The sound that the ghosts made was moaning and cavernous; long drawn-out howls so low that they were almost felt rather than heard. It was like the eeriest winter night’s wind imaginable; the sound that a wind might make after blowing through a thousand miles of cavern. But this was clearly no natural phenomenon, not the particle wind streaming past the ship, translated into sound; not even the fluctuations in the delicately balanced reactions in the engines. There were souls in that ghost-howl; voices calling across the night. In the moaning, though not one word was understandable, there remained nonetheless the unmistakable structure of human language.
‘What do you think?’ Volyova asked.
‘They’re voices, aren’t they? Human voices. But they sound so . . . exhausted; so sad.’ Khouri listened attentively. ‘Every now and then I think I understand a word.’
‘You know what they are, of course.’ Volyova diminished the sound, until the ghosts formed only a muted, infinitely pained chorus. ‘They’re crew. Like you and me. Occupants of other vessels, talking to each other across the void.’
‘Then why—’ Khouri hesitated. ‘Oh, wait a minute. Now I understand. They’re moving faster than us, aren’t they? Much faster. Their voices sound slow because they are, literally. Clocks run slower on ships moving near the speed of light.’
Volyova nodded, the tiniest bit saddened that Khouri had understood so swiftly. ‘Time dilation. Of course, some of those ships are moving towards us, so doppler-blueshifting acts to reduce the effect, but the dilation factor usually wins . . .’ She shrugged, seeing that Khouri was not yet ready for a treatise on the finer principles of relativistic communications. ‘Normally, of course, Infinity corrects for all this; removes the doppler and dilatory distortions, and translates the result into something which sounds perfectly intelligible.’
‘Show me.’
‘No,’ Volyova said. ‘It isn’t worth it. The end product is always the same. Trivia, technical talk, boastful old trade rhetoric. That’s the interesting end of the spectrum. At the boring end you get paranoid gossip or brain-damaged cases baring their souls to the night. Most of the time it’s just two ships handshaking as they pass in the night; exchanging bland pleasantries. There’s hardly ever any interaction since the light-travel times between ships are seldom less than months. And anyway, half the time the voices are just prerecorded messages, since the crew are usually in reefersleep. ’
‘Just the usual human babble, in other words.’
‘Yes. We take it with us wherever we go.’
Volyova relaxed back in her seat, instructing the sound-system to pump out the sorrowful, time-stretched voices even louder than before. This signal of human presence ought to have made the stars seem less remote and cold, but it managed to have exactly the opposite effect; just like the act of telling ghost stories around a campfire served to magnify the darkness beyond the flames. For a moment - one that she revelled in, no matter what Khouri made of it - it was possible to believe that the interstellar spaces beyond the glass were really haunted.
‘Notice anything?’ Sylveste asked.
The wall consisted of chevron-shaped granite blocks, interrupted at five points by gatehouses. The gatehouses were surmounted by sculptural Amarantin heads, in a not-quite-realistic style reminiscent of Yucatán art. A fresco ran around the outer wall, made from ceramic tiles, depicting Amarantin functionaries performing complex social duties.
Pascale paused before answering, her gaze tracking over the different figures in the fresco.
They were shown carrying farming implements which looked almost like actual items from human agricultural history, or weapons - pikes, bows and a kind of musket, although the poses were not those of warriors engaged in combat, but were far more formalised and stiff, like Egyptian figurework. There were Amarantin surgeons and stoneworkers, astronomers - they had invented reflecting and refracting telescopes, recent digs had confirmed - and cartographers, glassworkers, kitemakers and artists, and above each symbolic figure was a bimodal chain of graphicforms picked out in gold and cobalt-blue, naming the flock which assumed the duty of the representational figure.
‘None of them have wings,’ Pascale said.
‘No,’ Sylveste said. ‘What used to be their wings turned into their arms.’
‘But why object to a statue of a god with a pair of wings? Humans have never had wings, but that’s never stopped us investing angels with them. It strikes me that a species which really did once have wings would have even fewer qualms.’
‘Yes, except you’re forgetting the creation myth.’
It was only in the last years that the basic myth had been understood by the archaeologists; unravelled from dozens of later, embroidered versions. According to the myth, the Amarantin had once shared the sky with the other birdlike creatures which still existed on Resurgam during their reign. But the flocks of that time were the last to know the freedom of flight. They made an agreement with the god they called Birdmaker, trading the ability to fly for the gift of sentience. On that day, they raised their wings to heaven and watched as consuming fire turned them to ash, for ever excluding them from the air.
So that they might remember their arrangement, the Birdmaker gave them useless, clawed wing-stubs - enough to remind them of what they had forsaken, and enough to enable them to begin writing down their history. Fire burned in their minds too, but this was the unquenchable fire of being. That light would always burn, the Birdmaker told them - so long as they did not try to defy the Birdmaker’s will by once more returning to the skies. If they did that, it was promised, the Birdmaker would take back the souls they had been given on the Day of Burning Wings.
It was, Sylveste knew, simply the understandable attempt of a culture to raise a mirror to itself. What made it significant was the complete extent to which it had permeated their culture - in effect, a single religion which had superseded all others and which had persisted, through different tellings, for an unthinkable span of centuries. Undoubtedly it had shaped their thinking and behaviour, perhaps in ways too complex to begin guessing.
‘I understand,’ Pascale said. ‘As a species, they couldn’t deal with being flightless, so they created the Birdmaker story so they could feel some superiority over the birds which could still fly.’
‘Yes. And while that belief worked, it had one unexpected side-effect: to deter them from ever taking flight again: much like the Icarus myth, only exhibiting a stronger hold over their collective psyche.’
‘But if that’s the case, the figure on the spire . . .’
‘Is a big two-fingered salute to whatever god they used to believe in.’
‘Why would they do that?’ Pascale said. ‘Religions just fade away; get replaced by new ones. I can’t believe they’d build that city, everything in it, just as an insult to their old god.’
‘Me neither. Which suggests something else entirely.’
‘Like what?’
‘That a new god moved in. One with wings.’
Volyova had decided it was time to show Khouri the instruments of her profession. ‘Hold on,’ she said, as the elevator approached the cache chamber. ‘People don’t generally like this the first time it happens.’
‘God,’ Khouri said, instinctively pressing herself against the rear wall as the vista suddenly expanded shockingly; the elevator a tiny beetle crawling down the side of the vast space. ‘It looks too big to fit inside!’
‘Oh, this is nothing. There are another four chambers this large. Chamber two is where we train for surface ops. Two are empty or semi-pressurised; the fourth holds shuttles and in-system vehicles. This is the only one dedicated to holding the cache.’
‘You mean those things?’
‘Yes.’
There were forty cache-weapons in the chamber, though none exactly resembled any other. Yet in their general style of construction, a certain affinity was betrayed. Each machine was cased in alloy of a greenish-bronze hue. Though each of the devices was large enough to be a m
edium-sized spacecraft in its own right, none exhibited any indication that this was their function. There were no windows or access doors visible in what would have been their hulls, no markings or communications systems. While some of the objects were studded with what might have been vernier jets, they were only there to assist in the moving around and positioning of the devices, much as a battleship was only there to assist in moving around and positioning its big guns.
Of course, that was exactly what the cache devices were.
‘Hell-class,’ Volyova said. ‘That was what their builders called them. Of course, we’re going back a few centuries here.’
Volyova watched as her recruit appraised the titanic size of the nearest cache-weapon. Suspended vertically, its long axis aligned with the ship’s axis of thrust, it looked like a ceremonial sword dangling from a warrior-baron’s ceiling. Like all the weapons, it was surrounded by a framework which had been added by one of Volyova’s predecessors, to which were attached various control, monitoring and manoeuvring systems. All the weapons were connected to tracks - a three-dimensional maze of sidings and switches - which merged lower down in the chamber, feeding into a much smaller volume directly below, large enough to contain a single weapon. From there, the weapons could be deployed beyond the hull, into space.
‘So who built them?’ Khouri said.
‘We don’t know for sure. The Conjoiners, perhaps, in one of their darker incarnations. All we know is how we found them - hidden away in an asteroid, circling a brown dwarf so obscure it has only a catalogue number.’
‘You were there?’
‘No; this was long before my time. I only inherited them from the last caretaker - and he from his. I’ve been studying them ever since. I’ve managed to access the control systems of thirty-one of them, and I’ve figured out - very roughly - about eighty per cent of the necessary activation codes. But I’ve only tested seventeen of the weapons, and of that number, only two in what you might term actual combat situations.’
‘You mean you’ve actually used them?’
‘It wasn’t something I rushed into.’
No need, she thought, to burden Khouri with details of past atrocities - at least, not immediately. Over time, Khouri would come to know the cache-weapons as well as Volyova knew them - perhaps even more intimately, since Khouri would know them via the gunnery, through direct neural-interface.
‘What can they do?’
‘Some of them are more than capable of taking planets apart. Others . . . I don’t even want to guess. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of them did unpleasant things to stars. Exactly who’d want to use such weapons . . .’ She trailed off.
‘Who did you use them against?’
‘Enemies, of course.’
Khouri regarded her for long, silent seconds.
‘I don’t know whether to be horrified that such things exist . . . or relieved to know that at least it’s us who have our fingers on the triggers.’
‘Be relieved,’ Volyova said. ‘It’s better that way.’
Sylveste and Pascale returned to the spire, hovering. The winged Amarantin was just as they had left it, but now it seemed to brood over the city with imperious disregard. It was tempting to think that a new god really had moved in - what else could have inspired the building of such a monument, if not fear of the divine? But the accompanying text on the spire was maddeningly hard to unscramble.
‘Here’s a reference to the Birdmaker,’ Sylveste said. ‘So chances are good the spire had some bearing on the Burning Wings myth, even though the winged god clearly isn’t a representation of the Birdmaker.’
‘Yes,’ Pascale said. ‘That’s the graphicform for fire, next to the one for wings.’
‘What else do you see?’
Pascale concentrated for a few long moments. ‘There’s some reference here to a renegade flock.’
‘Renegade in what sense?’ He was testing her, and she knew it, but the exercise was valuable in itself, for Pascale’s interpretation would give him some indication of how subjective his own analysis had been.
‘A renegade flock which didn’t agree to the deal with the Birdmaker, or reneged on the deal afterwards.’
‘That’s what I thought. I was worried I might have made an error or two.’
‘Whoever they were, they were called the Banished Ones.’ She read back and forth, testing hypotheses and revising her interpretation as she went. ‘It looks like they were originally part of the flock who agreed to the Birdmaker’s terms, but that they changed their minds sometime later.’
‘Can you make out the name of their leader?’
She began: ‘They were led by an individual called . . .’ But then Pascale trailed off. ‘No, can’t translate that string; at least not right now. What does all this mean, anyway? Do you think they really existed?’
‘Perhaps. If I had to take a guess, I’d say they were unbelievers who came to realise that the Birdmaker myth was just that - myth. Of course, that wouldn’t have gone down very well with the other fundamentalist flocks.’
‘Which is why they were banished?’
‘Assuming they ever existed in the first place. But I can’t help thinking, what if they were some kind of technological sect, like an enclave of scientists? Amarantin who were prepared to experiment, to question the nature of their world?’
‘Like mediaeval alchemists?’
‘Yes.’ He liked the analogy immediately. ‘Perhaps they even tried experimenting with flight, the way Leonardo did. Against the backdrop of general Amarantin culture, that would have been like spitting in God’s eye.’
‘Agreed. But assuming they were real - and were banished - what happened to them? Did they just die out?’
‘I don’t know. But one thing’s clear. The Banished Ones were important - more than just a minor detail in the overall story of the Birdmaker myth. They’re mentioned all over the spire; all over this damned city, in fact - far more frequently than in any other Amarantin relics.’
‘But the city is late,’ Pascale said. ‘Apart from the marker obelisk, it’s the most recent relic we’ve found. Dating from near the Event. Why would the Banished Ones suddenly crop up again, after so long an absence?’
‘Well,’ Sylveste said. ‘Maybe they came back.’
‘After - what? Tens of thousands of years?’
‘Perhaps.’ Sylveste smiled privately. ‘If they did return - after that long away - it might be the kind of thing to inspire statue-building. ’
‘Then the statue - do you think it might portray their leader? The one called—’ Pascale took another stab at the graphicform. ‘Well, this is the symbol for the sun, isn’t it?’
‘And the rest?’
‘I’m not sure. Looks like the glyph for the act of . . . theft - but how can that be?’
‘Put the two together, what have you got?’
He imagined her shrugging, noncommittally. ‘One who steals suns? Sun Stealer? What would that mean?’
Sylveste shrugged himself. ‘That’s what I’ve been asking myself all morning. That and one other thing.’
‘Which would be?’
‘Why I think I’ve heard that name before.’
After the weapons chamber, the three of them rode another elevator further into the ship’s heart.
‘You’re doing well,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘Volyova honestly believes that she’s turned you to her side.’
She had, more or less, been with them the whole time - silently observing Volyova’s guided tour, only occasionally interjecting with remarks or prompts for Khouri’s ears only. This was extremely disquieting: Khouri was never able to free herself of the feeling that Volyova was also privy to these whispered asides.
‘Maybe she’s right,’ Khouri answered, automatically thinking her response. ‘Maybe she’s stronger than you.’
The Mademoiselle scoffed. ‘Did you listen to anything I told you?’
‘As if I had any choice.’
Shuttin
g out the Mademoiselle when she wanted to say something was like trying to silence an insistent refrain playing in her head. There was no respite from her apparitions.
‘Listen,’ the woman said. ‘If my countermeasures were failing, your loyalty to Volyova would force you to tell her of my existence.’
‘I’ve been tempted.’
The Mademoiselle looked at her askance, and Khouri felt a brief frisson of satisfaction. In some respects the Mademoiselle - or rather, her implant-distilled persona - seemed omniscient. But apart from the knowledge which had been instilled in it upon its creation, the implant’s learning was restricted entirely to what it could perceive through Khouri’s own senses. Maybe the implant could hook into data networks even if Khouri herself were not interfaced, but while that might have been possible, it seemed unlikely; there was too much risk of the implant itself being detected by the same systems. And although it could hear her thoughts when Khouri chose to communicate with it, it could not read her state of mind, other than by the most superficial biochemical cues in the neural environment in which it floated. So for the implant, there was a necessary element of doubt concerning the efficacy of its countermeasures.
‘Volyova would kill you. She killed her last recruit, if you haven’t worked that out for yourself.’
‘Maybe she had good reason.’
‘You don’t know anything about her - or any of them. Neither do I. We haven’t even met her Captain yet.’
There was no arguing with that. Captain Brannigan’s name had come up once or twice when Sajaki or one of the others had been indiscreet in Khouri’s presence, but in general they did not speak often of their leader. Clearly they were not Ultras in the usual sense, although they maintained a meticulous front even the Mademoiselle had not seen through. The fiction was so absolute that they went through the motions of trade just like all the other Ultra crews.
But what was the reality behind the façade?
Gunnery Officer, Volyova had said. And now Khouri had seen something of the cache of weapons stored within the ship. It was rumoured that many trade vessels carried discreet armaments, for resolving the worst sorts of breakdown in client-customer relations, or for staging acts of blatant piracy against other ships. But these weapons looked far too potent to be used in mere squabbles, and in any case, the ship clearly had an extra layer of conventional weaponry for just those circumstances. So what exactly was the point behind this arsenal? Sajaki must have had some long-term plan in mind, Khouri thought, and that was disturbing enough - but even more worrying was the thought that perhaps there was no plan at all; that Sajaki was carrying the cache around until he found an excuse for using it, like a tooled-up thug stumbling around in search of a fight.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 19
