Revelation Space

FIVE

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

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

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

“I’ll be ready.”

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

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

What did Khouri look like again?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you’re traders, right?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Volyova smiled. “I’m very glad to hear it.” Cuvier, Resurgam, 2563

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had no idea what it meant.

Worse, there were similar maps lower down the obelisk which were at least consistent with other solar systems, although it was nothing he could prove. How could the Amarantin have obtained such data—the other planets, the neutron star, other systems—without a spacefaring capability comparable to humankind’s?

Perhaps the crucial question was the age of the obelisk. The context layer suggested nine hundred and ninety thousand years, placing the burial within a thousand years of the Event—but in terms of validating his theory, he needed a much more precise estimate than that. On her last visit he had asked Pascale to run a TE measurement on the obelisk; he hoped she was going to give him the answer when she arrived.

“She’s been useful to me,” he said to Calvin, who responded with a look of derision. “I don’t expect you to understand that.”

“Perhaps not. I could still tell you what I’ve learned.”

There was no point delaying it. “Well?”

“Her surname isn’t Dubois.” Calvin smiled, drawing out the moment. “It’s Girardieau. She’s his daughter. And you, dear boy, have been had.”

They exited the Juggler and the Shrouder into the carousel’s sweaty impression of planetary night. Outlaw capuchin monkeys were descending from the trees which lined the mall, ready for a session of prehensile pickpocketing. Burundi drums pounded from somewhere around the curve. Neon lightning strobed in serpentlike shapes in the billowing clouds which hung from the rafters. Khouri had heard that it sometimes rained, but so far she had been spared this particular piece of meteorological verisimilitude.

“We’ve a shuttle docked at the hub,” Volyova said. “We’ll just need to take a spoke elevator and clear outbound customs.”

The elevator car they rode in was rattling, unheated, piss-smelling and empty, apart from a helmeted Komuso who sat pensively on a bench, his shakuhachi resting between his knees. Khouri assumed that his presence had made other people decide to wait for the next car in the endless paternoster which rode between the hub and the rim.

The Mademoiselle stood next to the Komuso, hands clasped matronly behind her back, dressed in a floorlength electric-blue gown, black hair pulled into a severe bun.

“You’re much too tense,” she said. “Volyova will suspect you have something to hide.”

“Go away.”

Volyova glanced in her direction. “Did you say something?”

“I said it’s cold in here.”

Volyova seemed to take far too long to digest the statement. “Yes. I suppose it is.”

“You don’t have to speak out loud,” the Mademoiselle replied. “You don’t even have to subvocalise. Just imagine yourself speaking what you wish me to hear. The implant detects the ghost impulses generated in your speech area. Go on; try it.”

“Go away,” Khouri said, or rather imagined herself thinking it. “Get the hell out of my head. This was never in the contract.”

“My dear,” the Mademoiselle said, “there never was any contract, merely a—what shall I say? A gentlewomen’s agreement?” She looked directly at Khouri as if expecting some kind of response. Khouri merely stared, venomously. “Oh, very well,” the woman said. “But I promise you I shall be back before very long.”

She popped out of existence.

“Can’t wait,” Khouri said quietly.

“Pardon?” Volyova asked.

“I said I can’t wait,” Khouri answered. “I mean until we get out of this damn elevator.”

Before very long they reached the hub, cleared customs and boarded the shuttle, a non-atmospheric craft consisting of a sphere with four thruster pods splayed out at right angles. The ship was called the Melancholia of Departure, the kind of ironic name Ultras favoured for their craft. The interior had the ribbed look of a whale’s gut. Volyova told her to go forward through a series of bulkheads and gullet-like crawlspaces until they reached the thing’s bridge. There were a few bucket seats, together with a console displaying reams of avionics gibberish, latticed by delicate entoptics. Volyova thumbed one of the visual readouts, causing a small, traylike device to chug out of a black recess in the side of the console. The tray was gridded with an oldstyle keyboard. Volyova’s fingers danced on the keys, causing a subtle change to sweep through the avionics data.

Khouri realised with a tingling feeling that the woman had no implants; that her fingers were actually one of the ways by which she communicated.

“Buckle in,” Volyova said. “There’s so much garbage floating round Yellowstone we might have to pull some gee-loads.”

Khouri did as she was told. For all the discomfort which ensued, it was her first chance to relax in days. Much had happened since her revival, all of it hectic. In all the time she had been asleep in Chasm City, the Mademoiselle had been waiting for a ship to arrive which was carrying on to Resurgam, and—given Resurgam’s lack of importance in the ever-shifting web of interstellar commerce—the wait had been a long one. That was the trouble with lighthuggers. No individual, no matter how powerful, could ever own one now unless it had already been in their possession for centuries. The Conjoiners were no longer manufacturing drives and people who already owned ships were in no mind to sell them.

Khouri knew that the Mademoiselle had not been searching passively. Nor had Volyova. Volyova—so the Mademoiselle said—had unleashed a search program into Yellowstone’s data network, what she called a bloodhound. A mere human—even a mere computerised monitor—could not have detected the dog’s elaborate sniffing. But the Mademoiselle was seemingly neither of these things, and she sensed the dog the way a pond-skater feels ripples in the membrane on which it walks.

What she did next was clever.

She whistled to the bloodhound until it came bounding towards her. Then she casually broke the thing’s neck, but not before she had flensed it open and examined its informational innards, working out just what it was that the dog had been sent to find. The gist was that the dog had been sent to retrieve supposedly secret information relating to individuals who had had slaver experience; exactly what one would have expected from a group of Ultras who were searching for a crewperson to fill a vacancy on their ship. But there was something else. Something a tiny bit strange, which pricked the Mademoiselle’s curiosity.

Why were they looking for someone with military activity in their backgrounds?

Perhaps they were disciplinarians: professional traders who were operating one level above the normal state of play of commerce, ruthless experts who used slippery constructs to glean the knowledge they wanted, and who were not averse to travelling to backwater colonies like Resurgam when they saw a chance of some massive reward, perhaps centuries hence. It was probable that their entire organisation was structured along military lines, rather than the quasi-anarchy which existed on most trade craft. So by searching for military experience in the backgrounds of their candidates, what they were doing was ensuring themselves that the candidate would fit into their crew.

That was it, naturally.

Things had gone well so far, even allowing for the strange way in which Volyova had not corrected Khouri when she made obvious her ignorance of the ship’s true destination. Khouri had known all along that the destination was Resurgam, of course—but if the Ultras knew this was where she really wanted to go to, she would have been forced to use one of several cover stories to explain her motivations for visiting the backwater colony. She had been ready to employ one of the stories as soon as Volyova corrected her—except she had failed to do so, seemingly willing to let her recruit keep on thinking they were really travelling to Sky’s Edge.

That was indeed odd, though understandable if one assumed they were now desperate to recruit anyone who came forward. It said little for their honesty, of course, but then again, it saved Khouri using a cover story. It was, she decided, nothing to worry about. It would, in fact, all have been roses, were it not for what the Mademoiselle had placed in her head while she was sleeping. The implant was tiny and would not elicit suspicion from the Ultras, designed to resemble—and function as—a standard entoptic splice. If they got too inquisitive and removed the damn thing, all its incriminating parts would self-erase or reorganise. But that was not the point. Khouri’s objection to the implant was not on the grounds that it was risky or unnecessary, but rather that the last person she wanted in her head on a daily basis was the Mademoiselle. Of course, it was just a beta-level simulation constructed to mimic her personality, projecting an image of the Mademoiselle into Khouri’s visual field and tickling her aural centre to allow her to hear what the ghost said. No one else would be privy to the woman’s apparitions, and Khouri would be able to communicate silently with her.

“Call it need to know,” the ghost had said. “As an ex-soldier, I’m certain you understand this principle.”

“Yes, I understand it,” Khouri said with sullen acceptance. “And it stinks, but I don’t suppose you’re about to take the damned thing out of my head just because I don’t like it.”

The Mademoiselle smiled. “To burden you with too much knowledge at this point would be to risk a momentary indiscretion in the presence of the Ultras.”

“Wait a minute,” Khouri said. “I already know you want me to kill Sylveste. What more could there possibly be to find out?”

The Mademoiselle repeated her smile, maddeningly. Like many beta-level sims, her compendium of facial expressions was small enough to make repetition inevitable, like a bad actor constantly falling into the same characterisations.

“I’m afraid,” she said, “that what you now know is not even a fragment of the whole story. Not even a splinter.”

When Pascale arrived, Sylveste made a point of studying her face, matching it against his memories of Nils Girardieau. As usual he rammed against the limitations of his vision. His eyes were poor at curves, tending to approximate the nuances of the human face as a series of stepped edges.

But what Calvin had said was not obviously untrue. Pascale’s hair was Bible-black and straight; Girardieau’s curly and red. But the bone structure had too many points of similarity for coincidence. If Calvin had not made the remark, perhaps Sylveste would never have guessed… but now that the idea was there, it explained far too much.

“Why did you lie to me?” he said.

She seemed genuinely taken aback. “About what?”

“Everything. Starting with your father.”

“My father?” She was quiet now. “Ah. Then you know.”

He nodded, tight-lipped. Then, “That was one of the risks you ran by collaborating with Calvin. Calvin is very clever.”

“He must have established some kind of data link with my compad; accessed private files. The bastard.”

“Now you know how I feel. Why did you do it, Pascale?”

“At first, because I had no choice. I wanted to study you. And the only way I could earn your trust was under another name. It was possible; few people even knew I existed, much less what I looked like.” She paused. “And it worked, didn’t it? You did trust me. And I did nothing to betray that trust.”

“Is that the truth? You never told Nils anything that might have helped him?”

She looked wounded. “You had forewarning of the coup, remember? If anyone was betrayed in all this, it was my father.”

He tried to find an angle that would prove her wrong, without really being sure he wanted to. Perhaps what she said was true. “And the biography?”

“That was my father’s idea.”

“A tool to discredit me?”

“There’s nothing in the biography which isn’t truthful—unless you know otherwise.” She paused. “It’s nearly ready for release, actually. Calvin’s been very helpful. It’ll be the first major work of indigenous art produced on Resurgam, do you realise? Since the Amarantin, of course.”

“It’s a piece of art all right. Are you going to release it under your real name?”

“That was always the idea. I was hoping you wouldn’t find out until then, of course.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. None of this will change our working relationship, believe me. After all, I always knew Nils was the real author behind it.”

“That makes it easier for you, doesn’t? To write me off as an irrelevance?”

“Do you have the TE dates you promised me?”

“Yes.” She passed a card to him. “I don’t break my promises, Doctor. But I’m afraid the little respect I have for you is in serious danger of vanishing altogether.”

Sylveste glanced at the trapped-electron summary scrolling down the card as he flexed it between thumb and forefinger. Some part of his mind was entirely unable to detach itself from what the numbers represented, even as he spoke to Pascale. “When your father told me about the biography, he said the woman who would be authoring it was someone whose illusions were on the point of being shattered.”

She stood up. “I think we should leave this until another time.”

“No; wait.” Sylveste reached out and held her hand. “I’m sorry. I need to talk to you about this, do you understand?”

She flinched at the contact, then slowly relaxed. Her expression was still watchful. “About what?”

“This.” He tapped his thumb against the TE summary. “It’s very interesting.”

Volyova’s shuttle was approaching a shipyard; up near the Lagrange point between Yellowstone and its moon, Marco’s Eye. About a dozen lighthuggers were parked in the yard; more ships than Khouri had ever seen in her life. At the yard’s hub was a major carousel, smaller in-system vessels attached to the wheel’s rim like suckling pigs. A few of the lighthuggers were encased in skeletal support structures for major ice-shield or Conjoiner-drive overhauls (Conjoiner ships were here, too: sleek and black, as if chiselled from space itself); but the rest of the starships were basically drifting, following lazy and slow orbits around the Lagrange point’s centre of gravity. Khouri guessed that there must be complex rules of etiquette governing the way those ships were parked; who had to move out the way of whom to avoid a collision which a computer might predict days in advance. The expenditure of fuel which might have to be burned to nudge a ship off a collision course would be tiny against the profit margin of a typical trade stopover… but the loss of face would be much harder to amortise. There had never been as many ships as this parked around Sky’s Edge, but even then she had heard of skirmishes between crews over issues of parking priority and trade rights. It was a common groundsider’s misapprehension that Ultras were a homogeneous splinter of humanity. In truth, they were as factional, and as paranoid about one another, as any other human strain.

Now they were approaching Volyova’s ship.

The thing, like all the other lighthuggers, was improbably streamlined. Space only approximated a vacuum at slow speeds. Up near lightspeed—which was where these ships spent most of their time—it was like cutting through a howling gale of atmosphere. That was why they looked like daggers: conic hull tapering to a needle-sharp prow to punch the interstellar medium, with two Conjoiner engines braced at the back on spars like an ornate hilt. The ship was sheathed in ice, so glisteningly pure that it looked like diamond. The shuttle swooped in low over Volyova’s ship, and for a moment Khouri apprehended the ship’s vastness. It was like flying over a city, not another vessel. Then a door irised open in the hull, revealing a glowing docking bay. Volyova guided the shuttle home with expert taps on her thruster controls, latching onto a berthing cradle. Khouri heard thumps as umbilicals and docking connectors thudded home.

Volyova was first out of her seat restraints. “Shall we step aboard?” she asked, with something that was not quite the politeness Khouri had been expecting.

They propelled themselves through the shuttle and out into the spacious environment of the ship. They were still in free-fall, but at the end of the corridor they were facing Khouri could see a complex arrangement where the stationary and rotating sections were joined together.

She was beginning to feel nauseous, but she was damned if she was going to let Volyova see this.

“Before we go ahead,” the Ultra woman said, “there’s someone you have to meet.”

She was looking over Khouri’s shoulder, back towards the corridor that led to the shuttle which had brought them aboard. Khouri heard the shuffling sound of someone working hand-over-hand along the rails which ribbed the passage. But that could only mean that there had been another person aboard the shuttle.

Something was wrong here.

Volyova’s attitude was not that of someone who was trying to impress a potential recruit. It was more as if she cared little what Khouri thought; as if it was of no consequence at all. Khouri looked around, in time to see the Komuso who had come with them in the elevator. His face was lost under the expressionless wicker helmet they all wore. He carried his shakuhachi in the crook of his arm.

Khouri started to speak, but Volyova silenced her. “Welcome aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, Ana Khouri. You’ve just become our new Gunnery Officer.” Then she nodded towards the Komuso. “Do me a favour, will you, Triumvir?”

“Anything particular?”

“Knock her out before she tries to kill either one of us.”

The last thing Khouri saw was a golden blur of bamboo.

Sylveste thought he smelt Pascale’s perfume before his eyes separated her from the crowd outside the prison building. He made a reflex move towards her, but the two burly militiamen who had escorted him from his room quickly restrained him. Catcalls and muffled insults came from the cordoned-off crowd, but Sylveste barely noticed them.

Pascale kissed him diplomatically, half hiding the conjunction of their mouths behind her lace-gloved hand.

“Before you ask,” she said, her voice barely audible above the noise of the crowd, “I have no more idea what this is about than you.”

“Is Nils behind it?”

“Who else? Only he’s got the clout to get you out of that place for more than a day.”

“Pity he’s not so keen to prevent me returning.”

“Oh, he might—if he didn’t have to placate his own people, and the opposition. It’s about time you stopped thinking of him as your worst enemy, you know.” They stepped into the sterile hush of the waiting car. The vehicle was adapted from one of the smaller surface exploration buggies, four balloon wheels at the extremities of its air-smoothed body, comms gear stowed in a matt-black hump on the roof. It was painted Inundationist purple, with Hokusai wave pendants mounted on the front.

“If it wasn’t for my father,” Pascale continued, “you’d have died during the coup. He protected you from your worst enemies.”

“That doesn’t make him a very competent revolutionary.”

“And what does that say about the regime he managed to overthrow?”

Sylveste shrugged. “Fair point, I suppose.”

A guard climbed into the front seat, behind a partition of armoured glass, and then they were moving, rushing through the crowd, speeding towards the edge of the city. They passed through one of the arboreta, then descended down one of the ramps which passed beneath the perimeter. Two other government cars accompanied them, also modified from surface buggies, but painted black and with masked militia riding postilion, holding rifles to their shoulders. After travelling for a kilometre along an unlit tunnel, the convoy arrived in an airlock and halted while the breathable city air was exchanged for Resurgam’s atmosphere. The guards remained at their posts, pausing only to adjust their breather masks and goggles. Then the vehicles moved on, ascending back towards the surface. They arrived in greyish daylight, surrounded by concrete blast walls, driving across a surface patterned in red and green lights.

An aircraft was waiting for them, parked on the apron on a tripod of skids, the undersides of its wings already uncomfortably bright to look at, already beginning to ionise the boundary layer of air below them. The driver reached into a dashboard compartment and removed breather masks, passing them back through the security grill, motioning for them to place them over their faces.

“Not that you have to,” he said. “Oxygen’s up two hundred per cent since you were last outside Resurgam City, Doctor Sylveste. Some people have breathed naked atmosphere for tens of minutes with no longterm effects.”

“Those must be the dissidents I keep hearing about,” Sylveste said. “The renegades Girardieau betrayed during the coup. The ones that are supposed to be communicating with True Path’s leaders in Cuvier. I don’t envy them. The dust must clog their lungs almost as much as it clogs their minds.”

The escort looked unimpressed. “Scavenger enzymes process the dust particles. It’s old Martian biotech. Anyway; dust levels are down. All the moisture we pumped into the atmosphere allowed the dust particles to bind into bigger grains which aren’t so easily transported by the wind.”

“Very good,” Sylveste applauded. “Pity it’s still such a miserable hellhole.”

He palmed the mask to his face and waited for the door to open. A moderate wind was blowing, no more than a stinging abrasion.

They dashed across the ground.

The aircraft was a welcome oasis of space and quiet, its sumptuous interior outfitted in governmental purple. The occupants of the other two cars boarded by a different door, Sylveste catching a glimpse of Nils Girardieau crossing the apron. Girardieau walked with a swaying motion that began somewhere near his shoulders, like a pair of architect’s dividers being walked across a drawing board point to point. There was a momentum to him, like a glacier compressed into a man’s volume. The leader vanished out of sight and then a few minutes later the visible edge of the closest wing turned violet, enveloped in a nimbus of excited ions, and the aircraft climbed from the apron.

Sylveste sketched a window for himself and watched Cuvier—or Resurgam City, as they now called it—grow small beneath him. It was the first time he had seen the place in its entirety since the coup, back before the statue of the French naturalist had been toppled. The old simplicity of the colony was gone. A froth of human habitation extended messily beyond the dome perimeters; air-sealed structures linked by covered roads and walkways. There were many smaller outlying domes, emerald-green with plantations. Even a few undomed strips of trial organisms laid out in eye-hurting geometric patterns, waiting to be unleashed far beyond the city.

They circled the city and then took off on a northerly course. Lacework canyons furled below. Occasionally they overflew a small settlement, usually just an opaque dome or streamlined shack, the glare from the wings momentarily illuminating whatever they overflew. Mostly it was wilderness, uncrossed by road, pipe or power line.

Sylveste catnapped intermittently, waking to see tropical deserts of ice and imported tundra washing below. Presently a settlement came over the horizon and the aircraft made loitering spirals towards the ground. Sylveste moved his window to get a better look.

“I recognise this area. It’s where we found the obelisk.”

“Yes,” Pascale said.

The landscape was craggy and mostly unvegetated, the horizon ruined by uprearing broken arches and improbable rock pillars, all of which looked on the point of imminent collapse. There was little flat ground, just deep fissures, like a calcified unmade bed. They came in over a solidified lava stream then landed on a flat hexagonal pad surrounded by armoured surface buildings. It was only midday, yet the dust in the air attenuated the sunlight so severely that it was necessary to bathe the pad in floodlights. Militia dashed across the ground to meet the flight, hiding their eyes against the light from the aircraft’s underside.

Sylveste grabbed his mask, regarded it disdainfully, then left it on the seat. He needed no help making it the short distance to the building, and if he did, no one was going to know about it.

The militia escorted them into the shack. It was years since Sylveste had been this close to Girardieau. He was shocked at how small his adversary now seemed. Girardieau was built like some piece of squat mining machinery. He looked capable of scrabbling his way through solid basalt. His red hair was short and wirelike, sprinkled with white. His eyes were wide and quizzical, like a startled Pekinese pup.

“Strange allegiances,” he said, as one of the guards sealed the door behind them. “Who’d have thought you and I would ever find ourselves with so much in common, Dan?”

“Less than you imagine,” Sylveste said.

Girardieau led the team forward through a ribbed corridor lined with discarded machines, grimed beyond recognition. “I suppose you’re wondering what all this is about.”

“I have my suspicions.”

Girardieau’s laughter boomed off the derelict equipment around them. “Remember that obelisk they dug up hereabouts? Of course—it was you who pointed out the phenomenological difficulty with the TE dating method used on the rock.”

“Yes,” Sylveste said tartly.

The implications of the TE dating had been enormous. No natural crystalline structure was ever completely perfect in its lattice geometry. There would always be gaps in the lattice where atoms were missing, and in those holes, electrons would gradually build up over time, knocked out of the rest of the lattice by cosmic-ray bombardments and natural radioactivity. Since the holes tended to fill up with electrons at a steady rate, the number of trapped electrons provided a dating method which could be used on inorganic artefacts. There was a catch, of course: the TE method was only useful if the traps had been emptied at some point in the past. Luckily, firing or exposure to light was enough to bleach—empty—the outermost traps in the crystal. TE analysis of the obelisk had shown that all the surface-layer traps had been bleached at the same time, which happened to be nine hundred and ninety thousand years earlier, within the errors of the measurement. Only something like the Event could have bleached an object as large as the obelisk.

There was nothing new in this; thousands of Amarantin artefacts had been dated back to the Event using the same technique. But none of them had been buried deliberately. The obelisk, on the other hand, had been emplaced deliberately in a stone sarcophagus after it had been bleached.

After the Event.

Even in the new regime, this realisation had been enough to draw attention to the obelisk. It had stimulated renewed interest in the inscriptions over the last year. On his own, Sylveste’s interpretation had been sketchy at best, but now what remained of the archaeological community came to his aid. There was a new freedom in Cuvier; Girardieau’s regime had relaxed some of its proscriptions on Amarantin research, even as the True Path opposition grew more fanatical.

Strange allegiances, as Girardieau had said.

“Once we had an idea of what the obelisk was telling us,” Girardieau said, “we sectioned the whole area and excavated down sixty or seventy metres. We found dozens more of them—all bleached prior to burial, all carrying basically the same inscriptions. It isn’t a record of something that happened in this area at all. It’s a record of something buried here.”

“Something big,” Sylveste said. “Something they must have planned before the Event—perhaps even buried before it, and then placed the markers afterwards. The last cultural act of a society poised on annihilation. Just how big, Girardieau?”

“Very.” And then Girardieau told him how they had surveyed the area first using an array of thumpers: devices for generating ground-penetrating Rayleigh waves, sensitive to the density of buried objects. They’d had to use the largest thumpers, Girardieau said, which meant that the depth of the object had to be at the extreme range of the technique; hundreds of metres down. Later they had brought in the colony’s most sensitive imaging gravitometers, and only then had they gained any idea of what it was they were seeking.

It was nothing small.

“Is this dig connected with the Inundationist program?”

“Completely independent. Pure science, in other words. Does that surprise you? I always promised we’d never abandon the Amarantin studies. Maybe if you’d believed me all those years ago we’d be working together now, opposing the True Pathers—the real enemy.”

Sylveste said, “You showed no interest in the Amarantin until the obelisk was discovered. But that scared you, didn’t it? Because for once it was incontrovertible evidence; nothing I could have faked or manipulated. For once you had to allow the possibility that I might have been right all along.”

They stepped into a capacious elevator, outfitted with plush seats, Inundationist aquatints on the walls. A thick metal door hummed shut. One of Girardieau’s aides flipped open a panel and palmed a button. The floor fell away sickeningly, their bodies only sluggishly catching up.

“How far down are we going?”

“Not far,” Girardieau said. “Only a couple of kilometres.”

When Khouri awakened they had already left orbit around Yellowstone. She could see the planet through a porthole in her quarters, much smaller than it had looked before. The region around Chasm City was a freckle on the surface. The Rust Belt was only a tawny smoke ring, too far away for any of its component structures to be visible. There would be no stopping the ship now: it would accelerate steadily at one gee until it had left the Epsilon Eridani system completely, and it would not stop accelerating until it was moving barely a whisker below the speed of light. It was no accident that they called these vessels lighthuggers.

She had been tricked.

“It’s a complication,” the Mademoiselle said, after long minutes of silence. “But no more than that.”

Khouri rubbed at the painful lump on her skull where the Komuso—Sajaki was his name, she now knew—had knocked her out with his shakuhachi.

“What do you mean, a complication?” she shouted. “They’ve kidnapped me, you stupid bitch!”

“Keep your voice down, dear girl. They don’t know about me now and there’s no reason they have to in the future.” The entoptic image smiled jaggedly. “In fact, I’m probably your best friend right now. You should do your best to safeguard our mutual secret.” She examined her fingernails. “Now, let’s approach this rationally. What was our objective?”

“You know damn well.”

“Yes. You were to infiltrate this crew and travel with them to Resurgam. What is now your status?”

“The Volyova bitch keeps calling me her recruit.”

“In other words, your infiltration has been spectacularly successful.” She was strolling nonchalantly around the room now, one hand on her hip, the other tapping an index finger against her lower lip. “And where exactly are we now headed?”

“I’ve no reason to suspect it isn’t still Resurgam.”

“So in all the essential details, nothing has happened to compromise the mission.”

Khouri wanted to strangle the woman, except it would have been like strangling a mirage. “Has it occurred to you that they might have their own agenda? You know what Volyova said just before I was knocked out? She said I was the new Gunnery Officer. What do you suppose she meant by that?”

“It explains why they were looking for military experience in your background.”

“And what if I don’t go along with her plans?”

“I doubt it matters to her.” The Mademoiselle stopped her strolling, adopting an expression of seriousness from her internal compendium of facial modes. “They’re Ultras, you see. Ultras have access to technologies considered taboo on colony worlds.”

“Such as?”

“Instruments for manipulating loyalty might be among them.”

“Well, thanks for giving me this important information well in advance.”

“Don’t worry—I always knew there was a chance of this.” The Mademoiselle paused and touched the side of her own head. “I took precautions accordingly.”

“That’s a relief.”

“The implant I put inside you will fabricate antigens for their neural medichines. More than that, it will also broadcast subliminal reinforcement messages into your subconscious mind. Volyova’s loyalty therapies will be completely neutralised.”

“So why bother even telling me this is going to happen?”

“Because, dear girl, once Volyova begins the treatment, you’ll have to let her think it’s working.”

The descent took only a few minutes, the air-pressure and temperature stabilised at surface normal. The shaft which the car descended was walled in diamond, ten metres wide. Occasionally there were recesses, stash-holes for equipment or small operations shacks, or switching points where two elevators could squeeze past one another before continuing their journeys. Servitors were working the diamond, extruding it in atomic-thickness filaments from spinnerettes. The filaments zipped neatly into place under the action of protein-sized molecular machines. Looking through the glass ceiling, the faintly translucent shaft seemed to reach towards infinity.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d found this?” Sylveste asked. “You must have been here for months at the very least.”

“Let’s just say your input wasn’t critical,” Girardieau said, and then added, “until now, that is.”

At the shaft’s bottom, they exited into another corridor, silver-clad, cleaner and cooler than the one they had walked through at ground level. Windows along its length offered glimpses into a disarmingly large cavern filled with geodesic scaffolding and industrial structures. Sylveste was able to freezeframe the view with his eyes, then do some image-processing and expand the captured view when he was ten paces further along the corridor. For that he offered grudging thanks to Calvin.

What he saw was enough to quicken his heartbeat.

Now they pushed through a pair of armoured doors ghosted by security entoptics, writhing snakes which seemed to hiss and spit at the group. They trooped on through into an ante-room with another set of doors at the far end, flanked by militia. Girardieau waved them aside, then turned to Sylveste. The roundness of his eyes, the Pekinese aspect of his features, suddenly made him think of a painted Japanese devil on the point of belching fire.

“Now this,” Girardieau said, “is where you either ask for your money back or stand in awed silence.”

“Impress me,” Sylveste said, with as much droll nonchalance as he could muster, despite his racing pulse and feverish internal excitement.

Girardieau opened the rear doors. They walked into a room half the size of the freight elevator, empty apart from a row of simple escritoires inlaid into the wall. A headset and wraparound mike lay on one of them, next to a compad displaying pencil-sketch engineering diagrams. The walls sloped outwards, the area of the ceiling greater than the floor. Combined with the huge glass windows set in three of the walls, it made Sylveste feel as if he was in the gondola of an airship, cruising under a starless night sky across an unnavigated ocean.

Girardieau killed the lights, enabling them to see what lay beyond the glass.

Floods swung from the roof of the chamber beyond, curving down towards the Amarantin object which lay below. It was emerging from one nearly sheer wall of the cave; a hemisphere of pure black, hemmed by gantries and geodesic scaffolding. Scabrous lumps of hardened magma still clung to it, yet across the large areas where the magma had been chipped away, the thing was as smooth and dark as obsidian. The underlying shape was spherical; at least four hundred metres wide, although more than half still lay entombed.

“You know who made this?” Girardieau said, finally whispering. He did not wait for an answer: “It’s older than human language, but my goddamn wedding ring has more scratches on it.”

Girardieau led the party back to the elevator shaft for the final short descent down to the operations floor of the hollowed-out chamber. The ride lasted no more than thirty seconds, but for Sylveste it seemed like a grindingly slow Homeric odyssey. The object felt like his own personal prize; as hard-won as if he had unearthed it with his own bloodied fingernails. It loomed over them now, its curved, rock-encrusted side jutting unsupported into the air. There was a faint groove scored around the object, running obliquely from one side to the other. It looked like little more than a shallow hairline fracture from where he was, but it was a metre or so wide, and probably just as deep.

Girardieau led them into the nearest chock: a concrete structure with its own inner rooms and operations levels abutting the object. Inside they took another elevator, rising up through the building into the haze of scaffolding which erupted from it. Sylveste’s stomach crawled with conflicting impulses of claustro-and agoraphobia. He felt hemmed in by the unthinkable megatonnes of rock looming hundreds of metres over his head, while simultaneously racked with vertigo as they ascended the scaffolding high up the side of the object.

Small shacks and equipment huts floated in the geodesic framework. The lift connected with one of these structures and they trooped out into a complex of rooms still abuzz with the afterhum of recently curtailed activity. All the warning signs and notices were decals or painted, the area too makeshift for entoptic generators.

They walked over a tremoring girderwork bridge which extended through a loom of scaffolding towards the black skin of the Amarantin object. They were halfway up the object’s height, level with the groove. The object no longer seemed spherical; they were too close for that. It was a single black wall blocking their progress, as vast and depthless as the view of Lascaille’s Shroud he remembered after he had travelled from Spindrift. They walked onwards, until the bridge took them into the groove.

The path immediately swung to the right. On three sides—to the left, and above and below—they were hemmed in by the eerily unmarked black substance of the artefact. They walked on a trelliswork path fixed to the underlying floor via suction pads, since the alien material was nearly frictionless. To the right was a waist-high safety railing and then several hundred metres of nothing. Every five or six metres on the inside wall was a lamp, attached via epoxy pads, and every twenty or so metres was a panel marked with cryptic symbols.

They continued along the steep incline of the groove for three or four minutes until Girardieau brought them to a halt. The place where they had arrived was a tangled nexus of power lines, lamps and communications consoles. The left-hand wall of the groove folded inwards here.

“Took us weeks to find the way in,” Girardieau said. “Originally the trench was plugged by basalt. It was only after we’d chipped it all out that we found this one place where the basalt seemed to continue inwards, as if it were plugging some kind of radial tunnel which emerged in the trench.”

“You’ve been busy little beavers, I can see.”

“Digging it out was hard work,” Girardieau said. “Excavating the trench was easy by comparison, but here we had to drill and remove material through the same tiny hole. Some of us wanted to use boser torches to cut a few secondary tunnels in to make the job easier, but we never went that far. And our mineral-tipped drills couldn’t touch the stuff.”

Sylveste’s scientific curiosity momentarily beat his urge to belittle Girardieau’s attempts at impressing him. “You know what this material is?”

“Basically carbon, with some iron and niobium and a few rare metals as trace elements. But we don’t know the structure. It’s not simply some allotropic form of diamond we haven’t invented yet, or even hyperdiamond. Maybe the top few tenths of a millimetre are close to diamond, but the stuff seems to undergo some kind of complex lattice transformation deeper down. The ultimate form—far deeper than we’ve yet sampled—may not even be a true crystal at all. It could be that the lattice breaks up into trillions of carbon-heavy macromolecules, locked together in a co-acting mass. Sometimes these molecules seem to work their way to the surface along lattice flaws, which is the only time we see them.”

“You’re talking as if it’s purposeful.”

“Maybe it is. Maybe the molecules are like little enzymes tooled-up to repair the diamond crust when it becomes damaged.” He shrugged. “But we’ve never isolated one of the macromolecules, or at least not in a stable form. They seem to lose coherence as soon as they’re removed from the lattice. They fall apart before we can get a look inside them.”

“What you’re describing,” Sylveste said, “sounds very much like a form of molecular technology.”

Girardieau smiled at Sylveste, seeming to acknowledge the private game in which they were enmeshed.

“Except we know that the Amarantin were far too primitive for such a thing.”

“Of course.”

“Of course.” Girardieau smiled again, only this time to the group as a whole. “Shall we forge inwards?”

Navigating the tunnel system which led from the groove was trickier than Sylveste had at first imagined. He had assumed that the radial tunnel would continue inwards for the necessary distance to traverse the shell of the object, and they would then enter the thing’s hollow interior. But it was not like that at all. The thing was a deliberate labyrinth. The path did progress radially, for perhaps ten metres, but then it jerked to the left and soon branched into multiple tunnel systems. The routes were colour-coded with adhesive markers, but the coding system was too cryptic to make much sense to Sylveste. Within five minutes he was thoroughly disorientated, though he had the suspicion that they had not strayed very deep into the object. It was as if the tunnel system was the work of a demented maggot which preferred the part of the apple immediately under the skin. Eventually, however, they crossed what seemed to be a regular fissure in the fabric of the object. Girardieau explained that the thing was structured in a series of concentric shells. They continued to worm their way through another confusing tunnel system while Girardieau regaled them with dubious stories about the initial exploration of the object.

They had known about it for two years—ever since Sylveste had drawn Pascale’s attention to the oddity of the obelisk’s burial sequence. Excavating the chamber had taken most of that time, detailed study of the object’s warrenlike interior only happening in the last few months. There had been a few deaths in those early days. Nothing mysterious, it eventually transpired—just teams getting lost in unmapped sections of the labyrinth and stumbling into vertical shafts in the tunnel system where the safety flooring had not yet been fixed. One worker had starved to death when she ventured too far without laying a breadcrumb trail behind her—servitors found her two weeks after she went missing. She had been wandering in a series of doodle-like circles, at times only a few minutes from the safe zones.

Progress through the final concentric shell was slower and more deliberate than the four they traversed before it. They worked downwards, eventually reaching a gratifyingly horizontal stretch of tunnel, the far end of which was milky with light.

Girardieau spoke to his sleeve and the light dimmed.

They moved on in semi-darkness. Gradually their breathing ceased to echo from the walls as the confining space opened out. The only sound came from the laboured purring of nearby air pumps.

“Hold on,” Girardieau said. “Here it comes.”

Sylveste steeled himself for the inevitable disorientation when the lights returned. For once he did not mind Girardieau’s theatrics. It permitted him a sense of discovery, albeit at second hand. Of course, he alone understood this surrogacy for what it was. But he did not begrudge the others the moment. That would have been churlish, for after all, they would never know what true discovery felt like. He almost pitied them, though in that moment the sight revealed in the lights purged all normal thought.

It was an alien city.