The Revelation Space Collection (187 page)

Deep in Santiago’s cargo hold, too light to have ever been worth sacrificing, was a thing of diaphanous beauty. Teams were preparing it even now. They had extracted it from the starship, anchored it to an orbital transfer tug and towed it beyond the planet’s gravitational field, out to the Lagrange point between Journey’s End and Swan. There, stationed by minute adjustments of ion-thust, the thing would float for centuries. That at least was the plan.

I looked away from the limb of the planet, towards interstellar space. The other two ships, the Brazilia and the Baghdad, were still out there. Current estimates placed their arrival three months in the future, but there was an inevitable margin of error.

No matter.

The first wave of shuttle flights had already made several return trips to and from the surface, and many transponder-equipped cargo packages had already been dropped, ready to be found in a few months’ time. A shuttle was descending now, its deltoid shape dark against a tongue of equatorial landmass which the geography section was calling the Peninsula. Doubtless, I thought, they would come up with something less literal given a few more weeks. Five more flights would be all it took to get all the remaining colonists down to the surface. Another five would suffice to transport all the crew and the heavy equipment which could not be dropped via cargo packages. The Santiago would remain in orbit, a skeletal hulk denuded of anything remotely useful.

The shuttle’s thrusters fired briefly, kicking it onto an atmospheric insertion course. I watched it dwindle until it was out of sight. A few minutes later, near the horizon, I thought I saw the glint of re-entry fire as it touched air. It would not be long before it was on the ground. A preliminary landing camp had already been established, near the southern tip of the Peninsula. Nueva Santiago, we were thinking of calling it - but again, it was early days.

And now Swan’s Pupil was opening.

It was too far away to see, of course, but the angstrom-thin plastic structure was being unfurled at the Lagrange point.

The placement was almost perfect.

A torch beam seemed to fall on the sombre world below, casting an ellipsoidal region of brightness. The beam moved, hunting - reshaping. When they had adjusted it properly, it would double the solar illumination falling on the Peninsula region.

There was life down there, I knew. I wondered how it would adjust to the change in ambient light, and found it hard to stir up much enthusiasm.

My communications bracelet chimed. I glanced down, wondering who amongst my crew would have the nerve to interrupt this moment of triumph. But the bracelet merely informed me that there was a recorded message waiting for me in my quarters. Annoyed - but nonetheless curious - I pushed myself out of the observation blister, through a gasket of locks and transfer wheels, until I reached the main, spinning part of our great ship. Now that I was in a gravitational zone, I walked freely, calmly, not allowing the faintest hint of doubt to show on my face. Now and then crew and senior officers passed me, saluting; sometimes even offering to shake my hand. The general mood was one of utter jubilation. We had crossed interstellar space and arrived safely at a new world, and I had brought us here before our rivals.

I stopped and talked with some of them - it was vital to cement alliances, for troubled times lay ahead - but all the while my mind was on the recorded message, wondering what it could mean.

I soon found out.

‘I assume by now you’ve killed me,’ Constanza said. ‘Or at the very least made me disappear for good. No; don’t say a word - this isn’t an interactive recording, and I won’t take very much of your precious time.’ I was looking at her face on the screen in my quarters: a face that looked fractionally younger than the last time I had seen her. She continued, ‘I recorded this some time ago, as you’ve probably gathered. I downloaded it into the Santiago’s data network and had to intervene once every six months to prevent it being delivered to you. I knew that I was an increasingly sharp thorn in your side, and thought the chances were good that you would find a way of getting rid of me before too long.’

I smiled despite myself, remembering how she had demanded to know how long I had held her prisoner.

‘Well done, Constanza.’

‘I’ve ensured that a copy will reach a number of senior officers and crew, Sky. Of course, I don’t really expect that I will be taken seriously. You’ll have certainly doctored the facts surrounding my disappearance. That doesn’t matter; it’s enough that I’ve sown a seed of doubt. You’ll still have your allies and admirers, Sky, but don’t be surprised if not everyone is prepared to follow your leadership with blind obedience.’

‘Is that all?’ I said.

‘There’s one final thing,’ she said, almost as if she had expected me to speak at that point. ‘Over the years, I’ve amassed a great deal of evidence against you, Sky. Much of it is circumstantial; much of it open to different shades of interpretation, but it’s a life’s work and I’d hate to see it go to waste. So - before I recorded this message - I took what I had and concealed it in a small, hard-to-find place.’ She paused.

‘Have we reached orbit around Journey’s End yet, Sky? If so, there’s little point trying to find the materials. By now they’re almost certainly on the surface.’

‘No.’

Constanza smiled. ‘You can hide, Sky, but I’ll always be there, haunting you. No matter how much you try and bury the past; no matter how effectively you remake yourself as a hero . . . that package will always be there, waiting to be found.’

Later, much later, I stumbled through the jungle. Running was difficult for me, but that had very little do with my age. The hard part was keeping my balance with only one arm, my body always forgetting that necessary asymmetry. I had lost the arm in the very earliest days of the settlement. It had been a dreadful accident, even though the pain of it was only an abstract memory now. My arm had been incinerated; burned to a crisp black stump when I held it in front of the wide muzzle of a fusion torch.

Of course, it hadn’t been an accident at all.

I had known for years that I might have to do it, but had kept delaying it until we were down on the planet. I had to lose the arm in such a way that no medical intervention could save it, which ruled out a neat, painless severing operation. Equally, I had to be able to survive the loss of it.

I had been hospitalised for three months after the accident, but I had pulled through. And then I had began to resume my duties, word escaping around the planet - and out to my enemies - of what had happened. Gradually it had settled into the mass consciousness that I only had one arm. Years had passed and the fact had become so obvious that it was barely mentioned any more. And no one had ever suspected that losing the arm was just a tiny detail in a greater plan; a precaution set in place years or decades before it might become useful. Well, now the time had come when I could be thankful for that forethought. I was a fugitive now, even as I approached my eightieth birthday.

Things had gone well enough in the early years of the colony. Constanza’s message from the grave had taken the shine off for a while, but before very long the people’s need for a hero had overridden any nagging doubts they might have had about my suitability for the role. I had lost some sympathisers, but gained the general goodwill of the mob, a trade-off I considered acceptable. Constanza’s hidden package had never come to light, and as time passed I began to suspect that it had never existed; that the whole thing had been a psychological weapon designed to unnerve me.

Those early days were heady times. The three months’ good grace which I had given the Santiago had been enough time for us to establish a network of small surface camps. We had three well-fortified main settlements by the time the other starships braked into orbit above them. Nueva Valparaiso, near the equator (it would make a fine site for a space elevator one day, I thought) was the latest. Others would follow. It had been a good start, and it had seemed unthinkable then that the people - with a few loyal exceptions - would turn so viciously against me.

Yet they had.

I could see something ahead, through the dense-packed rain-forest foliage. A light. Definitely artificial, I thought - perhaps the allies I was supposed to be meeting. I hoped that was the case anyway. I did not have many allies now. The few left in the orthodox power structure had managed to break me out of custody before the trial, but they had not been able to assist me in reaching sanctuary. Very probably those friends would be shot for their treason. So be it. They had made the necessary sacrifice. I had expected nothing less.

At first it had not even been a war.

The Brazilia and the Baghdad had arrived in orbit, confronted by the skeletal hulk of the old Santiago. For long months nothing had happened, the two allied ships maintaining a chill observational silence. Then they had launched a pair of shuttles on trajectories which would bring them down in the Peninsula’s northern latitudes. I had wished I could have saved a speck of antimatter in the old ship, just to fire up its engine for a moment, and to douse the shuttles with that killing lance. But I had never learned the trick of shutting down an antimatter reservoir.

The shuttles had come down, then made further flights back up to orbit, ferrying down sleepers.

More long months of waiting.

And then the attacks had begun: skirmish squads moving down from the north, striking against the Santiago’s nascent settlements. So what that there were barely three thousand people on the whole planet. It was enough for a small war . . . and it had been quiet at first, giving both sides time to dig in, consolidate . . . breed.

Not really a war at all.

But my own side were still trying to have me executed for war crimes. It was not that they were interested in peace with the enemy - too much had happened for that - but they certainly blamed me for bringing about the whole situation. They would kill me and then return to the fray.

Ungrateful sons of bitches. They had twisted everything now. They had even changed the name of the planet, as a kind of joke. Not Journey’s End any more.

Sky’s Edge.

Because of the edge I had given them to be the first to arrive.

I hated it. I knew what they meant by it: a sick acknowledgement of the necessary crime; a reminder of what had brought them here.

But the name was sticking.

Now I paused; not merely to catch my breath. I had never really liked the jungle. There were rumours of things in it - large things which slithered. But no one I trusted had ever seen one. Just stories then - that was all.

Just stories.

But I was still lost. The light I had seen earlier was gone now. It might have been obstructed by a thick patch of trees . . . or perhaps I’d imagined it all along. I looked around me. It was very dark, and everything looked the same. The sky was blackening overhead - 61 Cygni-B, normally the brightest star in the sky apart from Swan, was below the horizon - and the jungle would soon just be a darkening extension of that blackness.

Perhaps I was going to die here.

But then I thought I saw movement far ahead, a milky shape which I at first assumed was the same patch of light I’d seen earlier. But this milky shape was much closer - approaching me, in fact. It was man-shaped and it was stepping towards me through the overgrowth. It shone, as if imbued with its own inner luminosity.

I smiled. I recognised the shape now. I shouldn’t have been afraid. I should have remembered that I was never truly alone; that my guide would always appear to show me the way forward.

‘You didn’t think I’d forget you, did you?’ Clown said. ‘Come on. It’s not far now.’

Clown led me on.

It had not been my imagination; not completely. There was a light ahead, gleaming through the trees like spectral fog. My allies . . .

By the time I reached them Clown was no longer with me. He had faded away like a retinal burn. That was the last time I ever saw him - but he had done well to bring me this far. He had been the only trusted friend of my life, even though I knew that he was just a psychological figment, a subconscious entity projected into daylight, born from memories of the tutelary persona I had known in the nursery aboard the Santiago.

What did that matter?

‘Captain Haussmann!’ called my friends through the trees. ‘You made it! We were beginning to think the others hadn’t managed . . .’

‘Oh, they played their parts well,’ I said. ‘I imagine they’ve been arrested by now - if they haven’t already been shot.’

‘That’s the odd thing, sir. We are hearing reports of arrests - and they’re saying they’ve recaptured you.’

‘That wouldn’t make any sense, would it?’

But it would, I thought - if the man they thought they had recaptured only looked like me; if the man only looked like me because buried beneath the supple skin of his face was an armature of twenty additional muscles which allowed him to mimic almost anyone. He would talk and act like me too, as he had been conditioned over years to do so; trained to think of me as his God; his only desire to obey me selflessly. And the missing arm? Well, that was a dead giveaway, wasn’t it? The man they had arrested looked like Sky Haussmann and was missing an arm as well.

There couldn’t be any doubt that they had recaptured me. There’d be a trial, of sorts, during which the prisoner might appear incoherent - but what more would they expect from an eighty-year-old man? He was probably going senile. The best thing would be to make some kind of example of him; something as public as possible. Something no one was going to forget in a hurry, even if it bordered on the inhumane. A crucifixion might fit the bill.