Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  You were a good man, and you were loved.

  I was crying; weeping not for myself but for this dead man who had been mourned. By the twist that had united our selves within one body, I knew that I was both victim and accessory to that crime, and I could condemn and console myself in the same thought.

  ‘This . . . was a mistake,’ Pinky whispered. ‘And next time you’ll listen.’

  I found the will to say: ‘No, not a mistake. I needed to be here, I needed to feel it.’

  ‘I never doubted you were you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But if I had kept a little doubt back . . . this would’ve settled it.’ He turned his snout to the catafalque. ‘You have to let go now. We both have to let go.’

  ‘He gave you a thread back to Nevil. Now it’s been broken.’

  ‘I never depended on it.’ His grip on me intensified. ‘But we’re depending on you. Say goodbye, Warglass.’

  Ivril and Rindi had arrived at the funeral raft, flanked by courtiers. Their garb was more elaborate than before, both of them wearing spined head-dresses and with their bodies daubed in glowing inks. They met my gaze, then set about the formal part of the ceremony, intoning words for the dead, solemn recitations which were interspersed with sung passages and slow, bellowing moans, some of which were accompanied by those gathered, and some of which were the prerogative only of the king and queen. I stood back, allowing the waves of sound to wash over me, devoid of surface meaning but transparent in their emotional intensity. It was not necessary to know the mariners’ tongue to understand words of farewell. They did not know this man; had no inkling of his life, carried no catalogue of his deeds or misdeeds. But he had come to their sea and died by it, and if it was a mark against him that he had not heeded their warnings, the mariners were ready to forgive such transgressions.

  A silence fell.

  I gathered some composure and eased myself out of Pinky’s supportive embrace.

  I spoke, in a voice still broken by tears: ‘Please tell Ivril and Rindi that this man would be thankful for these words. I do not know what has been said, but I feel the kindness communicated. It is more than we expected, and more than he deserved.’ I touched my throat. ‘I know because a small part of him is still within me, and he would have wanted this to be said. You have honoured him.’

  Through her translators Ivril answered: ‘We would not anger Green Man by disrespecting his brother, even a brother that was shunned.’

  I nodded, not wanting to contradict her, but feeling that she was justifying an act of remembrance that would have been extended to any soul lost at sea, almost as if her charity embarrassed her.

  ‘However it is meant, it is good.’

  ‘Then you shall finish it,’ Rindi said.

  They were cutting the ties to the raft, ready to cast it loose. Mariners were gathered in the water with long staves, ready to encourage the raft out through the arched opening. But something remained to be done before it was out of reach. The courtiers brought forward a burning torch, and it was passed first to Rindi and Ivril, then offered to me.

  I took it, and was ready to lean out from the dock and ignite the raft. But I hesitated, and turned to the one who had been at my side since we left First Camp.

  ‘This is Pinky,’ I announced, addressing all who were gathered. ‘You know him a little by now. Trust me when I say that you could spend another life with him and not know a tenth of what he has seen and done. He was a friend to my brother in his last days, a true and loyal friend, and when my brother called on him to perform a task that should never be asked of any friend, Pinky was willing. Had he not been, then our history – and yours – would have been very different. He has carried the mark of that day ever since. But when I touched my brother’s mind – when Green Man spoke to me – the only message he wished me to communicate to Pinky was one of gratitude and fondness. I wronged my brother, and there are some wrongs that are beyond forgiveness. But if there is one thing that united us, it is our common friend Pinky.’ I nodded to my body. ‘He knew this man. Perhaps for not as long as either of them might have hoped, but for long enough. And he should be the one who accepts this torch.’ I passed it to him, nervous about his reaction, and gladdened when he did not immediately thrust it back.

  ‘I’m a pig,’ he said, diffidently. Then, indicating me: ‘She’s . . . something else. You fishy lot are some other things. Barras, Probably Rose . . . there isn’t one of us that doesn’t have a story about how we got here, and what made us. Same as the one you call Green Man. You want my advice? Fear the old guy’s moods a little less. Throw your weight around a little. His bite was never as bad as his bark, and this is your world just as much as it is his.’ He gave a shudder of sudden self-awareness. ‘Well, all I’m saying is, we’re a weird bunch. Pigs, mer-people, hemi-demi-Conjoiners . . . but somehow we’re here, and we’re not dead. That’s got to mean something, hasn’t it? We keep not dying. We’re hanging in. We’re a jumble of different ideas and different ways of living, and we squabble, and some of us smell a little funny . . . actually, some of us smell really funny, but the main thing is this: we’re not a bunch of identical black cubes with only one idea in the universe. We’re messy and broken and we make stupid mistakes but we aren’t stupid, mindless machines that are too dumb to realise their programming no longer makes any sense. We’re people. Fish people, pig people, people-people, creepy-zombie-spider-people . . . no offence, Warglass . . .’

  ‘I’ve heard worse.’

  ‘And yet we . . . stick around. Maybe like a bad stain, but so what? Many stains make a universe. And we aren’t done yet.’ The torch was still burning, but it was wavering and blackening at the edge of its flame, and I could see the slightly concerned looks of the courtiers, that it might gutter out before the big moment. Presumably none of their previous funeral ceremonies had had to contend with an overly loquacious pig, and they had no contingency in place.

  ‘We soon will be, if you don’t light that thing,’ I murmured.

  ‘Always there with an encouraging word.’ He leaned in and touched the torch to the base of the catafalque. The raft did not erupt into flames instantly, but began to consume itself unhurriedly, a river of sparks racing along the paths formed by the wreaths. They must have been soaked in the same slow-burning preparation used in the torch and the candles. A mariner extended a hand to Pinky and took the torch, daubing it at other points around the raft’s extremities, encouraging the fire to burn symmetrically. Then the torch was passed back to Pinky, and from him to me. It was ebbing out, flame turning sooty.

  The raft burned brighter: latticed in fire. The mariners nudged it on its course, employing their staffs deftly. The flames crept up the side of the catafalque and curdled around the reposed form on top of it. I watched for as long as I could, but when the skin on my face began to crisp and blacken it was more than I could endure, and I risked the tolerance of our hosts by averting my gaze so that I was viewing proceedings through narrowed eyes and peripheral vision.

  By then, the raft was nearly at the gate. The flames swooped up, formed a pair of swan’s wings, enclosing the body, and underlighting the arch as it slipped through. A dozen or more mariners swam after it at a respectful distance, occasionally offering it an encouraging prod, but mostly content that it was following whatever strange currents flowed through Marl. Flames daubed the swelling sea, and sparks challenged the stars.

  ‘He didn’t do too badly in the end,’ I said to Pinky in a low voice.

  ‘He acquitted himself.’

  ‘And would the old man have agreed with you?’

  ‘I think he would.’

  ‘Right answer,’ I murmured.

  I gave my old body one last squinting farewell before the walls of the arch snatched it from view, and then I tossed the spent torch into the waters. I did not know whether that accorded with mariner custom, but I felt that the right to do it was mine.

  Then I turned from the sea. In the course of the funera
l, I felt that some chemical marriage had been completed. The fluids had intermixed, become inseparable. Glass was dead, and so was Warren.

  I was one.

  I was Warglass.

  We returned to First Camp. The crossing was easier than I had anticipated, for the winds were blowing well and sea conditions were mostly favourable. I thought of the seconds that it would have taken Scythe to traverse the same stretch of water, seconds that might make a difference in some future calculation. But even if it had been ready for flight, my ship could not have been summoned; it was not until we were much nearer to First Camp that I felt the whisperings of its thoughts. More than that, though, I thought of how curious an omission it had been to have lived two long lives and never once been swept across water by wind and sail before.

  Barras, Pinky and Probably Rose were the first ashore, and they had some delicate groundwork to lay. The mariner delegation followed next, and then I ventured onto land, conscious of the many eyes on me. It was no good asking them to accept what I was without question, so I decided my best course was to keep out of their way and say as little as possible, leaving the refugees to the more difficult business of deciding whether their best hopes lay with me or the sea.

  Nothing would be settled in a day, but certain steps could already be taken. There was no point carrying on with any of the preparations for the resettlement of First Camp, so they were abandoned. This was difficult for those who had put their backs into the early work, feeling that their labours had been for nothing. Barras and Pinky reported that some of the revived pigs were extremely disinclined to stop, but in this matter at least I was perfectly happy to assert my authority. I had seen what my brother’s rage could do, and I had no doubt that we would not be permitted to remain on these rocks. After returning to Scythe, I had the robots begin reclaiming the materials I had provided, even if that meant tearing apart tables and chairs. I left just enough amenities to keep the revived cases comfortable for another five days, which was all the time I was giving them to decide their fate. The others, still sleeping, would need to be woken and polled as well. But if the twelve came to some kind of agreement among themselves, even if wasn’t quite unanimous, that might guide the others to a speedier decision.

  I had vowed to offer no opinion of my own. Since I was not going to remain on Ararat, it would have been hypocritical of me to take a stance. And I envied them neither course. Coming with us back into space would be hard on our passengers, and with no guarantee of survival. But who would submit to a kind of drowning and rebirth, emerging into an alien body, without very reasonable qualms? Even the mariners could offer only a shrugging assurance that the sea would welcome the pigs and reshape them for their new lives on Ararat. It was starting to anger me that they had offered this option without the additional clause that it was likely to succeed. Things had been simpler before.

  So I was content to have enough distractions to keep me within Scythe, fussing it back to life. The ship had done well while I was away. My first fear was that it might not recognise my command authority at all, seeing in me an impostor who only looked and spoke like Glass. My second was that it might only recognise the limited subset of commands I had assigned to Warren Clavain. But the ship welcomed me back with all the unquestioning loyalty of a puppy. It was keen to show me the repair schedules it had completed, the deferred upgrades it had worked on itself now that it had the opportunity. It was nearly ready to fly. In fact, quite a lot of the repair stages still to be done could be conducted while it was already under way.

  ‘Good ship,’ I murmured.

  I went to the infirmary and submitted myself to a full-body examination, including a deep neural trawl. The Jugglers had changed no part of me on the outside, but it was harder to know what had gone on beneath my skin. Large areas of my idiosyncratic brain structure had been remodelled to accept the memories and personality traits of Warren Clavain. There was going to be no easy way to tell which of Glass’s memories had been deleted or degraded to make room for the new ones, not until I stumbled on some odd absence within myself. I had expected to come back from the Jugglers with less of me than before, so I could not feel too hard done by if this or that had been sacrificed. Memory was indeed holographic, distributed across multiple embedded encoding structures, not at all like some clean digital ledger. But the Jugglers took apart and reassembled minds at a holographic level as well. Human science could never chase out a memory completely, without leaving fuzzy traces, but Juggler methods could.

  Once the scans and trawls were finished, I returned to the command deck and reviewed the results. I zoomed and scrolled through images of myself, peelings and sections, flowering eruptions of cortical structure. My neural augmentations were still in place: the silvery shimmer of implants and cross-connections which marked my brain as at least partly the work of Conjoiner neuromedicine.

  Were they indeed intact, or was it only my imperfect memory deceiving me? I checked against earlier trawls in Scythe’s database. Although my organic tissue had undergone some changes, areas of brain enlarging and shrinking like districts of a city, jostling against each other and negotiating new boundaries, the implants were unaltered. Warglass was still like Glass, in that respect. Every gift that those augmentations had given me was still mine.

  What of the rest of me? What of the real question?

  Was it still within me?

  I intensified the scan’s depth and resolution, peeling back layers of myself, until a hard metallic form emerged from a fog of tissue and bone.

  It was still there, still whole.

  Good.

  We’ll have need of you soon; need of you in Charybdis.

  Something snapped me out of myself, back to the immediate moment. It was Scythe, snagging my attention with the faint repeating tone of a sensor contact.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I called a meeting. Pinky, Barras, Probably Rose, the mariner delegation.

  They sat in a loose semicircle near the shore while I knelt and tried to work out the best way to convey the news I needed to share: the complicated, joyous, troubling fact of it, and how much of a mess it was going to make of our already fractured plans.

  ‘Wolves,’ Pinky said, searching my face.

  ‘Not wolves,’ I said. ‘At least, I have no evidence of any near enough to cause us trouble.’

  ‘What then?’ Probably Rose asked.

  ‘I don’t want any of us to have false hopes. At this point, I know only as much as the ship can tell me, from a very faint reading. But I couldn’t not bring it to your attention. If we decide that it’s real, we have no choice but to act on it immediately.’

  Pinky scratched at the stub of his ear. ‘This isn’t helping.’

  ‘I’m glad you said it,’ Barras agreed.

  I worked my jaw. Then I spoke. ‘Lady Arek may still be alive. Scythe has picked up a weak moving signal, consistent with a localisation pulse of the kind emitted by my suits.’

  There was silence, as I had anticipated. I could see Pinky straining to be the first to comment on my observation, yet holding himself back by sheer force of will, not wanting to expose himself to ridicule or contempt by showing too much haste to believe.

  ‘You told us she was lost in the star,’ Barras said.

  ‘She was,’ I affirmed. ‘In the photosphere of Bright Sun, when we were completing our slowdown. But here’s the thing. We were moving very quickly when it happened; faster than the star’s escape velocity. Lady Arek would still have had that velocity when she fell away from us. If she had the luck to make it out of the photosphere, out of the stellar envelope and into clear space . . . she’d have kept moving, far faster than Scythe. She’d have passed Ararat long before we did.’ And I nodded out to the horizon, to a patch of pearl-coloured sky above it. ‘The trajectory fits, within a margin of error. The signal is moving at the right speed, and in the right direction.’

  ‘If it all fits, yes,’ Probably Rose said, ‘if it all fits . . . why did we not go loo
king for her already?’

  ‘Because by all that’s sane, she shouldn’t be alive. I knew the capabilities of my suits. It was dangerous enough for Lady Arek to go out on the hull when she did, but at least she had the armouring skein to protect her, and some benefit from the cryo-arithmetic engines, sucking heat through her soles. But when she broke away . . .’ I shook my head, disappointed in myself. ‘I neglected one possibility: Lady Arek went outside because we had a problem with the ninth stone. When it was missing, I assumed that it had broken away at the same time, going off on its own trajectory.’

  ‘But Lady Arek was a survivor,’ Pinky said.

  I nodded. ‘Yes, she was.’

  Probably Rose said: ‘So she took the stone, yes, and yes?’

  ‘It’s the only way she could have survived long enough to escape Bright Sun. In her stronghold, the first time she showed us a stone, she said it wasn’t enough to protect a ship. But she did say it would have sufficed to protect a single spacesuit. That’s what she must have done. She didn’t choose to break away from us, but in the moment when she knew it was inevitable, she must have managed to take the stone along with her. The conformal skein wrapped her like a second skin. The forces on her would still have been hellish, but because she was moving quickly they’d have fallen away quickly as well.’

  ‘But without any protection from the cryo-arithmetics,’ Pinky said.

  ‘There’s that. But Lady Arek said the Gideon stones have some thermal shielding properties as well. Combined with the emergency life-support measures of her suit, the acceleration buffering she was already experiencing . . . I believe it’s possible that she lived. Is alive.’