “He had to get it through Shell 3, remember—not to mention how many shells we’ve come through since Shell 4. Maybe it just wasn’t possible. Maybe the simplest thing really was to have the Matryoshka sing itself to us. After all, it’s not as if someone didn’t notice in the end.”

  “Or maybe he was just insane, and the music’s just a side-effect.”

  “That’s also a possibility,” I said.

  The impulse that had drawn my hand towards the patterned wall compelled me to reach out and touch the pilot. I was moving my arm when the figure twitched, convulsing within the constra
ints of the couch. The blue lines strained like ropes in a squall. I jerked in my suit, nerves battling with curiosity. The figure was still again, but something about it had changed.

  “Either it just died,” Galenka said, “or it just came back to life. You want to take a guess, Dimitri?”

  I said nothing. It was all I could do to stare at the pilot. His chest wasn’t moving, and I doubted that there was a heart beating inside that ribcage. But something was different.

  The pilot’s head turned. The movement was glacially slow, more like a flower following the sun than the movement of an animal. It must have cost him an indescribable effort just to look at us. I could read no expression in the tight mask of his face or the blue facets of his eyes. But I knew we had his full attention.

  The gash of his lips opened. He let out a long, slow sigh.

  “You made it,” I said. “You completed your mission.”

  Perhaps it was my imagination—I would never know for certain—but it seemed to me then that the head nodded a fraction, as if acknowledging what I had said. As if thanking me for bringing this news.

  Then there was another gasp of air—longer, this time. It had something of death about it. The eyes were still looking at me, but all of a sudden I sensed no intellect behind them. I wondered if the pilot had conserved some last flicker of sanity for the time when he had visitors—just enough selfhood to die knowing whether he had succeeded or failed.

  Tension exited the body. The head lolled back into the frame, looking sideways. His arm slumped to the side, dangling over the side of the plinth. The fist relaxed, letting something small and metallic drop to the floor.

  I reached down and picked up the item, taking it as gingerly as I could in my suit gloves. I stared down at it as if it was the most alien thing in the universe. Which, in that moment, I think it probably was.