Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘They’re devices. Alien technology.’

  ‘Something we can use against the wolves?’

  ‘Indirectly.’

  ‘I don’t like “indirectly”.’

  ‘You won’t like any part of it.’ Glass continued her silent descent for a few more moments. ‘They’re a defensive system, and a useful one. The creatures that made them put the stones to one use; we shall put them to another.’

  I was starting to see something below me. Feeling more confident now that there was less distance to fall, even as the gravity increased, I quickened my descent. A floor or platform was coming up. I jumped down the last few rungs, feeling a reckless confidence in my newly strengthened bones. With my feet on solid ground – actually a gridded floor – I stepped back to allow Glass to finish her climb. When she was still above my head she skipped off the rungs entirely and slid down with her palms and feet skimming the ladder’s side. The floor clattered under her as she landed.

  ‘You missed your chance,’ she said. ‘You could have impaled me as I was coming down.’

  I dabbed my forehead in mock absent-mindedness.

  ‘I knew there was something I’d forgotten. An impaling spike! You know, I wouldn’t go around putting ideas in my head. I might start noting them down for future use.’

  The ladder had brought us to a room no larger than an airlock. There was no sign of the ladder continuing beneath us, so I supposed we had reached the maximum radius of the centrifuge. I estimated that we were experiencing about half a gravity. ‘They can’t operate this wheel all the time,’ Glass said. ‘No matter how well engineered it all is, there’ll be a heat burden. I left them with some cryo-arithmetic engines, but they can’t be used continually.’

  ‘They broke down.’

  Neither of us had spoken. A door had opened in the side of the room and a person of medium height was standing there, wearing a dark hood and gown. They had their arms by their side but the sleeves were so long that it was impossible to say whether they carried a weapon or were empty-handed. The hood projected forward, shadowing the whole of their face.

  ‘Lady Arek?’ Glass asked, doubtfully.

  ‘This man with you—’ The voice was deeper and raspier than Glass’s. ‘I take it he’s the one you went all that way for?’

  ‘He’s the one.’

  ‘Clavain?’

  ‘No. The brother, as I expected.’

  ‘Not what I expected.’ The hood lingered on me. I heard a sniffing sound. ‘Smells musty. Smells like old meat. Smells rotten.’

  ‘He’s old, but I’ve commenced rejuvenation measures. You should have smelled him before I began.’

  ‘You sure it’s really him?’

  ‘The gene markers don’t lie. Nor do the micro-surgical traces. He’s grown himself a new arm, and a new eye – maybe several times over. Swamped his own memories with blockades, so thick he doesn’t even remember his real identity. Been living as a kindly old man of the people, under the name Miguel de Ruyter.’

  ‘Couldn’t let the past go completely?’

  ‘No. A billion names he could have chosen, and he still went for one with a connection to Mars.’ Glass looked at me with a little sadness. ‘But it’s not who else he fools that matters. No one else cares. No one else remembers. He could have called himself Clavain and the world wouldn’t have noticed. But he needed to forget who he was.’

  ‘Is he coming back?’

  ‘Slowly. I used reefersleep to flood him with mnemonovores. The blockades create distinctive association structures. The mnemonovores target them preferentially, leaving authentic memories intact, and help reconsolidate pathways that have been left to wither. It’s not perfect, but . . . ’ There was an awkward lull. The hooded figure was still at the threshold and had made no overtures of welcome. ‘May we come inside, Lady Arek?’

  ‘I’m not Lady Arek.’ The figure lifted its arms, the sleeves falling back to reveal stubby, trotter-like hands with only two fingers and a thumb. It swept back the hood, disclosing a scarred, snouted face. I flinched in the first moment of recognition, realising that we had been speaking to a hyperpig. ‘My name is Snowdrop. Lady Arek’s head of security. I’ll decide whether you take another step inside.’

  I studied the map of scars that criss-crossed Snowdrop’s face. One had gone right through an eye socket, but somehow spared the eye. Some teeth were missing; others yellowed with age. Wisps of white hair straggled back from a low, angled brow. Her pointed, upraised ears were scarred, swollen, and ragged with long-healed voids. They were also punctured by numerous metal rings and studs, and where her skin showed, it was a patchwork of ink, mark over mark.

  ‘If you had any doubts about our identity, you should have acted sooner,’ I said.

  ‘Got that wrong for a start.’ Snowdrop shot Glass a quizzical look. ‘Are you sure he’s Clavain? Thought he was supposed to be some kind of tactical mastermind.’

  ‘You had to wait until we were out of our suits, and nearly defenceless,’ Glass said. ‘There’s some barrier across that door, a last line of security. Whatever it is, I can’t sense it.’

  ‘Then how do you know it’s there?’

  ‘Because I don’t think you or Lady Arek would be stupid enough not to have something.’

  Snowdrop gave a half-impressed cock of her head. ‘There’s a thread of filament, moving up and down the length of the doorway too quickly for your eye to detect. The mechanism is hydraulic, driven by shielded pumps. If you’d taken a step across the threshold, half of you wouldn’t have made it.’ She lifted her snout. ‘Tell me how you found us here.’

  ‘We followed breadcrumbs,’ Glass said. ‘John the Revelator, then the Rust Belt, then a beacon which had logged your ship movements six years ago.’

  ‘And how was John the Revelator’s state of mind?’

  Glass gave an indifferent shrug. ‘All that you could expect of a barely human consciousness haunting the bowels of a plague-ravaged wreck from another century. All that you’d expect from a man born when people used chemistry to get off planets. All that you’d expect from a man whose life consists solely of grand crimes and tiny inadequate twitches of reflex atonement. All you’d expect of an eight-hundred-year-old monster. Not that any of that’s a surprise. The man was more than mad before he became half-fused with his ship.’

  ‘And the rest,’ I said.

  ‘The rest?’ Snowdrop asked me, lifting an eyebrow over that scar-bisected eye.

  ‘I had to rescue Glass. In return for releasing her, I promised John the Revelator that I’d find out what had happened to you. Whoever you are, he seemed fonder of you than he was of Glass.’

  ‘From what I was told, he’d be fonder of most things in the universe than he is of Glass.’ Snowdrop stepped back from the door. ‘You can come through now. I’ve disabled the cutter.’ She called back over her shoulder: ‘They’re clean.’

  ‘We passed some test?’ Glass asked.

  ‘Old Stinky seems to be speaking some kind of truth. If you’d come up from below – or worse, if you were being run by wolves – you’d never know who John the Revelator did or didn’t like.’

  I took a breath and stepped across the threshold, pausing on the other side to make sure all of me had made it across. Then I turned around to offer a chivalrous hand to Glass. She wrinkled her nose and traversed the door without my assistance.

  I lowered my hand.

  Two thick-necked, over-muscled men appeared behind Snowdrop, wearing plated and buckled body armour and carrying boser pistols. The men were bearded, one with long hair and the other shaven all the way to the scalp, which was a map of scars and dents, like a planet after a heavy bombardment.

  ‘Stand down,’ Snowdrop murmured. ‘These are the incomers.’

  ‘Do you know these people?’ I asked Glass.

  ‘I don’t know any of them, including her. They must be . . . associates . . . Lady Arek has collected since her arrival.’

  ‘You make us sound like tri
nkets,’ Snowdrop countered. ‘Not exactly how I see it. Or Lady Arek, for that matter.’

  ‘Is Lady Arek one of the associates you sent from Hela?’ I asked. ‘The ally you met?’

  Snowdrop cocked her jaw in amusement. ‘Is that how Glass tells it? That it’s an equal partnership? Or did she go even further and make out she’s somehow running things and Lady Arek’s going along with whatever she’s told?’

  ‘Lady Arek and I arrived at a basis for cooperation,’ Glass stated.

  ‘Well, that’s one way of putting it,’ Snowdrop said. ‘Another would be that she turned you into a weeping little puddle, and it was all you could do to beg for your life and be given a tiny part of her plan to be getting on with, like a doggie thrown a bone.’ Snowdrop eyed me. ‘Sorry, Stinky, if this is all news to you. I bet you think Glass is scary. But that’s only ’cause you haven’t met Lady Arek.’

  ‘She’s well, I take it?’ Glass asked.

  ‘Six years in this place will test anyone’s will. But it’s a lot better than where we came from, and she knows it.’

  ‘And her escort, the pig?’

  ‘Oh, Pinky? He’s mostly fine. I see to that.’

  Glass had told me next to nothing about her associates. But now at least I had some names, or partial names, and the knowledge that one was a hyperpig, like Snowdrop. Also that Lady Arek was in no way acting under Glass’s direction, and that their alliance might be built on shakier foundations than I had been led to think.

  Who were they, beyond these names? I had no idea.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Snowdrop said to the two guards. ‘Would you mind going ahead and warning the Overlook we’re on our way up?’

  ‘You sure about that?’ asked the balder of the two men, scratching at his temple. ‘They haven’t been searched, scanned, decontaminated . . .’

  ‘It’s them, Omori. And if it isn’t – if the wolves are good enough to impersonate living, breathing bodies – we’re already in far too much trouble to do anything about it.’

  ‘I like that attitude,’ said the long-haired man. ‘Very pragmatic.’

  ‘We see things similarly, Cater. But don’t worry – the only thing likely to overwhelm me is Stinky’s old-man smell.’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘Friend, be glad you’re not a pig.’

  The guards went on ahead. Just before they went out of sight they shot Snowdrop a questioning glance, but she waved aside their concerns, shaking her head at their over-protectiveness.

  ‘You’re taking a risk, all the same,’ I said.

  ‘We haven’t had visitors in six years,’ Snowdrop answered, taking us along a connecting hallway where the gravity remained constant. ‘It makes them twitchy, dealing with new faces. But you’re who you say you are.’

  She had an awkward waddling gait, as if her hip joints were fused.

  ‘If Pinky and Lady Arek are Glass’s two associates,’ I said, ‘and if no other ship has come and gone from this system, then you must have already been here when Pinky and Lady Arek arrived from John the Revelator. How the hell is that possible?’

  ‘Well, I won’t say it was a picnic, Stinky. Anyone you see here is, by definition, a survivor, and most of us came through it with a few scars. Inside and out.’

  ‘I don’t disbelieve it. But we saw only ruins as we came in. No trace of life anywhere.’

  ‘If there was a visible trace, the wolves would’ve found it. So the trick is to not be visible. Easier said.’ She patted one of the walls as we passed along it. ‘Several of us were holed up in this place. It’s well shielded, so you can run basic life-support and a few other systems without putting out too much excess heat and noise. Which isn’t to say any part of it was easy. It was a cold, dark hell most of the time. Just one step above being dead.’

  ‘And the others?’ Glass asked.

  ‘There are pockets of survivors down in Chasm City. Or what’s left of it. Wolves cratered it pretty good when they hit Yellowstone: blew out all the domes and pancaked most of the bigger buildings. Not much left that you’d recognise. But life clings on in dark corners and hideaways. Survivors. Feral gangs. Crimelords. None of it pretty. And none of it capable of lasting much longer. Breathable air, water, food – all running low. People turning sick and hungry. Any idea what people will do to each other, when they turn sick and hungry?’

  ‘The place I came from had its hardships,’ I said.

  ‘I bet it did, Stinky. I bet you sometimes went as long as a day between hot meals.’

  ‘You don’t know me, Snowdrop,’ I said warningly.

  ‘And you don’t know any of us,’ she replied.

  Glass said nothing. I wondered what she was thinking, and how warm and friendly was the reunion she was anticipating with her associates.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Overlook was a large room with a stepped floor, numerous seats and tables, and a set of vast angled windows stretched across one wall. Beyond the windows was a grey gloom, hard to resolve in any detail, but with faint suggestions of depth and slow, grinding movement.

  A woman stood with her back to us, facing the window. She was tall and imperious in her stance. She had her hands laced behind her back, her legs spaced, her shoulders squared.

  ‘Something illicit used to take place here, is our best guess,’ were the first words to come out of her mouth. ‘That’s why the shielding is so effective. The people who constructed this environment wanted whatever happened within to remain a secret. Whether those activities constituted a consensual sport, or a form of coercive entertainment, is lost to us now. It was all far too long ago. But we should be grateful for their thoroughness. Their security measures have protected us long after the wolves rooted out every other human hiding place in these ruins.’ Her voice was slow, measured and extremely deep. Even when she fell silent, the lingering force of her words seemed to deny permission to speak. I wanted to say something, but I was dry-throated, my intentions stalling between thought and deed.

  She carried on, still not turning around: ‘I am Lady Arek. You may call me that. I have had other names, some longer, some shorter, but this one satisfies me for now. My mother was a soldier, my father a revolutionary. I was conceived within the influence of the Hades matrix and carried to term in the artificial womb of a half-sane Conjoiner whose name means “damage” in a tongue now long forgotten. I carry within me traces of all my antecedents, including those who passed forever into the Hades matrix. I am therefore both a scientist and a scholar. I have lived a hundred human lives and felt the death agonies of a thousand civilisations lost to the Inhibitors. I have seen worlds burn and suns shrivel. I have walked on bones and breathed the dust of the dead. I have wept. Some think me insane, others that I might be a goddess. I am neither of those things, but I am most certainly not to be underestimated.’ She began to turn. ‘You will not wrong me, will you? Or disappoint me? I would caution against it.’

  The shorter, squatter figure who had been standing next to the woman, also with his back to us, said: ‘So you know, this is her light, easy-going side.’

  Lady Arek had turned to us. I saw a human woman, with nothing about her to suggest any obvious genetic or prosthetic augmentation. Yet authority blasted off her like a cold, shrieking wind, finding every loose chink in my soul. I had never been in the presence of another person with such a commanding will.

  I could not guess her biological age, but I sensed that she had taken no steps to make herself appear youthful. There were lines around her mouth and eyes; a hollowness under her chin. Her hair was black turning to grey, and she wore it combed back from her forehead, without ostentation, and secured by a plain clasp that I had seen when she faced the window. Her deep-set eyes were pale and piercing, though, and all the more striking for the plainness of her features. The manner of her was judicial: as if any ornamentation or vanity would have been not only out of place, but disrespectful to her station. Only her coat offset the impression of severity. It was long-hemmed, high-colla
red, and marked in blue, red and white with a cross-shaped motif, imprinted diagonally across her back. Beneath it she wore a dark tunic, trousers and boots.

  I wanted to speak for myself. But Lady Arek’s gaze exerted a squeezing pressure on my windpipe. It took an immense effort to overcome that paralysing influence.

  ‘I was under the impression Glass wanted me for something.’

  Lady Arek looked at Glass without answering me. ‘Are you certain of his identity?’

  ‘As I told Snowdrop, the markers confirm it.’

  Lady Arek’s companion was another hyperpig. He had turned around as well, regarding me doubtfully. From halfway across the room he wrinkled his already well-wrinkled snout and wafted a hand in front of it. ‘He stinks.’

  ‘Old-man stink, love,’ Snowdrop said. She was with us, but standing back with a certain deference to the commanding figure in the multicoloured coat.

  ‘I know old-man stink, Snow. But he doesn’t smell like Clavain did.’

  ‘He’s not the same man,’ Glass clarified.

  ‘I’m not even sure he’s the same species.’ Pinky came closer. He was short, broad, pugnacious, and very obviously an old pig. There were scars as well as wrinkles, vying for space with each other. His left ear was little more than a fleshy nub, as if most of it had been ripped away. He had a sour smell to him, something lingering on his breath. I had not said a word to him, but I already felt as if I had crossed some line of invisible etiquette, failing to satisfy his expectations in the matter of some arcane, punctilious formality. ‘Don’t look like the old man, either. Looks like something the old man would have chewed up and spat out.’ His pink-tinged eyes narrowed. ‘What’s your game, exactly? Why’d you let Glass think you’re someone you’re not?’

  ‘There’s no game,’ Glass said. ‘He is the sibling. No great familial resemblance should be expected, either. They were of different ages, before centuries of interplanetary and interstellar war took them on different trajectories, through vastly different subjective time intervals.’ I watched her, thinking how odd and pleasing it was to see Glass on the defensive, being forced to explain herself. ‘He is Warren Clavain. His older memories are reconsolidating. He is coming back to the truth of what he is, in all its glorious ugliness.’