The queen put people in the suit. It kept them alive and fed them sensory information. It protected them from the sleeting radiation of interstellar flight when they were entombed, for years at a time, in the ice of the ship’s ablative shield.
The lucky ones were dead when they pulled them out of the suit.
Quaiche tried to stop the tremble in his voice. ‘If you look at things one way, we didn’t really . . . we didn’t really do too badly . . . all things considered. There was no material damage to the ship. No crew fatalities or major injuries. No contamination incidents. No unforeseen expenditures . . .’ He fell silent, looking hopefully at Jasmina.
‘That’s the best you can come up with? You were supposed to make us rich, Quaiche. You were supposed to turn our fortunes around in these difficult times, greasing the wheels of trade with your innate charm and grasp of planetary psychologies and landscapes. You were supposed to be our golden goose.’
He shifted uneasily.
‘Yet in five systems all you found was junk.’
‘You chose the systems, not me. It isn’t my fault if there wasn’t anything worth finding.’
Slowly and worryingly the queen shook her head. ‘No, Quaiche. Not that easy, I’m afraid. You see, a month ago we intercepted something. It was a transmission, a two-way trade dialogue between a human colony on Chaloupek and the lighthugger Faint Memory of Hokusai. Ring any bells?’
‘Not really . . .’
But it did.
‘The Hokusai was entering Gliese 664 just as we departed that system. It was the second system you swept for us. Your report was . . .’ The queen hoisted the skull to the side of her head, listening to its chattering jaw. ‘Let’s see . . . “nothing of value found on Opincus or the other three terrestrial worlds; only minor items of discarded technology recovered on moons five to eight of the Haurient giant . . . nothing in the inner asteroid fields, D-type swarms, Trojan points or major K-belt concentrations”.’
Quaiche could see where this was heading. ‘And the Faint Memory of Hokusai?’
‘The trade dialogue was absolutely fascinating. By all accounts, the Hokusai located a cache of buried trade items around one century old. Pre-war, pre-plague. Very valuable stuff: not merely technological artefacts, but also art and culture, much of it unique. I hear they made enough on that to buy themselves an entirely new layer of ablative hull cladding.’ She looked at him expectantly. ‘Any comments, thoughts, on that?’
‘My report was honest,’ Quaiche said. ‘They must have got lucky, that’s all. Look, just give me another chance. Are we approaching another system?’
The queen smiled. ‘We’re always approaching another system. This time it’s a place called 107 Piscium, but frankly from this distance it doesn’t look much more promising than the last five. What’s to say you’re going to be any use this time?’
‘Let me take the Dominatrix,’ he said, knitting his hands together involuntarily. ‘Let me take her down into that system.’
The queen was silent for many seconds. Quaiche heard only his own breathing, punctuated now and then by the abrupt, attenuated sizzle of a dying insect or rat. Something moved languidly beyond the green glass of a hemispherical dome set into one of the chamber’s twelve walls. He sensed that he was being observed by something other than the eyeless figure in the chair. Without having been told, he understood then that the thing beyond the glass was the real queen, and that the ruined body in the seat was only a puppet that she currently inhabited. They were all true, then, all the rumours he had ever heard: the queen’s solipsism; her addiction to extreme pain as a reality-anchoring device; the vast reserve of cloned bodies she was said to keep for just that purpose.
‘Have you finished, Quaiche? Have you made your case?’
He sighed. ‘I suppose I have.’
‘Very well, then.’
She must have issued some secret command, because at that moment the door to the chamber opened again. Quaiche spun around as the blast of cold fresh air touched the nape of his neck. The surgeon-general and the two Ultras who had helped him during Quaiche’s revival entered the room.
‘I’m done with him,’ the queen said.
‘And your intention?’ Grelier asked.
Jasmina sucked at a fingernail. ‘I haven’t changed my mind. Put him in the scrimshaw suit.’
FOUR
Ararat, 2675
Scorpio knew better than to interrupt Clavain when the old man was thinking something over. How long had it been since he had told him about the object falling from space, if that was indeed where it had come from? Five minutes, easily. In all that time, Clavain had sat there as gravely as a statue, his expression fixed, his eyes locked on the horizon.
Finally, just when Scorpio was beginning to doubt his old friend’s sanity, Clavain spoke. ‘When did it happen?’ he asked. ‘When did this “thing” - whatever it is - arrive?’
‘Probably in the last week,’ Scorpio said. ‘We only found it a couple of days ago.’
There was another troubling pause, though it was only a minute or so long this time. Water slapped against rock and gurgled in little eddies in and out of shallow pools by the shoreline.
‘And what exactly is it?’
‘We can’t be absolutely certain. It’s a capsule of some kind. A human artefact. Our best guess is that it’s an escape pod, something with re-entry capabilities. We think it splashed down in the ocean and bobbed to the surface.’
Clavain nodded, as if the news was of only minor interest. ‘And you’re certain it wasn’t left behind by Galiana?’
He said the woman’s name with ease, but Scorpio could only guess at the pain it caused him. Especially now, looking out to sea.
Scorpio had some inkling of what the ocean meant to Clavain: both loss and the cruellest kind of hope. In an unguarded moment, not long before his voluntary exile from island affairs, Clavain had said, ‘They’re all gone now. There’s nothing more the sea can do to me.’
‘They’re still there,’ Scorpio had replied. ‘They aren’t lost. If anything, they’re safer than they ever were.’
As if Clavain could not have seen that for himself.
‘No,’ Scorpio said, snapping his attention back to the present, ‘I don’t think Galiana left it.’
‘I thought it might hold a message from her,’ Clavain said. ‘But I’m wrong, aren’t I? There won’t be any messages. Not that way. Not from Galiana, not from Felka.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Scorpio said.
‘There’s no need to be. It’s the way of things.’
What Scorpio knew of Clavain’s past was drawn as much from hearsay as from things the old man had told him directly. Memories had always been fickle, but in the present era they were as mutable as clay. There were aspects of his own past even Clavain could not now be sure of.
Yet there were some things that were certain. Clavain had once loved a woman named Galiana; their relationship had begun many centuries ago and had spanned many of those same centuries. It was clear that they had birthed - or created - a kind of daughter, Felka; that she had been both terribly damaged and terribly powerful; and that she had been loved and feared in equal measure.
Whenever Clavain spoke of those times, it was with a happiness tempered by the knowledge of what was to follow.
Galiana had been a scientist, fascinated by the augmentation of the human mind. But her curiosity had not stopped there. What she ultimately wanted was an intimate connection with reality, at its root level. Her neural experiments had only ever been a necessary part of this process. To Galiana, it had been natural that the next step should be physical exploration, pushing out into the cosmos. She wanted to go deeper, far beyond the ragged edge of mapped space, to see what was actually out there. So far the only indications of alien intelligence anyone had found had been ruins and fossils, but who was to say what might be found further into the galaxy? Human settlements at that time spanned a bubble two dozen light-years across, but Galiana int
ended to travel more than a hundred light-years before returning.
And she had. The Conjoiners had launched three ships, moving slightly slower than the speed of light, on an expedition into deep interstellar space. The expedition would take at least a century and a half; equally eager for new experience, Clavain and Felka had journeyed with her. All had progressed according to plan: Galiana and her allies visited many solar systems, and while they never found any unambiguous signs of active intelligence, they nonetheless catalogued many remarkable phenomena, as well as uncovering further ruins. Then came reports, already outdated, of a crisis back home: growing tensions between the Conjoiners and their moderate allies, the Demarchists. Clavain needed to return home to lend his tactical support to the remaining Conjoiners.
Galiana had considered it more important to continue with the expedition; their amicable separation in deep space left one of the ships returning home, carrying Clavain and Felka, while the two other craft continued to loop further into the plane of the galaxy.
They had intended to be reunited, but when Galiana’s ship finally returned to the Conjoiner Mother Nest, it did so on automatic pilot, damaged and dead. Somewhere out in space a parasitic entity had attacked both of the ships, destroying one. Immediately afterwards, black machines had clawed into the hull of Galiana’s ship, systematically anatomising her crew. One by one, they had all been killed, until only Galiana remained. The black machines had infiltrated her skull, squeezing into the interstices of her brain. Horribly, she was still alive, but utterly incapable of independent action. She had become the parasite’s living puppet.
With Clavain’s permission the Conjoiners had frozen her against the day when they might be able to remove the parasite safely. One day they might even have succeeded, but then a rift had opened in Conjoiner affairs: the beginning of the same crisis that had eventually brought Clavain to the Resurgam system and, latterly, to Ararat. In the conflict Galiana’s frozen body had been destroyed.
Clavain’s grief had been a vast, soul-sucking thing. It would have killed him, Scorpio thought, had not his people been in such desperate need of leadership. Saving the colony on Resurgam had given him something to focus on besides the loss he had suffered. It had kept him somewhere this side of sanity.
And, later, there had been a kind of consolation.
Galiana had not led them to Ararat, yet it turned out that Ararat was one of the worlds she had visited after her separation from Clavain and Felka. The planet had attracted her because of the alien organisms filling its ocean. It was a Juggler world, and that was vitally important, for few things that visited Juggler worlds were ever truly forgotten.
Pattern Jugglers had been encountered on many worlds that conformed to the same aquatic template as Ararat. After years of study, there was still no agreement as to whether or not the aliens were intelligent in their own right. But all the same it was clear that they prized intelligence themselves, preserving it with the loving devotion of curators.
Now and then, when a person swam in the seas of a Juggler planet, the microscopic organisms entered the swimmer’s nervous system. It was a kinder process than the neural invasion that had taken place aboard Galiana’s ship. The Juggler organisms only wanted to record, and when they had unravelled the swimmer’s neural patterns they would retreat. The mind of the swimmer would have been captured by the sea, but the swimmer was almost always free to return to land. Usually, they felt no change at all. Rarely, they would turn out to have been given a subtle gift, a tweak to their neurological architecture that permitted superhuman cognition or insight. Mostly it lasted for only a few hours, but very infrequently it appeared permanent.
There was no way to tell if Galiana had gained any gifts after she had swum in the ocean of this world, but her mind had certainly been captured. It was there now, frozen beneath the waves, waiting to be imprinted on the consciousness of another swimmer.
Clavain had guessed this, but he had not been the first to attempt communion with Galiana. That honour had fallen to Felka. For twenty years she had swum, immersed in the memories and glacial consciousness of her mother. In all that time Clavain had held back from swimming himself, fearing perhaps that when he encountered the imprint of Galiana he would find it in some sense wrong, untrue to his memory of what she had been. His doubts had ebbed over the years, but he had still never made the final commitment of swimming. Nonetheless, Felka - who had always craved the complexity of experience that the ocean offered - had swum regularly, and she had reported back her experiences to Clavain. Through his daughter he had again achieved some connection with Galiana, and for the time being, until he summoned the courage to swim himself, that had been enough.
But two years ago the sea had taken Felka, and she had not returned.
Scorpio thought about that now, choosing his next words with great care. ‘Nevil, I understand this is difficult for you, but you must also understand that this thing, whatever it is, could be a very serious matter for the settlement.’
‘I get that, Scorp.’
‘But you think the sea matters more. Is that it?’
‘I think none of us really has a clue what actually matters.’
‘Maybe we don’t. Me, I don’t really care about the bigger picture. It’s never been my strong point.’
‘Right now, Scorp, the bigger picture is all we have.’
‘So you think there are millions - billions - of people out there who are going to die? People we’ve never met, people we’ve never come within a light-year of in our lives?’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘Well, sorry, but that isn’t the way my head works. I just can’t process that kind of threat. I don’t do mass extinction. I’m a lot more locally focused than that. And right now I have a local problem.’
‘You think so?’
‘I have a hundred and seventy thousand people here that need worrying about. That’s a number I can just about get my head around. And when something drops out of the sky without warning, it keeps me from sleeping.’
‘But you didn’t actually see anything drop out of the sky, did you?’ Clavain did not wait for Scorpio’s answer. ‘And yet we have the immediate volume of space around Ararat covered with every passive sensor in our arsenal. How did we miss a re-entry capsule, let alone the ship that must have dropped it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Scorpio said. He couldn’t tell if he was losing the argument, or doing well just to be engaging Clavain in discussion about something concrete, something other than lost souls and the spectre of mass extinction. ‘But whatever it is must have come down recently. It’s not like any of the other artefacts we’ve pulled from the ocean. They were all half-dissolved, even the ones that must have been sitting on the seabed, where the organisms aren’t so thick. This thing didn’t look as though it had been under for more than a few days.’
Clavain turned away from the shore, and Scorpio took this as a welcome sign. The old Conjoiner moved with stiff, economical footsteps, never looking down, but navigating his way between pools and obstacles with practised ease.
They were returning to the tent.
‘I watch the skies a lot, Scorp,’ Clavain said. ‘At night, when there aren’t any clouds. Lately I’ve been seeing things up there. Flashes. Hints of things moving. Glimpses of something bigger, as if the curtain’s just been pulled back for an instant. I’m guessing you think that makes me mad, don’t you?’
Scorpio didn’t know what he thought. ‘Alone out here, anyone would see things,’ he said.
‘But it wasn’t cloudy last night,’ Clavain said, ‘or the night before, and I watched the sky on both occasions. I didn’t see anything. Certainly no indication of any ships orbiting us.’
‘We haven’t seen anything either.’
‘How about radio transmissions? Laser squirts?’
‘Not a peep. And you’re right: it doesn’t make very much sense. But like it or not, there’s still a capsule, and it isn’t going away. I want
you to come and see it for yourself.’
Clavain shoved hair from his eyes. The lines and wrinkles in his face had become shadowed crevasses and gorges, like the contours of an improbably weathered landscape. Scorpio thought that he had aged ten or twenty years in the six months he had been on this island.
‘You said something about there being someone inside it.’
While they had been talking, the cloud cover had begun to break up in swathes. The sky beyond had the pale, crazed blue of a jackdaw’s eye.
‘It’s still a secret,’ Scorpio said. ‘Only a few of us know that the thing’s been found at all. That’s why I came here by boat. A shuttle would have been easier, but it wouldn’t have been low-key. If people find out we’ve brought you back they’ll think there’s a crisis coming. Besides which, it isn’t supposed to be this easy to bring you back. They still think you’re somewhere halfway around the world.’
‘You insisted on that lie?’
‘What do you think would have been more reassuring? To let the people think you’d gone on an expedition - a potentially hazardous one, admittedly - or to tell them you’d gone away to sit on an island and toy with the idea of committing suicide?’
‘They’ve been through worse. They could have taken it.’
‘It’s what they’ve been through that made me think they could do without the truth,’ Scorpio said.
‘Anyway, it isn’t suicide.’ He stopped and looked back out to sea. ‘I know she’s there, with her mother. I can feel it, Scorpio. Don’t ask me how or why, but I know she’s still here. I read about this sort of thing happening on other Juggler worlds, you know. Now and then they take swimmers, dismantle their bodies completely and incorporate them into the organic matrix of the sea. No one knows why. But swimmers who enter the oceans afterwards say that sometimes they feel the presence of the ones who vanished. It’s a much stronger impression than the usual stored memories and personalities. They say they experience something close to dialogue.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 229
