Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Most of them didn’t,” Clausen said.

  “Know what?” Gaunt asked.

  “Sleepover was a cover, even then,” Nero said. “You were being sold a scam. There was never any likelihood of an immortality breakthrough, no matter how long you slept.”

  “I don’t understand. You’re saying it was all a con?”

  “Of a kind,” Nero said. “Not to make money for anyone, but to begin the process of getting the whole of humanity into hibernation. It had to begin small, so that they had time to work the wrinkles out of the technology. If the people in the know had come out into the open and announced their plans, no one would have believed them. And if they had been believed, there’d have been panic and confusion all over the world. So they began with the Few, and then expanded the operation slowly. First a few hundred thousand. Then half a million. Then a million…so on.” She paused. “Establishing a pattern, a normal state of affairs. They kept the lid on it for thirty years. But then the rumours started spreading, the rumours that there was something more to Sleepover.”

  “The dragons didn’t help,” Da Silva said. “It was always going to be a tall order explaining those away.”

  “By the time I went under,” Nero said, “most of us knew the score. The world was going to end if we didn’t sleep. It was our moral duty, our obligation, to submit to the hibernation rigs. That, or take the euthanasia option. I took the freezer route, but a lot of my friends opted for the pill. Figured the certainty of death was preferable to the lottery of getting into the boxes, throwing the cosmic dice…” She was looking at Gaunt intently, meeting his eyes as she spoke. “And I knew about this part of the deal, as well. That, at some point, there’d be a chance of me being brought out of sleep to become a caretaker. But, you know, the likelihood of that was vanishingly small. Never thought it would happen to me.”

  “No one ever does,” Clausen said.

  “What happened?” Gaunt asked, nodding at the foil-wrapped body.

  “Gimenez died when a steam pipe burst down on level eight. I don’t think he felt much, it would have been so quick. I got down there as quickly as I could, obviously. Shut off the steam leak and managed to drag Gimenez back to the infirmary.”

  “Nero was burned getting Gimenez back here,” Da Silva said.

  “Hey, I’ll mend. Just not much good with a screwdriver right now.”

  “I’m sorry about Gimenez,” Clausen said.

  “You don’t need to be. Gimenez never really liked it here. Always figured he’d made the wrong decision, sticking with us rather than going back into the box. Tried to talk him round, of course, but it was like arguing with a wall.” Nero ran her good hand through her curls. “Not saying I didn’t get on with the guy. But there’s no arguing that he’s better off now than he was before.”

  “He’s dead, though,” Gaunt said.

  “Technically. But I ran a full blood-scrub on him after the accident, pumped him full of cryoprotectant. We don’t have any spare slots here, but they can put him back in a box on the operations rig.”

  “My box,” Gaunt said. “The one I was in.”

  “There are other slots,” Da Silva corrected. “Gimenez going back in doesn’t preclude you following him, if that’s what you want.”

  “If Gimenez was so unhappy, why didn’t you just let him go back into the box earlier?”

  “Not the way it works,” Clausen said. “He made his choice. Afterwards, we put a lot of time and energy into bringing him up to speed, making him mesh with the team. You think we were going to willingly throw all that expenditure away, just because he changed his mind?”

  “He never stopped pulling his weight,” Nero said. “Say what you will about Gimenez, but he didn’t let the team down. And what happened to him down on eight was an accident.”

  “I never doubted it,” Da Silva said. “He was a good guy. It’s just a shame he couldn’t make the adjustment.”

  “Maybe it’ll work out for him now,” Nero said. “One-way ticket to the future. Done his caretaker stint, so the next time he’s revived, it’ll be because we finally got through this shit. It’ll be because we won the war, and we can all wake up again. They’ll find a way to fix him up, I’m sure. And if they can’t, they’ll just put him under again until they have the means.”

  “Sounds like he got a good deal out of it in the end,” Gaunt said.

  “The only good deal is being alive,” Nero replied. “That’s what we’re doing now, all of us. Whatever happens, we’re alive, we’re breathing, we’re having conscious thoughts. We’re not frozen bodies stacked in boxes, merely existing from one instant to the next.” She gave a shrug. “My fifty cents, that’s all. You want to go back in the box, let someone else shoulder the burden, don’t let me talk you out of it.” Then she looked at Da Silva. “You gonna be all right here on your own, until I’m straightened out?”

  “Something comes up I can’t deal with, I’ll let you know,” Da Silva said.

  Nero and Da Silva went through a checklist, Nero making sure her replacement knew everything he needed to, and then they made their farewells. Gaunt couldn’t tell how long they were going to be leaving Da Silva alone out here, whether it was weeks or months. He seemed resigned to his fate, as if this kind of solitary duty was something they were all expected to do now and then. Given that there had been two people on duty here until Gimenez’s death, Gaunt wondered why they didn’t just thaw out another sleeper so that Da Silva wouldn’t have to work on his own while Nero’s hand was healing.

  Then, no more than half an hour after his arrival, they were back in the helicopter again, powering back to the operations rig. The weather had worsened in the meantime, the seas lashing even higher against the rigs’ legs, and the horizon was now obscured behind curtains of storming rain, broken only by the flash of lightning.

  “This was bad timing,” he heard Nero say. “Maybe you should have let me stew until this system had passed. It’s not like Gimenez couldn’t wait.”

  “We were already overdue on the extraction,” Clausen said. “If the weather clamps down, this might be our last chance for days.”

  “They tried to push one through yesterday, I heard.”

  “Out in Echo field. Partial coalescence.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Only on the monitors. Close enough for me.”

  “We should put guns on the rigs.”

  “And where would the manpower come from, exactly? We’re just barely holding on as it is, without adding more shit to worry about.”

  The two women were sitting up front; Gaunt was in the back with Gimenez’s foil-wrapped corpse for company. They had folded back one seat to make room for the stretchered form.

  “I don’t really have a choice, do I,” he said.

  “Course you have a choice,” Nero answered.

  “I mean, morally. I’ve seen what it’s like for you people. You’re stretched to breaking point just keeping this operation from falling apart. Why don’t you wake up more sleepers?”

  “Hey, that’s a good point,” Clausen said. “Why don’t we?”

  Gaunt ignored her sarcasm. “You’ve just left that man alone, looking after that whole complex. How can I turn my back on you, and still have any self-respect?”

  “Plenty of people do exactly that,” Nero said.

  “How many? What fraction?”

  “More than half agree to stay,” Clausen said. “Good enough for you?”

  “But like you said, most of the sleepers would have known what they were getting into. I still don’t.”

  “And you think that changes things, means we can cut you some slack?” Clausen asked. “Like we’re gonna say, it’s fine man, go back into the box, we can do without you this time.”

  “What you need to understand,” Nero said, “is that the future you were promised isn’t coming. Not for centuries, not until we’re out of this mess. And no one has a clue how long that could take. Meanwhile, the sleepers don’t h
ave unlimited shelf life. You think the equipment never fails? You think we don’t sometimes lose someone because a box breaks down?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You go back in the box, you’re gambling on something that might never happen. Stay awake, at least there are certainties. At least you know you’ll die doing something useful, something worthwhile.”

  “It would help if you told me why,” Gaunt said.

  “Someone has to look after things,” Nero said. “The robots take care of the rigs, but who takes care of the robots?”

  “I mean, why is it that everyone has to sleep? Why is that so damned important?”

  Something flashed on the console. Clausen pressed a hand against her headphones, listening to something. After a few seconds he heard her say: “Roger, vectoring three two five.” Followed by an almost silent “Fuck. All we need.”

  “That wasn’t a weather alert,” Nero said.

  “What’s happening?” Gaunt asked, as the helicopter made a steep turn, the sea tilting up to meet him.

  “Nothing you need worry about,” Clausen said.

  The helicopter levelled out on its new course, flying higher than before—so it seemed to Gaunt—but also faster, the motor noise louder in the cabin, various indicator lights showing on the console that had not been lit before. Clausen silenced alarms as they came on, flipping the switches with the casual insouciance of someone who was well used to flying under tense circumstances and knew exactly what her machine could and couldn’t tolerate, more intimately perhaps than the helicopter itself, which was after all only a dumb machine. Rig after rig passed on either side, dark straddling citadels, and then the field began to thin out. Through what little visibility remained Gaunt saw only open sea, a plain of undulating, white-capped grey. As the winds harried it the water moved like the skin of some monstrous breathing thing, sucking in and out with a terrible restlessness.

  “There,” Nero said, pointing out to the right. “Breech glow. Shit; I thought we were meant to be avoiding it, not getting closer.”

  Clausen banked the helicopter again. “So did I. Either they sent me a duff vector or there’s more than one incursion going on.”

  “Won’t be the first time. Bad weather always does bring them out. Why is that?”

  “Ask the machines.”

  It took Gaunt a few moments to make out what Nero had already seen. Half way to the limit of vision, part of the sea appeared to be lit from below, a smudge of sickly yellow-green against the grey and white everywhere else. A vision came to mind, half-remembered from some stiff-backed picture book he had once owned as a child, of a luminous, fabulously spired aquatic palace pushing up from the depths, barnacled in light, garlanded by mermaids and shoals of jewel-like fish. But there was, he sensed, nothing remotely magical or enchanted about what was happening under that yellow-green smear. It was something that had Clausen and Nero rattled, and they wanted to avoid it.

  So did he.

  “What is that thing?”

  “Something trying to break through,” Nero said. “Something we were kind of hoping not to run into.”

  “It’s not cohering,” Clausen said. “I think.”

  The storm, if anything, appeared to double in fury around the glowing form. The sea boiled and seethed. Part of Gaunt wanted them to turn the helicopter around, to give him a better view of whatever process was going on under the waves. Another part, attuned to some fundamental wrongness about the phenomenon, wanted to get as far away as possible.

  “Is it a weapon, something to do with this war you keep mentioning?” Gaunt asked.

  He wasn’t expecting a straight answer, least of all not from Clausen. It was a surprise when she said: “This is how they get at us. They try and send these things through. Sometimes they manage.”

  “It’s breaking up,” Nero said. “You were right. Not enough signal for clear breach. Must be noisy on the interface.”

  The yellow-green stain was diminishing by the second, as if that magical city were descending back to the depths. He watched, mesmerised, as something broke the surface—something long and glowing and whip-like, thrashing once, coiling out as if trying to reach for airborne prey, before being pulled under into the fizzing chaos. Then the light slowly subsided, and the waves returned to their normal surging ferocity, and the patch of the ocean where the apparition had appeared was indistinguishable from the seas around it.

  GAUNT HAD ARRIVED to his decision. He would join these people, he would do their work, he would accept their deal, such as it was. Not because he wanted to, not because his heart was in it, not because he believed he was strong enough, but because the alternative was to seem cowardly, weak-fibred, unwilling to bend his life to an altruistic mission. He knew that these were entirely the wrong reasons, but he accepted the force of them without argument. Better to at least appear to be selfless, even if the thought of what lay ahead of him flooded him with an almost overwhelming sense of despair and loss and bitter injustice.

  It had been three days since his revival when he announced his decision. In that time he had barely spoken to anyone but Clausen, Nero and Da Silva. The other workers in the operations rig would occasionally acknowledge his presence, grunt something to him as he waited in line at the canteen, but for the most part it was clear that they were not prepared to treat him as another human being until he committed to their cause. He was just a ghost until then, a half-spirit caught in dismal, drifting limbo between the weary living and the frozen dead. He could understand how they felt: what was the point in getting to know a prospective comrade, if that person might at any time opt to return to the boxes? But at the same time it didn’t help him feel as if he would ever be able to fit in.

  He found Clausen alone, washing dirty coffee cups in a side-room of the canteen.

  “I’ve made up my mind,” he said.

  “And?”

  “I’m staying.”

  “Good.” She finished drying off one of the cups. “You’ll be assigned a full work roster tomorrow. I’m teaming you up with Nero; you’ll be working basic robot repair and maintenance. She can show you the ropes while she’s getting better.” Clausen paused to put the dried cup back in one of the cupboards above the sink. “Show up in the mess room at eight; Nero’ll be there with a toolkit and work gear. Grab a good breakfast beforehand because you won’t be taking a break until end of shift.”

  Then she turned to leave the room, leaving him standing there.

  “That’s it?” Gaunt asked.

  She looked back with a puzzled look. “Were you expecting something else?”

  “You bring me out of cold storage, tell me the world’s turned to shit while I was sleeping, and then give me the choice of staying awake or going back into the box. Despite everything I actually agree to work with you, knowing full well that in doing so I’m forsaking any chance of ever living to see anything other than this…piss-poor, miserable future. Forsaking immortality, forsaking any hope of seeing a better world. You said I had…what? Twenty, thirty years ahead of me?”

  “Give or take.”

  “I’m giving you those years! Isn’t that worth something? Don’t I deserve at least to be told thank you? Don’t I at least deserve a crumb of gratitude?”

  “You think you’re different, Gaunt? You think you’re owed something the rest of us never had a hope of getting?”

  “I never signed up for this deal,” he said. “I never accepted this bargain.”

  “Right.” She nodded, as if he’d made a profound, game-changing point. “I get it. What you’re saying is, for the rest of us it was easy? We went into the dormitories knowing there was a tiny, tiny chance we might be woken to help out with the maintenance. Because of that, because we knew, theoretically, that we might be called upon, we had no problem at all dealing with the adjustment? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying it’s different, that’s all.”

  “If you truly think that, Gaunt, you’re even more
of a prick than I thought.”

  “You woke me,” he said. “You chose to wake me. It wasn’t accidental. If there really are two billion people sleeping out there, the chances of selecting someone from the first two hundred thousand…it’s microscopic. So you did this for a reason.”

  “I told you, you had the right background skills.”

  “Skills anyone could learn, given time. Nero obviously did, and I presume you must have done so as well. So there must be another reason. Seeing as you keep telling me all this is my fault, I figure this is your idea of punishment.”

  “You think we’ve got time to be that petty?”

  “I don’t know. What I do know is that you’ve treated me more or less like dirt since the moment I woke up, and I’m trying to work out why. I also think it’s maybe about time you told me what’s really going on. Not just with the sleepers, but everything else. The thing we saw out at sea. The reason for all this.”

  “You think you’re ready for it, Gaunt?”

  “You tell me.”

  “No one’s ever ready,” Clausen said.

  THE NEXT MORNING he took his breakfast tray to a table where three other caretakers were already sitting. They had finished their meals but were still talking over mugs of whatever it was they had agreed to call coffee. Gaunt sat down at the corner of the table, acknowledging the other diners with a nod. They had been talking animatedly until then, but without ceremony the mugs were drained and the trays lifted and he was alone again. Nothing had been said to him, except a muttered “don’t take it the wrong way” as one of the caretakers brushed past him.

  He wondered how else he was supposed to take it.

  “I’m staying,” he said quietly. “I’ve made my decision. What else am I expected to do?”

  He ate his breakfast in silence and then went to find Nero.

  “I guess you got your orders,” she said cheerfully, already dressed for outdoor work despite still having a bandaged hand. “Here. Take this.” She passed him a heavy toolkit, a hard hat and a bundle of brownish work-stained clothing piled on top of it. “Get kitted up, then meet me at the north stairwell. You OK with heights, Gaunt?”