Revelation Space (18 page)

Sylveste claimed they were never within the Shroud boundary itself—by his own visual evidence, more than half of the sky remained full of stars. Yet what little data was salvaged from the study ship suggested that the contact module was by then well inside the fractal foam surrounding the Shroud—well within the object’s own infinitely blurred boundary, well within what Lascaille had called Revelation Space.

She knew when it began to happen. Terrified, but icily calm, she told Sylveste the news. Her Shrouder transform was breaking up, her veil of alien perception beginning to thin, leaving only human thoughts. It was what they had feared all along, but prayed would not happen.

Quickly they informed the study station and ran psych tests to verify what she was saying. The truth was appallingly clear. Her transform was collapsing. In a few minutes, her mind would lack the Shrouder component and would be unable to calm the snakes through which they walked. She was forgetting the music.

Even though they had prayed this would not happen, they had taken precautions. Lefevre retreated into the opposite half of the module and fired the separation charges, amputating her part of the ship from Sylveste’s. By then her transform was almost gone. Via the audio-visual link between the two separated parts of the craft, she informed Sylveste that she could feel gravitational forces building, twisting and pulling at her body in viciously unpredictable ways.

Thrusters sought to move her module away from the curdled space around the Shroud, but the object was just too large, and she too small. Within minutes the stresses were tearing at the craft’s thin hull, though Lefevre remained alive, huddled foetally in the last dwindling pocket of quiet space focused on her brain. Sylveste lost contact with her just as the craft burst asunder. Her air was sucked quickly out, but the decompression did not happen quickly enough to entirely snatch away her screams.

Lefevre was dead. Sylveste knew it. But his transform was still holding the snakes at bay. Bravely, more alone than any human being in history, Sylveste continued his descent into the Shroud boundary.

Some time later Sylveste awoke in the silence of his craft. Disorientated, he tried to contact the study station which was supposedly awaiting his return. But there was no answer. The study station and the lighthugger were lifeless, almost destroyed. Some kind of gravitational spasm had passed him by and peeled them open, eviscerating them just as thoroughly as Lefevre’s craft had been. The crew and back-up members of his team had been killed instantly, along with the Ultras. He alone had survived.

But for what? To die, only far more slowly?

Sylveste steered his module back to what remained of the station and the. lighthugger. For a moment his thoughts were empty of the Shrouders, focused only on survival.

Working alone, living within the cramped confines of the pod, Sylveste spent weeks learning how to jump-start the lighthugger’s crippled repair systems. The Shroud spasm had vaporised or shredded thousands of tonnes of the lighthugger’s mass, but it only had to carry one man home now. When the recuperative processes were in swing he was able to sleep, finally—not daring to believe that he would actually succeed. And in those dreams, Sylveste gradually became aware of a momentous, paralysing truth. After Carine Lefevre was killed, and before he regained consciousness, something had happened. Something had reached into his mind and spoken to him. But the message that was imparted to him was so brutally alien that Sylveste could not begin to put it into human terms.

He had stepped into Revelation Space.

“I’m at the bar,” Volyova said into her bracelet, pausing at the entrance to the Juggler and the Shrouder. She regretted suggesting that this be the meeting point—she despised the establishment almost as much as she despised its clientele— but when she had arranged a rendezvous with the new candidate she had not been able to suggest an alternative.

“Is the recruit there yet?” Sajaki’s voice said.

“Not unless she’s very early. If she arrives on time, and our meeting proceeds favourably,. we should be leaving in an hour.”

“I’ll be ready.”

Squaring her shoulders she pushed on in, instantly assembling a mental map of the occupants. The air was still full of cloying pink perfume. Even the girl playing the teeconax was making the same nervous moves. Disturbingly liquid sounds emanated from the girl’s cortex, amplified by the instrument and then modulated by the pressure of her fingers on its complex; spectrally coloured touch-sensitive fretboard. Her music toiled up staircase-like ragas, then splintered into nerve-shredding atonal passages which sounded like a pride of lions dragging their foreclaws down sheets of rusty iron. Volyova had heard that you had to have specialised neuro-auditory implants before teeconax music made any sense.

She found a barside stool and ordered a single vodka; a hypo was stashed in her pocket ready to blast her back to sobriety when she needed it. She was resigned to the fact that it might be a very long evening waiting for the recruit to show up. Usually this would have made her impatient but—to her surprise—she felt relaxed and attentive, despite the surroundings. Perhaps the air was spiked with psychotropic chemicals, but she felt better than she had in months, even allowing for the news that the crew were now to journey to Resurgam. Yet it was good to be around humans again, even the specimens who frequented the bar. Whole minutes passed while she watched their animated faces, serenely entranced by conversations she could not hear, imagining for herself the travellers’ tales they were imparting. A girl inhaled from a hookah and blew out a long jetstream of smoke before cracking up as her partner reached the punchline in some outlandish joke. A bald man with a dragon tattoo on his scalp was boasting about how he had flown through a gas giant’s atmosphere with his autopilot dead, his Juggler-configured mind solving atmospheric flow equations like he had been born to it. Another group of Ultras, turned ghostly by the wan blue lighting above their alcove, played a heated card game. One man was having to pay off his debt by losing a lock from his hair. His friends were holding him down while the winner claimed his pleated prize, slicing through the man’s braid with a pocket knife.

What did Khouri look like again?

Volyova fished the card from her jacket, palming it unobtrusively and taking a last look at it. Ana Khouri, the name said, along with a few terse lines of biographical data. There was nothing about this woman that would make her stand out in any normal bar, but here her very ordinariness would have the same effect. Judging by the photograph, she would look slightly more out of place than Volyova herself, if that was possible.

Not that Volyova was complaining. Khouri looked like a remarkably suitable candidate for the vacant position. Volyova had already hacked into the system’s remaining data-networks—those which still functioned after the plague—and drawn up a shortlist of individuals who might suit her needs. Khouri had been among that number; an ex-soldier from Sky’s Edge. But Khouri had been impossible to trace, and eventually Volyova had given up, concentrating on other candidates. None of the others had really been what she was looking for, but she had kept searching anyway, growing steadily more despondent as each candidate failed to fit the bill. More than once Sajaki had suggested they just kidnap someone—as if recruiting someone under false pretences was somehow less of a crime. But kidnapping was too random: it still did not guarantee she would end up with someone she could work with.

Then Khouri had approached them out of the blue. She had heard that Volyova’s crew were looking for someone to join their ship, and she was ready to leave Yellowstone. She had not mentioned her military background, but Volyova already knew about that; doubtless Khouri was just being cautious. The odd thing was, Khouri had not actually approached them until Sajaki—in accordance with the standard protocols of trade—had announced the change of destination.

“Captain Volyova? It’s you, isn’t it?”

Khouri was small, wiry and dourly dressed, and did not subscribe to any recognisable Ultra fashions. Her black hair was cut only an inch longer than Volyova’s; short enough to make it obvious that her skull was not pierced by any clumsy input jacks or nerve-link interfaces. No guarantee that her head was not jam-packed with humming little machines, but it was certainly nothing she flaunted. The woman’s face was a neutral composite of the gene-types which predominated on her homeworld, Sky’s Edge; harmonious without being striking. Her mouth was small, straight and inexpressive, but that blandness was counter-balanced by the woman’s eyes. They were dark, almost colourlessly so, but they glistened with a disarming inner prescience. For a tiny fraction of a moment, Volyova believed that Khouri had already seen through her tawdry skein of lies.

“Yes,” Volyova said. “You must be Ana Khouri.” She kept her voice low, for having reached Khouri, the last thing she wanted was any other hopefuls within earshot trying to barge aboard. “I understand you contacted our trade persona regarding possibilities for crewing with us.”

“I only just reached the carousel. I thought I’d try you first, before I went onto the crews who are advertising now.”

Volyova sniffed at her vodka. “Odd strategy, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Why? The other crews are getting so many applicants they’re only interviewing via sim.” She took a perfunctory sip of her water. “I prefer dealing with humans. It was just a question of going after a different crew.”

“Oh,” Volyova said. “Ours is very different, believe me.”

“But you’re traders, right?”

Volyova nodded enthusiastically. “We’ve almost finished our dealings around Yellowstone. Not too productive, I must say. Economy’s in the doldrums. We’ll probably pop back in a century or two and see if things have picked up, but personally, I wouldn’t mind if I never saw the place again.”

“So if I wanted to sign up for your ship I’d have to make my mind up pretty soon?”

“Of course, we’d have to make our minds up about you first.”

Khouri looked at her closely. “There are other candidates?”

“I’m not really at liberty to discuss that.”

“I imagine there would be. I mean, Sky’s Edge . . . there must be plenty of people who’d want to hop a lift there, even if they had to crew to pay their way.”

Sky’s Edge? Volyova tried to keep a straight face, marvelling at their luck. The only reason Khouri had come forward was because she still thought they were going to the Edge, rather than Resurgam. Somehow she remained unaware of Sajaki’s announced change of destination.

“There are worse places one could imagine,” Volyova said.

“Well, I’m keen to jump to the head of the line.” A perspex cloud sailed between them, dangling from its ceiling track, wobbling with its cargo of drinks and narcotics. “What exactly is this position you have open?”

“It would be a lot easier if I explained things aboard the ship. You didn’t forget that overnight bag, did you?”

“Of course not. I want this position, you know.”

Volyova smiled. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

Calvin Sylveste was manifesting in his luxurious seigneurial chair at one end of the prison room. “I’ve got something interesting to tell you,” he said, stroking his beard. “Though I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“Make it quick; Pascale will be here shortly.”

Calvin’s permanent look of amusement deepened. “Actually, it’s Pascale I’m talking about. You’re rather fond of her, aren’t you?”

“It’s no concern of yours whether I am or not.” Sylveste sighed; he had known this would lead to difficulties. The biography was nearing completion now and he had been privy to most of it. For all its technical accuracies, for all the myriad ways in which it could be experienced, it remained what Girardieau had always planned: a cunningly engineered weapon of precision propaganda. Through the biography’s subtle filter, there was no way to view any aspect of his past in a light which was not damaging to him; no way to avoid his depiction as an egomaniacal, single-minded tyrant: capacious of intellect, but utterly heartless in the way he used people around him. In this, Pascale had been undoubtedly clever. If Sylveste had not known the facts himself, he would have accepted the biography’s slant uncritically. It had the stamp of truth.

That was hard enough to accept, but what made it immeasurably harder was how much of this harming portrait had been shaped by the testimonials of people who had known him. And chief among these—the most hurting of all—had been Calvin. Reluctantly, Sylveste had allowed Pascale access to the beta-level simulation. He had done so under duress, but there had been—at the time—what appeared to be compensations.

“I want the obelisk relocated and excavated,” Sylveste said. “Girardieau promised me access to field data if I assisted in destroying my own character. I’ve kept my side of the deal handsomely. How about the government reciprocating?”

“It won’t be easy . . . ” Pascale had begun.

“No; but neither will it be a massive drain on Inundationist resources.”

“I’ll speak to him,” she said, without much in the way of assurance. “Provided you let me talk to Calvin whenever I want.”

It was the devil of all deals; he had known so at the time. But it had seemed worth it, if only to see the obelisk again, and not just the tiny part which had been uncovered before the coup.

Remarkably, Nils Girardieau had kept his word. It had taken four months, but a team had found the abandoned dig and removed the obelisk. It had not been painstakingly done, but Sylveste had not expected otherwise. It was enough that the thing had been unearthed in one piece. Now a holographic representation of it could be called into existence in his room at his whim; any part of the surface enlarged for inspection. The text had been beguiling; difficult to parse. The complicated map of the solar system was still unnervingly accurate to his eyes. Below it—too deep to have been seen before—was what looked like the same map, on a much larger scale, so that it encompassed the entire system out to the cometary halo. Pavonis was actually a wide binary; two stars spaced by ten light hours. The Amarantin seemed to have known that, for they had marked the second star’s orbit conspicuously. For a moment, Sylveste wondered why he had never seen the other star at night: it would be dim, but still much brighter than any of the other stars in the sky. Then he remembered that the other star no longer shone. It was a neutron star; the burnt-out corpse of a star which would once have shone hot and blue. It was so dark that it had not been detected before the first interstellar probes. A cluster of unfamiliar graphicforms attended the neutron star’s orbit.