Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Have you been able to do much?’ I asked Probably Rose.

  ‘A little, yes,’ she said ruefully. ‘Until the ship saw what I was doing and decided it could do a much better job, yes and yes.’

  ‘I think in general it will always do better than us, provided it understands what we want. It’s like a loyal dog: it wants to please, but doesn’t always know how. How much Glass is also still pulling strings, I can’t say.’ I paused, eyeing the pig. ‘Pinky . . .’

  ‘Nothing to be said, Stink.’

  ‘But I might want to say it anyway. I’m sorry. That’s all. I wish it had happened differently.’ I looked beyond him, to Barras and the others. ‘Have you told them?’

  ‘I thought I’d wait until I knew what the clever people are planning.’ He planted his hands on his hips. ‘So what’s it to be?’

  ‘We’re all in this together, Pinky.’

  ‘Sure we are.’

  ‘I mean it. And if by clever people you think I’m part of deciding what your fate is, you’ve got it badly wrong. Glass and Lady Arek had plans for me – plans you were a part of – not the other way around. Have they told you about the machine Glass has been making inside this ship?’

  He looked at me warily. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘Enough to think I should be a little frightened by it all.’

  He considered my response, nodded curtly. ‘If you’d seen it in action, you’d understand why.’

  ‘Lady Arek says this is something new – something beyond what they’ve used in the past. They’re going to use this technology to make some new order of weapon.’

  ‘Helps to have a plan.’

  He made to turn away but I stopped him with a touch on his shoulder. ‘The machine needs a blueprint. If we had that blueprint, I imagine Lady Arek would have told me.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘You know that she didn’t. You know that because there’s no way she wouldn’t have shared every detail of this plan with her loyalist friend. So, tell me.’

  He met my eyes, and for a moment I felt as if all the rage and grief that had built up inside him had been saved just for me.

  ‘What’s to tell?’

  ‘She wants me to meet Nevil Clavain. It’s something to do with the location of a planet, and I suppose whatever that planet is hiding has something to do with the weapon Lady Arek wants to make. And I suppose also that the Gideon stones, which have just cost us so much . . .’

  He snarled: ‘Don’t speak to me about cost when you’ve lost nothing.’

  ‘It’s hard to have anything to lose when you’re a man without a past. A man who keeps being lied to.’

  ‘Why would you think you’re worth the trouble of lying to?’

  ‘Because something doesn’t fit, and you know it.’ I kept my voice level, trying to reach the core of reasonableness that I still believed lay within him. ‘I spoke your true name. I called you Scorp.’

  ‘Guess you overheard someone else.’

  ‘No, I doubt that very much, and so did you when you first picked me up on it. No one around you would be so foolish as to touch a nerve like that.’

  He grunted something that was not quite disagreement, even if it tortured him to do so.

  ‘So what’s your grand theory, Stink?’

  ‘My theory is that that knowledge could only have come from Nevil Clavain – this figure I’m yet to make contact with. Yet a little bit of him was already inside me, and I didn’t even realise it.’

  ‘You were brothers. Supposedly.’

  ‘But brothers who last spoke to each other in the crucible of war, half a thousand years ago. Nevil wouldn’t have known you then.’ I shook my head slowly. ‘It doesn’t add up. However that knowledge got into my head from his, it’s from much later in his life. But we never met again.’ I added it more firmly, for the sake of my own sanity. ‘We never met again.’ Then, plaintively, ‘Did we?’

  ‘You think I’d be the one to be told if you had?’

  ‘I think you probably know more than you want to admit to me. Perhaps more than you want to admit to yourself.’

  ‘You got the wrong pig,’ Pinky said.

  ‘Perhaps I did,’ I answered, moving past him. ‘Because if you were truly a friend of Nevil Clavain, I think you’d have the decency to tell the truth to his brother.’

  ‘You don’t . . .’ he began.

  Leaving Pinky to fume in his own self-contradictions I knelt next to Barras and explained our predicament and immediate intentions. He was the one I felt the most immediate connection to, and the one I felt could be trusted to keep details in mind. But there was no point in telling only Barras, and he was in no immediate position to spread the word to the others. So once we had spoken, I moved along the rows of embedded bodies, striding the narrow tongues of floor between them, and tried to give as honest an account as I could.

  ‘Lady Arek’s stronghold is gone. The only survivors are aboard this ship: Pinky, Probably Rose and Lady Arek herself. Glass, who saved you, is being healed somewhere else in this ship. Snowdrop and the others did us a huge favour, giving us the distraction we needed to make a bolt for interstellar space. Omori is still helping us, providing a distraction with the shuttle. What we’re doing now is capitalising on their bravery and selflessness. But I’m afraid it’ll mean running the engines very hard for many hours.’

  ‘How many hours?’ asked one of the pigs, her face staring up from the neat swaddling enclosure of the floor. ‘We can’t move, can’t talk to each other . . .’

  ‘After thirteen hours, we might have some idea how safe we are. Somewhere between half a day and a day, we might have some respite.’

  ‘Let us leave,’ said another. ‘I can bear this. I can walk around, just like you, and I won’t even need that frame.’

  ‘I’m sure you could,’ I answered. ‘But the ship came up with this arrangement; it decides when it’s time to end it.’

  ‘Then we’re still prisoners,’ lamented another.

  ‘You’re alive,’ I countered. ‘And you’ve got a future. That’s more than any of you had in Chasm City.’

  ‘You have to agree,’ Probably Rose called, overhearing our exchange. ‘He has a point, yes and yes. And we will take care of you, whatever it takes, and verily.’

  A sharp demand: ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘A place called Ararat,’ I answered. ‘About twenty-two light-years away, or twenty-three years flight time.’

  ‘Why’d we want to go there?’ demanded another.

  ‘Good fucking question,’ Pinky interjected, in a surly undertone.

  ‘Lady Arek needs me there. It’s a Pattern Juggler planet.’

  ‘Pattern what?’ a voice queried.

  I dredged up the few facts I felt sure of. ‘They’re a form of alien life, distributed throughout a living ocean. An information-storage biomass, intelligent in some respects but not really conscious in any way that we’d recognise. Harmless for the most part, and cooperative on occasions. A sort of living archive, capable of manipulating the deep structure of our minds – rewiring our brains, temporarily or permanently, with new information structures: memories, modes of perception, and so on.’

  ‘Water planet?’ a voice said.

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘Lots of it. Jugglers are found on several worlds, but they all have similar characteristics.’

  ‘Water and pigs don’t mix very nicely,’ the same voice said.

  ‘There’ll be some dry land as well, according to Lady Arek. Somewhere we can land and make some kind of camp. We shan’t be the first. Pinky has lived there before. He’s proof that it isn’t some kind of watery hell-hole.’

  He called out: ‘Don’t go over-selling it, Stink. There are reasons I never wanted to go back.’

  ‘There are also reasons why we might not want to rob these people of all hope just right now,’ I replied, smiling through my teeth.

  ‘First we have to get there, though,’ Barras said, pleasing me that he
at least accepted the fact of our destination without complaint. ‘And that’s not a given, is it?’

  ‘We’ll find a way,’ I answered, with more conviction than was warranted. ‘This ship will need to keep us alive for the crossing, but it isn’t as bad as it sounds. Time will slow down for us once Scythe gets close to the speed of light, which will take less than three months of steady acceleration. About ten years will pass: a long time, but quite a bit less than twenty-three years. My hope is that the ship can put us all into hibernation. But to do that it’ll need to provide more than a hundred caskets.’

  ‘I heard that pigs don’t do too well in those caskets,’ commented a woman, perhaps one who had a little more knowledge than the others.

  ‘I won’t pretend otherwise,’ I said, nodding slowly. ‘It’s not right, but it’s the way things are. The minds who spent centuries perfecting reefersleep technology weren’t really thinking about hyperpigs. But we know it can be done. Pinky is the proof of that, and Lady Arek says they’ve learned some useful measures – measures that ought to work on any of you.’

  ‘These caskets . . . are aboard, somewhere?’

  It was a question I had been hoping to skirt, for now. ‘If they aren’t, we’ll make them. The ship can do that. And if for some reason it can’t, or doesn’t understand our needs, then we go through those ten years the hard way.’

  Pinky grumbled: ‘You’d better mean that, Stink.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ I said, fierceness breaking through my reserve. ‘Trust me.’

  ‘I think he does,’ Probably Rose confided to her friend, but loudly enough for me to hear. ‘Yes, and verily. And you should start taking him at his word, too.’

  Yellowstone was small enough to cover with my fist. It was still showing its dayside, and the Rust Belt still bisected it, but it would not be long before the planet, its belt, its moon, and the furthest of its habitats could be encompassed in my grasp. It meant nothing, almost no distance at all on an interplanetary scale (let alone interstellar) but I allowed myself some slow-growing encouragement that we might yet make our escape unhindered. The brightest of the fires had begun to ebb, that dark garland returning to a procession of unlit ashes. But Omori was still trackable, still managing to keep apace of the flows.

  ‘He’ll exhaust his fuel any time now,’ Lady Arek said. ‘After that, it’ll be a matter of time until they close in on him. Those flows are almost overkill for what he represents: one small ship, unlikely to be carrying more than a few of us, and which can’t ever leave this system. They understand us well enough to know all that.’

  ‘They’ve been missing their sport,’ Pinky said, from the seat next to hers.

  Lady Arek shook her head in bitter regret. ‘Omori did not have to do this.’

  ‘But he did, and nothing you could have done would have stopped him. Now at least we still have one point of distraction.’ I nodded at the displays grouped around Lady Arek’s control seat: they were in a markedly different configuration compared to when I had left. ‘You seem to have made progress with the ship. Do you think you can get it to accept direct commands, or is it still going to be a case of telling it what we want and letting it choose how to interpret our wishes?’

  ‘I’ve made some small progress. For now, I am grateful that it’s taking us anywhere at all.’

  ‘So am I. But Barras and the others can’t stay in those acceleration pits for the rest of our crossing.’

  ‘What do you propose?’

  ‘As soon as it’s safe to do so, we reduce our acceleration. Even if it’s only for a day, it’ll give Probably Rose time to assess the condition of the refugees and make them feel that they’re more than inconvenient cargo we just happen to have been saddled with.’

  Lady Arek looked at me sharply. ‘Is that what they believe?’

  ‘I think they may have cause to, if this goes on.’

  ‘We have to survive, Clavain.’ A hardness entered her voice, too obviously forced to convince me that it was part of her character. ‘I am sorry that it is hard on them, but if we let the wolves catch us, a few bone fractures will be the least of their problems.’

  ‘Stink has a point, though. Glass brought ’em aboard. The moment she did it, they became our responsibility.’

  ‘I do not deny that, but . . . a moment, please, Pinky.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘I cannot be sure. I know only what I do not wish it to be.’

  Pinky purred: ‘A little less cryptic, your ladyship?’

  Lady Arek made an enlargement of Yellowstone, swelling back up as if we were still within its gravitational clutches. ‘I have been monitoring a possible development, and it troubles me. There has been a drop in albedo in this area of the face.’

  I understood her words, but not their significance to our plight. ‘A drop in albedo means less reflected light?’

  ‘Or less light reaching us. There’s something getting in the way of our view of Yellowstone. If it were a single solid object, we would see it. But at this distance there’s nothing to resolve, just a drop in the reflected light across a circular region about a third of the diameter of the planet, like a faint grey thumbprint on a picture.’

  Lady Arek made some adjustments to the display parameters and the face of Yellowstone gained a new disfigurement beyond the bisection of the Rust Belt. The two were interlinked, but not the same phenomenon.

  ‘Wolf flow,’ I said.

  ‘But aimed directly at us, so we stare down the column, rather than seeing it from the side as we have the others. It’s been growing over several minutes, spreading in its extent and deepening the albedo drop.’

  ‘Then they’ve locked onto us after all. The distractions helped, but not enough to give us time to slip free.’ I was hearing my own words, marvelling at their cold detachment. ‘Do you have a distance estimate, an interception solution?’

  Lady Arek gave a shrug of precise helplessness. ‘They could be ten thousand kilometres astern of us, or a hundred thousand. If we change course, we should see the albedo locus shift relative to the planet, and that will give us an idea of their distance and spread. But it won’t help us run any faster, and our turn will only confirm that we are a viable target.’

  ‘Looks like they’ve already made their minds up about that to me,’ Pinky said.

  ‘I do not think this flow is as concerted as the other,’ Lady Arek demurred. ‘It’s exploratory: a relatively small commitment compared to the total aggregate around Yellowstone. That suggests to me that the wolves do not believe we are worth throwing all their resources at.’

  ‘Then we hold our nerve,’ I said. ‘Keep running, but with no change in our course or acceleration. And hope that the flow loses interest in us.’

  Lady Arek looked at the display, then back to me. ‘I see little point in informing Barras and the others about this. There’s nothing they can do, so why add to their concerns?’

  I disagreed. ‘We have to build trust, here. I think the safest way to do it is to be as open and transparent with Barras and the others as we are with ourselves.’

  ‘They won’t thank you,’ Lady Arek said.

  ‘They won’t,’ Pinky said. ‘But he’s right, too. If we only share the good news, they’ll never know when to believe us.’

  Lady Arek was neither right, nor entirely wrong. The refugees took the news of our predicament with the full range of responses, from fury that I had burdened them with worry about a situation totally out of their control, to a grumbling but mostly stoic acceptance, to a cheerful resignation, to heartfelt gratitude that I had spared them nothing of the truth. Mostly it was somewhere in the middle, but verging on the opinion that it was better to be informed than to remain in ignorance.

  ‘I won’t deny that we’re in trouble,’ I told them, walking along the aisles between the pits, each footfall a fresh lesson in pain despite the exoskeleton. ‘But if any ship has a chance of escaping the wolves, this is it. We think it likely they picked up somethin
g, enough to tease their interest: maybe some interaction of ours with the debris around Yellowstone, or a perturbation of the magnetosphere. But they aren’t sure we’re anything but a ghost signal. That’s why they’ve only sent a relatively small number of elements after us. It’s a fishing expedition, not a committed action. In the meantime, our friend Omori is giving them something real to chase . . .’

  My timing could have been better.

  Lady Arek called down, interrupting my sermon to inform me – and my audience – that the shuttle had blown up. Omori had used munitions, or the shuttle’s last drops of fuel, to deny the wolves a fresh source of material for their transformations.

  ‘Pinky and I risked our lives to obtain the Gideon stones, but both of us had hoped to make it back alive. Omori knew exactly what he was doing when he took that shuttle. There was no way back for him, no hope of survival. But he wanted to give us a tiny advantage, and he did.’

  ‘A good man, yes and yes,’ Probably Rose affirmed.

  Someone asked if it was too late to go back to the Swinehouse.

  ‘The Swinehouse is a pile of rubble at the bottom of the chasm,’ I said. ‘But you’re welcome to lodge a complaint. Perhaps when we next make port you’ll be lucky or stupid enough to find a ship going back in the other direction.’

  The question had not been meant seriously, but in that moment I was feeling an acute awareness of the sacrifices made for us by the others. ‘We’re not finished, not by a long margin. Ahead of us will be fresh problems and worries. But if I’m to treat you with the respect you all deserve, then you need to know the worst of it, as well as the best.’

  ‘It was the right thing to tell them,’ Barras murmured to me as I passed his station. ‘And they’ll come to understand that. In the meantime . . . did you know this man, Omori?’

  I thought about another lie, one that would make the sting of his death seem more personal to me, and therefore more noble.

  ‘I’d like to say I did. But until a few weeks ago, we’d never met.’