Revelation Space

THIRTY-SIX

“You learnt something,” Pascale said. “Sun Stealer told you something. That’s why you’ve been so desperate to stop him ever since.”

She was addressing Volyova, who had begun to feel slightly less vulnerable once the shuttle had passed turnover, midway between Cerberus and the point where she had increased the thrust to four gees. Now, with the drive flame pointing away from the pursuing lighthugger, they would make a far less conspicuous target. The downside of this, of course, was that the drive flame was now wafting towards Cerberus, and might be interpreted as a sign of hostility by the planet itself, if it had not already got the message that its recent human visitors did not necessarily have its best interests at heart.

But there was nothing any of them could do about that.

The lighthugger was sustaining a comfortable six gees now; enough to steadily whittle the distance down, bringing it within kill-range of the shuttle in five hours. Sun Stealer could have pushed the ship faster, which suggested to her that he was still cautiously exploring the limits of the drive. It was not, she thought, that he particularly cared about his own survival, but if the lighthugger was destroyed, the bridgehead would quickly follow. And although Sylveste was now inside, perhaps the alien needed to know that the objective had been achieved, which presumably required the prolonged opening of the crustal breach, so that some signal could return to outside space. She did not believe for one instant that Sylveste’s safe return had any place in Sun Stealer’s plans.

“Was it what the Mademoiselle showed me?” Khouri asked. After hours of sustained gee-load, her voice sounded like someone after a heavy drinking session. “The thing I could never get quite right in my head—was it that?”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure,” Volyova said. “All I know is what he showed me. I believe it was the truth—but I doubt that we’ll ever know for sure.”

“You could start by telling me what it was,” Pascale said. “Seeing as I’m the one among us who definitely doesn’t know. Then you can fight over the details between yourselves.”

The console chimed, as it had done once or twice in the last few hours, signifying that a radar beam had just swept across them from aft, directed from the lighthugger. For the moment, it was not especially valuable data, since light-travel delay between the ship and the shuttle was still in the order of seconds, long enough for the shuttle to displace itself from its radar-tagged position with a burst of lateral thrust. But it was unnerving, since it confirmed that the lighthugger was indeed chasing them, and that it was indeed attempting to get a sufficiently accurate positional fix to justify opening fire. It would be hours before that situation came to pass, but the machine’s intent was grimly obvious.

“I’ll start with what I know,” Volyova said, drawing in a generous inhalation of breath. “Once, the galaxy was a lot more populous than it is now. Millions of cultures, though only a handful of big players. In fact, just the way all the predictive models say the galaxy ought to be today, based on the occurrence rates of G-type stars and terrestrial planets in the right orbits for liquid water.” She was digressing, but Pascale and Khouri decided not to fight it. “That’s always been a major paradox, you know. On paper, life looks a lot commoner than we find it to be. Theories for the developmental timescales for tool-using intelligence are a lot harder to quantify, but they suffer from much the same problem. They predict too many cultures.”

“Hence the Fermi paradox,” Pascale said.

“The what?” asked Khouri.

“The old dichotomy between the relative ease of interstellar flight, especially for robotic envoys—and the complete absence of any such envoys turning up from non-human cultures. The only logical conclusion was that no one else was around to send them, anywhere in the galaxy.”

“But the galaxy’s a big place,” Khouri said. “Couldn’t there be cultures elsewhere, except that we just don’t know about them yet?”

“Doesn’t work,” Volyova said emphatically, Pascale nodding in agreement. “The galaxy’s big, but not that big—and it’s also very old. Once a single culture decided to send out probes, everyone else in the galaxy would know about it within a few million years. And the galaxy happens to be several thousand times older than that. Granted, several generations of stars had to live and die before there were enough heavy elements to sustain life, but even if machine-building cultures only arise once every million years or so, they’ve had thousands of opportunities to dominate the entire galaxy.”

“To which there have always been two answers,” Pascale said. “Firstly, that they are here, but we just haven’t ever noticed them. Maybe that was conceivable a few hundred years ago, but no one takes it seriously now; not when every square inch of every asteroid belt in about a hundred systems has been mapped.”

“Then maybe they never existed in the first place?”

Pascale nodded at Khouri. “Which was perfectly tenable until we knew more about the galaxy, which begins to look suspiciously accommodating of life, at least in the essentials; what Volyova just said—the right types of stars, and the right kind of planets in the right places. And the biological models were still arguing for a higher occurrence rate, right on up to intelligent cultures.”

“So the models were wrong,” Khouri said.

“Except they probably weren’t.” Volyova was speaking now. “Once we got into space, once we left the First System, we began to find dead cultures all over the place. None had survived until much more recently than a million years ago, and some had gone out a lot earlier than that. But they all pointed to one thing. The galaxy had been a lot more fecund in the past. So why not now? Why was it suddenly so lonely?”

“The war,” Khouri said, and for a moment no one spoke. The silence was only interrupted when Volyova began speaking, softly and reverently, as if they were discussing something sacred.

“Yes,” she said. “The Dawn War—that was what they called it, wasn’t it?”

“I remembered that much.”

“When was this?” Pascale asked, and for a moment Volyova sympathised with her, caught between two who had been vouchsafed glimpses of something extraordinary, and who were less interested in adumbrating the whole of it than in exploring each other’s ignorances, shoring up each other’s doubts and misconceptions. But Pascale knew none of it; not yet.

“It was a billion years ago,” Khouri said, and for a moment Volyova let her speak without interruption. “And it sucked up all those cultures and spat them out in shapes and forms a lot different to the ones they’d had when they went in. I don’t think we can really understand what it was about, or who or what exactly survived it—except that they were more like machines than living creatures, although as far beyond anything we can envisage as our machines are beyond stone tools. But they had a name, or they were given it—I don’t really remember the details. But I do remember the name.”

“The Inhibitors,” Volyova said.

Khouri nodded. “And they deserved it.”

“Why?”

“It was what they did afterwards,” Khouri said. “Not during the war, but in its aftermath. It was like they subscribed to a creed; a rule of discipline. Intelligent, organic life had given rise to the Dawn War. What they were now was something different; post-intelligent, I guess. Anyway, it made what they did a lot easier.”

“Which was?”

“Inhibition. Literally: they inhibited the rise of intelligent cultures around the galaxy, so that nothing like the Dawn War could ever happen again.”

Volyova took over now. “It wasn’t just a case of annihilating any extant cultures which might have survived war. They also set about disturbing the conditions which could lead to intelligent life ever arising again. Not stellar engineering—I think that would have been too great an interference; too much an act which contradicted their own strictures—but inhibition on a lesser scale. They could have done it without tampering in the evolution of a single star, except in extreme cases—by altering cometary orbits, for instance, so that episodes of planetary bombardment lasted much longer than the norm. Life probably would have found niches in which to survive—deep underground, or around hydrothermal vents—but it would never have become very complex. Certainly nothing which would threaten the Inhibitors.”

“You said this was a billion years ago,” Pascale said. “And yet we’ve come all that way since then—-from single-celled creatures right up to Homo sapiens. Are you saying we slipped through the net?”

“Exactly that,” Volyova said. “Because the net was falling apart.”

Khouri nodded. “The Inhibitors seeded the galaxy with machines, designed to detect the emergence of life and then suppress it. For a long time it looked like they worked as planned—that’s why the galaxy isn’t teeming today, although all the preconditions look favourable.” She shook her head. “I sound like I actually know this stuff.”

“Maybe you do,” Pascale said. “In any case, I want to hear what you have to say. All of it.”

“All right, all right.” Khouri fidgeted in her acceleration couch, doubtless trying to do what Volyova had been doing for the last hour: avoiding putting pressure on the bruises she had already gained. “Their machines worked fine for a few hundred million years,” she said. “But then stuff started to go wrong. They started failing; not working as efficiently as intended. Intelligent cultures began to emerge which would have previously been suppressed at birth.”

There was a look on Pascale’s face which showed that she had just made a connection. “Like the Amarantin…”

“Just like the Amarantin. They weren’t the only culture to slip through the net, but they did happen to lie close to us in the galaxy, which is why what happened to them has had such an… impact on us.” Volyova was doing the talking now. “Maybe there should have been an Inhibition device keeping a close watch on Resurgam, but that one either never existed or stopped working long before they emerged to intelligence. So they ascended to civilisation, and later budded off a starfaring sub-species—all without attracting the attention of the Inhibitors.”

“Sun Stealer.”

“Yes. He took the Banished with him into space—changed them biologically and mentally, until they had little but their ancestry and language in common with the Amarantin who had stayed at home. And of course they explored, reaching out into their solar system, and later to its periphery.”

“Where they found…” Pascale nodded at the image of Hades and Cerberus. “This. Is that what you’re saying?”

Khouri nodded in agreement, and then began to explain the rest; what little there was to relate.

Sylveste fell and fell, and in his falling he hardly bothered to note the passing of time. Finally there came a point where more than two hundred kilometres of the shaft reached above his head; barely a few kilometres lay below his feet. Twinkling lights shone below, arranged into constellation-like patterns, and for an instant he entertained the idea that he had travelled much further than seemed possible, and these lights were actually stars, and that he was on the point of leaving Cerberus completely. But the thought died as soon as it had come to mind. There was something just a little too regular about the way the lights were aligned, just a little too purposeful; a little too pregnant with intelligent design.

He dropped out of the shaft into emptiness as, much earlier, he had passed out of the bridgehead. As then, he found himself falling through a tremendous unoccupied volume, but this chamber seemed very much larger than the one immediately below the crust. No gnarled tree-trunks rose up from a crystal floor to support the ceiling over his head, and he doubted that any lay beyond the immediate curvature of the horizon. Yet there was a floor below him, and it must have been that the ceiling was unsupported, thrown around the entire volume of the world-within-a-world below, suspended only by the preposterous counter-balancing of its own gravitational infall, or something beyond Sylveste’s imagination. Whatever; he was dropping now towards the starred floor tens of kilometres below.

It was not difficult, finding Sajaki’s suit; not once Sylveste had begun that lonely descent. His own still-functioning suit did all that was required, locking onto the signature of its fallen companion (something of which must therefore have survived) and then directing Sylveste’s fall towards it, bringing him down only tens of metres from the spot where Sajaki had fallen. The Triumvir had hit fast; that much was obvious. But then there were few other options if one had to accept an uncontrolled fall from two hundred kilometres up. He appeared to have partially buried himself in the metallic floor, before undergoing a bounce which had resulted in his final resting position being face down.

Sylveste had not been expecting to find Sajaki alive, but the mangled contours of his suit were still shocking; rather as if it were a china doll which had been subjected to some terrible temper tantrum by a malevolent child. The suit was gashed and scarred and discoloured, damage which had probably happened during the battle and Sajaki’s subsequent grazing fall, as the Coriolis force knocked him repeatedly against the shaft walls.

Sylveste moved him onto his back, using his own suit’s amplification to ease the process. He knew that what he would be confronted with would not be pleasant, but that it was nonetheless something he had to endure so he could press on; the closing of a mental chapter. He had seldom felt anything but antipathy towards Sajaki, alleviated by a forced respect for the man’s cleverness and the sheer bloody-minded stubbornness with which he had sought Sylveste across all the decades. It was nothing remotely resembling friendship; merely the craftsmanlike appreciation for a piece of equipment which did its job exceptionally well. That was Sajaki, Sylveste thought: a well-honed tool; shaped admirably towards one end and one end only.

The suit’s faceplate was riven by a thumb-wide crack. Something drew Sylveste forward, kneeling until his own head was next to that of the dead Triumvir.

“I’m sorry it had to end like this,” he said. “I can’t say we were ever friends, Yuuji—but I suppose in the end I wanted you to see what lay ahead as much as I did. I think you’d have appreciated it.”

And then he saw that the suit was empty; that all it had ever been was a shell.

This was what Khouri knew.

The Banished had reached the edge of the solar system, thousands of years after their exile from mainstream Amarantin culture. It was in the nature of things that they progressed slowly, since it was not simply technological limits against which they were pushing. They were also ramming against the constraints of their own psychology, barriers no less impervious.

The Banished, at first, still retained the flock instincts of their brethren. They had evolved into a society highly dependent on visual modes of communication; highly organised into large collectives, where the individual was of less importance than the whole. Displaced from its position in a flock, a single Amarantin underwent a kind of psychosis; the equivalent of massive sensory deprivation. Even small groupings were not enough to assuage that terror, which meant that Amarantin culture was extremely stable; extremely resilient against internal plots and treason. But it also meant that the Banished were, by their very isolation, consigned to a kind of insanity.

So they accepted this, and worked with it. They changed themselves; cultured sociopathy. In only a few hundred generations the Banished had stopped being a flock at all, but had fragmented into dozens of specialised clades, each tuned to a particular strain of madness. Or what would have been seen as madness by those who had stayed at home…

The ability to function in smaller groups enabled the Banished to probe further from Resurgam, out of the immediate volume of light-limited communication. The more psychotic individuals reached even further from the sun, until they found Hades and the odd, troubling planet which orbited it. By this time the Banished had gone through the same philosophical hoops which Volyova and Pascale had just summarised for Khouri’s benefit. How the galaxy should have been a busier place than it really was, if their ideas were correct—which, as a consequence, was probably not the case. They had listened in the radio, optical, gravitational and neutrino bands for the voices of other cultures, others like them, but had heard nothing. Some of the more adventurous among them—or the more deranged, depending on one’s point of view—had even left the system entirely, and had found nothing of great consequence to report back to home: a few ruins here and there (enigmatic) and a puzzling sludge-like organism which hinted at organisational sophistication, encountered on a handful of aquatic planets, as if it had been placed there.

But all of this became incidental when they found the thing around Hades.

It was, beyond any possible doubt, artefactual. It had been placed there by another civilisation, uncountable millions of years in the past. It seemed to actively invite them to enter its mysteries. So they began to explore it.

And that was when their problems began.

“It was an Inhibitor device,” Pascale said. “That was what they found, wasn’t it?”

“It had been waiting there for millions of years,” Khouri said. “All the time they were evolving from what we’d think of as dinosaurs, or birds. All the time they spent reaching towards intelligence; learning to use tools; discovering fire…”

“Just waiting,” Volyova echoed. Behind her, the tactical display had been pulsing red for many minutes now, indicating that the shuttle had now fallen within the theoretical maximum range of the lighthugger’s beam weapons. A kill at this distance would be difficult but not impossible, and neither would it be swift. She continued, “Waiting for something recognisably intelligent to enter its vicinity—at which point it doesn’t strike out mindlessly; doesn’t destroy them. Because that would defeat the point. What it does is encourage them in, so it can learn as much about them as possible. Where they come from. What kind of technology they have, how they think, how they co-operate and communicate.”

“Gathering intelligence.”

“Yes.” Volyova’s voice was as dolorous as a church bell. “It’s patient, you see. But sooner or later there comes a point when it decides that it has all the intelligence it needs. And then—only then—it acts.”

Now the three of them were on common ground. “Which is why the Amarantin died out,” Pascale said, wonderingly. “It did something to their sun; tampered with it, triggered something like a vast coronal mass ejection; just enough to scour Resurgam clean of life, and cause a phase of cometary-infall for a few hundred thousand years.”

“Ordinarily the Inhibitors wouldn’t go to such drastic lengths,” Volyova said. “But in this case they’d left it far too late for anything less. And even that wasn’t sufficient, of course; the Banished were already spaceborn. They had to be hunted down; across tens of lightyears, if necessary.”

Again there was a chime from the hull sensors, warning of a directed radar scan. Another chime followed soon after; evidence that the pursuing ship was narrowing its focus.

“The Inhibitor device around Hades must have alerted others, elsewhere,” Khouri said, trying to ignore the mechanised prophecies of imminent doom. “Transmitted the intelligence it had gathered, warning them to be on the lookout for the Banished.”

“It can’t have simply been a case of sitting around waiting for them to show up,” Volyova said. “The machines must have switched over from passivity to something more active—replicating hunting machines, for instance, programmed with the templates of the Banished. No matter which direction the Banished turned to flee, light would have outraced them, and Inhibitor systems would always be one step ahead, alert and waiting.”

“They wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

“But it can’t have been instantaneous extinction,” Pascale said. “The Banished had time to return to Resurgam; time to preserve what they could of the old culture. Even if they knew they were being hunted down, and that the sun was in the process of destroying their homeworld.”

“Maybe it took ten years; maybe a century.” The way Volyova spoke, it was obvious she didn’t think it made a great deal of difference. “All we know is that some managed to get further than others.”

“But none survived,” Pascale said. “Did they?”

“Some did,” Khouri said. “In a manner of speaking.”

Behind Volyova, the tactical display began to shriek.