Revelation Space

NINE

“Sorry about the eyes,” the voice said, after an eternity of pain and motion.

For a moment Sylveste drifted in confused thought, trying to arrange the order of recent events. Somewhere in his recent past lay the wedding, the murders, their flight into the labyrinth, the tranquilliser gas, but nothing connected with anything else. He felt as if he were trying to reassemble a biography from a handful of unnumbered fragments, a biography whose events seemed tantalisingly familiar.

The unbelievable pain in his head when the man had pointed the weapon at him—

He was blind.

The world was gone, replaced by an unmoving grey mosaic; the emergency shutdown mode of his eyes. Severe damage had been wrought on Calvin’s handiwork. The eyes had not merely crashed; they had been assaulted.

“It was better that you not see us,” said the voice, very close now. “We could have blindfolded you, but we weren’t sure what those little beauties could do. Maybe they could see through any fabric we used. It was simpler this way. Focused mag pulse… probably hurt a bit. Blitzed a few circuits. Sorry for that.”

He managed not to sound sorry at all.

“What about my wife?”

“Girardieau’s kid? She’s okay. Nothing so drastic was required in her case.”

Perhaps because he was blind, Sylveste was more sensitive to the motion of his environment. They were in an aircraft, he guessed, steering through canyons and valleys to avoid dust storms. He wondered who owned the aircraft, who was now in charge. Were Girardieau government forces still holding Cuvier, or had the whole colony fallen to the True Path uprising? Neither was particularly appealing. He might have struck an alliance with Girardieau, but he was dead now and Sylveste had always had enemies in the Inundationist power structure; people who resented the way Girardieau had allowed Sylveste to live after the first coup.

Still, he was alive. And he had been blind before. The state was not unfamiliar to him; he knew it was something he could survive.

“Where are we going?” he asked. They had bound him with tight, circulation-inhibiting restraints. “Back to Cuvier?”

“What if we were?” asked the voice. “I’m surprised you’d be in much of a hurry to get there.”

The aircraft tilted and “banked sickeningly, plummeting and jerking aloft like a toy yacht in a squall. Sylveste tried to relate the turns to his mental map of the canyon systems around Cuvier, but it was hopeless. He was probably much closer to the buried Amarantin city than home, but he could also be anywhere on the planet by now.

“Are you…” Sylveste hesitated. He wondered if he ought to fake some ignorance about his situation, then crushed the idea. There was little he needed to fake. “Are you Inundationists?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re True Path.”

“Give the man a round of applause.”

“Are you running things now?”

“The whole show.” The guard tried to put some swagger into his answer, but Sylveste caught the momentary hesitation. Uncertainty, Sylveste thought. Probably they had no real idea how well their takeover was going. What he said could have been true, but, given that communications across the planet might have been damaged, there was no way of knowing; no way of confirming the thoroughness of their control. It could easily be that Girardieau-loyal forces retained the capital, or another faction entirely. These people must be acting out of faith, hoping that their allies had also succeeded.

They could, of course, be completely right.

Fingers placed the mask over his face, its hard edges knifing into his skin. The discomfort was tolerable, though: against the permanent pain from his damaged eyes it hardly registered at all.

Breathing with the mask in place took some effort. He had to work hard to draw air through the dust-collector built into the mask’s snout. Two-thirds of the oxygen which entered his lungs would now come from Resurgam’s atmosphere, while the remaining third came from a pressurised canister slung beneath the proboscis. It was doped with enough carbon dioxide to trigger the body’s breathing response.

He had barely felt the aircraft touch down—had not even been certain that they had arrived somewhere until the door was opened. Now the guard undid his restraints and shoved him peremptorily towards the coldness and the wind of the exit.

Was it dark or daytime out there?

He had no idea; no way of telling.

“Where are we?” he called. The mask muffled his voice and made him sound moronic.

“You imagine it makes any difference?” The guard’s voice was not distorted. He was breathing the air directly, Sylveste realised. “Even if the city was within walking distance—which it isn’t—you wouldn’t get beyond spitting distance of where you are now without killing yourself.”

“I want to speak to my wife.”

The guard grabbed his arm and pivoted it back to the point where Sylveste felt it was going to be dislocated. He stumbled, but the guard refused to let him fall. “You’ll speak to her when we’re good and ready. Told you she was fine, didn’t I? You don’t trust me or something?”

“I just watched you kill my new father-in-law. What do you think?”

“I think you should keep your head down.”

A hand ducked him, forcing him into shelter. The wind ceased stinging his ears; voices suddenly had an echoey quality .Behind, a pressure door hove shut and amputated the sound of the storm. Though blind, he sensed that Pascale was nowhere near him, and hoped that that meant she had been escorted separately, and that his captors were not lying when they said she was safe.

Someone snatched the mask away.

What followed was a forced march down narrow, shoulder-bruising corridors which stank of brutal hygiene. His escort helped him descend rattling stairwells and ride two lurching elevators down an unguessable distance. They exited into an echoey subterranean space, the air metallic and breezy .They walked past a gusting air duct; from the surface came the shrill proclamation of the wind. Intermittently he heard voices, and though he thought he recognised intonations, he could not begin to put names to the sounds.

Finally there was a room.

He was sure it was painted white. He could almost sense the blank cubic pressure of its walls.

Someone stepped next to him; cabbage breath. He felt fingers touch his face, delicately. They were sheathed in something textureless, reeking faintly of disinfectant. The fingers touched his eyes, tapping their facets with something hard.

Each tap was a small nova of pain behind his temples.

“Fix them when I say,” said a voice which, beyond any doubt, he knew. It was female, but with a throaty quality which rendered it almost masculine. “For now keep him blind.”

Footsteps left; the speaker must have dismissed the escort with a silent gesture. Alone now, with no reference points, Sylveste felt his balance go. No matter how he moved, the grey matrix remained in front of him. His legs felt weak, but there was nothing with which to support himself. For all he knew he was standing on a plank of wood ten storeys above the floor.

He began to topple, arms flailing pathetically.

Something snatched at his forearm and stabilised him. He heard a pulsing rasp, like someone sawing through timber.

His breathing.

He heard a moist click, and knew that she had opened her mouth to speak again. Now she must be smiling, contemplating.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“You hopeless bastard. You don’t even remember my voice.”

Her fingers gouged his forearm, expertly locating nerves and pinching them in the appropriate place. He let out a doglike yelp; it was the first stimulus which had made him forget the pain in his eyes. “I swear,” Sylveste said, “I don’t know you.”

She released the pressure. As his nerves and tendons sprang back into place there was more pain, subsiding into a numb discomfort which gloved his entire arm and shoulder.

“You should,” said the wrecked voice. “I’m someone you think died a long time ago, Dan, buried under a landslide.”

“Sluka,” he said.

Volyova was on her way to the Captain when the disturbing thing happened. Now that the rest of the crew were sleeping out the journey to Resurgam—including Khouri—Volyova had again fallen into her old habit of conversing with the slightly warmed Captain; elevating his brain temperature by the fraction of a kelvin necessary to allow him some kind of consciousness, however fragmentary. This had been her routine now for the better part of two years, and would continue for another two and half, until the ship arrived around Resurgam and the others came out of reefersleep. Of course, the conversations were infrequent—she could not risk warming the Captain too often, for with each warming the plague claimed a little more of both him and the surrounding matter—but they were little oases of human interaction in weeks otherwise filled only with the contemplating of viruses, weapons and the general matter of the ship’s ailing fabric.

So, in her own way, Volyova looked forward to their talks, even though the Captain seldom showed much sign of remembering what they had talked about previously. Worse, a certain frostiness had entered their relationship of late. Partly this was due to Sajaki’s lack of fortune in locating Sylveste in the Yellowstone system, condemning the Captain to another half-decade of torment at the very least—or longer, if Sylveste could not be found on Resurgam either, which struck Volyova as an at least theoretical possibility. What made matters difficult was that the Captain kept asking her how the search for Sylveste was going, and she kept having to break the news to him that it was not going as auspiciously as one might wish. The Captain would become sullen at that point—she could hardly blame him for that—and the tone of the conversation would darken, often to the point where the Captain became completely incommunicative. When, days or weeks later, she tried to speak to him again, he would have forgotten what she had told him before and they would go through the same process again, except this time Volyova would do her best to break the bad news more gently, or put some kind of optimistic spin on it.

The other thing that was casting a shadow over their talks stemmed from Volyova’s side, which was her nagging insistence on probing the Captain about the visit he and Sajaki had made to the Pattern Jugglers. It was only in the last few years that Volyova had become interested in the details of the visit, for it now seemed to her that Sajaki’s change of personality had occurred around the same time. Of course, having one’s mind altered was the whole point of visiting the Jugglers—but why would Sajaki have allowed the aliens to change him for the worse? He was crueller than he had been before; despotic and single-minded where once he had been a firm but fair leader; a valued member of the Triumvirate. Now she hardly trusted him at all. And yet—instead of casting some light on the change—the Captain deflected her questions aggressively, and left her even more obsessed with what had happened.

She was on her way to speak to him, then, with these things foremost in her mind; wondering how she would deal with the inevitable question about Sylveste, and what new approach she would take when probing the Captain about the Jugglers. And, because she was taking her usual route, she was obliged to pass through the cache-chamber.

And she saw that one of the weapons—one of the most feared, as it happened—appeared to have moved.

“There have been developments,” said the Mademoiselle. “Both fortuitous and otherwise.”

It was a surprise to be conscious at all; let alone to hear the Mademoiselle. The very last thing Khouri remembered was climbing into a reefersleep casket with Volyova looking down on her, tapping commands into her bracelet. Now she could neither see nor feel anything, not even a sense of cold, yet she knew she was still—somehow—in the reefer, and still by some measure asleep.

“Where—when—am I?”

“Still aboard the ship; about halfway to Resurgam. We are moving very quickly now; less than one per cent slower than light. I have raised your neural temperature slightly—enough for conversation.”

“Won’t Volyova notice?”

“Her noticing may be the least of our problems, I am afraid. Do you remember the cache, how I found something hiding in the gunnery architecture?” The Mademoiselle did not wait for an answer. “The message that the bloodhounds brought back was not easy to decipher. Over the subsequent three years… their auguries have become clearer, now.”

Khouri had a vision of the Mademoiselle disembowelling her dogs, studying the topology of the outspilled entrails.

“So is the stowaway real?”

“Oh yes. And hostile too, though we’ll come to that in a moment.”

“Any idea what it is?”

“No,” she said, though the answer was guarded. “But what I have learnt is almost as interesting.”

What the Mademoiselle had to say related to the gunnery’s topology. The gunnery was an enormously complex assemblage of computers: layers accreted over decades of shiptime. It was doubtful that any one mind—even Volyova’s—could have grasped more than the very basics of that topology; how the various layers interpenetrated each other and folded back on themselves. But in one sense the gunnery was easy to visualise, since it was almost totally disconnected from the rest of the ship, which was why most of the higher cache-weapon functions could only be accessed by someone physically present in the gunnery seat. The gunnery was surrounded by a firewall, and data could only pass from the rest of the ship to the gunnery. The reasons for this were tactical; since the gunnery’s weapons (and not just those in the cache) would project outside the ship when they were used, they potentially offered routes for enemy weapons to penetrate the ship by viral means. So the gunnery was isolated: protected from the rest of the ship’s dataspace by a one-way trapdoor. The door only allowed data to enter the gunnery from the rest of the ship; nothing within the gunnery could traverse it.

“Now,” said the Mademoiselle, “given that we have discovered something in the gunnery, I invite you to draw the logical conclusion.”

“Whatever it was got there by mistake.”

“Yes.” The Mademoiselle sounded pleased, almost as if the thought had not struck her. “I suppose we must consider the possibility that the entity found its way into the gunnery via the weapons, but I think it is far more likely it entered via the trapdoor. I also happen to know when the door was last traversed.”

“How long ago?”

“Eighteen years ago.” Before Khouri could interject, the Mademoiselle added, “Shiptime, that is. In worldtime, I estimate between eighty and ninety years prior to your recruitment.”

“Sylveste,” Khouri said, wonderingly. “Sajaki said that the reason Sylveste went missing was because they brought him aboard this ship, to fix Captain Brannigan. Do the dates tie together?”

“Conclusively, I would say. This would have been 2460—twenty or so years after Sylveste returned from the Shrouders.”

“And you think he brought—whatever it is—with him?”

“All we know is what Sajaki told us, which is that Sylveste accepted the Calvin simulation in order to heal Captain Brannigan. At some point during the operation Sylveste must have been connected to the ship’s dataspace. Perhaps that was how the stowaway gained access. Thereafter—very soon after, I suspect—it entered the gunnery through the one-way door.”

“And it’s been there ever since?”

“So it appears.”

This seemed to be a pattern: whenever Khouri felt she had things ordered in her head, or at least approximately so, some new fact would dash her scheme to shreds. She felt like a mediaeval astronomer, creating ever more intricate clockwork cosmologies to incorporate every new observational oddity. Now, in some way she could not begin to guess, Sylveste was related to the gunnery. At least she could take comfort in her ignorance. Even the Mademoiselle was foxed.

“You mentioned the thing was hostile,” she said carefully, not really sure she wanted to ask any more questions, in case the answers were too difficult to assimilate.

“Yes.” Hesitating now. “The dogs were a mistake,” she said. “I was too impetuous. I should have realised that Sun Stealer—”

“Sun Stealer?”

“What it calls itself. The stowaway, I mean.”

This was bad. How did she know the thing’s name? Fleetingly, Khouri remembered that Volyova had once asked her if that name meant anything to her. But there was more to it than that. It was as if she had been hearing that name in her dreams for some time now. Khouri opened her mouth to speak, but the Mademoiselle was already talking. “It used the dogs to escape, Khouri. Or at least for a part of itself to escape. It used them to get into your head.”

Sylveste had no reliable way of marking the time in his new prison. All he remained certain of was that many days had passed since his capture. He suspected he was being drugged, forced into comalike sleep, barren of dreams. When he did dream, which was rarely, he had sight, but his dreams always revolved around his imminent blindness and the preciousness of the sight he retained. When he awoke he saw only grey, but after some time—days, he guessed—the grey had lost its geometric structure. The pattern had been imposed on his brain for too long; now his brain was simply filtering it out. What remained was a colourless infinity, no longer even recognisably grey, but simply a bright absence of hue.

He wondered what he was missing. Perhaps his actual surroundings were so dull and Spartan that his mind would sooner or later have performed the same filtering trick, even if he still had his sight. He sensed only the echoless enclosure of rock; many megatonnes of it. He thought constantly of Pascale, but it became harder by the day to hold her in his mind. The grey seemed to be seeping into his memories, smearing over them like wet concrete. Then there came a day, just after Sylveste had finished his rations, when the cell door was unlocked and two voices joined him.

The first was that of Gillian Sluka.

“Do what you can with him,” her croak of a voice said. “Within limits.”

“He should be put under while I operate,” said the other voice, male and treacle-thick. Sylveste recognised the cabbagy smell of the man’s breath.

“He should, but he won’t be.” The voice hesitated, then added: “I’m not expecting any miracles, Falkender. I just want the bastard to see me.”

“Give me a few hours,” Falkender said. There was a thump as the man placed something down on the cell’s blunt-edged table. “I’ll do my best,” he said, almost mumbling. “But from what I know, these eyes were nothing special before you had him blinded.”

“One hour.”

She slammed the door as she exited. Sylveste, cocooned in silence since his capture, felt its reverberations jar his skull. For too long he had been striving to pick up the softest of noises, clues to his fate. There had been none, but in the process he had become sensitised to silence.

He smelled Falkender loom nearer. “A pleasure to work with you, Dr Sylveste,” he said, almost diffidently. “I’m confident I can undo most of the damage she had inflicted on you, given time.”

“She gave you one hour,” Sylveste said. His own voice sounded foreign; it had been too long since he had done much except mumble incoherently to himself in his sleep. “What can you possibly do in one hour?”

He heard the man rummage through his tools. “At the very least improve things for you.” He punctuated his remarks with clucking noises. “Of course, I can do more if you don’t struggle. But I can’t promise that this will be pleasant for you.”

“I’m sure you’ll do your best.”

The man’s fingers skated over his eyes, lightly probing.

“I always admired your father, you know.” Another cluck, reminding Sylveste of one of Janequin’s chickens. “It’s well known that he fashioned these eyes for you.”

“His beta-level simulation,” Sylveste corrected.

“Of course, of course.” He could visualise Falkender waving aside this vaporous distinction. “And not the alpha, either—we all know that vanished years ago.”

“I sold it to the Jugglers,” Sylveste said blankly. After years of holding it in, the truth had popped out of his mouth like a small sour pip.

Falkender made an odd tracheal sound which Sylveste eventually decided might be the man’s mode of chuckling. “Of course, of course. You know, I’m surprised no one ever accused you of that. But that’s human cynicism for you.” A shrill whirring sound filled the air, followed by a nerve-searing vibration. “I think you can say goodbye to colour perception,” Falkender said. “Monochrome’s going to be about the best I can manage.”

Khouri had been hoping for some mental breathing-space, some time in which to collect her thoughts, in which to listen quietly for the breathing of the invasive presence in her head. But the Mademoiselle was still speaking.

“I believe Sun Stealer has already attempted this once before,” she said. “I’m speaking of your predecessor, of course.”

“You mean the stowaway tried to get into Nagorny’s head?”

“Exactly that. Except in Nagorny’s case, there would have been no bloodhounds on which to hitch a ride. Sun Stealer must have had to resort to something cruder.”

Khouri considered what she had learnt from Volyova about this whole incident.

“Crude enough to drive Nagorny mad?”

“Evidently so,” her companion nodded. “And perhaps Sun Stealer only attempted to impose his will on the man. Escape from the gunnery was impossible, so Sun Stealer merely tried to make Nagorny his puppet. Perhaps it was all done via subconscious suggestion, while he was in the gunnery.”

“Exactly how much trouble am I in?”

“Little, for now. There were only a few dogs—not enough for him to do much damage.”

“What happened to the dogs?”

“I decrypted them, of course—learnt their messages. But in doing so, I opened myself up to him. To Sun Stealer. The dogs must have limited him somewhat, because his attack on me was far from subtle. Fortunately, because otherwise I might not have deployed my defences in time. He was not particularly hard to defeat, but of course I was only dealing with a tiny part of him.”

“Then I’m safe?”

“Well, not quite. I ousted him—but only from the implant in which I reside. Unfortunately my defences do not extend to your other implants, including those Volyova installed in you.”

“He’s still in my head?”

“He may not have even needed the dogs,” the Mademoiselle said. “He might have entered Volyova’s implants as soon as she placed you in the gunnery for the first time. But he certainly found the dogs advantageous. If he hadn’t tried to invade me with them, I might not have sensed his presence in your other implants.”

“I feel the same.”

“Good. It means my countermeasures are effective. You recall how I used countermeasures against Volyova’s loyalty therapies?”

“Yes,” Khouri said, gloomily uncertain that those had worked quite as well as the Mademoiselle liked to imagine.

“Well, these are much the same. The only difference is, I’m using them against those sites in your mind which Sun Stealer has occupied. For the last two years, we’ve been waging a kind of…” She paused, and then seemed to experience a moment of epiphany. “I suppose you could call it a cold war.”

“It would have to be cold.”

“And slow,” the Mademoiselle said. “The cold robbed us of the energies for anything more. And, of course, we had to be careful that we did not harm you. Your being injured was no use to either myself or Sun Stealer.”

Khouri remembered why this conversation was possible in the first place.

“But now that I’m warmed…”

“You understand well. Our campaign has intensified since the warming. I think Volyova may even suspect something. A trawl is reading your brain even now, you see. It may have detected the neural war Sun Stealer and I are waging. I would have relented—but Sun Stealer would have used the moment to overwhelm my countermeasures.”

“But you can hold him at bay…”

“I believe so. But should I not succeed in holding Sun Stealer at bay, I felt you needed to know what happened.”

That much was reasonable: better to know that Sun Stealer was in her than to suffer the delusion that she was clean.

“I also wished to warn you. The bulk of him remains in the gunnery. I’ve no doubt that he will try to enter you fully, or as fully as is possible, when he finds the chance.”

“You mean, next time I’m in the gunnery?”

“I admit the options are limited,” the Mademoiselle said. “But I thought it best that you knew the entirety of the situation.”

Khouri was, she thought, still a long way from anything that approximated that. But what the ghost said was correct. Better to appreciate the danger than ignore it.

“You know,” she said, “if Sylveste really was responsible for this thing, killing him won’t pose too many problems for me.”

“Good. And the news is not unremittingly bad, I assure you. When I sent those dogs into the gunnery I also sent in an avatar of myself. And I know from the reports that the dogs returned that my avatar remained undetected by Volyova, at least during those early days. That was, of course, more than two years ago… but I’ve no reason to suspect that the avatar has been found since.”

“Assuming it hasn’t been destroyed by Sun Stealer.”

“A reasonable point,” she conceded. “But if Sun Stealer is as intelligent as I suspect, he won’t do anything that might draw attention to himself. He can’t know for certain that this avatar isn’t something Volyova has sent into the system. She has enough doubts of her own, after all.”

“Why did you do it?”

“So that, if necessary, I might gain control of the gunnery.”

If Calvin had had any grave, Sylveste thought, then his father would be spinning in it faster than Cerberus spun around the neutron star Hades, aggrieved at the abuse of his own handiwork. Except Calvin had already been dead, or at least non-corporeal, long before his simulation had engineered Sylveste’s vision. Such thought-games held the pain at bay, at least part of the time. And, in truth, there had never really been a time since his capture when he had not been in pain. Falkender was flattering himself if he imagined his surgery was exacerbating Sylveste’s agony to any significant degree.

Eventually—miraculously—it began to abate.

It was like a vacuum opening in his mind, a cold, void-filled ventricle which had not been there before. Taking the pain away was like taking away some inner buttress. He felt himself collapsing, whole eavestones of his psyche grinding loose under their suddenly unsupported weight. It took an effort to restore some of his own internal equilibrium.

And now there were colourless, evanescent ghosts in his vision.

By the second they hardened into distinct shapes. The walls of a room—as bland and unfurnished as he had imagined—and a masked figure crouched low over him. Falkender’s hand was immersed in a kind of chrome glove which ended not in fingers but in a crayfish-like explosion of tiny glistening manipulators. One of the man’s eyes was monocled by a lens system, connected to the glove by a segmented steel cable. His skin had the pallor of a lizard’s underbelly: his one visible eye was unfocused and cyanotic. Dried specks of blood sprinkled his brow. The blood was grey-green, but Sylveste knew well enough what it was.

In fact, now that he noticed, everything was grey-green.

The glove retracted, and Falkender pulled it from his wrist with the other hand. A caul of lubricant sheened the hand which had been under the glove.

He began to pack his kit away. “Well, I never promised miracles,” he said. “And you shouldn’t have been expecting any.”

When he moved, it was jerkily, and it took moments for Sylveste to grasp that his eyes were only perceiving three of four images a second. The world moved with the stuttering motion of the pencil cartoons children made in the corners of books, flicked into life between thumb and forefinger. Every few seconds there were upsetting inversions of depth, when Falkender would appear to be a man-shaped recess carved into the cell’s wall, and sometimes part of his visual field would jam, not changing for ten or more seconds, even if he looked to another part of the room.

Still, it was vision, or at least vision’s idiot cousin.

“Thank you,” Sylveste said. “It’s… an improvement.”

“I think we’d better move,” said Falkender. “We’re five minutes behind schedule as it is.”

Sylveste nodded, and just the action of tipping his head was enough to spark pulsing migraines. Still, they were nothing compared with what he had endured until Falkender’s work.

He helped himself from the couch and stepped towards the door. Maybe it was because he now moved to the door with a purpose—because, for the first time, he actually expected to step through it—but the action suddenly seemed perverse and alien. He felt as if he were casually stepping off a precipice. He now had no balance. It was as if his inner equilibrium had become accustomed to no vision, and was now thrown by its return. The dizziness faded, though, just as two True Path heavies emerged from the outer corridor and took him by the elbows.

Falkender trailed behind. “Be careful. There may be perceptual glitches…”

But though Sylveste heard his words, they meant nothing to him. He knew where he was now, and that knowledge was momentarily too overpowering. He was back home, after more than twenty years of exile.

His prison was Mantell, a place he had not seen—and barely even visited in his memory—since the coup.