Even with the bots, the work took its toll. Between cutting stints, when I was too tired to supervise the machines, I’d float with Skanda in the observation bubble. We’d be goggled up, our naked bodies intertwined.
I’d seen my share of the system but Skanda had been places I’d only dreamed of visiting. I kept telling myself not to worry about the future, just to enjoy the moment, this time we had together. When the rock was done, there’d be nothing to keep Skanda with me. Even with the money in my account, I was just a rock cutter.
But Skanda made me wonder. With the goggles on, he’d show me things. Industrial flows; streams of processed matter on their way from launcher to customer. “That one,” he’d say, directing my eye to a tagged procession of cargo pellets, shot out from a catapult on some iceteroid. “That’s on its way to Mars. Slower than shipping it bulk, but cheaper in the long run. No engines, no guidance—just celestial mechanics, taking it all the way home.”
“You own that flow?”
He’d kiss me as if to say: don’t trouble yourself with such matters. “In a tediously complicated sense, yes.”
“People like you,” I said, “put people like me out of work.”
Skanda smiled. My face bulged back in the mirrored globes of his goggles. “But I’m putting you in work now, aren’t I?”
It wasn’t just industry and economics. Orbits lit up, coloured bands arcing away like the racetracks of the gods. Worlds flowered in the darkness. Not just the major planets, of course, but the minor ones: Ceres, Vesta, Hidalgo, Juno, Adonis, dozens more. In turn each world had its gaggling court of fellow-travellers. We watched moons, habitats, stations, shuttles and ships. The goggles painted designations, civil registrations and cargo summaries.
“I’ll take you to Venus Deep,” he said. “Or Ridgeback City on Iapetus. I know a great place there, and the views…have you ever seen the skimmers plunge through Jupiter’s spot, or the reef cities under Europa?”
“I’ve never even been to Europa.”
“There’s so much to see, Loti. More than one life could ever encompass. When we’re done with this…I hope you’ll let me show you more of the system. It would be my privelege.”
“I’m just a rock cutter from Titan, Skanda.”
“No,” he said, firmly enough that it was almost a reprimand. “You’re infinitely more than that. You’re a true artist, Loti. And you have a gift that people aren’t going to forget in a hurry. Take my word on that.”
Stupid thing was, I did.
BY THE TIME Ingvar steers me to another part of the quadrangle, the band has given up for the night. Most of the skaters have surrendered to the cold. There are only a couple left, perhaps the best of them, orbiting each other like a pair of binary pulsars.
“They say they aren’t dynamically stable,” Ingvar comments, looking up through the dome. “Something to do with Triton’s influence, I think. The rings of Saturn aren’t stable either, not on timescales of hundreds of millions of years. But they’ll outlast these many times over. I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
“You should be happy. Something wrong will be put right.”
“Well, yes. But Naiad was destroyed to make this happen. And those people, too. Given their deaths, I’d rather the end result was a bit more permanent.”
“It’ll outlast us. That’s probably all that matters.”
Ingvar’s head bobs in the fur-lined hood of her coat. “Maybe by the time the rings start to dissipate, we’ll have decided we like them enough to want to preserve them. Sure we’d find a way, if we felt it mattered enough.”
I look at them now. Try to see them through fresh eyes.
The rings of Neptune.
They bisect the face of the world like a knife slash, very nearly as magnificent as the rings of Saturn. There always were rings here, I tell myself, but they were little more than smoky threads, all but invisible under most conditions. The ghostly promise of rings yet to come.
Not so now. The resonant effects of Triton, and its lesser siblings, conspire to divide and subdivide these infant rings into riverine bands. In turn, these concentric bands shimmer with a hundred splendid hues of the most ethereal blue-white or pastel green or jade. There’s a lot of ice and rubble in a moon, even one as small as Naiad, and enough subtle chemistry to provide beguiling variations in reflection and transmission.
Skanda should have seen this, I think. He’d have known that the rings would be beautiful, a thing of wonder, commanding the awe of the entire system. But he couldn’t have begun to predict their dazzling complexity. The glory of it.
But then who could?
“Does it anger you, that he did this to your greatest work?” Ingvar asks. “Let you create the head of David, let you think this would be the thing that made your name, all the while knowing it was going to be destroyed?”
“I did what I was paid to do. Once my part in it was over, I forgot about David.”
“Or rather, you forced yourself not to dwell on it. For obvious reasons, in light of what happened. But you always believed it was still out there, didn’t you? Ticking its way round the Sun, waiting to be found. You clung to that.” Ingvar’s tone changes. “Would he have taken credit, do you think? Was that always his intention?”
“He never said anything about it to me.”
“But you knew him a little. When the voidship reached the Oort cloud, when he was scheduled to be woken…would he have declared himself responsible? Would he have basked in the fame, knowing he was untouchable, beyond the reach of solar law, or would he have preferred to leave the mystery unsolved?”
“What do you think?” I ask snidely.
“From what I’ve gathered of his profile,” Ingvar says, resuming her curious lopsided walk, “he doesn’t strike me as the kind to have settled for anonymity.”
I’VE LIVED A good and full life since the day he left. I still cut rock. I’ve had many lovers, many friends, and I can’t say I’ve been unhappy. But there are days when the pain of his betrayal feels as raw as if it all happened yesterday. We were nearly done with David—just a couple more weeks of finishing-off, and then the head was complete. It already looked magnificent. It was the finest thing I’d ever touched.
Then Skanda returned from the bridge, where he’d been conducting business dealings. Nothing about his manner suggested anything untoward.
“I’ve got to go for a little while.”
“Go?”
“Back to the main system. Something’s come up. It’s complicated and it would be a lot easier to resolve without hours of timelag.”
“We’re nearly done. I don’t usually abandon a piece when it’s this near to completion—it’s too hard to get back into the right frame of mind.”
“You don’t have to abandon anything. My people…they’re sending out a ship to get me. In fact it will be here very shortly. You can stay on station, finish the work.”
He’d made it seem like some unscheduled crisis, something that had blown up at short notice, but deep down I knew that couldn’t be that case. Not if that little ship of his had already been on its way out here for what must have been days.
I watched it arrive. It was a tiny thing, a beautiful jewelled toy of a spacecraft, porpoise-sleek and not much larger. “An extravagance,” Skanda said, as the craft docked. “It’s just that sometimes I need to be able to move around very quickly.”
I bottled my qualms. “You don’t have to apologise for being rich. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be paying for the head of David.”
“I’m glad you see it that way.” He kissed me on the cheek, forestalling any objection. “I wish there was some alternative, but there isn’t. All I can promise is that I won’t be long. My ship can get me there and back very quickly. Two weeks, three at the most. Keep on working. Finish David for me, and I’ll be back to see the end result.”
“Where are you going? You were so keen on being here. I understand timelag, but it hasn’t held you back until now. What’s
so important that you have to go away?”
He touched a finger to my lips. “Every second that I’m here is another that I’m not on my way, doing what has to be done. When I’m back, I’ll tell you everything you want to know—and I guarantee you’ll be bored within five minutes.” He kissed me again. “Keep on working. Do that for me. Remember what I said, Loti. You have a gift.”
What was the point in arguing further? I believed him. All that talk of the places he’d show me, the things we’d share together—the glamour and spectacle of the entire system, ours for the taking. He’d fixed that idea so firmly in my head that it never once occurred to me that he’d been lying the entire time. I never thought that we’d have a life together; I wasn’t that naïve. But some good months, was that too much to ask for? Venus Deep and the reef cities of Europa. The two of us, the artist and her wealthy lover and sponsor. Who wouldn’t turn that down?
“Be fast,” I whispered.
From the observation bubble, I watched his little ship drop away from Moonlighter. The drive was bright, and I tracked it until it was too faint to detect. By then, I had a handle on his vector. It didn’t mean much—he could easily have been heading to an intermediate stopover, unrelated to his true destination, or just travelling in a random direction to throw me off the scent.
Both of those things were possible. But so was the third possibility, which was that the vector was reliable, and that Skanda had business around Jupiter.
And even then I didn’t guess.
“HOW LONG WAS it before you found out about the voidship?” Ingvar asks.
“A while. Weeks, months. Does it really matter now?”
“When he left Moonlighter…was that the last contact you had with him?”
“No.” The admission is difficult, because it takes me back to the time when I was foolish enough to believe Skanda’s promises. “He called me from Jupiter. Even mentioned the voidship: said a relative of his was being frozen, put aboard for the voyage. That was the emergency. He wanted to be there, to give whoever it was a good send off.”
“Whereas the relative was really his wife, and Skanda would soon be joining her. They’d both paid for slots on the voidship. Off to establish a human bridgehead in the Oort cloud. But he hadn’t finished with the head of David, had he? He still had instructions for you. It was still important that the work be finished.”
“I’d been paid, and I had no reason to doubt that he’d be back.”
“Other than the completion of the head, what were the instructions?”
“When his little ship docked, it came with a marker beacon. I was told to fix it onto the head.”
“And the…function…of this beacon? You never questioned it?”
I look down. I wish I had something to say.
Ingvar continues. “The beacon was also a steering motor. Skanda had programmed it to make an adjustment to the rock’s orbit. An impulse, to kick into a collision course for Naiad. He’d calculated everything. The binding energy of the moon, the kinetic energy of the impactor. He knew it would work. He knew he could shatter that moon and turn it into a ring system around Neptune. The ultimate artistic statement, a piece of planetary resculpting to dwarf the ages.”
I think things over for a moment. The conversation has been as lopsided as Ingvar’s walk. She’s been asking all the hard questions; now it’s my turn.
“What’s in it for you? What made you decide that you had to solve this mystery? The entire system thinks the rings were made by accident. What made you think otherwise?”
Against expectation, Ingvar seems pleased rather than annoyed. “I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“The head of David. With my own eyes, just before it hit.”
“You were there?”
All of a sudden, Ingvar looks tremendously old and weary, as if this is the end of some enormous and taxing enterprise, something that has swallowed decades of her life.
“I was Authority. Pilot of one of the quick reaction ships we sent up to deflect the impactor, as soon as we saw it coming in. I got close enough to see your handiwork, Loti. Too close, as it happens. We were hitting the rock with weapons, trying to adjust its vector or shatter it to rubble. There was an impact, near David’s right eye. My ship was caught in the blast. I lost control; nearly died.” She takes a breath. “My ship was badly damaged. So was I.”
“What happened to you?”
“Oh, they patched me up well enough after my ship was recovered. More than they could do for my partner. Still, lucky as I’d been, I was never much good to Authority after that. Hence the change of profession.”
“But you always knew about the head.”
“So did everyone involved. That couldn’t come out, though. No one could know that people had died on Naiad, because that made us look bad. And no one could know that the impactor had been sculpted because that made it a crime, not an accident—and if that had come out, it wouldn’t have been long before the rest of it was public as well. Our multiple screw-ups.”
“Skanda never meant for people to die. He just wanted to do something outrageous.”
“He succeeded. But as of now, only two people are aware of that. You and me. The question is, what do we do with our knowledge?”
I wonder if there’s a trap I’m missing. “You’ve spent years putting this together, haven’t you. Tracking down the truth. Finding me, and establishing my involvement. Well, congratulations. You’re right; I was his accomplice. So what if I didn’t know what I was getting into? Authority won’t care about that. Especially as there isn’t anyone else left to blame. You could hand me over now.”
“I could. But would that necessarily be the right thing to do?” Ingvar studies her boots. “My second career…it’s not as if it’s anything I need to be ashamed of. I’ve worked hard, had my share of successes. Minor cases, in the scheme of things. But I’ve not failed. So what if I’ve done nothing anyone will ever remember me for?”
“Until now. Turn me in…it could make your reputation.”
“And yours,” Ingvar nods. “Think of it, Loti. Everything you’ve done, every rock you’ve cut, the entirety of your art, it’s as nothing against the head of David. And the head of David is as nothing against the rings of Neptune. You created something marvellous, a thing of wonder. Beyond Yinning and Tarabulus or anyone else. It was the one time that your life was touched by greatness.” A sudden reverence enters Ingvar’s voice. “But you can’t tell anyone. All you’ll have is the rest of your art, in all its middling obscurity, until the day you die. No fame, no notoriety. And all I’ll have is a limp and the dog days of my second career. The question is: could either of us live with that?”
“What if I chose not to?”
“I’d make your name.”
“As a convicted criminal, locked away in some Authority cell?”
Ingvar’s shrug suggests that this is no more than a trifle. “Some would make the trade in an instant. Artists have killed themselves for a stab at immortality. No one’s asking that much of you.”
“And you?”
“I’d have solved the mystery of the Naiad event. Brought its last living perpetrator to justice. There’d be a measure of acclaim in it for me.”
“Just a measure?”
“Some trouble as well. As I said, not everyone would welcome the truth getting out.”
I shake my head, almost disappointed with Ingvar, that she should give in now. “So you’re saying I have a choice?”
“I’m saying we both have one. But we’d have to agree on it, I think. No good one of us pulling one way, the other resisting.”
I look at Neptune again. The rings, the storms, the brooding blue vastness of it all. And think of that temporary star, shining for a few seconds in the constellation Fornax. The light of a voidship, dying in a soundless eruption of subatomic energy. They say they were pushing the engines, trying to outrun the other voidships. Trying to be the first to stake a claim in the Oort clouds. Go
ing for victory.
They also say no living thing saw that flash; that it was only machines that witnessed it, but that if anyone had been looking toward Fornax, at the right time…
“It would be something, to be known for that,” I tell Ingvar.
“It would.”
“My name would ring down the ages. Like Michelangelo.”
“That’s true,” she agrees. “But Michelangelo’s dead, and I doubt that it makes much difference to him now.” Ingvar claps her hands against her body. “I’m getting cold. I know a good bar near here, and there are no rock cutters. Let’s go inside and talk it over, shall we?”
TRAUMA POD
WHEN I come round I’m in a space about the size of a shower cubicle, tipped on its side. I’m flat on my back, resting on a soft padded surface. Curving around me, close enough to touch, are walls of antiseptic white. They wrap around to form a smooth ceiling, broken by hatches and recesses. Cables and tubes emerge through gaps. There’s the soft whirr of pumps, the hiss and chug of air circulation. And looking at me right now, peering down from the ceiling just above my own face, is a pair of stereoscopic camera eyes.
I twitch, trying to raise my head enough to get a good look at myself. I’ve been stripped of my armour. I was wearing combat exo-cladding, but the outer shell’s gone now. All that’s left is the lightweight mesh suit, and that’s ripped and shredded pretty badly. I try and get a better look at my extremities but a pair of hands gently pushes me back down. They poke through a pair of hatches above my sternum, as if there’s someone just outside, reaching in.
They’re perfectly normal human hands, wearing green surgical gloves.
A woman’s voice says: “Stay still, and don’t panic, Sergeant Kane. You’re going to be fine.”
“What…” I start to say.
“That’s good. You can hear us, and understand my words. That’s very positive. You can speak, too. That’s also encouraging. But for the moment, I’d like you to let me do the talking.”
Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds Page 72