Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  We returned to the warmth and security of Scythe, where nothing of the storm touched us. Although all three of us had visited Ararat before (even if I remembered almost no part of my time here) Glass was still insistent that we should be subjected to thorough examinations in case something had changed in the biological environment of the planet. But if anything harmful had got into us, it was too subtle to be picked up by Glass’s methods. Beyond runny noses and mildly irritated eyes, neither of which were expected to last, we were experiencing no ill-effects directly attributable to Ararat.

  Before we rested, Pinky and I went to the hibernation bay and made a revised inventory of the sleepers according to physical fitness and age. Barras and Probably Rose had already been agreed upon, but it took some further deliberation to settle on the other ten to rouse first. We needed pigs who were old enough to work and take decisions independently, but not so infirm that any manual labour was too much for them. If we were too slow in establishing a settlement, the survivors were going to have to travel with us regardless of any risk that lay ahead.

  Having made our choices, we set the caskets to a slow revival cycle, knowing it would be at least thirteen hours before any of them reached any awareness. We needed sleep ourselves, but before we spoke to the twelve, we also needed the ghost of a plan so that Barras and the rest did not feel they were being thrown to the fates.

  ‘Glass is getting worse,’ I said, while Pinky folded shut the last of the manual override panels on the twelve caskets.

  ‘And Glass probably has ears in every part of this ship.’

  ‘Then she won’t be surprised by any part of this conversation. She’s pinning her hopes on the Jugglers being able to fix whatever went wrong with her in the Swinehouse, winding her back to the version of Glass that visited here the last time.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think we might be asking a lot of something that no one understands.’ I dropped my voice in deference to his earlier comment. ‘But she is getting sicker, and I’m certain we’re only seeing the tip of it. You saw how she nearly collapsed out there. If you hadn’t caught her, she’d have probably dashed her head on those rocks.’

  ‘I’d be more worried about the rocks.’

  ‘I’m concerned that we may not have much time, now that we’re here. As soon as that boat is ready, and this storm dies down to the point where it isn’t suicide to go out into the water . . . I think we ought to be leaving.’

  ‘And you want me with you.’

  ‘If Glass is right, things didn’t go so well the last time I was here. It may be that I never reached my brother. But it’s also possible that I reached him – whatever remains of him in this ocean – and he fought back. I need an advocate: someone who my brother will recognise as a friend and an ally.’

  ‘Then maybe go with someone other than the person who killed him.’

  ‘Whatever happened between you and Nevil, I know this much just from the time I’ve spent with you: whatever you did, you did it with love in your heart.’

  He began to scoff, but I carried on regardless.

  ‘The universe gave you no choice. It held your hand in an iron glove and made you do its bidding. And if your hand was on that knife, so was my brother’s, at every step.’

  ‘Maybe it was.’ He held a fragile calm for a moment, before exploding. ‘But I still killed him! His mind understood why it had to happen. But that was his living mind. Whatever’s left of him out there, the two aren’t necessarily the same. What if all that’s left of Nevil Clavain is hate and rage and regret, and a faint memory of someone who cut him open while he was still screaming?’

  ‘Then we may need to be each other’s advocates.’

  ‘Is that the best reassurance you’ve got?’

  ‘For now.’

  ‘Well, if it does take madness to go out in that boat . . . I’d say you’ve got that part covered.’ Pinky gave a dog-like shiver that I took to be equal parts fury and exasperation. ‘You’re fuckers, all of you. Clavains. Why does my life keep getting tied up in your problems? Why am I always the salvation? Why can’t you find some other pig?’

  ‘Look on it this way: we have excellent taste in allies.’

  In the morning the twelve were revived. Glass, Pinky and I were waiting for them as they came to life, ready to dab lips and eyes and offer succour to dry throats. Scorpio and I bore the brunt of the work, since Glass was having trouble controlling her trembling.

  They had the obvious questions. Had we made it to Ararat? Where was Lady Arek? Why were the others still sleeping? What was going to happen next?

  We answered them patiently, imagining ourselves in the same states of ignorance, and were not at all annoyed when our account of skimming Bright Sun was either dismissed outright or accepted without dispute. Our twelve fell into two camps, it seemed: either knowledgeable enough to think our exploit an outrageous falsehood until we stressed that it had really happened, or sufficiently ignorant of stars and their properties not to consider it in any way remarkable.

  They were soon disabused of that notion. We explained that the ship had come close to catastrophe, and only Lady Arek’s bravery had held it together. But that bravery had taken her from us.

  The pigs could not mourn her as Pinky and Probably Rose did – not even as much as Glass, who had lost a collaborator, if not a friend – but they understand that her absence cost us very dearly.

  ‘It’s nearly the worst thing that could have happened,’ I told them. ‘But the very worst would have been all of us dying, and we have Lady Arek to thank that that’s not the case. She’s given us a chance to carry on, a chance to regroup and continue our fight. Which we will, in her name, and those who gave themselves so that we could escape from the wolves around Epsilon Eridani.’ I drew myself up, looking each of them in the eye. ‘Now we need to work without her guidance. And we do have work ahead of us.’

  When Barras, Probably Rose and the other ten were fit enough to walk around and leave Scythe, we ventured back onto land. The worst of the storm had played out overnight, with rain only falling in spurts, and never as heavily as it had at its fiercest. That did not mean that the weather was treating us kindly. The sea was still wind-ruffled and restless, and more clouds were marshalling to the north-east. It was not exactly how I might have wished to present this new world to the refugees. But I supposed it was better they were acquainted with its moods now, than be disheartened later on.

  Yet the twelve seemed unconcerned. It was a wonder to them just to be able to breathe outside or walk more than a few strides without running into cage bars or a wall. They tripped, stumbled, fell face down on the slippery rocks, and got up laughing again. There would be many bruises and gashes by the time the day was done, many stinging eyes and runny noses, perhaps an aching bone or two, but all seemed to consider the price of survival a fair one. Even Probably Rose, who had never been incarcerated, was glad to be somewhere not bounded by artificial surfaces, and where her life did not depend on the immediate and continual functioning of machines.

  ‘We can live here,’ she said to me, gesturing at the conch structures. ‘If they did, we can, yes and yes. I know they didn’t have it easy, but we’ve been through worse.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. And we’re not necessarily talking about a place that no one ever leaves, just a world where we have to live for a few decades.’ I smiled at myself: how easily I spoke of decades as if they were mere inconsequential episodes in a lifetime, soon forgotten. I knew better, but the old habits lingered.

  ‘We as in yes, “you”,’ Probably Rose said.

  ‘Scythe will return.’ A rash promise, but if I did not bank on success I might as well have ended myself now. ‘And we may not be the only ship. I’m sure there are others out there, somewhere. If we succeed, then eventually there won’t be any need for us to hide. Those of you who’ve adapted to Ararat can remain, but it doesn’t have to be a life sentence.’

  ‘But first, and verily, we hav
e to build.’

  The twelve had already been briefed on the burden placed on them. Pinky was there to assist, but it was up to them how they went about the division of labour and responsibility. First it was agreed that they would explore the conches and decide which were the most suitable for early occupation. After that, the work would be at least twofold: one group would spend time learning how to collaborate with Scythe, persuading it to manufacture what they needed. The other group would be preparing the ground – clearing out debris and drawing up blueprints for partitions, floors and ceilings, interlocking with what was already present, building on the ruins.

  ‘Nothing needs to be perfect,’ I stressed. ‘It just has to work well enough for now. The ship will remain here while three of us go off in the boat, so there’s always that fallback. You can come and go as you please, and depend on the ship for your basic needs. But we always need to be thinking ahead to the day when the ship has to depart, and that may not be too far in the future.’

  ‘Months?’

  ‘Sooner, unless things go badly wrong with the Pattern Jugglers.’

  I watched all the hope drain out of Probably Rose between one breath and the next.

  ‘I take back what I said just now.’ The strain of the moment brought on one of her twitching fits, and she cuffed her forehead violently. ‘It’s yes, yes, and yes, impossible!’

  ‘No, just difficult. Every part of this has been done before, and Pinky knows all of it. You’ll never starve. Pinky tells me that provided you take certain precautions, you can eat almost anything that washes up against the island. I won’t say you won’t get bored of it, but it’ll keep you alive. And you won’t suffocate, or die of anything contagious. Nor will you die of hypothermia. Clothes, blankets and heaters will be easy to provide. This isn’t the end: it’s the start of something. Ararat is about as compatible a planet as we could ever land on.’

  ‘It killed the others.’

  ‘No,’ I stressed. ‘Not Ararat, and not the Pattern Jugglers. They were both tolerant hosts. It was the war that happened in space that spelled their end, and it won’t come again.’

  ‘You’re very sure of yourself.’

  ‘There’ll be a war,’ I clarified. ‘But not the kind we fought before. The next one will be different.’

  She measured me with a gently cocked head. ‘You’ve changed from the man who came to us, the man I stuck my needles into on that first night in the stronghold. Yes and yes. I knew it was you from the genetic samples, but I still didn’t believe it, not quite. Now I do. There’s another man looking out at me from behind your face. Colder. Harder, yes and yes. More sure of himself. More willing to think the unthinkable.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for this. But now that it’s here, it feels like it was always waiting to come back.’ I stomped my foot onto rock. ‘We make a stand here. We build something. We build to say that humanity’s not done. That we’ve been pushed back, cornered, forced to cower and hide, but we’re not finished. We’ve been into the darkness, all of us. This is the cusp, the point where we turn to the light again. It starts on Ararat, and it starts with you.’

  She considered my words, nodded slowly. ‘So, build.’

  ‘So build,’ I echoed.

  ‘Go and tend your boat, old man,’ Probably Rose told me. ‘Some of us have real work to be getting on with, yes, and yes.’

  Part of me would have been very glad to depart that morning: not because I was in any way looking forward to meeting the Jugglers, but because there could be no room in my thoughts for much else. I had felt the same way on Sun Hollow, when I knew I had to have a tooth taken out. I just wanted it over; to be on the other side of all the pain and uncertainty.

  But we would not be leaving for a day or two. Glass expected to be ready with the adaptations to the boat by the evening, and the provisioning could be done an hour or two before we were ready to depart. But the weather had other plans for us. The overnight storm might have broken temporarily, but those clouds on the horizon had continued to swell and mass their ranks, and now they looked like dark-bellied galleons, hulls prickling with cannon fire. The sea roared and spat. A bigger craft with an enclosed cabin could have set out, but our open-topped boat would have been tossed to the waves within minutes of setting sail. It was laughable that it had come to this: that all our travelling, all our boldness, had brought us back to the Stone Age, watching the skies and setting our eyes to the wind. We had no forecasts and no idea of the weather conditions beyond the horizon. Glass had been unwilling to leave monitoring eyes in orbit, and now that we were safely down she was adamant that it was too much of a risk to send any drones or servitors out on scouting trips beyond First Camp, in case they registered with the wolves. It would be dangerous enough setting off in a boat, but that was the one part of our expedition that could not be avoided.

  So we had to wait. While it tested my nerves, the delay did at least allow time for Barras and the others to get into their stride, and for Pinky and me to lend our wits and muscles where we could. Scythe and its servitors had been busy, spitting out stacks of simple modular forms which could be locked together to make chairs and tables, as well as providing the tools and bonding agents to allow these forms to be adapted into more complicated designs. Already the Administrative conch contained a long, ramshackle galley where legs could be rested and food and drink served, and a number of basic partitions had already been established to provide toilets and washrooms, furnished using basic but reliable templates from Scythe’s libraries. It was all haphazard to start with, and both the food and waste products had to come and go from the ship. But over time, as Pinky’s experience told us, there was nothing to stop the settlement becoming dependent solely on the sea. Knowing that a thing could be made to work was a very powerful incentive to short-term problem solving, and his assurance and swagger soon communicated itself to the twelve. Pinky was also wise enough to step back when he saw a solution, but knew that it would help the twelve to discover it for themselves. I watched him with a powerful sense of pride, as if I had ownership of his accomplishments, and then rebuked myself for that fallacy.

  By the end of the second full day, when the worst of the eye and nasal irritation had begun to wear off, there was talk of bringing out more of the sleepers to accelerate the preparations. But Barras and Probably Rose had established the outlines of a democratic process and the matter was voted on, and narrowly rejected. The twelve would continue building at their own pace, and only revive another portion of the refugees when they had something to show them besides acres of slimy rock, draughty conches, and sad moraines of human debris.

  The twelve worked in shifts, alternating between the physical labour of clearing out the conches, and the mental tasks of learning how to communicate with Scythe. Glass had arranged control interfaces for the ship’s manufactory, enabling the pigs to work with natural language, written code, or abstract symbol manipulation. The interfaces were custom-manufactured weatherproof compads, sturdy enough to be dropped on rock or into shallow water, and with their tactile controls suitable for pig digits.

  None of this was straightforward for the pigs, since few of them had ever had to submit instructions to a machine. But on the other hand, they had almost nothing to unlearn and therefore came to the problem without pre-established ideas. I was pleased to see how quickly they overcame their initial hesitancy and persuaded the ship into creating fully finished objects and machines that already met a need, rather than just raw materials. The process of furnishing the conches was already gaining pace, and the pigs were coming up with ever more inventive and efficient solutions to help in turning these damp, wind-haunted shells into something liveable. It was as if all the years and decades of free will that had been denied them in Yellowstone was now finding expression in a matter of days.

  Still no bodies had turned up. Glass had found none on her earlier visit, but she had admitted that her search had not been thorough. And I had no sense that I had found bodies either, although
in that respect all I could go on was the emotional tenor of my still-buried memories. There was drowning in there, and fear, but nothing like the horror of coming across unburied dead. Perhaps I too had spent only the minimum time in and around First Camp, with all my significant experiences confined to the open waters.

  I told Glass that I should like to visit the memorial ground she had mentioned before we set off for the Jugglers. It felt necessary; a paying of respects. But Glass demurred. What had been an hour’s travel in her skimmer would be far more arduous in our boat, and she was against anything that counted as an unnecessary journey.

  ‘This isn’t tourism, Clavain. We didn’t come here to sightsee.’

  ‘I feel like we’re already treading on their bones.’

  Glass’s rejection was final. ‘The moment the weather cooperates, we leave. But not for the memorial ground.’ Her eyes searched me ‘What are you hoping to find? Some fond message from your brother, some absolution from beyond the grave?’

  ‘If I was here, then perhaps I left a message for myself.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ she said flatly. ‘I’d have found it.’

  The next day the weather was as bad as the first storm, and there was no easing in it for another fifty-two hours. It made any sort of work difficult, so even the pigs had to slow their labours. They had put down meandering high-friction walkways around and between the conches (another of the things they had asked Scythe to manufacture) but between the rain, the wind, and the eye-stinging foam flecking in from the sea, it was impossible for any sort of productive labour to go on. The pigs rested, either back on the ship, or in the conch where the work was already most advanced. It was a time for wounds to be addressed, sprains and strains to be eased, bellies replenished, stories told and boasts exaggerated. They had heating and as much hot water as they needed by then, and the ship had no trouble providing food and drink in the desired quantities and varieties. Pinky, in a spirit of solidarity, had even shown the pigs how best to collect, prepare and consume the seaweed; which varieties to look for, which to avoid, and how best to make it semi-palatable. It seemed like the basis for a crushingly monotonous diet, and perhaps it was. But I thought of the similar lessons we had endured on Sun Hollow (though they had happened to some man who was not quite me) and how our palates had gradually found a way to detect surprising nuance and variety in the few basic foodstuffs we had been able to grow in those caverns, and how that discriminatory faculty had only been amplified with each successive generation.