Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Press back,’ I said, leading by example. I pushed myself hard against the outer wall of the spiral – the wall of the dome, now – and bid Pinky and Lady Arek to follow. ‘They aren’t responding to us. If they’d detected our presence, and considered us a threat to their ship, we’d have been stopped or killed by now. This is something else.’

  ‘They’ll notice us when they pass!’ Lady Arek said.

  ‘I don’t think they will. But the best way of testing that is by not squeezing in against the wall.’

  ‘I’ll put off the testing part for now,’ Pinky said, grunting as he encouraged his suit to flatten itself even more firmly against the wall.

  The Nestbuilders completed each loop of the helix a little faster than the last the nearer they got to us. I tried to count them. Perhaps sixty, in all, identical in size and form to my eye, but doubtless varying in ways both minor and significant were I to study them carefully. I had a theory, but there was no point voicing it aloud until the aliens had swept past us.

  They came around the last loop beneath us. Although we were not breathing the atmosphere outside, our suits were still using it for auditory pickup. The advance of the Nestbuilders was a roaring, continuous whisking, like a thousand swords being drawn and drawn again. There was no other sound: no cries, no language, no breathing, no hint of coordination between the advancing elements.

  They came past us in the same frenzy of scuttling and leaping: as oblivious to our presence as I had hoped. Ten, twenty: carrying on up the tightening coil, in the direction of the desiccation vaults and the parts of the ship above us. Thirty, forty. They were low enough, even as they leapt, that their ridged, crenulated backs never came above hip-height. Only near the end did one come closer to the wall than the others, catching the toe of Lady Arek, losing its footing momentarily, even with all those legs, and in the moment of chaos that followed not only tumbling over the edge of the path, but taking two more with it. They fell slowly, their limbs stilled, and when they crunched gently against the floor – seemingly undamaged – they gathered themselves and resumed their climb.

  ‘These are functionaries,’ I said, as the last of the fallers passed by again, hurrying after the others. ‘There are no Slugs inside them. Or if there are, they are Slugs that have been mentally downgraded, either by accident or punishment, to a kind of lobotomised docility. These functionaries are kept animate when the rest of the crew are still in the desiccation vaults. They retain just enough of their original Nestbuilder nervous system to be used as biological robots, tending to the ship. They were never interested in us, nor even properly aware of us, even as they passed. They saw us, but we didn’t concern them. They had been tasked to go to some other part of the ship, for some other reason, that had nothing to do with us.’ I qualified myself. ‘Or nothing directly.’

  ‘The wolves,’ Lady Arek said.

  ‘I think it likely that the ship has detected their presence around Charybdis, and is now moving to a different readiness condition. The functionaries are part of that preparation.’

  ‘Battle stations?’ Pinky asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. They’ve survived until now by avoiding engagement. It will take a lot to change that.’

  There was no second surge of Nestbuilders as we completed our descent to the floor. Again, I reminded myself that whatever we saw in any given area of the ship would only be a small part of the overall activity. Hundreds, even thousands, of functionaries might be moving through it as we walked. Meanwhile, some small percentage of the sleeping crew might be in the process of being roused – undesiccated – so that their higher states of sentience could be queried.

  We moved across the floor, eyeing the entry points and wary of another eruption of Nestbuilders. If they came, I was as certain as I could be that their interest in us would be negligible, but they might still become a nuisance. And very soon, too. I expected to provoke the ship in ways that would be much harder for either it or its functionaries to ignore.

  The floor’s frond-like extrusions were numerous and varied. Each was a pulpy, translucent bag rising to about chest-height, sheathed in a pink or purple membrane and with moving, glowing forms within. The floor’s patterns crowded and brightened around these extrusions: logical pathways thickening like fat-sheathed axons. The fronds all had different shapes, sizes and configurations of pseudopods, some of which were jelly-like nubs and others of which were so finely differentiated as to glimmer with glories of refracted colour. In human terms, these fronds were control terminals, status boards, data-entry ports, and perhaps a dozen other things including medical diagnostic devices or even punishment or euthanisation stations. I reached for the patterns of knowledge and recognition I expected to come naturally – the same reserves that had shown my hands how to work the gestural commands – and nothing came. I understood what I was looking at, the class of objects; I understood something of what they might be, but not the detailed particulars of any one item.

  ‘Is this the place?’ Pinky asked.

  ‘It will be as good as any other. But I’ll need to do some trial and error on these interfaces, until I find the right path into the ship, the one that will lead us to the Incantor schedules.’

  ‘Well, who doesn’t like a bit of trial and error, when you’re inside an alien spaceship, floating at three hundred thousand atmospheres, in a sea hot enough to singe a star.’

  ‘Let her do what she must,’ Lady Arek cautioned.

  ‘Believe me, I wasn’t about to stop her.’

  Since I had to start somewhere, I began at one of the fronds with a crown of long, finger-sized pseudopods. While Lady Arek and Pinky watched, I reached into the mass of pseudopods and allowed them to probe my glove and sleeve, gently testing its properties. The fronds were stimulating my suit with chemical and electrical signals and expecting the suit to respond in kind, just as if it were a Nestbuilder’s sensory appendage. Cautiously, following a set of pre-programmed decision steps, my suit reciprocated the contact. It was generating localised electrical and chemical emissions at the points where the fronds touched it: attempting a kind of deeper, more intimate form of the gestural grammar.

  In a manner the frond terminal was talking to me, or at least attempting to talk. The impulses picked up by the suit were packaged and translated into forms compatible with my neural systems. But that did not mean that I understood them. It was a discussion going on at a level beyond my own direct comprehension: alien machinery negotiating with Conjoiner machinery, and me only listening in.

  The voice within me said to disconnect.

  I wrenched my glove and sleeve away from the fronds. They stretched, sticking in place, then relinquished sharply, curling in with a curious brooding resentment.

  Lady Arek took my hand and arm, examining it for injury or signs that the suit had been breached.

  ‘What happened, Warglass?’

  ‘I’m all right. I got a little way with this terminal, but it’s only a local node, not strongly connected to the rest of the ship. Let me try the next.’

  ‘What is happening when you make contact with those things?’

  ‘There’s a flow of information between the frond, my suit, and then my hardware. I don’t understand all of it. But I’m primed to recognise when we’re getting warm, and we’re not there yet.’

  ‘First the gestural commands, and now the means to process Nestbuilder data patterns. You really are a wonder.’ Her remark was sardonic, rather than complimentary. ‘When might you care to tell me how this is possible, Warglass? You said Glass met one of their kind. I can only conclude that the transfer of intelligence was considerably more than a few clues about how to break into one of their ships.’

  I was at the next frond, one with the larger nubs. Steeling myself for whatever was to come, I dipped my hand in. They closed around it, probing me with the soft, exploratory curiosity of nursing fish. The nubs had padded mouthlike extremities, sucking and tasting.

  ‘Glass found a Slug, Lady A
rek. Or the Slug found Glass. It was the one exception to the rule I mentioned earlier.’

  ‘A Slug with a conscience?’

  ‘Or at least one with a grievance against its kind. It had been wronged, and it wished to see justice. The Slug had been told a lie, you see. A great, all-encompassing lie, one that cut to the very core of its being. It had been told that the Nestbuilders were devoid of intelligence before the Slugs found them. That the only crime of the Slugs was to inhabit and repurpose the mindless bodies and technologies of a post-sentient civilisation. An act of cosmic indecency, perhaps, cosmic grave-robbery, and an act of gruesome ventriloquism, but not actual xenocide.’

  ‘None of them knew?’

  ‘All civilisations move to an accommodation of their past atrocities. Some do it by acceptance, some by forgetting. The Slugs chose to erase the fact of their crime, to pretend to themselves that the Nestbuilders were never more than empty hosts. To pretend and pretend until the pretence became fact. But Glass’s Slug discovered counterfactual data. Nestbuilder relics, pointing to a retention of sentience very late in the day: entirely at odds with their species-level narrative. For that, her Slug was punished in ways that would seem mostly unfathomable to us and, after a thousand strange cruelties, they were divested of a host body: torn out of a Nestbuilder. That we recognise. Being left to die, like a snail without a shell. But they lived. Hatred is a very strong survival imperative.’

  ‘It’s worked for me,’ Pinky said.

  Something flowered inside my skull: a bright intrusion, like a neon fireworks display flickering across the underside of my brain-pan.

  ‘I have . . .’

  ‘I feel it too,’ Lady Arek said urgently. ‘It’s Scythe: emergency signal.’

  She was right: the flowering was nothing to do with the Nestbuilders.

  ‘Wolves?’ Pinky asked.

  ‘No,’ I answered, forcing myself to focus on the emergency status pulse, unpicking its threads. ‘Not wolves. Scythe is reporting inertial movement. It’s still attached where we docked it, but it’s being dragged further down into Charybdis. We’re moving, this whole ship. We don’t feel it because of this microgravity field, but it’s real enough. That’s how they’re responding to the Inhibitors: not by going to a battle condition, but sinking deeper into Charybdis.’

  ‘They wouldn’t do it if the floater couldn’t take it,’ Pinky said, plaintively. ‘Would they?’

  ‘There must be a higher level of risk, or they’d have gone as deep as they could right from the start. But it’s not the Nestbuilder ship that is the problem.’

  He nodded behind his visor. ‘Scythe won’t be able to take it.’

  ‘How much deeper can it go?’ Lady Arek asked.

  ‘With our understanding of the Gideon stones? It’s impossible to predict. Another ten thousand atmospheres, another hundred thousand. Or it could be that we’re almost at crush depth as it is.’

  ‘Then we abandon the extraction. Do you still have a command linkage with Scythe? Summon it as close as you can, then create another exit point. If you cannot do that, then we begin to retrace our steps.’

  ‘We came for the Incantor,’ I said stubbornly.

  ‘And we accept failure, this time, but we fight another day. Issue the commands, Warglass. This was a noble effort, but the three of us dying here won’t help anyone.’

  ‘You forget the wolves outside. We were lucky around Yellowstone, but that was because we had friends to act as distraction. Here we have nothing. We’ll need the Incantor to break through them.’

  ‘We can still evade them if we leave now and leave quickly.’

  ‘Do it, Warglass. You said it yourself: we may already be close to crush depth.’

  I gave up on the second frond. This failure was of a different kind: not because it was too local a node, but because it seemed formatted to only understand and reciprocate a limited subset of queries, like a simplified terminal made for the use of children. Perhaps that was indeed what it was – an educator for underdeveloped Nestbuilders who had only passed through a small number of shell cribs.

  I moved to the third: the kind with the fine, whiskery fronds, bursting with refraction patterns.

  ‘I’ll summon Scythe.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Lady Arek, do you trust me? I am going to ask something very demanding of you, something difficult for any Conjoined, even a Demi-Conjoiner. I should know. I’d find it just as difficult if our places were reversed.’

  I heard her sigh, made up in equal parts of resignation and sorrow. ‘You wish me to disable all my mental barricades. To give you absolute, unfettered access to my mind.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I can already feel you breathing at my windows.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise it was that obvious.’

  ‘Never mind.’ There was no rancour in her voice, just a fearful understanding. ‘What is it, Warglass? What are you going to do?’

  The fine fronds wrapped me like vines. Their hold was firm, and as soon as they made contact the electrical and chemical information flow was going to be richer than before, demanding more of me in return.

  ‘Three things,’ I said. ‘The first is to assign you complete control of Scythe, along with all associated neural command routines. You said you’d like one just like it. Well, now you have the ship itself. Scythe will be yours, as soon as you allow it. You will have total access to its systems and archives, forever.’

  I caught a swallow before her answer. ‘Go on.’

  ‘The second is to give you the gestural syntax, in its entirety. You will only need a small part of it: just enough to form a lock, and pass through it. I’ll isolate and highlight that particular set of gestures. I think the ship will oblige – we have not been too impolite until now.’

  ‘And the third?’

  ‘You will establish a data flow between my mind, your mind, Scythe, and the hypometric device. As soon as I have the Incantor schedules, they will be transmitted directly to the precursor: provided that flow remains open.’

  ‘You could do all this yourself,’ Pinky said, addressing me.

  ‘She could,’ Lady Arek said, understanding what I intended. ‘But not if she remains with the Nestbuilder ship as it descends. That is your intention, isn’t it, Warglass? To remain here, while Pinky and I depart?’

  ‘There’s no other way. We must get the schedules now, but I’ll need more time than we have and we cannot risk Scythe. But if you detach, and move Scythe to a safer altitude, we should still be able to remain in contact. We’ll only need long enough to transmit the schedules. That won’t take as long as you think: they’re arcane, but not complex.’

  ‘Once you go deeper, Scythe won’t be able to return.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And this ship could be down here for . . . years, centuries.’

  ‘I know also.’

  ‘Eventually your suit will exceed its life-support endurance.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you will die.’

  ‘I think it highly likely, Lady Arek, that my suit will not be the limiting factor.’

  ‘I think it also, Warglass.’ She regarded me silently, immense processes of deliberation going on behind the locked seals of her mind. But already those seals were loosening. ‘We don’t need a duelling adversarial network to settle this matter, the way we did inside Bright Sun. We can do it as friends and allies. I am . . . readily persuaded that there is no better course. If I had the means to speak to this ship, to know its secrets as you do, I might insist on our trading places. But I lack your capabilities.’

  ‘Did you feel that?’

  ‘Feel what?’

  ‘The universe moving on its axis. You just admitted to a deficiency.’

  I heard the smile in her voice. ‘I hope it was worth it.’

  ‘Nearly.’

  ‘I am lowering all neural barricades: do with me as you must. I suppose you will be able to verify t
hat the conduit back to Scythe is working as it should?’

  ‘I’m sending you the gestural syntax, scripting it directly into procedural memory. The conduit is established, but the flow won’t begin until I have the schedules. Until then, I’ll send a continuous stream of test packets, to confirm that the link remains viable. You’ll feel a little like a high-pressure pipeline between me and Scythe, but you’ll get over it.’

  ‘Doubtless I will, Warglass.’ Lady Arek looked down at her hand, watching as her fingers curled and uncurled, seemingly without volition. ‘That must be the syntax. It wants to be expressed, like an itch that needs scratching! How curious to feel as if I’ve always known something that was only injected into my head a few seconds ago.’

  ‘Sorry for the short-cut, but it will be easier that way.’ I shifted my attention for a moment. ‘Scythe is detaching now. I’ve instructed it to descend until it’s level with our present position, just a few hundred metres below the original docking point.’

  ‘Yes, I feel it move. Your command authority is already transferring to me. May I ask something?’

  ‘Provided it doesn’t need too lengthy an answer.’

  ‘This decision of yours . . . I admire it, and accept it. Pinky and I will play our part. But I must know . . . has it been formed unanimously?’

  ‘There has only ever been unanimity, Lady Arek. Glass was a soldier. Clavain was a soldier. We have had our minor differences, most certainly. But in the prosecution of war, there has never been any dissension. Warglass speaks with one voice.’

  ‘You say that as if this were the easiest thing in the world.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Old man,’ Pinky said. ‘If there’s a part of you still in there, then know this. You did all right in the end. And I hope I did too. You put a lot on me, back on Ararat, but I don’t think I screwed up too badly. For a pig, at least.’ He paused. ‘And, Stink?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Guess you made the grade, in the end.’

  ‘Thank you for advocating for Warren,’ I replied. ‘I think it made all the difference. And if I may speak for Warren, I can speak for Nevil as well. You never let anyone down, not once in your life. I know the Clavains have not always made things easy for you . . . but they chose their friends as carefully as they chose their enemies.’