Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  I was a soldier. I accepted this now. It was in my marrow, no longer to be denied. Every soldierly part of me wanted to take the fight directly to the wolves, to unpick that black scab, to slash at those reaching fingers before they found their objective. But a cooler part of me, borne of experience and survival – the wiser, older warrior – knew that we take our victories where we find them, and accept our defeats with grace and patience.

  Stepping stones.

  While Probably Rose was down with the evacuees, doing what she could with her own medical supplies, Lady Arek, Pinky and I watched the end of things from the control room. Scythe was flying away from the Rust Belt, with its nose pointed towards interstellar space, so the view through the false windows ought to have been one of blackness and stars. But Lady Arek had found a way to have the windows show the view to our stern, of the receding Rust Belt and the planet it orbited.

  Our acceleration soon had Yellowstone looking visibly smaller, with a larger and larger fraction of the Rust Belt coming into view, until we could see all of it, from one side of the orbit to the other. Yellowstone’s face was lit, so the part of the Rust Belt that bisected the planet was a sooty ribbon, a smear of ash across the brow. No intact structures could be made out within that procession now; it was a flow of ruins, the shards of worlds, dust-wreathed and dream-haunted. It was where humans had tried to be more than themselves, for a few short centuries.

  We had seen it on our approach, and it was different now. The wolf flows were dark arteries, curling and spiralling through these broken pieces, throbbing out of the largest remnants, where the machines had gorged and multiplied and waited until their time of release and quickening. Where the Rust Belt lay against a background of space, on either side of the planet, it should have been as invisible as it had been before, its presence betrayed only by the stars it occluded. But now flecks of gold and red burned like lanterns on a slow-flowing river. These were the last human fires, the last gasps of life and oxygen, as tiny warm pockets were at last evacuated to space.

  ‘It’s beautiful again,’ Lady Arek said. ‘After all this, it gets to be beautiful again. Just for a few hours, on this last day.’

  ‘We precipitated this,’ I said. ‘Our arrival, Glass and me. If we hadn’t come, this wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘Maybe not today, but soon enough,’ she replied. ‘We were here because the wolves came for us in the first place. And the only reason they did that is because some misguided fish once decided to try breathing oxygen instead of water.’

  ‘She does this,’ Pinky said. ‘Just when you think you’re consequential, she finds a way to bring you down to the level of a fish.’ He shrugged, shoulders powerful even in three gees. He had buckled on an exoskeleton, helpfully finding one that was adjustable to his frame. He was so short, squat, stocky and muscular that I wondered if he needed its assistance at all. ‘Still, at least she stopped at something with a nervous system. She’s been known to go all the way down to bacteria.’

  He was distracting himself.

  A moment later a pinprick of light stabbed out from one quadrant of the Rust Belt. It was like a little eye, winking open, an eye that disclosed a brighter, purer creation beyond itself. It stared out for a second or two. Then the eye shuttered, the light extinguished.

  Pinky was silent. I wanted to say something, to offer some consolation, but any words that came to mind were immediately self-censored, unforgivably trite and demeaning.

  ‘We thank her,’ Lady Arek said. ‘Snowdrop and the others. That’s all. We thank them, and keep thanking them, while we have breath to do so. There’s nothing we can do, except to live, and keep living, and always hold that gratitude in our hearts.’ She reached out to her friend the hyperpig, the man I hoped might, in time, become my own friend as well. ‘And be consequential.’

  When we were alone – a stoic, brooding Pinky had waddled off in his exoskeleton to see Probably Rose, Barras and the other evacuees – Lady Arek called an image onto one of the screens, drawn from deep in Scythe’s archives.

  ‘Hourglass would have shown this to you sooner or later, or you would have found a way to extract it via your own enquiries, but it’s as well that you see it now and understand.’

  I felt as if I were being set a test that I was already in the process of failing.

  The image was a square, bisected along a very shallow curve, practically a straight diagonal. The upper left half was black: a backdrop of space, with only a few faint stars speckling into view. The lower right half of the image was a close-up of part of a planet, with the curved limb forming the boundary between the darker and lighter parts of the image. The visible part of the planet was a pale blue in colour, but with bands and swirls of deeper colour, shading to opal and turquoise.

  ‘I don’t recognise it.’

  ‘I did not expect you to. What does that begin to tell you?’

  ‘I suppose it must be Charybdis, the place Glass has been dropping hints about since we met. She told me that she was the one who applied the name, and that it isn’t so far away as to be beyond the reach of a ship like Scythe. From that view, I’d say it’s an ice giant, something fairly common. We’d need to cross-correlate against the known systems . . .’

  ‘You are right that ice giants are commonplace. But this planet matches none in any of the systems that have been subjected to any kind of robotic or human exploration. That is our difficulty, Clavain. Tell me: if I asked you to localise this planet, what would you do next?’

  ‘Zoom out, so that more stars fall into view. It should be child’s play to back-compute the star patterns and identify which system the planet’s in.’

  ‘A valid suggestion. Unfortunately, what you are seeing is the extent of the image, and the handful of stars that happened to be recorded offer an insufficient baseline for parallactic triangulation. All other image localisation measures have failed. The brightness of the galactic ridge, the anisotropy of the background radiation – none give us enough leverage. From the spectrum of light falling onto Charybdis we may hazard that its primary is a G-type star, perhaps a G-zero dwarf, but that barely begins to help us. We cannot determine the system in which this planet lies.’

  ‘This doesn’t make sense, Lady Arek. If you have one snapshot, you should have a billion. Whether someone captured this view through a telescope from light-years away, or from much closer in, it would never be the only thing you have.’

  ‘In this instance, regrettably, it is. Let me explain.’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘I misled you slightly: this system has been visited. But it was an undocumented visitation, centuries ago, by an early interstellar expedition sent out by the Conjoiners. Specifically, this image was recorded by the Sandra Voi, the prototype starship assembled and launched under the aegis of Galiana.’

  ‘The Galiana?’

  ‘One and the same. In the early decades of the twenty-third century, Galiana and her doughty band of allies pushed deep into interstellar space, looking for sanctuary, and for anything else that pricked their limitless curiosity. They came home, eventually. In time, their discoveries entered the Conjoiner archives. But those archives were very badly corrupted during subsequent troubles.

  ‘Much was lost, or scrambled beyond recognition, including the data logs relating to this system. Only fragments remained legible. Among them was enough information to indicate the significance of Charybdis to the anti-wolf effort, but not enough to help us determine how to find the planet itself. Of course, it is a cold gas giant, and while they are numerous there must be a fixed limit to the number of systems and worlds that the Sandra Voi could possibly have reached, allowing for relativistic mechanics. So, if our time and resources were limitless, we could simply send autonomous expeditions to every possible system of interest, out to at least fifty or sixty light-years from Earth. That is a great many systems, Clavain, many thousands, and these are not normal times. Even if we restricted our search space to G-types, the task facing us
would still be formidable. The wolves stalk us at every step, as we see. We cannot solve this problem by blunt means.’ She paused. ‘Hence, you.’

  I blinked. ‘Nevil Clavain was closely involved with Galiana. They were enemies once, I know that much. Then something happened to turn him to her cause. He defected from his own side and threw his lot in with the Conjoiners.’ When she did not contradict me, I ventured further: ‘To the extent that he was on that expedition, I suppose?’

  ‘He was. And we know that Nevil Clavain must have died with the knowledge we need. He would have remembered Charybdis as an anomaly, something worthy of further investigation, and he would have known the system in which it lies.’

  ‘Then . . . you’re hoping that by some osmosis his dying knowledge will have seeped into my brain as well, just because I’m his long-lost brother?’

  ‘No. We are not fools, Warren. Ararat is the key, because Clavain died there. Normally that would be the end of it, except for one thing: Ararat is an ocean planet. A Pattern Jugglers world. It is . . . believed by us . . . that Clavain’s memory patterns remain encoded and retrievable, through the Pattern Jugglers.’

  ‘I know something of how it works with the Jugglers,’ I admitted. ‘If they have preserved his personality – and there’s no promise of that – someone else might be able to swim in the same seas and have his patterns imprinted into their own neural matrix. If the Jugglers are willing, and they understand the request. Has one of you already tried it?’

  I detected some diffidence in Lady Arek, there and gone in a flash. ‘Hourglass indeed attempted communion, in the manner you allude to. It was not successful. There would be a much greater likelihood of success if someone with a personal connection to Nevil Clavain were to meet the Jugglers.’

  ‘I see.’ I reflected on her answer, feeling that something larger – and more obvious – lay just out of reach. ‘I’m guessing her contact attempt wasn’t totally unsuccessful. Clearly she reached enough of Nevil to gain some insight into my part in all this.’

  ‘Your part?’

  ‘That I existed. That I might be able to stand in for Nevil, to some extent. That I could be found on Sun Hollow.’

  But a small, doubtful voice whispered to me that my brother could never have known of my intentions to take the Salmacis to AU Microscopii. Our paths had diverged after Mars. He might have hated me, in the aftermath of that betrayal, but the years would surely have pushed my memory to the back of his mind, along with all the trappings of his younger days. He had concerned himself with bigger matters than brotherly spite: the fate not just of one ideology but human civilisation itself. There was no reason at all that I should have crossed his thoughts in the last years of his life, and even less reason for me to have mattered to some ghost of him, haunting an alien ocean.

  Then again, my brother had never been one to forget a slight.

  Lady Arek prompted gently: ‘Warren?’

  ‘I was just wondering what it would take from me.’

  ‘It will not be so onerous. You will swim with them – something millions have done before. There’s little risk in that alone. You may be rebuffed before the opening of any window of contact, but if that happens you will survive and we will regroup and make another attempt. Eventually there will be an opportunity for communion. After that, it is just a question of intent and the holding in mind of a clear objective. If you open your mind to the Jugglers, if you submit to them that you are the brother of one who lies within them, there is every chance that they will facilitate the transfer of recorded knowledge. Your mind, and that of Nevil’s, will not be so very different. Your neural matrix will accept his: an augmentation of your personality, rather than an erasure. It must and will succeed. You are by far the best receptacle we could hope to find.’

  ‘And after this is done, if it’s possible, it’s your expectation that I’ll magically remember everything you need to know about Charybdis?’

  ‘It is not a question of magic, merely one of alien biology. But you see that our hopes must be pinned on the Jugglers. However we calculate the odds, they improve with your involvement.’

  I tasted salty water; felt the sting of green sunlight on my eyes. A sudden panic of drowning rose in my chest.

  ‘Why am I frightened, Lady Arek? Why do I feel like I’ve already been to the Pattern Jugglers – already tried this thing you want me to do – and that it didn’t end well?’

  ‘You would remember if you had visited them,’ Lady Arek answered. Then, consolingly: ‘Don’t dwell on it, Warren. It is what lies ahead of us that we must be concerned by – not imagined phantoms. The unknown is always troubling.’

  ‘I knew his name,’ I whispered.

  ‘His name?’

  ‘Scorpio. Or Scorp, as his friends called him. As I think Nevil called him. It slipped out of me without thinking.’ I looked at her with renewed intensity. ‘How could I ever know that?’

  ‘I must have used his old name in a moment of indiscretion, and you overheard it without realising.’

  Sensing an impasse, I returned to my attention to the cryptic image fragment, wondering how it had come into our possession, and how Glass or Lady Arek could be sure that their answers lay there.

  ‘All right. The past be damned. I’ll go to your damned Jugglers. But if this does work, what will we find?’

  Lady Arek caused the image to disappear and another to spring into its place. It was a machine of some kind: a sort of nightmare fusion of turbine, corkscrew and pine tree, all glittering, intertwining and counter-rotating in ways that made my eyes hurt.

  Of course, I had seen it already: if not complete, then in a condition of partial assembly. It was the mechanism I had glimpsed through the little window in the partition, during my first exploration of Scythe. The mechanism that Glass had been content to let me see, even if she had not seen fit to explain its presence in anything other than teasing allusion.

  ‘A hypometric precursor device,’ Lady Arek said.

  ‘Good. I feel enormously enlightened.’ I paused. ‘John the Revelator mentioned something about hypometric weapons. Is this the same thing?’

  ‘Let us say that it belongs to the same family of technologies. But it is not in itself a weapon.’

  ‘All right,’ I said slowly. ‘That fits with what Glass told me when I asked her about the machine I’d seen inside Scythe.’

  ‘It’s helpful that you’ve seen it,’ Lady Arek said. ‘I’m at least spared the tedium of persuading you that such a thing might exist. Permit me to assume a certain degree of ignorance on your part.’

  ‘Assume away.’

  She took a breath. ‘Years ago, we attempted to gain an advantage over the Inhibitors by the use of hypometric weapons: instruments that performed certain operations on the local structure of spacetime. With the hypometric weapons, we could reach inside the hull of a ship without disturbing a single atom of its structure: tunnelling beneath reality. Or snip a smaller ship or missile entirely out of existence.’

  ‘It’s possible I heard rumours. The Salmacis was picking up all sorts of transmissions as we fled to Michael, and some of them alluded to impossible weapons, or weapons stolen from the future.’

  ‘It would have been better if there had never been rumours. The hypometric weapons were a false dawn. They helped us survive a number of engagements, but they were too few in number, and too inexpertly controlled, to offer a decisive advantage. In the end we added them to the roll-call of things that had failed us: dark toys that should have remained in the toy-box.’

  ‘You’re going to give them a second try?’

  ‘No, that would be as futile as all the other attempts, and besides, the wolves learned from our limited successes and evolved counter-strategies of their own. But we have not exhausted the possibilities of hypometric technology. If our first efforts were atomic bombs, instruments of blunt destruction, what we make next will be an engine of creation. An atomic-force microscope, by analogy.’

  I tho
ught back to what I remembered from our makeshift laboratories in Sun Hollow, our fumbling efforts to repair or maintain miniature systems. ‘An atomic-force microscope allows the manipulation of matter at the atomic scale.’

  ‘And by extension, a hypometric manipulator – this machine you see in Hourglass’s constructor files – will operate on spacetime at an analogous precision. Fed a set of constructional schedules – a blueprint, if you will – it becomes a precursor technology: an intermediate step in the direction of something else, something utterly beyond our comprehension.’

  ‘What?’

  Lady Arek dropped her voice to a reverential whisper, as if what she meant to utter was too heretical or possibly blasphemous to voice in anything but the most hushed of tones.

  ‘An Incantor.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  My head was swimming by the time I found Pinky conferring quietly with Probably Rose. All three of us were wearing exoskeletons and moving slowly and cautiously even with their protection. An exoskeleton was helpful under Scythe’s acceleration, but it was no insurance against carelessness.

  Barras and the other evacuees were still pressed down into individual pockets in the floor, like dolls half sunk into quicksand. The sphere robots bustled around them, attending to those who needed more assistance than the others. Most of the refugees were able to cope on their own, but about a tenth needed additional medical support, and the ship was providing it. They had oxygen masks, pressed over their faces like inverted flowers with the stalks emerging from the part of the floor immediately next to their heads. Some had nutrient or anaesthetic lines, provided by similar means, and monitored by the robots. There were broken limbs, fractured ribs and skulls, open wounds and older, badly healed injuries that still gave trouble.