Inhibitor Phase

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I suppose the human thing is to buy time.’

  ‘Always and forever.’

  ‘But one of these will only do so much good, won’t it?’

  ‘Then it’s as well that there will be more,’ I answered. ‘Glass laid the preparations. Wherever she went, she had Scythe bud off parts of itself: self-assembling seeds, which used ambient matter to grow themselves into manufactory units like the one in which we made the hypometric device. Hela, Sun Hollow, Yellowstone, wherever there might be allies to make use of them, Glass left these seeds. All these manufactories needed to do was wait for the arrival of the Incantor schedules. And now all we have to do is transmit them.’

  ‘Someone will have to know what to do when they arrive.’

  ‘They will,’ I said. ‘Glass made sure of that, as well.’

  Within the hypometric device, a process neared fruition. The threshing machinery was slowing, the blades opening, the entire bizarre structure loosening apart like a time-lapsed recording of an exploding bomb. While Scythe loitered inside the cover of the atmosphere the wolves, undoubtedly as aware of us as we were of them, but not yet persuaded that it was worth the trouble of closing in on us while we were still inside Charybdis – for where else could a little human ship go but back into space? – I left Pinky in the control room, put a suit back on and passed back into the bulb-shaped assembly volume. It was cavalier of me, I suppose, but I wanted to see the evidence of our work with my own eyes, in the first moments of its existence.

  The hypometric machinery had stilled. It had disconnected and disassembled itself and retreated to the outer walls of the bulb, becoming a glittering, many-edged plaque.

  Where the main mass of the hypometric device had been, in the bulb’s core, there now floated an Incantor.

  It was beyond my powers of description. I could say with some confidence that it occupied a volume of space of a certain size and shape: approximately a cylinder, about three metres across and twenty long. It was smaller than I had anticipated. But on some level I understood that matters of size and form became slippery in the context of an Incantor. This was an artefact anchored to a layer of reality that was not quite congruent with ours. What I saw – what I thought I saw – was some partial shadow or projection of the true entity. I was not capable of apprehending the true form of it. I might go to the Jugglers and have my perceptual limits remodelled, so that the nature of the weapon became comprehensible to me. But if I did that I would never be able to explain or describe it to anyone else, even via the mind-to-mind channels of the Conjoined.

  What could I say, truthfully? There was a light. It bled out of the Incantor. It was something close to purple, being made up of red and blue photons. Where they had come from, and what dark bargains had been struck to keep the universe’s bookkeeping square, I could not say. I found it hard not to stare into the light’s depths, into the seductive, shifting, layered mysteries of the Incantor. There were details within it, glories of structure and componentry, some teasing promise of rational organisation. But I could not hold any part of it clearly long enough to relate it to another. My head swam, my thoughts twisted back around themselves like Möbius loops. Cross-eyed and fuzzy-headed, I realised that I had forgotten to breathe.

  I drew life into my lungs and turned from the Incantor. It was ready, and I knew what to do with it. But it was not mine to understand or admire.

  ‘Are we ready?’ Pinky asked, when I returned to him.

  ‘We are.’

  We shrugged off the last of the atmosphere. Beneath us, an energy pulse flared once within Charybdis, and we guessed that the Nestbuilders had gone too deep after all.

  Then we swung to face the wolves, and I made ready.

  Nicola drew back the kitchen chair and invited me to sit. She was older than I remembered, but not so aged that I failed to recognise her. The years had been gentle to her in some ways, less so in others, but the patience and tolerance I had so often called upon was still present, breaking through the lines and blemishes.

  ‘I never forgot you,’ I said.

  ‘Nor we you,’ said Victorine, who was already seated.

  She was a woman now, about as old as Nicola had been when we first met, back in the first year of Sun Hollow. Though I could still see the child in her, it was like glimpsing something through many nested shells of experience, each a hard, bitterly won layer. She wore these layers as Scythe wore its armouring skein: clinging close to her, surface-conformal. There had been grief, sadness, anger, despair, hope, sorrow, disillusionment. And again hope, again despair, a dozen times over, grinding away at her human core as if she were some foreign thing that the universe very much wished to annihilate. But she had endured.

  ‘You came through,’ I said, scraping my seat forward, as Nicola lowered into hers, facing me next to her daughter. Two grown women now, similar in so many regards, even to the common threads of grey hair and the particular way time had grooved their faces, as if working from the same diagram.

  ‘Things nearly fell apart,’ Nicola said. ‘Not just because she took you from us. You were important, but not that important. But then, I don’t need to tell you that. You had many sins, Miguel. But pride was never one of them.’

  ‘How bad was it?’

  ‘Very bad,’ Victorine said. Her voice was deeper than her mother’s, her delivery somehow more measured and judicial, as if each utterance were a verdict in stone, incapable of being overturned. I sensed that she would never be someone who spoke unnecessarily, and that many would listen when she did. ‘A third died in the five years after your departure. But things got a little better after that. Glass had left instructions in Sanctum’s archives: better ways of making do with what we had. It took a little while to learn how to use them, but once we did, it was never as bad again. And the manufactories she had left us began to spit out things that helped our medicine, agronomy and life-support. We have something better than torpor boxes now, as well. That’s useful, because there’s good reason for some of us to sleep out the years and decades, from time to time.’

  ‘And the defences?’

  Nicola answered: ‘She made them better as well. Improved our surveillance and our weapons. Eventually, in the seventeenth year after you left, a small number of wolves arrived in our system. We thought it was the end of us, but Glass’s weapons dispersed them quite effectively. Of course, we knew they would come back one day, and that there would be more, and that we would need something better than those weapons. But we survived.’

  ‘Did other ships ever come?’

  ‘No,’ they answered in unison, with something between regret and relief. ‘No other ships.’

  ‘Then no one else needed to die. That’s good, I think. Though I would have liked to have known that there were others still out there.’

  ‘Are there?’ Victorine asked.

  ‘I think so. I think I may have met some. There were some people in the sea, a king and a queen. But it’s a little hard to remember.’ I worked my fingers together restlessly. ‘I’m not even sure what it means to be having this conversation. I think I might be dead, or dying. I think I might still be inside a planet. Is this real? Are we really talking?’

  ‘Did you want to see us again?’ Nicola asked, deflecting my question.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered forcefully.

  ‘Even though we were from a part of your life that was never quite true.’

  ‘It was all true. It doesn’t matter what name I had, or where I thought I’d come from. I cared for you.’

  The two women glanced at each other: some delicate crux had arrived. ‘Glass left us other things,’ Victorine said. ‘One was the means to have this conversation. We’re not speaking to you directly. That would be impossible, with so much time and distance between us. But Glass said that if we spoke of you often enough, and talked between us about what you had been, and what we might want to say to you, her machine would gather these impressions and put them into a tr
ansmission. When it was safe to do so, it would be sent out into space, to be picked up wherever you were. We could send it at any time, but in the instructions she left us, Glass said that it was important to wait until we were ready to make the Incantor.’

  ‘You have one?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Nicola said, smiling gently at my confusion. ‘But the hypometric machine is ready and primed to activate, as soon as the schedules arrive. They’ll come, one day. It might be a year from now or several decades, but they’ll arrive, and we’ll be ready.’

  ‘Have you tested it?’

  ‘No: Glass warned that the activation alone might function as a wolf lure, so we should never be tempted to activate the device until we are quite sure that the schedule is with us.’

  ‘And so we wait,’ Victorine said, squeezing her mother’s hand. ‘For the day we know will come. We sleep, through the quiet years. Sun Hollow grants us this. It knows that it will have need of us in the future.’ A touching awkwardness came about her. ‘We thought that it would be good for you to know this, wherever you are.’

  ‘Tell him,’ Nicola said.

  Some additional diffidence – humility or shyness – creased Victorine’s lips. ‘I am the one it’s chosen. Or rather, Glass chose me. The hypometric device will answer only to me, and when the Incantor forms, I will be its guardian. I did not choose this; it was chosen for me.’

  I shook my head, awed by the wonderful and frightening being that she had become.

  ‘Victorine the Wolf-Slayer. It seems . . . fitting.’

  ‘I will be wise,’ she said, as if I had begun to voice a suspicion to the contrary. ‘I do not need to know what the Incantor will do, to know that it cannot be borne lightly.’

  ‘There will be others,’ I said. ‘It will be a difficult burden, I’m sure, but you’ll have the knowledge that you’re not alone. Other systems, other Incantors, other wolf-slayers. I just wish I could be there to help.’

  ‘You would be dead by now,’ Nicola said.

  Her bluntness amused me. As tempting as it was to blame it on an infelicity of Glass’s machine, it was entirely true to character. I had loved her for it once, and some part of me still did.

  ‘Yes, that’s probably true. Glass made me younger again, on her ship, but only because she needed me that way. In the end, I’m not sure it made much difference. But until we got to . . . this place . . . she couldn’t know what would be needed of either of us.’

  ‘Where are you?’ Victorine asked.

  I had to fight both to summon the name and force my mind onto the true nature of my predicament, and its inescapability. ‘A planet called Charybdis.’

  With her mother’s unsparing directness she asked: ‘And will you die there?’

  ‘I think I may have already died. Or be dying. But I know this: Glass must have received this transmission from you, or it wouldn’t be possible to know any of this. It must have reached Scythe many years ago, though: anything else would be a ridiculous coincidence. But Glass didn’t want me to know about it until now.’

  ‘Cruelty?’ Nicola asked.

  ‘No, I think it was actually a strange sort of kindness.’

  ‘Then why now?’

  ‘Because we’ve succeeded. The Incantor schedules are inside Scythe. And very shortly those same schedules will be on their way to you. They’ll be spreading out across space, ready to be received and acted upon by all the hypometric devices Glass left in her wake. It will take time: many decades. But it doesn’t matter if the wolves intercept those signals: they’ll never get ahead of them. And by the time they arrive, wherever they follow the signals, they’ll meet an Incantor.’

  ‘You won’t see it,’ Victorine said.

  ‘No. But I’ve had this moment. This knowledge. It’s enough. It’s more than I deserved.’

  ‘You call that kindness?’ Nicola asked.

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  Some prickling sense told me that I might be in danger of overstaying my welcome. I made to push back my chair, and leave Nicola and Victorine in peace. But Nicola laid a hand on mine. ‘Stay awhile, Miguel de Ruyter. Remember what I said to you, at the end. You were a good man.’

  Victorine met her mother’s words with a nod, and the three of us linked hands. I sat down again, knowing this time I could stay, while the white light of love filled our hearts and seemed to swell out into the room itself, cleansing everything with its radiance.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A number of friends were kind enough to read and offer comment on this book. I would like to thank, in no particular order: Bernt Handl, Kotska Wallace, Tim Kaufmann, Frank Perrin, Merryn Jongkees, Sam Miller, Roy Miller, Paul McAuley, Louise Kleba, Bob Pell, William Donelson, Kate and Carol Sherrod, Malcolm Galloway, Ulla-Maija Borg, and my wife Josette Sanchez. Such flaws as remain in the book, of course, are entirely my responsibility. I would also like to thank my editors, Gillian Redfearn, Abigail Nathan and Brit Hvide for their continued insight and encouragement, and I would also like to express my appreciation to the rest of the teams at Orion and Orbit. Thanks also to Robert and Yasmin at United Agents. Finally, although she did not live to see this novel finished, I remain grateful to my mother Diane for the kindness and encouragement she showed me throughout my writing career, back to the very earliest days when I was thinking up places like Chasm City and Yellowstone.

  END NOTES

  Here are some additional notes on the Revelation Space universe, including a timeline, key characters (as they relate to the current book) and a brief glossary. I’ve also appended some notes on the internal consistency of the timeline, which I hope will be of interest.

  Condensed timeline for Revelation Space universe and Inhibitor Phase

  2190 – Coalition-Conjoiner War on Mars

  2205 – Nevil Clavain defects to Galiana’s side

  Circa 2300–2500 – A ‘Belle Epoque’ period of expansion, colonisation and great prosperity. Perfection of relativistic starflight. Mind-uploading. Numerous extrasolar planets settled. Speciation of humanity into many distinct factions. Realisation that most alien civilisations appear to be extinct

  2510 – Melding Plague afflicts human space

  2567 – Human activity in Resurgam system triggers Inhibitor Phase

  2675 – Nevil Clavain dies on Ararat

  2750 – Glass leaves Hela en route to Sun Hollow

  2791 – Glass’s arrival at Sun Hollow

  2828 – Glass and Miguel rendezvous with Lady Arek

  2850 – Bright Sun manoeuvre and return to Ararat

  2858 – Events in Charybdis

  2882 – Victorine receives Incantor schedule

  Circa 2900–3300 – Human reprisal against wolf incursion, second Belle Epoque before Greenfly emergence forces human diaspora

  KEY CHARACTERS IN THE TIMELINE

  Aura: daughter of Ana Khouri, one of the crew aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity. Due to the odd circumstances of her conception, Aura was born with advanced tactical knowledge relating to the Inhibitors. Her brain incorporated some elements of Conjoiner neurocybernetic architecture, making her a Demi-Conjoiner.

  Brannigan, John: a very long-lived human who eventually ended up cybernetically fused with the starship Nostalgia for Infinity.

  Clavain, Nevil: a soldier, born in the mid twenty-second century, who became a significant figure in the first war against the Conjoiners, a sect of rogue neuroscientists led by Galiana who established an experimental compound on Mars.

  Els, Rashmika: a pseudonym adopted by Aura.

  Galiana: figurehead of the Conjoiner movement, and an ally of Nevil Clavain following his defection to her cause.

  Gideon: an alien, a survivor of the ‘grub’ species, kept alive and exploited via cruel means by criminal factions in Chasm City.

  Khouri, Ana: a former soldier, assassin and weapons specialist aboard Nostalgia for Infinity.

  Pink, Mister: a pseudonym adopted by Scorpio.

  Scorpio: a hyperpig and close friend
and ally of Nevil Clavain.

  Skade: a ruthless Conjoiner whose methods were fiercely opposed by Nevil Clavain.

  Veda, Irravel: a starship captain who made one of the longest relativistic voyages in history, taking her across many centuries and far out into galactic space.

  Voi, Sandra: a political figure in the Demarchist movement, who adopted a moderate, conciliatory stance in the war against the Conjoiners. An early Conjoiner starship was named in her honour.

  Volyova, Ilya: senior crewmember on Nostalgia for Infinity: mentor and eventual friend to Ana Khouri.

  SELECTED GLOSSARY

  Ararat: a Pattern Juggler-dominated water world around p Eridani.

  Boser: directed energy system employing coherent (Bose-Einstein condensate) matter, usually with a laser or particle-beam precursor.

  Canasian: a language incorporating elements of Cantonese and Quebecois French. The main language of Demarchists.

  Chasm City: the largest conurbation in human space, constructed around a gas-belching void on the otherwise inhospitable Yellowstone. Closely aligned economically with the Glitter Band.

  Coalition for Neural Purity: an amalgamation of conservative states opposed to mind augmentation technologies.

  Conjoiners: a human faction employing extensive mind-to-mind linkage. Emerging from Mars, Conjoiner technology made human starflight practicable.

  Conjoiner drive or C-drive: propulsion system manufactured by Conjoiners and sold to various clients including Demarchists.

  Cryo-arithmetic engine: quantum-computational cooling system, employing local thermodynamic violation. Conjoiner invention.

  Darkdrive: a modified Conjoiner drive with no detectable emission products.

  Demarchists: a human faction using implants to achieve real-time participatory democracy.

  Glitter Band: in pre-plague years, the ring of 10,000 habitats orbiting Yellowstone.

  Great Wall of Mars: a 200-kilometre-tall ringlike ‘atmospheric dam’ built on Mars. Designed by Europan Demarchists under Sandra Voi, the wall employed advanced, actively strengthened materials science. Dismantled by Coalition forces on the eve of the second Conjoiner war.