Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  Ground-level entrances led into the conch forms. Some of them were natural arches: clefts or fractures that had already been there when the settlers arrived. Others had been cut by human tools, some door-sized and others tall and wide enough to allow heavy equipment or cargo to be brought under cover. Once or twice we found faded but still-legible symbols or writing above the doors, such as Central Amenities or Security. It was a reminder that this had been much more than just a temporary outpost. There had been a functional self-governing community, on this island and others, a place not so far removed from Sun Hollow, but where the skies were made of air rather than rock. I wondered how well I would have adapted.

  We picked our way through the interiors of the larger conch forms, confining our explorations to the lowest levels. A milky light suffused the conch walls, enabling us to move around without using torches. The structures were not hollow, for the most part, but subdivided into smaller chambers and with multiple levels. Most of these partitions, floors and ceilings had been put in by the settlers, and they had all suffered some degree of damage and deterioration. There had been staircases and ladders leading to the upper floors, but nearly all of them had been damaged during the upheavals. To reach the higher levels, we would need to come back with more equipment.

  That could wait. There was more than enough to keep us occupied down below, searching for clues and anything we might use – especially to cross the sea. The piles of debris reached two or three times as high as a person, but they were loosely organised and shallowly pitched, so it was not too difficult to scramble up and into their lower flanks and begin to survey the contents. It was in the third building that we found the hull of a boat, wedged upside down and at an angle, but still seemingly intact, and light enough that between the three of us (and mainly Pinky) we were able to wrestle it loose and jump out the way before it came free and tumbled onto us.

  It was a small boat, tin-coloured and traditionally shaped. Its function, if not its means of manufacture, would have been instantly familiar to any human who had lived within a hundred kilometres of the sea at any point in the last three thousand years. It was open, lacking any sort of enclosed cabin. A handful of cross-planks sufficed for seating. Six people would have been its limit, and no more than four could be accommodated in any sort of comfort.

  Near the back was a fixture where a motor might have been attached.

  Glass squatted, examining the absent component. ‘I can adapt an existing propulsion solution.’ She stood up, rubbing her palms. ‘It’s a good find. We’ll keep looking in case there’s something better, but if not, this hull should suffice for our crossing.’

  I eyed the metallic grey hull, doubtful as to its suitability. We were on dry land now, so it looked more capacious than it would when immersed.

  ‘Let’s hope the sea stays nice and calm. And that whoever made this boat understood the part about the Jugglers digesting anything we put into the water.’

  Glass shot a hard, frowning stare at the boat. ‘I’ve tagged it. The hull is metalloceramic so should resist the ocean for as long as we have need of it. I’ll have the servitors come and drag it out into the open air. If we choose our weather window wisely, a boat of this size should meet our needs.’

  ‘We’ve come all this way in an invisible spaceship with force-fields, and now we’re doing the rest by a dissolving boat?’ Pinky asked.

  ‘You were here,’ Glass replied sternly. ‘You know how it works. The Jugglers respond to certain subtlety of approach. My skimmer was at the limit of the technologies they tolerate. And since we can’t swim all the way . . .’

  ‘I can’t even swim my own body length,’ Pinky said.

  ‘I’m assuming you had other priorities besides learning to swim,’ I said.

  ‘The boat will suffice, unless we turn up something better.’

  We did not. We found broken helicopters, mangled hovercraft, some land vehicles, several things that were unrecognisable, and a couple of boats four times the size of the first. But bigger was not necessarily better, Glass said. They would be harder to move into water, and the larger craft would likely be slower and clumsier, without any gains in safety.

  ‘We’ll keep looking,’ I said. ‘There’s no telling what might be in these debris piles: even a weapon or a medical kit could benefit us down the line.’

  ‘There’s something I’m not looking forward to,’ Pinky said.

  ‘What?’ Glass asked absently.

  ‘Finding dead people in these ruins. But you were here more recently, Glass. You’d know.’

  ‘I would. Except I never found any bodies. There was a memorial site, not too far from here, while I was testing the skimmer. But it must have predated the final catastrophe.’

  Eventually, exhausted and dispirited by what we had found, we gathered back outside on the sloping ground just above the green margin. A shelf of cloud lay over us like a blackened boot heel, ready to stomp down. The rain arrived in greasy, fitful spalls. Sometimes it smelled of the sea, at other times of electrical burning. Glass was shivering and shuddering, and at one point she bent over and vomited something dry onto the ground.

  Pinky caught her before she lost her footing.

  ‘Time for some truth. What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘She’s lying,’ I said. ‘And she’s not our only concern, either. Somehow or other, we have to make a home here for the refugees. Shelter’s taken care of – or it will be, once we have enough hands to clean the worst of the debris out of these buildings, bodies or not. Then we can adapt what’s inside, or have Scythe make us new walls and floors that we can fit together into rooms. Shouldn’t be asking too much of a spacecraft that can remodel itself at the drop of a hat.’

  ‘Scythe has already reallocated internal mass resources to create the hypometric precursor device.’

  ‘I’m sure it has. I’m also sure that it wouldn’t miss a thousand tonnes or so, and that’d be more than enough to make a self-sufficient community, given that we already have a head start with the conch structures.’

  Glass seethed and fizzed. ‘I suppose a small mass allowance would be within Scythe’s capabilities.’

  ‘See, that wasn’t too hard, was it? But we need to start now, and we also need to send a clear sign to Barras and the others that they’re more than just some inconvenient cargo we happen to have saddled ourselves with.’

  ‘What do you propose?’ Pinky asked.

  ‘Let’s revive Probably Rose, Barras and a dozen or so of the fittest pigs. We bring these few out and show them what they’ve got to work with. Your voice will be useful, Pinky. You’ve lived here; you know what’s possible – and just as importantly what isn’t.’ Then, to Glass: ‘If we’re to mean what we say, you should assign Barras authorisation to command Scythe. I don’t mean all the functions, but enough that he can tell the ship what it needs to make, tools and materials, and have your servitors help with moving things around and assembling them into bigger units.’

  Some battle of wills seethed within Glass. ‘All right. It’s not an unreasonable proposal. They won’t be able to come with us when we use the boat, so at least they will be usefully occupied while we’re at sea. Pinky?’

  ‘You remember my name? She remembers my name, Stink. I’ve gone up in the world.’

  ‘Chose the fittest of them to be revived first. You can oversee their orientation while Clavain and I prepare the boat.’

  ‘That wasn’t an order,’ I said. ‘Was it, Glass?’

  ‘A suggestion,’ she clarified, through half-gritted teeth.

  ‘And not a bad one,’ I said. I nodded back at the ship which, wreathed as it was in seaweed, resembled some hump-backed behemoth breaching water. ‘I suppose the ship can keep everyone fed and clothed for the time being, even if they’re outside. But by the time we leave, we’ll need to have established a self-sufficient settlement. Do you think that’s feasible in . . . what, a matter of days, weeks at best, depending on
the weather and the Jugglers?’

  ‘We made it work once.’ Pinky was looking out to the west. I wondered what his eyes saw, or perhaps what they now failed to see. ‘It helps if you can develop a taste for seaweed tea. And seaweed soup. And seaweed everything else.’

  ‘How long did it take you?’

  He looked at me with surprise. ‘I said it helps if you can, not that you ever do.’

  Glass was showing an interest in the conch forms, wandering around their bases. I watched her from a distance, wondering what it was that she sought or thought she saw.

  Glass stopped at one of the conches, where a smooth surface rose up from the ground, rooted into it like a standing stone. She smeared a green film away from the Nestbuilder’s construct, exposing the off-white translucence of its surface. She studied this cleared patch for a few moments, hands on hips, head slightly cocked, as if trying to make sense of a piece of abstract art. Then she tilted forward, pressing out an arm to lean against the conch, as if she were suddenly exhausted. The arm moved, Glass’s hand stiff and curled, so that it was the heel of her palm in contact with the conch rather than her fingers. Where some of the green still lingered, her palm etched a narrow, curving trace. Glass stepped back and deliberated. She used her other palm to etch a curve that cut across the first at a diagonal, making a loose shape like a pair of crossed cutlasses. Glass studied her handiwork again, hands dropping to her sides, a quiver of animation running from her shoulders to her hips. Glass began again. She leaned in and made parallel marks with both hands at the same time. Her gestures become faster: rapid scrubbing strokes, as if she were trying to erase some error or blasphemy that was lost to my senses. The shaking intensified, overcoming her whole body. Now her hands criss-crossed in a fury of negation, scuffing the conch far too quickly for me to visualise the individual traces. Glass dropped to her knees, flinging her arms above her head, palms whisking against the conch. Her head wrenched itself from one extreme to the next, as if it were trying to tear itself off her neck.

  Something showed itself in the conch: a faint darkening, a sort of shadow moving behind the material. Where Glass was still scrubbing, the conch seemed to my eyes to become momentarily rough, catching the light in a way that hinted at a leathery texture. But it was there and gone in a second. Glass’s shaking consumed her, and her arms flailed away from the conch. She lolled onto her side, her head thudding against the ground.

  I dashed to her, as perhaps I should have done the instant I saw her being taken by the fit. She was still writhing when I slid down next to her, ramming my knees into the rock. I cupped my hands under her head. It was like trying to stop the movement of a machine, something bigger and more powerful than me. I slumped back and dragged all of Glass with me, hugging her shuddering form close to mine. By gradual increments her fitting began to reduce. A white froth bubbled from her lips.

  I looked up at the area of the conch where she had conjured something into being.

  ‘Glass,’ I said quietly, not even sure that she could hear me. ‘We need to talk.’

  When there was a moment, I made her sit down next to me, our haunches on the slippery rock, the darkening sea beyond us, a margin of salmon-coloured light breaking between striated cloud layers close to the horizon.

  ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘Nothing is wrong.’

  ‘Stop lying about there being nothing wrong. If I hadn’t got to you by the conch, you’d have dashed your brains out in about five minutes. And what was all that about, anyway?’

  Glass brooded. Her eyes searched the west. ‘I was attempting to verify a set of Nestbuilder gestural commands. They didn’t work.’

  ‘Something nearly worked.’

  ‘I wasn’t even close. And the conch is damaged: shorn from its proper place and therefore unable to function properly.’

  ‘You said these things used to be part of a ship.’

  ‘Or many ships, or a structure that could break apart and reorganise itself however it wished. I need to be sure that when we meet one of these ships, we understand enough of it not to get ourselves killed.’

  I looked around at the ruins. ‘And why would we be likely to run into one of these ships? Unless you already had a good idea where to look for one.’

  ‘When the Sandra Voi made an examination of Charybdis, it detected something inside the ice giant’s atmosphere. A large, solid mass. Unfortunately, neither Clavain nor Galiana had the background knowledge to interpret their finding correctly, nor the means to do more than send in a few high-atmosphere sounding probes. But with the benefit of centuries, I know exactly what it was: an intact, or near-intact, Nestbuilder vehicle.’

  ‘How can you know?’

  ‘I know.’ She gathered herself. ‘And we’ll locate it, once we reach Charybdis. The floater will still be there. You mustn’t make the error of thinking on human timescales when it concerns the Nestbuilders. But it would help if I had confidence in these command protocols, ahead of time.’

  ‘You over-reached yourself.’

  ‘I assigned too many mental resources to the conch. I left myself unguarded.’

  ‘Unguarded against what?’

  She sighed. It was an oceanic sigh: an immense and painful admission of imperfection. ‘The ninecats.’

  ‘The ninecats? We left them on Yellowstone.’

  ‘They did more harm to me than I admitted. They contained an engineered weapon, something specifically designed to hurt Conjoiners, or those like me who have Conjoiner proprietary neural architecture.’

  ‘Snowdrop and Lady Arek told us that was a risk. Why didn’t you listen?’

  ‘I thought I had the better of the ninecats.’ She grimaced, shaking her head. ‘Even when I was hurt and taken into Scythe to be treated, I didn’t realise the extent of the trouble I was in. But the diagnostics showed that parts of the ninecats’ limbs had broken off inside my wounds: little slivers of them. Microscopic, autonomous splinters, independent weapons in their own right. They’ve been in me ever since, working their way into my head. Scythe tried to . . . flush them out. Then to cut them out, or hunt them down with nanophages of its own. But the slivers were adaptable and easily able to devise counter-strategies of their own. They had already seen and defeated many Conjoiner countermeasures.’

  ‘But you, Glass. You? You broke every system in Sun Hollow; rewrote our records and turned our own guns against us. How the hell did this catch you out?’

  ‘I hate to disappoint you, but defeating Sun Hollow was never more than child’s play. I told you I liked games.’ She smiled at my innocence. ‘This, though . . . this is an adult game. It’s far less forgiving.’

  ‘You can’t lose.’

  ‘Can’t I?’

  ‘No. Now that we’ve lost Lady Arek, who else has the tactical knowledge to see this through? Not me, not Pinky. This was your fight, Glass. I may have been the weapon you needed, but you were the mastermind guiding it. So you don’t get to die on us.’

  ‘The work on the Gideon stones needed to be completed. If I had permitted Scythe to treat me properly, we would never have had time to achieve the full integration of the stones.’ She breathed in, tightening her arms around her upraised knees. ‘I . . . made a calculation, Clavain. I traded my health against the stones, and that saved us.’

  ‘It was the wrong calculation, then!’

  ‘Do you recall what Lady Arek said about stepping stones? I was listening in, whether you realised it or not. And she was right. This was the step that needed to be taken.’

  ‘And now you die, is that it?’

  ‘No – at least, I hope not. But since the ship’s remedies have failed me, and the slivers are knocking on my last defences – as you have noticed – there is only one other treatment option open to me. I’m afraid it’s a radical one.’

  The evening chill was working its way into my bones. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’ll come with you to the Pattern Jugglers. We’ll both swim, but for different reasons. You,
to make contact with your brother. Me, to be restored to an earlier biological template: a back-up condition in which I don’t contain the slivers.’

  ‘Can it be done?’

  ‘I entered the sea once before and attempted partial communion with the Jugglers.’

  ‘And failed.’

  ‘Not entirely. I detected your intentions, which means there was at least a partial breakdown and reintegration of my own memories. That means the Jugglers have known me once, and perhaps retained an echo of that encounter. I am only asking to be restored to that echo.’

  ‘Drastic,’ I agreed.

  ‘Right answer.’

  ‘What about the memories you’ve acquired since you were last on Ararat? What happens to them?’

  ‘In all likelihood they’d be lost – or at least surrendered to the sea. But I could reconstruct them, over time. The ship knows what I did. So do you. You have stood witness.’

  ‘This is madness, Glass.’

  ‘It is. Glorious madness. Glorious necessary madness. Will you help me? I may be weaker than you expect, by the time we get to them. I can’t do this on my own.’

  ‘I can’t do it on my own either.’

  Glass shook her head in wonder. ‘What a pair of broken monsters we make, Clavain. Do you think the sea will put us back together again?’

  I looked out to the dulling horizon, to the despair and promise that it held for the both of us.

  ‘I think it’ll either mend us, or be the death of us,’ I answered.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Night came: our first on Ararat. The clouds that had been gathering solidified into a storm, pouring continuous sheets of rain onto the island. Lightning shattered the sky, sometimes striking near enough to light the remains of First Camp in a spasm of counterfeit day. The sea swelled in slow, dark, green-crested waves like the breathing rhythms of some world-wrapping monster, something enormous, black, tentacular and foul-tempered, that we were in abject danger of rousing.