Revelation Space

FOUR

Volyova disembarked from the lighthugger’s shuttle and followed Triumvir Hegazi down the exit tunnel. Via twisting gaskets, the tunnel led them into the weightless hub of a spherical transit lounge at the heart of the carousel.

Every fractured strain of humanity was there; a bewildering free-floating riot of colour, like tropical fish in a feeding frenzy. Ultras, Skyjacks, Conjoiners, Demarchists, local traders, intrasystem passengers, freeloaders, mechanics, all following what seemed to be completely random trajectories, but never quite colliding, no matter how perilously close they came. Some—where their bodyplans allowed it—had diaphanous wings sewn under their sleeves, or attached directly to the skin. The less adventurous made do with slim thrust-packs, or allowed themselves to be pulled along by tiny rented tugs. Personal servitors flew through the throng, carrying baggage and folded spacesuits, while liveried, winged capuchin monkeys foraged for litter, tucking what they found into marsupial pouches under their chests. Chinese music tinkled pervasively through the air, sounding to Volyova’s untutored ear like windchimes stirred by a breeze with a particular taste for dissonance. Yellowstone, thousands of kilometres below, was an ominous yellow-brown backdrop to all this activity.

Volyova and Hegazi reached the far side of the transit sphere and moved through a matter-permeable membrane into a customs area. It was another free-fall sphere, wall festooned with autonomic weapons which tracked each arrival. Transparent bubbles filled the central volume, each three metres wide and split open along an equatorial bisector. Sensing the newcomers, two bubbles drifted through the airspace and clamped themselves around them.

A small servitor hung inside Volyova’s bubble, shaped like a Japanese Kabuto helmet, with various sensors and readout devices projecting from beneath the rim. She felt a neural tingle as the thing trawled her, like someone daintily rearranging flowers in her head.

“I detect residual Russish linguistic structures but determine that Modern Norte is your standard tongue. Will this suffice for bureaucratic processing?”

“It’ll do,” Volyova said, miffed that the thing had detected the rustiness of her native language.

“Then I shall continue in Norte. Apart from reefersleep mediation systems, I detect no cerebral implants or exosomatic perceptual modification devices. Do you require the loan of an implant before the continuation of this interview?”

“Just give me screen and a face.”

“Very well.”

A face resolved beneath the rim. The face was female and white, with just a hint of Mongolism, hair as short as Volyova’s own. She guessed that Hegazi’s interviewer would appear male, moustached, dark-skinned and heavily chimeric, just like the man himself.

“State your identity,” the woman said.

Volyova introduced herself.

“You last visited this system in… let me see.” The face looked down for a moment. “Eighty-five years ago; “461. Am I correct?”

Against her best instincts, Volyova leaned nearer the screen. “Of course you’re correct. You’re a gamma-level simulation. Now dispense with the theatrics and just get on with it. I’ve wares to trade and every second you detain me is a second more we have to pay to park our ship around your useless dog-turd of a planet.”

“Truculence noted,” the woman said, seeming to jot a remark in a notebook just out of sight. “For your information, Yellowstone records are incomplete in many areas owing to the data corruption of the plague. When I asked you the question I did so because I wanted to confirm an unverified record.” She paused. “And by the way; my name is Vavilov. I’m sitting with a rancid cup of coffee and my last cigarette in a draughty office eight hours into a ten-hour shift. My boss will assume I was dozing if I don’t turn back ten people today and so far I’ve only notched up five. With two hours to go I’m looking at ways to fill my quota, so please, think very carefully before your next outburst.” The woman took a drag and blew the smoke in Volyova’s direction. “Now. Shall we continue?”

“I’m sorry, I thought—” Volyova trailed off. “Your people don’t use simulations for this kind of work?”

“We used to,” Vavilov said, with a long-suffering sigh. “But the trouble with simulations is that they put up with far too much shit.”

From the carousel’s hub Volyova and Hegazi rode a house-sized elevator down one of the wheel’s four radial spokes, their weight mounting until they reached the circumference. Gravity there was Yellowstone normal, not perceptibly different to the standard Earth gravity adopted by Ultras.

Carousel New Brazilia orbited Yellowstone every four hours, in an orbit which meandered to avoid the “Rust Belt’—the debris rings which had come into existence since the plague. It had a wheel configuration: one of the commonest carousel designs. This one was ten kilometres in diameter and eleven hundred metres wide, all human activity wound on the thirty-kilometre strip around the wheel. It was sufficient size for a scattering of towns, small hamlets and bonsai landscape features, even a few carefully horticultured forests, with azure snowcapped mountains carved into the rising valley sides of the strip to give the illusion of distance. The curved roof around the concave part of the wheel was transparent, rising half a kilometre above the strip. Metal rails were fretted across its surface, from which hung billowing artificial clouds, choreographed by computer. Apart from simulating planetary weather, the clouds served to break up the upsetting perspectives of the curved world. Volyova supposed they were realistic, but having never seen real clouds with her own eyes, at least not from below, she could not be wholly sure.

They had emerged from the elevator onto a terrace above the carousel’s main community, a collision of buildings piled between stepped valley sides. Rimtown, they called it. It was an eyesore of architectural styles reflecting the succession of different tenants which the carousel had enjoyed throughout its history. A line of rickshaws waited at ground level, the driver of the closest quenching his thirst from a can of banana juice which sat in a holder rigged to the taxi’s handlebars. Hegazi passed the driver a piece of paper marked with their destination. The driver held it closely to his black, close-set eyes, then grunted acknowledgement. Soon they were trundling through the traffic, electric and pedal vehicles barging recklessly around each other, pedestrians diving bravely between openings in the seemingly random flow. At least half the people Volyova saw were Ultranauts, evidenced by their tendency towards paleness, spindly build, flaunted body augmentations, swathes of black leather and acres of glinting jewellery, tattoos and trade-trophies. None of the Ultras she saw were extreme chimerics, with the possible exception of Hegazi, who probably qualified as one of the half-dozen most augmented people in the carousel. But the majority wore their hair in the customary Ultra manner, fashioned in thick braids to indicate the number of reefersleep stretches they had done, and many of them had their clothes slashed to expose their prosthetic parts. Looking at these specimens, Volyova had to remind herself that she was part of the same culture.

Ultras, of course, were not the only spacegoing faction spawned by humanity. Skyjacks—at least here—made up a significant portion of the others she saw. They were spacedwellers to be sure, but they did not crew interstellar ships and so their outlook was very different to the wraithlike Ultras, with their dreadlocks and old-fashioned expressions. There were others still. Icecombers were a Skyjack offshoot; psychomodified for the extreme solitude which came from working the Kuiper belt zones, and they kept themselves to themselves with ferocious dedication. Gillies were aquatically modified humans who breathed liquid air; capable of crewing short-range, high-gee ships: they constituted a sizeable fraction of the system’s police force. Some gillies were so incapable of normal respiration and locomotion that they had to move around in huge robotic fishtanks when not on duty.

And then there were Conjoiners: descendants of an experimental clique on Mars who had systematically upgraded their minds, swapping cells for machines, until something sudden and drastic had happened. In one moment, they had escalated to a new mode of consciousness—what they called the Transenlightenment—precipitating a brief but nasty war in the process. Conjoiners were easy to pick out in crowds: recently they had bio-engineered huge and beautiful cranial crests for themselves, veined to dissipate the excess heat produced by the furious machines in their heads. There were fewer of them these days, so they tended to draw attention. Other human factions—like the Demarchists, who had long allied themselves with the Conjoiners—were acutely aware that only Conjoiners knew how to build the engines which powered lighthuggers.

“Stop here,” Hegazi said. The rickshaw darted to the streetside, where wizened old men sat at folding tables playing card games and mah-jong. Hegazi slapped payment into the driver’s fleshy palm and then followed Volyova onto the streetside. They had arrived at a bar.

“The Juggler and the Shrouder,” Volyova said, reading the holographic sign above the door. It showed a naked man emerging from the sea, backdropped by strange, phantasmagoric shapes among the surf. Above him, a black sphere hung in the sky. “This doesn’t look right.”

“It’s where all the Ultras hang out. You’d better get used to it.”

“All right, point made. I suppose I wouldn’t feel at home in any Ultra bar, come to think of it.”

“You wouldn’t feel at home in anything that didn’t have a navigational system and a lot of nasty firepower, Ilia.”

“Sounds like a reasonable definition of common sense to me.”

Youths barged out into the street, plastered in sweat and what Volyova hoped was spilt beer. They had been arm wrestling: one of their number was nursing a prosthetic which had ripped off at the shoulder, another was riffling a wad of notes he must have won inside. They had the regulation sleep-stretch locks and the standard-issue star-effect tattoos, making Volyova feel simultaneously ancient and envious. She doubted that their anxieties extended much beyond the troubling question of where their next drink or bed was coming from. Hegazi gave them a look—he must have seemed intimidating to them, even given their chimeric aspirations, since it was difficult to tell which parts of Hegazi were not mechanical.

“Come on,” he said, pushing through the disturbance. “Grin and bear it, Ilia.”

It was dark and smoky inside, and with the combined synergistic effects of the noise from the music—pulsing Burundi rhythms overlaid with something that might have been human singing—and the perfumed, mild hallucinogens in the smoke, it took Volyova a few moments to get her bearings. Then Hegazi pointed to a miraculously spare table in the comer and she followed him to it with the minimum of enthusiasm.

“You’re going to sit down, aren’t you?”

“I don’t suppose I have much choice. We have to look as if we at least tolerate each other’s company or people will get suspicious.”

Hegazi shook his head, grinning. “I must like something about you, Ilia, otherwise I’d have killed you ages ago.”

She sat down.

“Don’t let Sajaki hear you talking like that. He doesn’t take kindly to threats being made against Triumvir members.”

“I’m not the one who has a problem with Sajaki, in case you forgot. Now, what are you drinking?”

“Something my digestive system can process.”

Hegazi ordered some drinks—his physiology allowed that—waiting until the overhead delivery system brought them.

“You’re still annoyed by that business with Sudjic, aren’t you?”

“Don’t worry,” Volyova said, crossing her arms. “Sudjic isn’t anything I can’t handle. Besides, I’d be lucky to lay a finger on her before Sajaki finished her off.”

“He might let you have second pickings.” The drinks arrived in a little perspex cloud with a flip-top, the cloud suspended from a trolley which ran along rails mounted on the ceiling. “You think he’d actually kill her?”

Volyova attacked her drink, glad of something to wash away the dust of the rickshaw ride. “I wouldn’t trust Sajaki not to kill any of us, if it came to that.”

“You used to trust him. What made you change your mind?”

“Sajaki hasn’t been the same since the Captain fell ill again.” She looked around nervously, well aware that Sajaki might not be very far from earshot. “Before that happened, they both visited the Jugglers, did you know that?”

“You’re saying the Jugglers did something to Sajaki’s mind?”

She thought back to the naked man stepping from the Juggler ocean. “That’s what they do, Hegazi.”

“Yes, voluntarily. Are you saying Sajaki chose to become crueller?”

“Not just cruel. Single-minded. This business with the Captain…” She shook her head. “It’s emblematic.”

“Have you spoken to him recently?”

She read his question. “No; I don’t think he’s found who he’s looking for, though doubtless we’ll find out shortly.”

“And your own quest?”

“I’m not looking for a specific individual. My only constraint is that whoever I find should be saner than Boris Nagorny. That ought not to pose any great difficulties.” She let her gaze drift around the drinkers in the bar. Although none of the people looked definitely psychotic, neither was there anyone who exactly looked stable and well-adjusted. “At least I hope not.”

Hegazi lit a cigarette and offered Volyova a second. She took it gratefully and smoked it solidly for five minutes, until it resembled a glowing speck of fissile material wrapped in glowing embers. She made a mental note to replenish her supply of cigarettes during this stopover. “But my search is only just beginning,” she said. “And I have to handle it delicately.”

“You mean,” Hegazi said with a knowing smile, “that you’re not actually going to tell people what the job is before you recruit them.”

Volyova smirked. “Of course not.”

The sapphire-hulled shuttle he was riding had not come far: only a short inter-orbital hop from the Sylvestes’ familial habitat. Even so, it had been difficult to arrange. Calvin strongly disapproved of his son having any contact with the thing which now resided in the Institute, as if the thing’s state of mind might infect Sylveste by some mysterious process of sympathetic resonance. Yet Sylveste was twenty-one. He chose his own associations now. Calvin could go hang, or bum his neurons to ash in the madness he was about to inflict on himself and his seventy-nine disciples… but he was not going to dictate who Sylveste could see.

He saw SISS looming ahead, and thought, none of this is real; just a narrative strand from his biography. Pascale had given him the rough-cut and asked for his comments. Now he was experiencing it, still walled in his prison in Cuvier, but moving like a ghost through his own past, haunting his younger self. Memories, long buried, were welling up unbidden. The biography, still far from complete, would be capable of being accessed in many ways, from many viewpoints, and with varying degrees of interactivity. It would be an intricately faceted thing, detailed enough that one could easily spend more than a lifetime exploring only a segment of his past.

SISS looked as real as he remembered. The Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies had its organisational centre in a wheel-shaped structure dating from the Amerikano days, although there was not a single cubic nanometre which had not been reprocessed many times over the intervening centuries. The wheel’s hub sprouted two grey, mushroom-shaped hemispheres, pocked with docking interfaces and the modest defence systems permitted by Demarchist ethics. The wheel’s edge was a hectic accretion of living modules, labs and offices, embedded in a matrix of bulk chitin polymer, linked by a tangle of access tunnels and supply pipes walled in shark-collagen.

“It’s good.”

“You think so?” Pascale’s voice was distant.

“That’s how it was,” Sylveste said. “How it felt when I visited him.”

“Thanks, I… well, this was nothing—the easy part. Fully documented. We had blueprints for SISS, and there are even some people in Cuvier who knew your father, like Janequin. The hard part’s what happened afterwards—where we have so little to go on except what you told them on your return.”

“I’m sure you’ve done an excellent job of it.”

“Well, you’ll see—sooner rather than later.”

The shuttle coupled with the docking interface. Institute security servitors were waiting beyond the lock, validating his identity.

“Calvin won’t be thrilled,” said Gregori, the Institute’s housekeeper. “But I suppose it’s too late to send you home now.”

They had been through this ritual two or three times in the last few months, Gregori always washing his hands of the consequences. It was no longer necessary to have someone escort Sylveste through the shark-collagen tunnels to the place where they kept him; the thing.

“You’ve nothing to worry about, Gregori. If Father gives you any trouble, just tell him I ordered you to show me around.”

Gregori arched his eyebrows, the emotionally attuned entoptics around him registering amusement.

“Isn’t that just what you’re doing, Dan?”

“I was trying to keep things amicable.”

“Utterly futile, dear boy. We’d all be much happier if you just followed your father’s lead. You know where you are with a good totalitarian regime.”

It took twenty minutes to navigate the tunnels, moving radially outwards to the rim, passing through scientific sections where teams of thinkers—human and machine—grappled endlessly with the central enigma of the Shrouds. Although SISS had established monitoring stations around all the Shrouds so far discovered, most of the information-processing and collating took place around Yellowstone. Here elaborate theories were assembled and tested against the facts, which were scant, but unignorable. No theory had lasted more than a few years.

The place where they kept him, the thing Sylveste had come to see, was a guarded annex on the rim; a generously large allocation of volume given the lack of evidence that the thing within was actually capable of appreciating the gift. The thing’s name—his name—was Philip Lascaille.

He did not have many visitors now. There had been lots in the early days, shortly after his return. But interest had dwindled when it became clear that Lascaille could tell his inquisitors nothing, useful or otherwise. But, as Sylveste had quickly appreciated, the fact that no one paid Lascaille much attention these days could actually work to his advantage. Even Sylveste’s relatively infrequent visits—once or twice a month—had been sufficiently far from the norm to enable a kind of rapport to form between the two of them… between himself and the thing Lascaille had become.

Lascaille’s annex contained a garden, under an artificial sky glazed the deep blue of cobalt. A breeze had been created, sufficient to finger the windchimes suspended from the bower of over-arching trees which fringed the garden.

The garden had been landscaped with paths, rockeries, knolls, trellises and goldfish ponds, the effect being of a rustic maze, so that it always took a minute or so to find Lascaille. When Sylveste did find him the man was usually in the same state: naked or half-naked, filthy to some degree, his fingers smeared with the rainbow shades of crayons and chalks. Sylveste would always know he was getting warm when he saw something scrawled on the stone path; either a complex symmetrical pattern, or what looked like an attempt at mimicking Chinese or Sanskrit calligraphy, without actually knowing any real letters. At other times the things which Lascaille marked on the path looked like Boolean algebra or semaphore.

Then—it was always only a question of time—he would round a corner and Lascaille would be there, working on another marking, or carefully erasing one he had worked on previously. His face would be frozen in a rictus of total concentration, and every muscle in his body would be rigid with the exertion of the drawing, and the process would take place in complete silence, except for the stirring of the windchimes, the quiet whisper of the water or the scraping of his crayons and chalks against stone.

Sylveste would often have to wait hours for Lascaille to even register his presence, which would generally amount to nothing more than the man turning his face to him for an instant, before continuing. Yet the same thing always happened in that instant. The rictus would soften, and in its place would be—if only for a moment—a smile; one of pride or amusement or something utterly beyond Sylveste’s fathoming.

And then Lascaille would return to his chalks. And there would be nothing to suggest that this was a man—the only man—the only human being—to ever touch the surface of a Shroud and return alive.

“Anyway,” Volyova said, quenching what remained of her thirst, “I’m not expecting it to be easy, but I have no doubts that I will find a recruit sooner or later. I’ve begun to advertise, stating our planned destination. As far as the work is concerned, I say only that it requires someone with implants.”

“But you’re not going to take the first one that comes along,” Hegazi said. “Surely?”

“Of course not. Though they won’t know it, I’ll be vetting my candidates for some kind of military experience in their backgrounds. I don’t want someone who’s going to crack up at the first hint of trouble, or someone unwilling to submit to discipline.” She was beginning to relax now, after all her difficulties with Nagorny. A girl was playing on stage, working a gold teeconax through endlessly spiralling ragas. Volyova did not greatly care for music; never had done. But there was something mathematically beguiling about the music which for a moment worked against her prejudices. She said: “I’m confident of success. We need only concern ourselves with Sajaki.”

At that moment Hegazi nodded towards the door, where bright daylight forced Volyova to squint. A figure stood there, majestically silhouetted in the glare. The man was garbed in a black anklelength cloak and a vaguely defined helmet, the light making it resemble a halo cast around his head. His profile was split diagonally by a long smooth stick which he gripped two-handedly.

The Komuso stepped into the darkness. What looked like a kendo stick was only his bamboo shakuhachi; a traditional musical instrument. With well-rehearsed rapidity he slid the thing into a sheath concealed behind the folds of his cloak. Then, with imperial slowness, he removed the wicker helmet. The Komuso’s face was difficult to make out. His hair was brilliantined, slickly tied back in a scythe-shaped tail. His eyes were lost behind sleek assassin’s goggles, infrared sensitive facets dully catching the room’s tinted light.

The music had come to an abrupt stop, the girl with the teeconax vanishing magically from the stage.

“They think it’s a police bust,” Hegazi breathed, the room quiet enough now that he didn’t need to raise his voice. “The local cops send in the basket-cases when they don’t want to bloody their own hands.”

The Komuso swept the room, flylike eyes targeting the table where Hegazi and Volyova sat. His head seemed to move independently of the rest of his body, like some species of owl. With a bustle of his cloak he cruised towards them, appearing to glide more than locomote. Nonchalantly Hegazi kicked a spare seat out from under the table, simultaneously taking an unimpressed drag on his cigarette.

“Good to see you, Sajaki.”

He dropped the wicker helmet next to their drinks, ripping the goggles away from his eyes as he did so. He lowered himself into the vacant chair, then turned casually around to the rest of the bar. He made a drinking gesture, imploring the people to get on with their own business while he attended to his. Gradually the conversation rumbled back into life, although everyone was keeping half an eye on the three of them.

“I wish the circumstances merited a celebratory drink,” Sajaki said.

“They don’t?” Hegazi said, looking as crestfallen as his extensively modified face permitted.

“No, most certainly not.” Sajaki examined the nearly spent glasses on the table and lifted Volyova’s, downing the few drops which remained. “I’ve been doing some spying, as you might gather from my disguise. Sylveste isn’t here. He isn’t in this system any more. As a matter of fact, he hasn’t been here for somewhere in the region of fifty years.”

“Fifty years?” Hegazi whistled.

“That’s quite a cold trail,” Volyova said. She tried not to sound gloating, but she had always known this risk existed. When Sajaki had given the order to steer the lighthugger towards the Yellowstone system, he had done so on the basis of the best information available to him at the time. But that was decades ago, and the information had been decades old even when he received it.

“Yes,” Sajaki said. “But not as cold as you might think. I know exactly where he went to, and there’s no reason to assume he’s ever left the place.”

“And where would this be?” Volyova asked, with a sinking feeling in her stomach.

“A planet called Resurgam.” Sajaki placed Volyova’s glass down on the table. “It’s quite some distance from here. But I’m afraid, dear colleagues, that it must be our next port of call.”

He fell into his past again.

Deeper this time; back to when he was twelve. Pascale’s flashbacks were non-sequential; the biography was constructed with no regard for the niceties of linear time. At first he was disorientated, even though he was the one person in the universe who ought not to have been adrift in his own history. But the confusion slowly gave way to the realisation that her way was the right one; that it was right to treat his past as shattered mosaic of interchangeable events; an acrostic embedded with numerous equally legitimate interpretations.

It was 2373; only a few decades after Bernsdottir’s discovery of the first Shroud. Whole academic disciplines had sprung up around the central mystery, as well as numerous government and private research agencies. The Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies was only one of dozens of such organisations, but it also happened to be backed by one of the wealthiest—and most powerful—families in the whole human bubble. But when the break came, it was not via the calculated moves of large scientific organisations. It was through one man’s random and dedicated madness.

His name was Philip Lascaille.

He was a SISS scientist working at one of the permanent stations near what was now called Lascaille’s Shroud, in the trans Tau Ceti sector. Lascaille was also one of a team kept on permanent stand-by should there ever be a need for human delegates to travel to the Shroud, although no one considered that this was very likely. But the delegates existed, with a ship kept in readiness to carry them the remaining five hundred million kilometres to the boundary, should the invitation ever arrive.

Lascaille decided not to wait.

Alone, he boarded and stole the SISS contact craft. By the time anyone realised what was happening, it was far too late to stop him. A remote destruct existed, but its use might have been construed by the Shroud as an act of aggression, something no one wanted to risk. The decision was to let fate take its course. No one seriously expected to see Lascaille come back alive. And though he did eventually return, his doubters had in a sense been right, because a large portion of his sanity had not come back with him.

Lascaille had come very close indeed to the Shroud before some force had propelled him back out again—perhaps only a few tens of thousands of kilometres from the surface, although at that range there was no easy way of telling where space ended and the Shroud began. No one doubted that he had come closer than any other human being, or for that matter any living creature.

But the cost had been horrific.

Not all of Philip Lascaille—not even most of him—had come back. Unlike those who had gone before him, his body had not been pulped and shredded by incomprehensible forces near the boundary. But something no less final appeared to have happened to his mind. Nothing remained of his personality, except for a few residual traces which served only to heighten the almost absolute obliteration of everything else. Enough brain function remained for him to keep himself alive without machine assistance, and his motor control seemed completely unimpaired. But there was no intelligence left; no sense that Lascaille perceived his surroundings except in the most simplistic manner; no indication that he had any grasp of what had happened to him, or was even aware of the passage of time; no indication that he retained the ability to memorise new experiences or retrieve those that had happened to him before his trip to the Shroud. He retained the ability to vocalise, but while Lascaille occasionally spoke well-formed words, or even fragments of sentences, nothing he uttered made the slightest sense.

Lascaille—or what remained of Lascaille—was returned to the Yellowstone system, and then to the SISS habitat, where medical experts desperately tried to construct a theory for what might have happened. Eventually—and it was more out of desperation than logic—they decided that the fractal, restructured spacetime around the Shroud had not been able to support the information density of his brain. In passing through it, his mind had been randomised on the quantum level, although the molecular processes of his body had not been noticeably affected. He was like a text which had been transcribed imprecisely—so that much of the meaning was lost—and then retranscribed.

Yet Lascaille was not the last person to attempt such a suicide mission. A cult had grown up around him, its chief rumour being that, despite his exterior signs of dementia, the passage close to the Shroud had bestowed on him something like Nirvana. Once or twice every decade, around the known Shrouds, someone would attempt to follow Lascaille into the boundary, and the results were miserably uniform, and no improvement on what Lascaille himself had achieved. The lucky ones came back with half their minds gone, while the unlucky ones never made it back at all, or did so in ships so mangled that their human remains resembled a salmon-coloured paste.

While Lascaille’s cult bloomed, people soon forgot about the man himself. Perhaps the salivating, mumbling reality of his existence was a touch too uncomfortable.

Sylveste, however, did not forget. More than that, he had become obsessed with teasing a last, vital truth out of the man. His familial connections guaranteed him an audience with Lascaille whenever he wanted—provided he ignored Calvin’s forebodings. And so he had taken to visiting, and waiting in absolute patience while Lascaille attended to his pavement drawings, ever watchful for the one, transient clue which he knew the man would eventually bequeath him.

In the end, it was a lot more than a clue.

It was difficult to remember how long he had waited, on that day when the waiting finally paid off. For all that he intended to focus his mind with absolute attentiveness on what Lascaille was doing, he had been finding it increasingly difficult. It was like staring intently at a long series of abstract paintings—one’s concentration inevitably began to wane, no matter how much one tried to keep it fresh. Lascaille had been halfway through the sixth or seventh hopeless chalk mandala of the day, executing the task with the same fervent dedication he brought to every mark he made.

Then, with no forewarning, he had turned to Sylveste and said, with complete clarity: “The Jugglers offer the key, Doctor.”

Sylveste was too shocked to interrupt.

“It was explained to me,” Lascaille continued blithely. “While I was in Revelation Space.”

Sylveste forced himself to nod, as naturally as possible. Some still-calm part of his mind recognised the phrase which Lascaille had spoken. As far as anyone had ever been able to tell, it was what Lascaille now called the Shroud boundary—‘space’ in which he had been granted certain “revelations’ too abstruse to relate.

Yet now his tongue seemed to have been loosened.

“There was a time when the Shrouders travelled between the stars,” Lascaille said. “Much as we do now—although they were an ancient species and had been starfaring for many millions of years. They were quite alien, you know.” He paused to switch a blue chalk for a crimson one, placing it between his toes. With that, he continued his work on the mandala. But with his hand—now free from that task—he began to sketch something on an adjacent patch of ground. The creature he drew was multi-limbed, tentacled, armour-plated, spined, barely symmetrical. It looked less like a member of a starfaring alien culture than something which might have flopped and oozed its way across the bed of a Precambrian ocean. It was utterly monstrous.

“That’s a Shrouder?” Sylveste said, with a shiver of anticipation. “You actually met one?”

“No; I never truly entered the Shroud,” Lascaille said. “But they communicated with me. They revealed themselves to my mind; imparted much of their history and nature.”

Sylveste tore his gaze away from the nightmarish creature. “Where do the Jugglers come into it?”

“The Pattern Jugglers have been around for a long time and they’re to be found on many worlds. All starfaring cultures in this part of the galaxy encounter them sooner or later.” Lascaille tapped his sketch. “Just like we did, so did the Shrouders, only very much earlier. Do you understand what I’m saying, Doctor?”

“Yes…” He thought he did, anyway. “But not the point of it.”

Lascaille smiled. “Whoever—or whatever—visits the Jugglers is remembered by them. Remembered absolutely, that is—down to the last cell; the last synaptic connection. That’s what the Jugglers are. A vast biological archiving system.”

This was true enough, Sylveste knew. Humans had gleaned very little of significance concerning the Jugglers, their function or origin. But what had become clear almost from the outset was that the Jugglers were capable of storing human personalities within their oceanic matrix, so that anyone who swam in the Juggler sea—and was dissolved and reconstituted in the process—would have achieved a kind of immortality. Later, those patterns could be realised again; temporarily imprinted in the mind of another human. The process was muddy and biological, so the stored patterns were contaminated by millions of other impressions, each subtly influencing the other. Even in the early days of Juggler exploration it had been obvious that the ocean had stored patterns of alien thought; hints of otherness bleeding into the thoughts of the swimmers—but these impressions had always remained indistinct.

“So the Shrouders were remembered by the Jugglers,” Sylveste said. “But how does that help us?”

“More than you realise. The Shrouders may look alien, but the basic architectures of their minds were not completely dissimilar to our own. Ignore the bodyplan; realise instead that they were social creatures with a verbal language and the same perceptual environment. To some degree, a human could be made to think like a Shrouder, without becoming completely inhuman in the process.” He looked at Sylveste again. “It would be within the capabilities of the Jugglers to instil a Shrouder neural transform within a human neocortex.”

It was a chilling thought: achieve contact not by meeting an alien, but by becoming it. If that was what Lascaille meant. “How would that help us?”

“It would stop the Shroud from killing you.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Understand that the Shroud is a protective structure. What lies within are… not just the Shrouders themselves, but technologies which are simply too powerful to be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Over millions of years, the Shrouders combed the galaxy seeking harmful things left over by extinct cultures—things which I can almost not even begin to describe to you. Things which may once have served good, but which are also capable of being used as weapons of unimaginable horror. Technologies and techniques which may only be deployed by ascended races: means of manipulating spacetime, or of moving faster-than-light… other things which your mind literally can’t encompass.”

Sylveste wondered if that really were the case. “Then the Shrouds are—what? Treasure chests, where only the most advanced races get the keys?”

“More than that. They defend themselves against intruders. A Shroud’s boundary is almost a living thing. It responds to the thought patterns of those who enter it. If the patterns do not resemble those of the Shrouders… it fights back. It alters spacetime locally, creating vicious eddies of curvature. Curvature equals gravitational sheer stress, Doctor. It rips you apart. But the right kinds of mind… the Shroud admits them; guides them closer, protects them in a pocket of quiet space.”

The implications, Sylveste saw, were shattering. Think like a Shrouder and one could slip past those defences… into the glittering heart of the treasure box. So what if humans were not advanced enough by Shrouder reckoning to behold that treasure? If they were clever enough to break open the box, were they not entitled to take what they found? According to Lascaille, the Shrouders had assumed the role of galactic matron when they secreted those harmful technologies… but had anyone asked them to do it? Then another question ghosted into his mind.

“Why did they let you know this, if what was inside the Shrouds had to be protected at all costs?”

“I don’t know if it was intentional. The barrier around the Shroud that bears my name must have failed to identify me as alien, if only fleetingly. Perhaps it was damaged, or perhaps my… state of mind… confused it. Once I had begun to penetrate the Shroud, information began to flow between us. That was how I learned these things. What the Shroud contained, and how its defences might be circumvented. It’s not a trick machines can learn, you know.” The last remark seemed to have come from nowhere; for a moment it hung there before Lascaille continued. “But the Shroud must have begun to suspect that I was foreign. It rejected me; flung me back out into space.”

“Why didn’t it just kill you?”

“It must not have been completely confident in its judgement.” He paused. “In Revelation Space, I did sense doubt. Vast arguments taking place around me, quicker than thought. In the end, caution must have won the day.”

Now another question; the one he had wanted to ask since the moment Lascaille had opened his mouth.

“Why have you waited until now to tell us these things?”

“I apologise for my earlier reticence. But first I had to digest the knowledge that the Shrouders had placed in my mind. It was in their terms, you see—not ours.” He hesitated, his attention seemingly drawn to a smudge of chalk which was marring the mathematical purity of his mandala. He licked his finger and rubbed it away. “That was the easy part. Then I had to remember how humans communicate.” Lascaille looked at Sylveste, his animal eyes veiled by a Neanderthal tangle of uncombed hair. “You’ve been kind to me, not like the others. You had patience with me. I thought this might help you.”

Sylveste sensed that this window of lucidity might soon be closing. “How exactly do we persuade the Jugglers to imprint the Shrouder consciousness pattern?”

“That’s the easy part.” He nodded at the chalk drawing. “Memorise this figure, and hold it in mind when you swim.”

“That’s all?”

“It will suffice. The internal representation of this figure in your mind will instruct the Jugglers as to your needs. You’d better take them a gift, of course. They don’t do something of this magnitude for free.”

“A gift?”

Sylveste was wondering what kind of gift one could possibly offer to an entity which resembled a floating island of seaweed and algae.

“You’ll think of something. Whatever it is, make sure it’s information-dense. Otherwise you’ll bore them. You wouldn’t want to bore them.” Sylveste wanted to ask further questions, but Lascaille’s attention had returned to his chalk drawings. “That’s all I have to say,” the man said.

It turned out to be the case.

Lascaille never spoke to Sylveste, or anyone else again. A month later they found him dead, drowned in the fishpond.

“Hello?” Khouri said. “Is there anyone here?”

She had awoken, that was all she knew. Not from a catnap, either, but from something much deeper, longer and colder. A reefersleep fugue, almost certainly—they were not something you forgot, and she had woken from one before, around Yellowstone. The physiological and neural signs were exactly right. There was no sign of a reefersleep casket—she was lying, fully-clothed, on a couch—but someone could easily have moved her before she was properly conscious. Who, though? And where was she? It seemed as if someone had tossed a grenade into her memory, blowing it into frags. The place where she found herself now was only teasingly familiar.

Someone’s hallway? Wherever it was, it was filled with ugly sculptures. She had either walked past these things a matter of hours ago, or else they were recessive figments from the depths of her childhood; nursery horrors. Their curved, jagged and burnt shapes loomed over her, casting demonlike shadows. Groggily she intuited that these things fitted together in some way, or had once done so, though they were perhaps too warped and torn for that now.

Footsteps padded unsteadily across the hallway.

She twisted her head to view the approaching person. Her neck felt stiffer than cured wood. Years of experience had told her that the rest of her body would be no more supple after the sleep fugue.

The man stopped a few paces from her bed. In the moonlight glow of the chamber it was hard to read his features, but there was a familiarity within the shadowed jowliness that tugged at her memory. Someone she had known, many years ago.

“It’s me,” he said, the voice wet and phlegmatic. “Manoukhian. The Mademoiselle thought you might appreciate a familiar face when you woke up.”

The names meant something to her, but exactly what, it was hard to say. “What happened?”

“Simple. She made you an offer you couldn’t refuse.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Twenty-two years,” Manoukhian said, offering her a hand. “Now, shall we go and see the Mademoiselle?”

Sylveste woke facing a wall of black which swallowed half the sky—a black so total that it seemed like a nullification of existence itself. He had never noticed it before, but now he saw—or imagined he saw—that the ordinary darkness between the stars was in fact aglow with its own milky luminosity. But there were no stars in the circular pool of emptiness which was Lascaille’s Shroud; no source of any light whatsoever, no photons arriving from any part of the detectable electromagnetic spectrum; no neutrinos of any flavour, no particles, exotic or otherwise. No gravity waves, electrostatic or magnetic fields—not even the slight whisper of Hawking radiation which, according to the few extant theories of Shroud mechanics, ought to be bleeding out of the boundary, reflecting the entropic temperature of the surface.

None of these things happened. The only thing a Shroud did—so far as anyone had ever been able to tell—was to comprehensively obstruct all forms of radiation attempting to pass through it. That, of course, and the other thing: which was to shred any object daring to pass too close to its boundary.

They had woken him from reefersleep, and now he was in the state of sickening disorientation which accompanied the crash revival, yet young enough to weather the effects: his physiological age was only thirty-three, despite the fact that more than sixty years had passed since his birth.

“Am I… all right?” he struggled to ask the revival medicos, while all the time his attention was being snared by the nothingness beyond the station window, like someone staring into the black counterpart of a snowstorm.

“You’re almost clear,” said the medico next to him, watching neural readouts scroll through midair, digesting their import with quiet taps of a stylus against his lower lip. “But Valdez faded. That means Lefevre’s bumped up to primary. Think you can work with her?”

“Bit late for doubts now, isn’t it?”

“It’s a joke, Dan. Now, how much do you remember? Revival amnesia’s the one thing I haven’t scanned for.”

It seemed like a stupid question, but as soon as he interrogated his memory, he found it responding sluggishly, like a document retrieval system in an inefficient bureaucracy.

“Do you remember Spindrift?” the medico asked, with a note of concern in his voice. “It’s vital that you remember Spindrift…”

He remembered it, yes—but for a moment he could not connect it with any other memories. What he remembered—the last thing he remembered which was not adrift—was Yellowstone. They left it twelve years after the Eighty; twelve years after Calvin’s corporeal death; twelve years after Philip Lascaille had spoken to Sylveste; twelve years after the man had drowned himself, his purpose seemingly fulfilled.

The expedition was small but well equipped—a lighthugger crew, partially chimeric, Ultranauts who seldom mingled with the other humans; twenty scientists largely culled from SISS, and four potential contact delegates. Only two of the four would actually travel to the surface of the Shroud.

Lascaille’s Shroud was their objective, but not their first port of call. Sylveste had heeded what Lascaille had told him; the Pattern Jugglers were vital to the success of his mission. It was first necessary to visit them on their own world, tens of light-years from the Shroud. Even then Sylveste had little idea of what to expect. But, rash as it seemed, he trusted Lascaille’s advice. The man would not have broken his silence for nothing.

The Jugglers had been a curiosity for more than a century. They existed on a number of worlds, all of them dominated by single planet-sized oceans. The Jugglers were a biochemical consciousness distributed through each ocean, composed of trillions of co-acting micro-organisms, arranged into island-sized clumps. All the Jugglers’ worlds were tectonically active, and it was theorised that the Jugglers drew their energy from hydrothermal outlet vents on the seabed; that the heat was converted to bioelectrical energy and transferred to the surface via tendrils of organic superconductor draping down through kilometres of black cold. The Jugglers’ purpose—assuming they had a purpose—remained completely unknown. It was clear that they had the ability to mediate the biospheres of the worlds in which they had been seeded, acting like a single, intelligently acting mass of phytoplankton—but no one knew if this was merely secondary to some hidden, higher function. What was known—and again not properly understood—was that the Jugglers had the capacity to store and retrieve information, acting like a single, planet-wide neural net. This information was stored on many levels, from the gross connectivity patterns of surface-floating tendrils, down to free-floating strands of RNA. It was impossible to say where the oceans began and the Jugglers ended—just as it was impossible to say whether each world contained many Jugglers or merely one arbitrarily extended individual, for the islands themselves were linked by organic bridges. They were world-sized living repositories of information; vast informational sponges. Almost anything entering a Juggler ocean would be penetrated by microscopic tendrils, partially dissolved, until its structural and chemical properties had been revealed, and that information would then be passed into the biochemical storage of the ocean itself. As Lascaille had intimated, the Jugglers could imprint these patterns as well as encode them. Supposedly those patterns could include the mentalities of other species which had come into contact with the Jugglers—such as the Shrouders.

Human study teams had been investigating the Pattern Jugglers for many decades. Humans swimming in the Juggler-infested ocean were able to enter rapport states with the organism, as Juggler micro-tendrils filtered temporarily into the human neocortex, establishing quasi-synaptic links between the swimmers’ minds and the rest of the ocean. It was, they said, like communing with sentient algae. Trained swimmers reported feeling their consciousness expand to include the entire ocean, their memories becoming vast, verdant and ancient. Their perceptual boundaries became malleable, although at no point was there any sense that the ocean itself was truly self-aware; more that it was a mirror, massively reflecting human consciousness: the ultimate solipsism. Swimmers made startling breakthroughs in mathematics, as if the ocean had enhanced their creative faculties. Some even reported that these boosts persisted for some time after they had left the oceanic matrix and returned to dry land or orbit. Was it possible that some physical change had taken place in their minds?

So it was that the concept of the Juggler transform arose. With additional training, the swimmers learned how to select specific forms of transform. Neurologists stationed on the Juggler world attempted to map the brain alterations wrought by the aliens, but with only partial success. The transformations were extraordinarily subtle, more akin to retuning a violin than ripping it apart and building it from scratch. They were rarely permanent—days, weeks or, very occasionally, years later, the transform would fade.

Such was the state of knowledge when Sylveste’s expedition reached the Juggler world Spindrift. Now he remembered it, of course—the oceans; the tides; the volcanic chains and the constant, overpowering seaweedy stench of the organism itself. Smell unlocked the rest. All four potential Shrouder contact delegates had learnt the chalk diagram on a deep level of recall. After months of training with expert swimmers, the four entered the ocean and filled their minds with the form Lascaille had given them.

The Juggler had reached into them, partially dissolved their minds, and then restructured them according to its own embedded templates.

When the four emerged, it seemed at first that Lascaille had been crazy after all.

They did not exhibit freakishly alien modes of behaviour, nor had they suddenly gained answers to the great cosmic mysteries. Questioned, none of them reported feeling particularly different, nor were they any the wiser about the identity or nature of the Shrouders. But sensitive neurological tests probed deeper than human intuition. The spatial and cognitive skills of the four had changed, though in ways that were perplexingly difficult to quantify. As days passed, they reported experiencing states of mind that were—paradoxically—both familiar and yet utterly alien. Evidently something had changed, though no one could be sure that the states of mind they were experiencing had any connection with the Shrouders.

Nonetheless, they had to move quickly.

As soon as the initial tests were complete, the four delegates entered reefersleep. The cold prevented the Juggler transforms from decaying, though they would inevitably begin to fade once the four were awakened, despite a complicated regimen of experimental neuro-stabilising drugs. They were kept asleep throughout the voyage to Lascaille’s Shroud, then for weeks in the vicinity of the object itself, as their study station was manoeuvred closer, within the nominal 3 AU safe distance which it had maintained until that point. Even then, the delegates were not awoken until the eve of their trip to the surface.

“I… remember,” Sylveste said. “I remember Spindrift.” And then there was a moment while the medico kept tapping his stylus against his lips, assimilating the reams of information pouring from the medical analysis systems, before nodding and passing him fit for the mission. “The old place has changed a bit,” Manoukhian said.

He was right, Khouri saw. She was looking out over something she hardly recognised as Chasm City. The Mosquito Net was gone. Now the city was open to the elements once more, its buildings rising nakedly into Yellowstone’s atmosphere where once they had sheltered beneath the merged drapery of the domes. The Mademoiselle’s black chateau was no longer amongst the tallest structures. Tiered, aero-formed monsters knifed into the broiling brown sky, like sharks’ fins, or blades of spinifex, slashed by countless scores of tiny windows, emblazoned with the giant Boolean-logic symbols of the Conjoiners. Like yacht sails, the buildings rose from what remained of the Mulch on slim masts so that their leading edges cut into the wind. Only a scattering of the old gnarled architecture remained, and only a vestigial remnant of the Canopy. The old city forest had been slashed into history by the shining bladelike towers.

“They grew something in the chasm,” Manoukhian said. “Right down in the depths. They call it the Lilly.” His voice took on a tone of fascinated repulsion. “People who’ve seen it say it’s like a huge piece of breathing viscera, like a piece of God’s stomach. It’s fastened to the walls of the chasm. The stuff belching out of the depths is poisonous, but by the time it’s been through the Lilly it’s just about breathable.”

“All this in twenty-two years?”

“Yes,” someone answered. Movement played in the gloss-black armour of the shutters. Khouri turned around in time to catch a palanquin resting silently. Seeing it, she remembered the Mademoi-selle, and much else too. It was as if no more than a minute had elapsed since their last meeting.

“Thank you for bringing her here, Carlos.”

“Will that be all?”

“I think so.” Her voice echoed slightly. “Time is of the essence, you see. Even after all these years. I’ve located a crew who need someone like Khouri, but they won’t wait for more than a few days before leaving the system. She will need to be educated, primed in her role, and introduced to them before we lose this opportunity.”

“What if I say no?” Khouri said.

“But you won’t, will you? Not now that you know what I can do for you. You do remember, don’t you?”

“It’s not something you forget very easily.” She remembered clearly now what the Mademoiselle had shown her: that the other reefersleep casket held someone. The person inside had been Fazil, her husband. Despite what she had been told, she had never been separated from him. The two of them had both come from Sky’s Edge, the clerical error more benign than she had imagined. Yet she had still been deceived. Evidence of the Mademoiselle’s handiwork was clear from the outset. Khouri’s job working as a Shadowplay assassin had come about a little too easily: in hindsight, the role had served only to demonstrate her fitness for the task ahead. As for ensuring her compliance, that was simplicity itself. The Mademoiselle had Fazil. If Khouri refused to do what was required of her, she would never see her husband again.

“I knew you would see sense,” the Mademoiselle said. “What I ask of you is really not so difficult, Khouri.”

“What about the crew you’ve found?”

“They’re just traders,” Manoukhian said soothingly. “I used to be one myself, you know. That’s how I came to rescue…”

“Enough, Carlos.”

“Sorry.” He looked back at the palanquin. “All I’m saying is, how bad can they be?”

By accident or subconscious design—it was never entirely clear—the SISS contact craft resembled an infinity symbol: two lobelike modules packed with life support equipment, sensors and comms gear, spaced by a collar rimmed with thrusters and additional sensor arrays. Two people could fit into either of the lobes, and in the event of a mid-mission neural fadeout, one or both of the lobes could be ejected.

Ramping up thrust, the contact craft fell towards the Shroud, while the station made a retreat back beyond the safe range, towards the waiting lighthugger. Pascale’s narrative showed the craft dwindling to ever-smaller size, until only the livid glare of its thrust and the pulsing red and green of its running lights remained, and then grew steadily fainter; the surrounding blackness seeming to occlude it like spreading ink.

No one could be certain of what happened thereafter. In the events which followed, most of the information gleaned by Sylveste and Lefevre on their approach was lost, including the data transmitted back to the station and the lighthugger. Not only were the timescales uncertain, but even the precise order of events was questionable. All that was known was what Sylveste himself remembered—and as Sylveste, by his own admission, underwent periods of altered or diminished consciousness in the vicinity of the Shroud, his memories could not be taken as the literal truth of events.

What was known was this.

Sylveste and Lefevre approached closer to the Shroud than any human being had ever done, even Lascaille. If what Lascaille had told them was true, then their transforms were fooling the Shroud’s defences; forcing it to envelop them in a pocket of flattened spacetime while the rest of the boundary seethed with vicious gravitational riptides. No one, even now, pretended to understand how this might be happening: how the Shroud’s buried mechanisms were able to curve spacetime through such insanely sharp geometries, when a folding a billion times less severe should have required more energy than was stored in the entire rest-mass of the galaxy. Nor did anyone understand how consciousness could bleed into the spacetime around the Shroud, so that the Shroud itself could recognise the sorts of minds which were attempting to gain passage into its heart, and at the same time reshape the thoughts and memories of those same minds. Evidently there was some hidden link between thought itself and the underlying processes of spacetime; the one influencing the other. Sylveste had found references to an antiquated theory, centuries dead, which had proposed a link between the quantum processes of consciousness and the quantum-gravitational mechanisms which underpinned spacetime, through the unification of something called the Weyl curvature tensor… but consciousness was no better understood now; the theory was as speculative as it had ever been. Perhaps, though, in the vicinity of the Shroud, any faint linkage between consciousness and spacetime was massively amplified. Sylveste and Lefevre were thinking their way through the storm, their reshaped minds calming the gravitational forces which seethed around them, only metres from the skin of their ship. They were like snake-charmers, moving through a pit of cobras, their music defining a tiny region of safety. Safe, that was, until the music stopped playing—or began to grow discordant—and the snakes began to break out of their hypnotic placidity. It would never be entirely clear how close Sylveste and Lefevre got to the Shroud before the music soured and the cobras of gravity began to stir.

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.