Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that. All right. Accepting this, just for now, next question. Excuse me if I’m blunt, even for a pig. Why the fuck has this happened?’

  I laughed. ‘Excuse me if I’m equally blunt. I have no fucking idea, my friend. Except that Nevil made a vow to kill Warren if he ever came back to Ararat. Perhaps this is his way of honouring that promise, in word if not in spirit.’

  ‘Did Glass get a say?’

  ‘I remember nothing of what happened to Glass after we separated in the lagoon. But we do know that Glass was already badly damaged. Perhaps this was the best possible outcome for both of us: stitching Warren into Glass to make a whole personality again.’

  Pinky shook his head. ‘Just when I thought the universe was done throwing weird shit at me.’

  I met his observation with a half smile. ‘It gets stranger. I think there’s a little bit of Nevil in with us. Not his personality, but a few shards of what made him. Enough to help us with what needs to be done next.’

  ‘Got to say, the old man really did a number on you.’

  ‘But we got what we came for. I know where to find Charybdis. It’s an ice giant planet in the Zeta Tucanae system, about six and half light-years from Ararat – say a little under eight years of flight time. As soon as Scythe is ready, and the refugees are established . . . why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘We need to talk about the refugees. And our hosts.’

  ‘That was going to be my next question. Are they as friendly as you make them seem?’

  ‘Allowing for the odd slip-up in communications, I think they’re on our side.’

  ‘I suppose that’s better than the alternative. Who are they, and how did they get here?’

  ‘It’s complicated, and I think you still need to rest awhile. We agreed not to wear you out in one go. Whatever you are, whatever’s in you, you need to be strong.’

  ‘Who is “we”?’

  ‘Probably Rose and Barras are with me. We call ourselves the Temporary Floating Embassy. The mariners call this place Marl – it’s not their only floating settlement, but I think it’s one of the biggest. The others are still at First Camp. When the mariners saw our boat, and realised what was happening, they sent another party back to the island to make contact.’

  ‘Why did they wait?’

  ‘Until we set out in the boat, they didn’t have a clue we’d even landed on the planet. We didn’t see them, they didn’t see us.’ He shrugged. ‘What’s done is done. Our hosts have tried to make us comfortable. Me, I’ve been seasick nearly the whole time. Have you any idea how much puke comes out of a pig? Even I’m a little appalled by it.’

  ‘They say it helps if you widen your stance.’

  Pinky pushed himself up from the chair. ‘I’ll have some food sent to you. I hope you like the colour green, because that’s all you’ll be eating and drinking for a few days. Most of what comes out of you’ll be green as well.’

  ‘I can’t wait. And concerning the refugees?’

  ‘Eat, rest, and then we’ll talk.’ He was about to leave the room when he turned back. ‘I don’t know what you are, exactly. But I’m working on the assumption we’re better off with you than without you.’

  ‘So am I.’ I paused, remembering something. ‘Pinky?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Nevil said he wanted to thank you. He said he misses you, and was glad it was you with him at the end. He said you were the best of us.’

  He was right: I needed more rest than I realised. I both knew and did not know the limits of my own body. There could be nothing more familiar than my own flesh, and at the same time nothing more alien. When the oddness tripped me up, it was Warren behind my eyes. When Warren stopped dwelling on himself, accepting what was absent and what was new, it was Glass gaining dominance. We flickered between each other like a spinning mirror. Somewhere in that dazzle was the person we might be merging into, perhaps with whatever figment of himself Nevil had lodged within this shimmering union. It was a peculiar condition to find myself in, and not one I would have chosen. But it was preferable to non-existence.

  Food was brought to me at intervals, and I ate and rested. I was given the means to wash myself, and when the need arose I made use of the toilet that I found within the dresser, which turned out to be a sort of disposal chute, funnelling my waste into the sea beneath us. I squatted over it awkwardly at first, easily losing my balance, but after those initial trials I came to accept its essential utility. Let what came from the sea return to the sea.

  Pinky brought in the food most of the time, and if it was not him than it was Barras or Probably Rose. The mariners had brought them here (wherever we were) aboard a boat or raft that used the wind for propulsion and which, with the right handling and sea conditions, was hardly any slower than the powered boat that had carried us from First Crossing. But when I tried to get more out of them concerning their journey, and what exactly had been discussed before my revival, they answered only in the tersest of terms.

  I did not blame them. Pinky had been to this world before and knew something of the Pattern Jugglers and the unpredictability of their gifts. He could believe what the others found harder to accept, with so little proof. Barras and Probably Rose had no trouble accepting that I was Glass, because I looked like her. But when I addressed them as Warren, the same voice still came out of my mouth. It was no help pleading that I had the memories of a dead man, a man whose body had been fished from the sea. They had seen some of Glass’s capabilities (mine) and had no trouble believing that she (I) could have accessed and internalised my (his) memories, and that what seemed to be Warren (me) was merely an adept piece of mimicry. Not that they voiced those thoughts to me, but I could read it in their eyes. Would I have believed myself? I wondered. Almost certainly not. And could I have offered anything by way of corroboration? Not a hope.

  My only advocate remained Pinky, because he had known Warren a little, and known Nevil very well, and by his testimony the doubters might be won around. In the meantime, all I could do was tolerate their guardedness with good humour and understanding, and do nothing that might undermine their slowly changing opinion of me.

  It was clear that I was being isolated from our hosts for the time being, and clear also (from the questions I asked, and the evasive answers I almost always received) that some difficult business remained to be resolved where the matter of First Camp was concerned. Wisely, I stopped pressing against an unmoving wall. I concentrated on regaining my energies and satisfying myself that my broken body had indeed been remade and the battles within me put to rest.

  This seemed clear. I remembered being very ill indeed. I remembered fighting to conceal the severity of it from Warren and the others, lest they lose all confidence in me as an ally. The hostile entities which had broken through my defences on Yellowstone had been close to killing me. But they had been purged by the Jugglers, and I felt clear and clean.

  Nearly. There was still something inside me, wasn’t there? Something lodged deep. But I had put that there, and like house cleaners the Jugglers had understood to leave that one precious thing intact. They had dusted around the priceless heirloom, but never touched it.

  I stopped. It was as if a clock gear within me had snagged on a broken tooth.

  Oh, I’m sorry, Warren. You didn’t know about that? I must have omitted to mention it.

  Or omitted to remember it yourself. We each had our secrets, Glass. Mine was the lie I chose to live, the bed of false memories I made for myself. Yours was the thing lodged inside you. You might have put it there. But it became such a part of you that you eventually forgot what you’d done. What you’d allowed into yourself.

  I didn’t forget . . .

  One of us gave a wry chuckle.

  But you didn’t exactly remember, either.

  Pinky gave off a controlled nervous energy as he took me along the winding, conch-walled passages of Marl which led to the others. Evidently such negotiations as had been
proceeding were still at a delicate stage and an indiscretion from me might undo days of good work. But I was in no mind to ruin the efforts of the Temporary Floating Embassy. All I wanted was to leave Ararat before the knowledge I held melted away.

  ‘They have language and writing all of their own,’ he was saying. ‘And you can see where there are little bits of Canasian and Russish and Norte jammed into the pudding. But it’s not really comprehensible to any of us.’

  ‘So they’re derived from human stock. A ship must have come here, with genetically augmented colonists, pre-engineered to survive in the ocean. Something went wrong: the ship must have crashed, or abandoned them, and they slipped back into the Dark Ages. Only now are they rebuilding some kind of aquatic culture.’

  ‘Wow,’ he said, looking at me with amazement. ‘That’s so far from what happened it’s almost beautiful. These aren’t colonists, Glass.’ He paused in his stride. ‘Glass? Do I call you Glass, or Warren? We’re going to have to help me sort that one out. I’m just a pig: I’m not wired to deal with this shit.’

  ‘Nevil called him War, when they were boys. Now War and Glass are in the same body.’ I thought on that for a moment. ‘So call me Warglass. I like that. It makes me think of something fused at high temperatures, a substance that wouldn’t otherwise exist.’

  ‘All right,’ he said doubtfully, going along with me for the sake of argument. ‘Warglass it is. Who is speaking now?’

  ‘I’m not sure it matters.’

  ‘Is it one person inside your head, or two?’

  ‘Two becoming one.’

  ‘That’s a great help.’

  ‘It’s the best I can do. I feel as if we’re two fluids poured into the same container. We each have access to each other’s memories, and the more that sharing happens, the less it matters that we were ever two different people. The fluids are mixing. Our voices are becoming one. That’s why it makes sense for us to have a single name.’

  He walked on, clearly unsatisfied by my answer. ‘Well, Warglass. News for you: these aren’t colonists who arrived on Ararat after the fall of First Camp. These are the survivors. Or rather, the descendants. These are the people we left behind.’

  ‘It’s not possible,’ I stated flatly. ‘I was there, Pinky. I remember.’

  ‘Ah, so now it’s Stink stepping up?’

  ‘No, it’s me, Warglass, but with access to two sets of memories. The people who stayed behind on Ararat were human, not merfolk. They had no technology that could have let them reshape their bodies, and no time to do it even if they had.’

  ‘You’re right on that score. They didn’t do it to themselves. The sea did.’

  ‘By which you mean the Pattern Jugglers?’

  ‘Probably, but don’t go looking for hard evidence. You won’t find it. It’s been a hundred and eighty-odd years since we left them behind. To us, it’s recent history. But these people have lived through it the slow way, generation after generation. We’re six or seven of them beyond any direct memory of what happened here. What they have is oral testimony, songs, stories, pictures.’ He stiffened in his stride. ‘Don’t judge them for that. They could have thrown me back into the sea, but they didn’t.’

  I patted his shoulder. ‘They know an ally when they see one. As did I. Did we. I never did thank you for smoothing the way with the Jugglers, but consider a debt owed to you.’

  ‘Pigs don’t hold anyone in debt.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Bitter experience. We tend to die before anyone has a chance to pay us back.’

  ‘And yet, I have a distinct feeling you’ll outlive all of us.’

  During my confinement I had formed a tentative view as to the nature of this place. Pinky had said that it was like a boat that never went anywhere, by which he meant a floating structure that was tethered to the seabed, or at least anchored against drift by some means. In fact, it was a whole flotilla of such objects. The main part of each was a large conch, watertight enough to bob up and down on the waves, and of which some larger or smaller portion remained permanently submerged. Some of these conches were fused together, so that they moved as a whole, even while trapping areas of open water between them. We stepped between these fixed conches by archways or precariously narrow hump-backed footbridges, with balustrades that were too low for my liking. At times it was a thirty- or forty-metre drop down to the sea. Evidently the mariners had no fear of falling, since they could survive almost any plunge into water.

  I saw glimpses of them below, swimming in the enclosed waters, tending rafts, fixing nets, scrambling high up the sides of the conches on trellises. I heard their barked instructions, their laughter, and their shanties.

  The other conches, especially the outlying ones – the community was about the size of one chamber in Sun Hollow – were only loosely tethered, and moved on independent swells, one rising where another might be falling. They were lashed together by larger, stronger versions of the material that had been strung up to trap our boat. Ropes and nets of this stuff were used in abundance, lending the conches the look of white shells which had been lathered in masses of sticky, cloying seaweed.

  Nowhere did I see anything that depended on power to function. There were complicated devices – drawbridges, locks, winches and cranes – but they all used muscle power or some clever arrangement of waterwheels and water reservoirs. They were fashioned of something like wood or bamboo, stiff and green-veined, but which I presumed was some marine organism that could be harvested and worked in a similar manner, and nothing like anything growing on the fringes of First Camp. Where I saw metal, or some artificial material which must have been scavenged from the abandoned colony, it was used with deliberation and care: they knew it to be precious and irreplaceable. Elsewhere there was much use of bone, or the baleen-like material, and a kind of coral-like cement which I presumed to have been built up in laborious layers, by hand, to form the bridges and other structural flourishes which were not part of the original conches. Once in place, it must have set rock-hard and appeared perfectly strong enough for the uses it was put to. They had fire and light, dispensed by candles and lanterns, which seemed to burn strongly and enduringly, and emitted a sweet smell as they combusted, but I could only guess at the materials and methods behind them. Was the glass in the windows and lanterns really glass, or just some translucent, tinted natural substance, like a kind of keratin?

  There were a hundred things about which I could only speculate. What was clear to me was these were not a primitive people. They were clever and resourceful, with an innate understanding of many subtle principles of engineering and geometry. All the same, I could have been looking at civic amenities from any point in the last four thousand years. It was an impressive and defiant act of survival, a means of living that kept the mariners beneath the threshold of interest of the Inhibitors. By the same token, though, they had surrendered their lives to the moods of a world, to the capricious governance of weather and climate and geological catastrophe. They could persist here, I thought, and in some comfort, but that was all. They could never make their world safer, or avert destruction from the skies, or escape to some better sanctuary. But it was community, and life, and since I had lost one and nearly lost the other, I was moved by their resilience and adaptability.

  At length, we emerged into a large, high-ceilinged chamber lit by grander versions of the coloured windows in my stateroom. The space was ornately decorated, with relief work formed from the same rocky cement I had seen earlier, only this time employed purely for ornamentation. Between pediments and curlicues of layered-on cement were friezes, marked on the walls in blue, gold and turquoise pigments, and depicting marine men and women engaged in acts of drama and antiquity, as if I looked upon a history that was millennia deep, rather than a scattering of decades. There was writing, too: chains of winding, antennae-like symbols garlanding the drawings, some of which snagged my eye with the illusion of meaning. Somewhere in the lineage of this writing were language forms
known to me, ghostly traces that my brain detected, but which had been shattered and recombined so many times that I could read no part of them. Yet I knew that human minds were behind this work.

  Barras and Probably Rose were waiting, along with about twenty mariners, including a pair of enthroned eminences who I took to be their leaders. Their chairs were mounted on a raised dais of conch material, with the other mariners flanking them at different levels in some kind of ceremonial hierarchy. Other than the seated pair, all were standing. I had only seen them in the water before, or from far above, and had not really formed any definite opinion as to whether they were capable of walking upright. But out of the water’s protection they were not so far from baseline humanity as I might have imagined. Their skins were dark, but mottled with flecks of grey, green and gold. Their fingers and toes had been adapted for swimming, and their chests and shoulders were wide; each of them had a thick, muscular neck that supported their head like a plinth. They had large dark eyes, slitted noses, whiskery faces, a sort of mane, often green-stained, but beyond those generalities each was an individual, and I soon made tentative guesses as to age and gender. Their clothes, such as they were, consisted at the minimum of a skirt or loin cloth of some green woven material. To this might be added augmentations of woven plates, almost like armour, but which surely had only a decorative function, as well as diagonally worn belts and various sheaths and pouches containing weapons and tools, including two of the spearlike stanchions that had been used in the attempted trapping of our boat.

  ‘The ones on the thrones are the king and queen,’ Pinky told me in a whisper. ‘Least, that’s the nearest we’ve got to their titles. The man is Rindi, the woman Ivril. They seem to run things equally between them. As far as we can tell there’s a ruling lineage going back about seventy or eighty years, when there was some sort of upheaval. That’s not even half their history, but they talk as if it were somewhere back in the Bronze Age.’ He gave me a gentle shove. ‘Introduce yourself. Speak slowly, and their interpreters will pick up enough to be going on with. And if you want my advice, go easy on the two fluids in one head bit. We’re trying to build some bridges here, not send our allies running for the hills.’