The Revelation Space Collection (215 page)

He wanted to weep.

Clavain touched the cold lid of the casket, skating his fingers across the surface, leaving four faint trails. He had imagined a thousand times the things he might say to her should she ever emerge from the Wolf’s clasp. She had never been thawed again after that one time shortly after her return, but that did not mean that it might not happen again, years or centuries from now. Time and again Clavain had wondered what he would say, were Galiana to shine through the mask even for the briefest of moments. He wondered if she would remember him and the things they had shared. Would she even remember Felka, who was as close to being her daughter as made no difference?

There was no point thinking about it. He knew he would never speak to her again.

‘I’ve made my mind up,’ he said, the fog of his breath visible before him. ‘I’m not sure you’d approve, since you would never have agreed to something like the Closed Council existing in the first place. They say the war made it inevitable, that the demands for operational secrecy forced us to compartmentalise our thinking. But the Council was already there before the war broke out, in a nascent form. We’ve always had secrets, even from ourselves.’

His fingers were very cold. ‘I’m doing it because I think something bad is going to happen. If it’s something that has to be stopped, I will do my best to make sure it is. If it can’t be helped, I will do my best to guide the Mother Nest through whatever crisis is awaiting it. But I can’t do either on the outside.

‘I’ve never felt so uneasy about a victory as I do about this one, Galiana. I’ve a sense you’d feel much the same way. You always used to be suspicious of anything that looked too simple, anything that looked like a ruse. I should know. I fell for one of your tricks once.’

He shivered. It was suddenly very cold and he had the prickly feeling that he was being watched. All around him the reefersleep caskets hummed, their banks of status lights and read-outs unchanging.

Clavain suddenly knew that he did not want to spend much longer in the vault. ‘Galiana,’ he said, too hastily for comfort, ‘I have to do it. I have to accede to Skade’s request, for good or ill. I just hope you understand.’

‘She will, Clavain.’

He turned around sharply, but even in the act of turning he realised that he knew the voice and it was nothing to be alarmed by. ‘Felka.’ His relief was total. ‘How did you find me?’

‘I assumed you’d be down here, Clavain. I knew Galiana would always be the one you spoke to last of all.’

She had entered the vault unheard. He could see now that the door at the end was ajar. What had made him shiver was the shift in air currents as the vault was opened.

‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ Clavain said. ‘I know she’s dead.’

‘She’s your conscience, Clavain.’

‘That’s why I loved her.’

‘We all did. That’s why she still seems to be alive, to be guiding us.’ Felka was by his side now. ‘It’s all right to come down here. It doesn’t make me think less of you, or respect you less.’

‘I think I know what I have to do.’

She nodded, as if he had merely told her the time of day. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. It’s too cold for the living. Galiana won’t mind.’

Clavain followed her to the door leading out of the vault.

Once they were on the other side he worked the wheel, sealing the great piston-like stopper back into place, sealing memories and ghosts away where they belonged.

Clavain was ushered into the privy chamber. As he crossed the threshold he felt the million background thoughts of the Mother Nest drop from his mind like a single dying sigh. He imagined that the transition would have been traumatic for many of the Conjoined, but even if he had not just come from Galiana’s place of rest, where the same kind of exclusion applied, he would not have found it more than a little jarring. Clavain had spent too much time on the fringes of Conjoiner society to be troubled by the absence of other thoughts in his head.

He was not entirely alone, of course. He sensed the minds of those in the chamber, although the usual Closed Council restrictions still only allowed him to skim the surfaces of their thoughts. The chamber itself was unremarkable: a large sphere with many seats arranged in encircling balconies reaching almost to the chamber’s zenith. The floor was flat and gleaming-grey, with a single austere chair positioned in the chamber’s centre. The chair was solid, curving seamlessly into the floor as if it had been pushed through from beneath.

[Clavain.] It was Skade. She was standing on the tip of a protruding tongue jutting from one side of the chamber.

Yes?

[Sit in the seat, Clavain.]

He walked across the glittering floor, his soles clicking against the material. The atmosphere could not help but feel judicial; he might as well have been walking towards a place of execution.

Clavain eased himself into the seat, which was as comfortable as it had appeared. He crossed his legs and scratched his beard.
Let’s get this over with, Skade.

[All in good time, Clavain. Do you appreciate that with the burden of knowledge comes the additional burden of holding that knowledge secure? That once you have learned Closed Council secrets, you cannot jeopardise them by risking enemy capture? That even communicating these secrets to other Conjoiners cannot be tolerated?]

I know what I’m letting myself in for, Skade.

[We just want to be certain, Clavain. You cannot begrudge us that.] Remontoire rose from his seat. [He’s said he’s ready, Skade. That’s enough.]

She regarded Remontoire with an absence of emotion that Clavain found far more chilling than mere anger. [Thank you, Remontoire.]

He’s right. I am ready. And willing
.

Skade nodded. [Then prepare yourself. Your mind is about to be allowed access to previously excluded data.]

Clavain could not help gripping the armrests of his chair, knowing as he did so how ridiculous the instinct was. This was how he had felt four hundred years earlier, when Galiana had first introduced him to Transenlightenment. It had been in her nest on Mars, and she had infected his mind with droves of machines after he had been injured. She had given him a glimpse then, no more than that, but in the moments before it arrived he had felt like a man standing before the rushing wall of a tsunami, counting down the seconds until he was engulfed. He felt like that now, even though he was anticipating no actual change in consciousness. It was enough to know that he was about to be granted access to secrets so shattering that they merited layers of hierarchy within an otherwise omniscient hive mind.

He waited ... but nothing happened.

[It’s done.]

He relaxed his grip on the seat.
I feel exactly the same
.

[You’re not.]

Clavain looked around him at the ringed walls of the chamber. Nothing had altered; nothing felt different. He examined his memory and there seemed to be nothing lurking there that had not been present a minute earlier.
I don’t ...

[Before you came here, before you made this decision, we permitted you to know that the reason for our seeking your assistance was a matter of recovering lost property. Isn’t that true, Clavain?]

You wouldn’t tell me what you were looking for. I still don’t know.
[That’s because you haven’t asked yourself the right question.]

And what question would you like me to ask, Skade?

[Ask yourself what you know about the hell-class weapons, Clavain. I’m sure you’ll find the answer very interesting.]

I don’t know anything about any hell-class ...

But he faltered, fell silent. He knew exactly what the hell-class weapons were.

Now that the information was available to him, Clavain realised that he had heard rumours of the weapons on many occasions during his time amongst the Conjoined. Their bitterest enemies told cautionary tales of the Conjoiners’ hidden stockpile of ultimate weapons, doomsday devices so ferocious in their destructive capability that they had hardly been tested, and had certainly never been used in any actual engagements. The weapons were supposedly very old, manufactured during the very earliest phase of Conjoiner history. The rumours varied in detail, but all the stories agreed on one thing: there had been forty weapons, and none of them were precisely alike.

Clavain had never taken the rumours seriously, assuming that they must have originated with some forgotten piece of fear-mongering by one of the Mother Nest’s counter-intelligence units. It was unthinkable that the weapons could ever have been real. In all the time he had been amongst the Conjoined, no official hint of the existence of such weapons had ever come his way. Galiana had never spoken of them, and yet if the weapons were truly old - dating back to the Mars era - she could not possibly have been unaware of their existence.

But the weapons
had
existed.

Clavain sifted through his bright new memories with grim fascination. He had always known there were secrets within the Mother Nest, but he had never suspected that something so momentous could have been concealed for so long. He felt as if he had just discovered a vast, hidden room in a house he had lived in nearly all his life. The feeling of dislocation - and betrayal - was acute.

There were forty weapons, just like in the old tales. Each was a prototype, exploiting some uniquely subtle and nastily inventive principle of breakthrough physics. And Galiana did indeed know about them. She had authorised the construction of the weapons in the first place, at the height of the Conjoiner persecution. At the time, her enemies had been effective only by weight of numbers rather than technical superiority. With the forty new weapons she could have wiped the slate clean, but at the eleventh hour she had chosen not to: better to be erased from existence than have genocide on her hands.

But that had not been the end. There had been blunders by the enemy, lucky breaks and contingencies. Galiana’s people had been pushed to the brink, but they had never quite been excised from history.

Afterwards, Clavain learned that the weapons had been locked away for safekeeping, stockpiled inside an armoured asteroid in another system. Murky images flickered through his mind’s eye: barricaded vaults, fierce cybernetic watchdogs, perilous traps and deadfalls. Galiana had clearly feared the weapons as much as she feared her enemies, and though she was not willing to dismantle the weapons, she had done her best to put them beyond immediate use. The data that had allowed them to be made in the first place was erased, and apparently this had been sufficient to prevent any further attempts at duplication. Should the weapons ever be needed again - should another time of mass persecution arise - the weapons were still there to be used; but distance - years of flight-time - meant there was a generous cooling-off period built into the arrangement. Her forty hell-class weapons could only ever be used in cold blood, and that was the way it should be.

But the weapons had been stolen. The impregnable asteroid had been breached and by the time a Conjoiner investigative team arrived there was no trace of the thieves. Whoever had done it had been clever enough both to break through the defences and to avoid waking the weapons themselves. In their dormant condition the forty weapons could not be tracked, remotely destroyed or pacified.

There had been many attempts to locate the lost weapons, Clavain learned, but so far all had failed. Knowledge of the cache had been a closely guarded secret to begin with; the theft was kept even more hush-hush, with only a few very senior Conjoiners knowing what had happened. As the decades passed, they held their collective breaths: in the wrong hands, the weapons could shatter worlds like glass. Their only hope was that the thieves did not realise the potency of what they had stolen.

Decades became a century, then two centuries. There had been a great many disasters and crises in human space, but never any indication that the weapons had been awakened. The few Conjoiners in the know began to dare to believe that the matter could be quietly forgotten: perhaps the weapons had been abandoned in deep space, or tossed into the searing face of a star.

But the weapons had not been lost.

Completely unexpectedly, not long before Clavain’s return from deep space, activation signatures had been detected in the vicinity of Delta Pavonis, a sunlike star slightly more than fifteen light-years from the Mother Nest. The neutrino signals were weak; it was possible that earlier flickers of awakening had been missed entirely. But the most recent signals were quite unambiguous: a number of the weapons had been awakened from dormancy.

The Delta Pavonis system was not on the main trade routes. It did have a single colony world, Resurgam, a settlement established by an archaeological expedition from Yellowstone that had been led by Dan Sylveste, the son of the cyberneticist Calvin Sylveste and scion of one of the wealthiest families within Demarchist society. Sylveste’s archaeologists had been picking through the remains of a birdlike race that had lived on the planet barely a million years earlier. The colony had gradually severed formal ties with Yellowstone, and a series of regimes had seen the original scientific agenda replaced by a conflicting policy of terraforming and widescale settlement. There had been coups and violence, but it was nonetheless highly unlikely that the settlers were the ones who now possessed the weapons. Scrutiny of outbound traffic records from Yellowstone showed the departure of another ship en route to Resurgam: a lighthugger,
Nostalgia for Infinity
, that had arrived around the system at approximately the time that the activation signatures were detected. There was scant information on the ship’s crew and history, but Clavain learned from Rust Belt immigration records that a woman named Ilia Volyova had been scouting for new crewmembers immediately before the ship’s departure. The name might or might not have been genuine - in those confused post-plague days, ships could get away with whatever identities suited them - but Volyova had reappeared. Although very few transmissions made it back to Yellowstone, one of those, panicked and fragmentary, had mentioned Volyova’s ship terrorising the colony into surrendering its former leader. For some reason, Volyova’s Ultranaut crew wanted Dan Sylveste aboard their ship.