Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  Pinky swallowed back something.

  ‘Glass?’

  ‘What is it you would say to her?’

  ‘We’ll make this count. I’ll be at the ladyship’s side, making sure of that.’

  ‘I do not doubt it.’ I smiled tightly: the eternal awkwardness of the drawn-out farewell. It was a human trait we had carried with us from prehistory, from hunting parties leaving the safety of cave mouths to the iron crush of Charybdis, it was a thing no amount of practice ever helped us get right. ‘And now you need to go and get aboard Scythe, and I need the presence of mind to make this terminal deliver me the Incantor. Go, now. The gestures will come naturally, and your intuition will guide you to the right spot in the wall. Work quickly and detach as soon as you are inside. Ascend cautiously: a sudden reduction in pressure could be just as dangerous as going any deeper.’

  ‘We shall be cautious.’ Lady Arek raised her hand, fingers now stilled after the in-laying of the gestural syntax. ‘Farewell, Warglass.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ Pinky said. ‘It’s been . . . something.’

  ‘It has indeed,’ I said.

  I turned my back on them then, not because I was careless of my friends, or did not wish to see them to safety, but because I needed all of my concentration, and I knew they had the wherewithal to leave without any further guidance or encouragement.

  I continued with the terminal, fully engaging with the electrical and chemical interaction, assigning larger and larger areas of my mind to the task. The Nestbuilder ship was a brutal mistress: the more I gave of myself, the more it demanded. But the seriousness of its dialogue, the complexity and depth of its interrogations, assured me that I was getting close. It was disclosing layers of itself, whispering precious secrets. It thought I was someone to be trusted.

  A little while later, something pricked at the edges of my attention. It was Scythe, informing me that it had detached from the ship and was now retracing its steps back to the relative shallows of three hundred thousand atmospheres. But the Nestbuilder ship was still on its way down. We were now five hundred kilometres deeper than when we had first docked.

  I worked. Veils of formidable security and cunning misdirection vanished beneath my gaze. I glimpsed the holy citadel: the kernel in which the schedules lay treasured. It was nearly mine. I batted aside the ship’s last nagging questions, the final checks before it surrendered the prize. The citadel flung itself open, and the spell for casting an Incantor flowed into my mind, and out of it – all the way back to Lady Arek, and from her mind into the waiting registers of Scythe, where the precursor machine waited for something to feed upon.

  ‘Glass?’

  ‘Yes, Clavain.’

  ‘I think our rudeness may finally have crossed some threshold. There are more Nestbuilders coming into this chamber.’

  It was not by conscious choice that we had disassociated again, breaking down into our component personalities. But I think it served the higher purpose of survival, to have two foci for our attention: Glass attending to the problem of the Incantor – the sort of informational-intelligence work that had always been her metier – and Clavain maintaining situational awareness, cold eyes levelled to the horizon. I was still Warglass, but within me were two assets I would be foolish to neglect.

  These new Nestbuilders, emerging into the chamber, arrived in far fewer numbers than the first group. I counted no more than twelve. But by their independence of movement, their caution and curiosity, I recognised that these were not the robotic functionaries we had seen before. These were the sort that had fully intelligent Slugs within them, perhaps more than one, driving these armoured bodies as if they were expendable mechanical exoskeletons. Undoubtedly these were members of the crew who had been summoned from desiccation, initially because of the detection of the wolf concentration. But now, having been revivified, they had been alerted to investigate anomalous activity in this chamber. What they were in the process of discovering was a human, in a spacesuit of human manufacture (they knew of us, albeit distantly, and with only a dry disregard) and engaged in stealing technical secrets from their data vaults. Perhaps, already, some systems audit had confirmed that the data flow related to the Incantor.

  I – or rather Clavain – did not hesitate. The suit began to repel the Nestbuilders. It did so non-lethally, for our interest lay in stealing from the aliens, not adding them to our toll of enemies. By blasting small puncture wounds into their shells, the tissue beneath could be locally superheated to the point where it produced steam, sending Nestbuilders skittering across the floor in microgravity. If that did not work, or was insufficient deterrent, the suit was authorised to snip away at the peripheral limbs. It could do that without causing harm to the Slugs.

  But we would kill them if we had to, and meanwhile Glass left an indelible message at every point in the ship’s data architecture that I was able to access. The message was in the language of Slugs, a matter of personal business. In terms that we might comprehend it said: Allow the humans to leave with the Incantor, allow them to duplicate it, and use it as they see fit, and I will hold my silence concerning the act that was perpetrated against the Nestbuilders. Impede the humans, act against them at any point in the future, and the truth that was told to me will propagate and poison every one of our kind, until the stars choke and die. Do not doubt that I have the means.

  The degree to which it had any effect was difficult to say. No more Nestbuilders were coming . . . but perhaps this was as many as the ship could muster at short notice and with it already under the strain of sinking deeper into the ice giant.

  But those that were here were not being easily deterred. Even with parts of their shells and limbs missing, they were returning to the fray. Steadfastly I refused to escalate to more lethal modes of persuasion. This was not mere prudence, but a sober reflection on our predicament. If I started using high-energy weapons, there was no gauging the incidental damage that might be done to the ship, nor how vulnerable it might have become since descending further.

  ‘How far along are we?’

  ‘About twenty per cent of the schedule is now with Scythe.’

  ‘Can you make it go faster?’

  ‘I don’t know, Clavain, what do you think?’

  ‘Just a question.’

  ‘Not a particularly helpful one. I’m doing all that I can, but this is a very slow sensory modality. The suit is the bottleneck, not the connection between my mind and Lady Arek.’

  ‘Then I might make a suggestion.’

  There was a long wait for elaboration. ‘Which is?’

  ‘We are going to die, Glass. Neither of us is any doubt about that. We are never leaving Charybdis. And even if I thought there was a chance of Scythe returning to these depths to rescue us, I wouldn’t countenance putting Pinky and Lady Arek at risk.’

  After brooding on an answer: ‘Nor would I. We’ve asked enough of them. This is our grave, whatever happens.’

  ‘So the question becomes . . . not do we die . . .’

  ‘But what useful thing can we do in dying.’

  After an interval of consideration: ‘How long do you think we could survive without the suit, Glass?’

  ‘A very short, unpleasant while.’

  ‘Quantify it.’

  ‘A few minutes. Four or five at the most.’

  ‘But there would be no bottleneck. Especially if . . .’

  ‘Especially if we were not inside the suit. If we can establish a direct physical link between the Nestbuilder ship and our mind . . . with no suit in the way, slowing things down . . .’

  ‘It must be done, Glass. The sooner the better.’

  New fronds were emerging from strategic points in the floor. The Nestbuilders that were still capable of movement – those that had not been too badly incapacitated – were gathering at these fronds, plucking fruit-like nubs from their fleshy crowns. They were assembling these nubs into larger forms.

  ‘You are aware, Clavain, that there will be no going back
. When the alien air hits us, I will do my best to make it bearable. There are pain blockades that should make those last few minutes tolerable. But tolerable will not be the same as pleasant.’

  ‘However we end, Glass, I think we will have had a better deal than many. What about the one inside us . . .’

  Amusedly: ‘I wondered how long you had known.’

  ‘Longer than you think. But not as soon as I should have. I’ll give you this much: you never once lied. I asked you if it was a life-support device and you answered truthfully. The error was all mine: assuming the means of life-support applied to you.’

  ‘Would you have trusted me sooner, knowing I carried an alien – a Slug – inside my chest?’

  ‘I think, in time, I would have come to an understanding of it.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘All right. You’ve got me there. But I tried.’

  The Nestbuilders were massing around us with their new tools. Once joined, the nubs had morphed and merged into larger items. They were veined and glistening, throbbing with internal circulation. The Nestbuilders attacked our suit in several different ways. Some of the nubs spat a blue fire, a sort of liquid flame which, once in contact with the suit, moved with a vague, amoeba-like intelligence. Where it had passed, the suit showed a blistered wound which defeated its self-repair routines. Other nubs seemed to secrete an acid, etching deep furrows into the armour. While all this was going on, the Nestbuilders were using their other limbs to snip and wrestle with us. We thrashed them away. The suit’s weapons were still functioning, and permitted to exceed the earlier thresholds, albeit narrowly.

  For a moment, with bodies and limbs scattered around us, the nubs turned to withered black husks, there was an interlude. The remaining Nestbuilders were circling, lurching and limping, contemplating their next move. Very soon they would elect to destroy or damage the terminal itself, if that was within their means. That they had not already done so spoke to the possibility of inflicting injury on their ship, but it would not be long before that became an acceptable outcome.

  It was time.

  ‘Open the suit.’

  ‘Are we sure?’

  ‘Yes. We’re sure. Do it now, while we still can.’

  The command was given. The suit naturally needed superhuman persuasion before it was convinced to expose its occupant to an atmosphere it knew to be incompatible with the preservation of life. But between us we had become very good at superhuman persuasion. The disassociation was gone again, now: our differences erased. In this moment, as we had promised Lady Arek, there was only unanimity.

  I was Warglass again.

  Inside my chest, something broke free of the layers of willing confinement it had wrapped around itself. When the last seal broke, there was only a little curtain of muscle, bone, and skin to be flung aside before the blue light flooded in. Mere disposable human tissue, nothing of consequence. There was, as I had expected, some discomfort as the Slug ripped its way out of my chest, on its way to a closer union with the Nestbuilder ship. But all things told it was not, in the end, quite as bad as it could have been.

  A voice that might have been mine sent one last query: ‘Do you have it, Lady Arek?’

  ‘Yes. It’s complete. The check sums are validated. I am feeding the schedule to the precursor immediately. If we are wrong, if there has been an error, I imagine we shall know very, very shortly.’

  ‘I imagine we shall too. But there won’t be an error.’ I smiled, allowing myself one last boast. ‘I don’t do errors. Happy hunting, Lady Arek, and please, take very good care of your ship.’

  It was timely. The link back to Scythe was losing coherence. Somewhere above us those vast, dark megatonnes of compressed atmosphere were closing the door on the rest of creation. It was just us now, in a dying body, in a dying ship, falling into Charybdis, hoping that the work we had done was sufficient. Whatever happened out there, whatever became of Lady Arek, whatever became of Pinky, whatever became of the Incantor or of the wolves – their fates entwined – it would not be ours to know.

  But that was all right. We had done what we had come to do. The precursor machinery had its schedule, the knowledge to forge an Incantor. And what had been done once could be done again, in other systems. With these dark, dangerous gifts, humanity could begin to push back. To emerge from its hiding places, out of the shadows and into the light. To draw a line against the wolves and begin to retaliate. And if these little victories only gained us a few centuries, then in those times granted us we would think of something else. Yes, it was indeed all right, here at the end. We had known and seen enough.

  I said goodbye to Clavain.

  I said goodbye to Glass.

  I thought we were done with each other. We had been cruel to each other, each in our fashion, and there were crimes that could not be forgiven. But there had been kindness, too, and consolation, and a kind of atonement.

  But Glass had one last gift to give.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  At last I felt some relaxation in the tension between the Gideon stones and the cryo-arithmetic engines. Scythe had climbed two thousand kilometres nearer to the outermost cloud layer, and while I believed that we were still deep enough to be safe from wolves, the pressures and temperatures now confronting the ship were entirely manageable.

  ‘What?’ Pinky asked, after regarding me for long minutes.

  ‘What, what?’

  ‘That look. The one that says that you know something the rest of us don’t.’

  ‘By some criteria that would be the look I have carried my entire life. But you are right, my friend: there has been a development.’ While the hypometric device threshed and whirled at a higher rate than before, kneading and stretching spacetime like dough, bringing the Incantor into existence, I smiled fondly, more grateful than ever to have my loyalest ally at my side. ‘While Warglass was trying to find her way to the Incantor, she told me she was sending test packets, to make sure we had a stable connection. That was true enough. The packets served that purpose very well.’

  ‘And beyond that?’

  ‘Warglass embedded non-essential data into those packets. I recognised that there was deeper structure in the packets, but I set it aside until I was sure that the schedules had come through cleanly. Only now have I taken the time to unpack the embedded data.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I think you can already guess, Pinky. Shards of a life. Shards of two lives, more accurately. Pieces of Glass are within me now, and the pieces of Clavain that came with her from Ararat.’

  ‘The question a pig might ask is . . . which Clavain?’

  ‘I think we will both need some time to work that one out. Certainly there are traces of Warren in these fragments: specific memories and emotional affectations that can only be derived from his life before Glass, as real or unreal as that was. But if a part of his life thereafter involved contact with the Jugglers, and through them some communion with whatever remained of his brother? I dare not say. All I can assert, with any certainty, is that I am now the custodian of these shards.’

  ‘But they aren’t alive within you. This isn’t the way it was with Warglass, two minds in the same skull?’

  ‘No,’ I said, not without some regret. ‘Not like that. Their voices are silent, for now. Perhaps they will speak again, but not today. Yet while I have these shards, while I carry them within myself, I do not think it would be correct to say that Glass and Clavain are truly dead.’

  ‘They’d better budge up, then. It must be getting crowded in that head.’

  ‘My mind is a mansion with many rooms. There is always space.’

  He shook his head wonderingly.

  ‘Did I ever tell you how scary you can be?’

  ‘Perhaps I am no more than what is required. These are indeed scary times, after all.’

  Pinky nodded to the control room console. ‘Do any of those readouts help me understand how our new toy’s doing? I feel like a dog being shown hieroglyp
hics.’

  ‘Something is busy being born. Something slouches its way towards us. I think, in a few minutes, we shall have some idea of what it is, and what we may do with it.’

  ‘And when that time comes . . . are you the one to know?’

  ‘The Incantor’s functioning is beyond our comprehension – beyond even mine. But the set of commands by which it may be used is not complicated at all.’ Knowing that nothing I did or said could hasten the processes now instigated, I forced my attention onto the more immediate matter of our departure from Charybdis. With the utmost insouciance, I used every active and passive sensor to scan the thinning layers of atmosphere above our position, and the near-orbital space just beyond it. I no longer cared that by doing so I removed any possible ambiguity about our presence.

  ‘There’s a thing that troubles me,’ Pinky said.

  ‘Just the one?’

  ‘The Nestbuilders had this weapon. But something held them back from using it.’

  ‘They used it. But sparingly.’

  ‘And the reason for that restraint?’

  ‘I expect we shall find out, in time. But that is the crux of it. In time. We saw the lights go out, you and I. We have seen the ships stop flying and the worlds fall into silence. One by one we have watched the beacons of civilisation gutter into darkness. We have stood vigil in the twilight. There is no future for us now except a few squalid centuries, and only then if we are very lucky. But the Incantor buys us possibility. It hinges our history onto another track. It may be better, it may even be worse, but the one thing we can be sure of is that it will be different. And if after a few centuries we begin to understand that there have been consequences to our use of the Incantor, we shall meet them. We shall pay for our actions. But we shall have lived, and that is better than the alternative.’

  After a moment, the pig nodded; understanding, if not yet fully persuaded. ‘The old man would have seen it similarly.’