Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  Some of his anger bled away. But his chest was still heaving up and down, his hands still tight on the excellent assortment of cutting implements he had come back with.

  ‘I could use these on you.’

  ‘You could try.’ I paused, and pressed my forehead against Lady Arek’s, hugging her into me as if she were the last fixed thing in the universe, the last and final point of reference. ‘There’s something. Neural housekeeping, just enough to read. She’s in there.’ My eyes were closed, her skin sticking to mine. It was the cushioning gel that had been inside the suit when she went outside Scythe, broken down into a viscous, lumpy grease. ‘She’s there.’

  ‘I want her back,’ Pinky said. And he let go of the blades, allowing them to float from his fingers.

  Three days later Lady Arek came back to us.

  Pinky and I were waiting, keeping vigil at her bedside. We had been observing her for hours, saying very little. Scythe had been accelerating steadily since retrieving the suit, and I anticipated no further difficulties before we reached Charybdis.

  ‘Pinky,’ she said, her eyes settling on him. ‘Dear Pinky. You found me, in the end. Either that, or some undocumented part of my brain is giving me a very agreeable fantasy.’

  Pinky pinched himself. ‘I think I’m real.’

  ‘I think you are real as well. How long has it been?’

  ‘You were out there for twenty-six days,’ he told her. ‘Falling through the system at few hundred kilometres per second. We picked you up three days ago, but it’s taken until now for you to come around. You were a long way under.’

  ‘Did I still have the stone?’

  ‘Yes, and we’ll add it back to the collection.’

  ‘That is good. Our plight will be marginal with nine; with eight we would have very little hope at all.’

  ‘I see you haven’t lost your talent for morale-building, your ladyship.’

  ‘Nor you your talent for reminding me of my limits, Pinky.’ She smiled. ‘For which I remain grateful.’

  She turned to me next.

  ‘I felt you, Hourglass. You were trying to pull me back into the light. Thank you. You gave me something to struggle towards.’

  ‘You were a long way in,’ I said.

  ‘You must have seen the condition of my suit. Almost the last thing it was capable of doing was keeping me alive, and even that became a struggle in the end.’

  I said: ‘Your pulses were fading out.’

  ‘My decision, to conserve energy. I took a gamble, which was to count on you detecting and acting on my pulses when they were at their strongest. I presumed that you had launched the ship and were closing in on my position. If I was right in that presumption, it was safe to reduce the pulse intensity, because you should be close enough to detect and localise them.’

  ‘It was quite a gamble.’

  ‘I would think it the sort of thing you admired, Hourglass. All or nothing. Every iron in the fire.’ But she tilted her head finally. ‘It is you, Hourglass. But something is different.’ Then some redawning clarity of mind had her looking beyond our faces. ‘Clavain. If you are here, I would have expected him to be here as well.’

  ‘Something happened on Ararat,’ Pinky said.

  ‘Did you obtain the intelligence?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, bristling a little at her directness. ‘The information is secure. We know our destination. It’s locked in as we speak. As soon as the ship declares you strong enough, we’ll go into reefersleep.’

  ‘Clavain swam?’

  I nodded. ‘Clavain swam.’

  ‘And he met his brother?’

  ‘I did, Lady Arek.’

  She frowned at me, puzzlement giving way to doubt and then a brittle comprehension. ‘Oh, Hourglass.’

  ‘Oh indeed.’

  ‘What have you become?’

  ‘Something that didn’t exist before. Something new in the universe.’

  ‘What strange times we find ourselves in.’

  ‘Said the woman spat out by a star,’ Pinky said.

  Part Seven

  NESTBUILDER

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Charybdis was nothing much to look at, just another ice giant with some mildly interesting weather and common-as-muck hydrogen-helium chemistry. It was a fifty-thousand-kilometre-wide pale blue ball accompanied by a garland of wiry, thinned-out rings and a litter of runtish moons, mostly dirty iceballs of one kind or another. Nothing about the world or its satellites was noteworthy. The galaxy made worlds like Charybdis as easily as beaches made pebbles, grinding them out with monotonous regularity. But it was exactly that unexceptional nature that had made the ice giant such a suitable place to hide. If you had a choice of trees to use for concealment, you would never pick the one that stood out.

  Had Nevil and Galiana come to it later, after they had already catalogued a dozen similar giants, they might not have been inclined to give it as thorough an examination as they had. It was our luck that they had, because without that close-up inspection, the Sandra Voi’s sensors would never have detected the signature of something anomalous lodged deep beneath the outermost cloud layers, and seemingly floating.

  Ice giants had no definite surfaces, unless one counted their cores. They were atmosphere nearly all the way down, gas transitioning to a liquid-like state, and then to a mantle of icy slush, wrapped around an Earth-sized nugget of iron where the pressures nudged into the thousands of gigapascals.

  We knew from the fragmentary records that the Sandra Voi had dropped atmospheric sounding probes into Charybdis. These devices had gathered radar-returns and sonar traces, enough to tantalise. But the gathering pressure and temperature of the deeper cloud layers had crushed the probes long before they got any sort of detailed view of the floater. Beyond that, there was nothing more the Sandra Voi could do. The anomaly was intriguing, but it was far from the only mystery collected in their travels, and it had to wait its turn for a follow-up expedition. Some while later, it was expected, Conjoiner science would have advanced to the point where probes could penetrate further into Charybdis, deep enough to at least determine the nature of the anomaly, even if reaching it was still a goal too far.

  The science might well have improved, but by the time it did there were more pressing concerns besides pure exploration, such as surviving an interstellar war. Almost without anyone realising it, Charybdis was all but forgotten: its significance reduced to a few puzzling data fragments and one cryptic image.

  No human, Conjoined or otherwise, could have synthesised those fragments and appreciated their true significance.

  But Glass had. That former part of me knew what was there, what it contained, and that the Gideon stones would be required to reach it. The only thing she did not know was how to get to Charybdis.

  Now we were here, though, our task had only become more daunting. It was one thing to find a world: it had taken decades of travel, numerous sacrifices, my own little death, to bring us to our destination. Until now, I had allowed myself to think of the world as a point of light, a thing unto itself which would immediately disclose all its secrets. But now we were orbiting this vast, cool crypt of a planet, its treasures (if any remained) screened behind millions of square kilometres of mute blue cloud, lost in plunging, fathomless depths, I realised we had barely begun.

  Lady Arek put one matter to rest: it was the right planet. Using her system privileges, she had again called up the image fragment, and now she was able to cross-compare it with the real view of Charybdis turning beneath us as we orbited.

  Nothing matched precisely, but after centuries that was to be expected. The earlier bands and storms had shifted, evaporated and re-formed elsewhere. But what was below us was consistent in its colour, brightness, and implied chemistry. Better still, using our present vantage, Lady Arek was able to obtain high likelihood identifications for the stars that had appeared in the fragment. No amount of brute computation could have matched them previously, not with any reliability, but now
we were here the problem was much more tractable, and once I saw the correlations I put aside any doubts that we might have followed a false lead. Better still, a dark patch on the image turned out to be exactly where one of the moons’ shadows was expected to fall.

  Scythe orbited and scanned. It was using minimally invasive measures to peer into the atmosphere, but these were at least as effective as anything available to the Sandra Voi. They had seen something worth the trouble of getting in closer, worth the loss of the probes.

  It ought to have been easier for us.

  Ten orbits, then twenty, looping around the planet for maximum coverage. Twenty, then fifty. By the hundredth orbit we knew a great deal about the conditions in the outermost cloud layers: chemistry, physical parameters, wind shear. It was almost certainly the most detailed picture of Charybdis ever assembled, at least by human minds. But nothing in that portrait hinted at anything anomalous.

  ‘It’s been a while,’ Pinky said, voicing the fears that Lady Arek and I were doing our best to keep to ourselves. ‘I know Glass had her reasons to think there’d still be something waiting for us . . . but who knows? Maybe whatever it was, it moved on.’

  ‘It’s still there,’ I said.

  ‘Faith won’t make it so,’ Lady Arek.

  ‘It’s not faith,’ I answered doggedly. ‘The floater won’t have left. It didn’t have the means, not in the condition it was in. If we don’t see it now, then it can only be because it’s gone deeper since Nevil and Galiana last saw it.’

  ‘You know this, or you just want it to be the case?’

  ‘I know.’

  Pinky scratched at an eye, digging deep into an inflamed duct. He had been looking tired since we came out of reefersleep and I wondered at the particular toll it had taken on him.

  ‘The old man wouldn’t have led us on a goose chase.’

  ‘Who is to say Nevil was any better informed than Glass?’ Lady Arek asked.

  ‘Nobody. But between the time he went into the ocean, and the time he appeared to Stink, who’s to say what else didn’t get into his head? He certainly had time to reflect on things. Time for other bits of information to soak into him. Maybe, by the time Stink showed up, Nevil had figured that there was something worth looking into after all. And maybe he knew enough to guess that the floater would still be present.’

  I nodded, liking this argument even if I had no reason to accept it as fact. ‘Nestbuilders were present on Ararat – or at least their remains were. Only a tiny part of their technical lore might have reached the Jugglers, but that would have been enough to convince Nevil that returning to Charybdis wasn’t futile. It’s been centuries, which feels like an awfully long span to us. But we’re human. To a Nestbuilder, that might be a long afternoon.’

  ‘But the floater’s missing,’ Lady Arek said.

  We were in the control room, surrounded by ever-changing images and graphs of the orbital scans. It had been exciting, at first, to see these datasets assemble. But over those hundred orbits our feelings had shifted to prickling doubt and then a growing despondency.

  ‘So, we’re not looking closely enough,’ I said. ‘That’s all. We go lower and use the active measures we’ve avoided until now. We drop missiles and use them as advance probes. We keep trying, however long it takes, until we get a return. If we take Scythe all the way to its crush depth, and then all the way down to the crush depth of the Gideon stones, and still see nothing, we still don’t give in. There’s nothing to be gained by turning away now. Either our salvation’s here, or salvation’s lost, for the rest of time.’ I stiffened in my acceleration couch, facing my two doubting allies. ‘Warren and Glass played a game, after she stole him from Sun Hollow. Actually, a series of games. Glass promised him that if he won, she would let him have his family back. In truth, the odds were always against him, even when Glass dropped her cognition level just to even things out a little. But Warren knew that, and it didn’t stop him. He never gave in, not when there was still a move to be made. Glass knew he was the person we needed, then. And I won’t accept anything less from us now.’

  ‘And if he’d won, even by a fluke?’ Pinky asked.

  ‘Glass would have honoured her promise.’

  ‘Not if I know how much this victory meant to her,’ Lady Arek said, shaking her head.

  ‘Glass accessed the medical records of Sun Hollow: the register of births and deaths. By the time she got to them, the average life expectancy for his wife was about twenty years. Victorine would have lived a little longer, but not by very much: childhood diseases were in the ascendant, and their medicine was crumbling by the hour. So Glass would have waited long enough for him to bury his family, and then continued with her mission. We’d be here, exactly as we are now, if just a little later in the life of the universe.’ I nodded to the scans. ‘And the floater – wherever it is – would still be here.’

  Pinky folded his arms tendentiously. Between the shared experiences of Warren and Glass, I had become quite adept at reading the pig. I knew when he was settling in for an argument: it was a sort of itch that needed periodic scratching. ‘If you had a way to keep War alive, presumably the same kindness could have been extended to the rest of them?’

  ‘He lost the game,’ I said brightly. ‘Nothing else mattered.’

  The pig huffed and shook his head, but my candour had blunted any possible response.

  ‘I always knew we’d benefit from a sharp, sterile blade,’ Lady Arek said. ‘I knew that’s what you were, from the moment I made you whimper before me. But sometimes it frightens me how very surgical you became.’

  ‘I am glad that Glass proved not to have been a disappointment,’ I answered. ‘But do not mistake her for me. Now, shall we discuss plans for a closer look at Charybdis?’

  Scythe dropped lower: inside the orbit of the rings and all the major moons, barring a few stray shards that had been knocked loose by some relatively recent gravitational encounter, and which would be destined to burn up in the atmosphere in a few short centuries. I turned up the energy and spectral-response of all the electromagnetic scanning modes. Now we would be starting to illuminate Charybdis in frequencies and intensities that were not part of its usual emission pattern, and our reflected radiation might alert anything nearby – even as far out as hundreds or even thousands of light hours – that something odd was going on. Like a foolhardy civilisation, pumping a planet’s worth of radio waves into space, Scythe was easily capable of generating the necessary energy output to betray its own presence.

  But this was a gamble I was willing to make. So, after reflection, were Lady Arek and Pinky. It was an endgame gambit. All or nothing. If we brought all hell down upon us, so be it.

  Still nothing showed. Scythe increased the diversity of its scanning modes, moving into exotic radiation forms that could not be generated by any natural means, and were therefore a clear marker for technological intelligence. These reached a thousand kilometres or so into Charybdis, but still not far enough to find something. Given time, and an asteroid’s worth of resources, we could have set up a sphere of emitters and detectors, girdling the planet completely, and allowing for a much more efficient search process. But other than its missiles, which had some limited capability to act as receivers, Scythe had to rely solely on itself, and the hope that some signal would be bounced back into the detection cross-section of its sensor batteries.

  Failure did not daunt me. If the floater had descended, then I would not be at all surprised if it had gone down a long way, perhaps beyond the range of all but the most extreme scanning modes. So we dipped further, until Scythe was partially within the upper layers of the atmosphere, and the missiles were sent streaking off on hunter-seeker search patterns that would involve successively deeper passes into the cloud deck. The missiles had nothing like the energy budget of Scythe, and by comparison with the ship, they were slow and vulnerable. But I had enough to use them wisely. By sprinkling missiles around the planet at a range of latitudes, longitudes
and cloud depths, as far down as the point where the pressure reached a hundred atmospheres – their effective operating limit – I managed to establish an improvised acoustic monitoring network. It was only going to be useful as long as the missiles had fuel, or avoided being crushed, so I needed to work quickly. Selectively, the warheads in some of the missiles were triggered. We were over the nightside of Charybdis when this happened, and there was a certain desolate beauty in watching these pale flowers bloom from beneath the clouds, lighting them up in dizzying stacks. But seeing these pinprick flashes against the face of the planet was also a reminder as to how pitiful even our major weapons were against the effortless scale of nature.

  It was not the brightness of the yields that counted, though, so much as the amount of energy they injected into the atmosphere at each detonation point. These energy bursts created waves in the gas, propagating away from each explosion, with the lowest frequency waves travelling the furthest. The remaining missiles only had to listen for the reports of the distant events and report their findings back to Scythe. The ship had already modelled the pattern of sounds it expected if there were no reflecting surfaces suspended somewhere in the atmosphere, with the sound waves reverberating unimpeded around the transition zone between the lowest gas layer and the onset of the liquid mantle beneath it. Any localised deviation between model and observations – allowing for the noisy reality of weather systems – would be a strong hint that we were zeroing in on our objective.

  If we had taken risks by scanning at higher energies, then letting off warheads in the clouds of Charybdis was another level of provocation still. But that could not be helped, and in any case the acoustic search would be necessarily brief in duration. I only had so many missiles to spare, and the more I detonated the less I had available to act as listening posts.