Revelation Space

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Case, are we getting warm?’

  The voice came back, blurred and trembly through the mass of the building above her. ‘So warm we’re incandescent, dear girl. Just hold on and make sure you don’t waste those toxin darts.’

  ‘Yes, about those, Case, I —’

  Khouri dived aside as three New Komuso trooped past, their heads enveloped in basketlike wicker helmets. Shakuhachi — bamboo flutes — cut the air ahead of them like majorettes’ staffs, dispersing a gang of capuchin monkeys into the shadows. ‘I mean,’ she continued, ‘what if we take out a collateral?’

  ‘It can’t happen,’ Ng said. ‘The toxin’s keyed directly to Taraschi’s biochemistry. Hit anyone else on the planet and what they’ll have to show for it is a nasty puncture wound.’

  ‘Even if I hit Taraschi’s clone?’

  ‘You think you might?’

  ‘Just a question.’ It struck her that Case was unusually jumpy.

  ‘Anyway, if Taraschi had a clone, and we killed him by mistake, that would be Taraschi’s problem, not ours. It’s all in the fine print. You should read it sometime.’

  ‘When I’m gripped by existential boredom,’ Khouri said, ‘I might try it.’

  She stiffened, then, because all of a sudden it was different. Ng was silent, and in place of his voice was a clear pulsing tone. It was soft and evil, like the echolocation pulse of a predator. She had heard that tone a dozen times in the last six months, each time signifying her proximity to the target. It meant that Taraschi was no more than five hundred metres away. That fact, coupled with the onset of the pulse, strongly suggested that he was within the Monument itself.

  The moves of the game were now public property. Taraschi would know it, for an identical device — implanted in a secure Canopy clinic — was generating similar pulses in his own head. Across Chasm City, the various media networks which concentrated on Shadowplay would even now be sending their field teams across town to the location of the kill. A lucky few would already be in the vicinity.

  The tone hastened as they walked further under the Monument’s concourse, but not quickly. Taraschi must have been overhead — actually in the Monument — so that the relative distance between them was not changing swiftly.

  The concourse beneath was cracked by land subsidence, lying perilously close to the chasm. Originally there had been an underground mall complex beneath the structure, but the Mulch had infiltrated it. The lowest levels were flooded, sunken walkways emerging from water the colour of caramel. The tetrahedron of the Monument was elevated well above the concourse and the flooded plaza by a smaller inverted pyramid abutted deep into rock foundations. There was only one entrance to the structure. That meant that Taraschi was as good as dead already, if she caught him aside. But to reach it she had to cross a bridge across the plaza, and her approach would be obvious to the man inside. She wondered what kind of primal thoughts were slipping through his mind now. In her dreams, she had often found herself in some half-deserted city being chased by some implacable hunter, but Taraschi was experiencing that terror in reality. She remembered that in those dreams the hunter never had to move quickly. That was part of its unpleasantness. She would run desperately, as if through thickened air with weighted-down legs, and the hunter would move with a slowness born of great patience and wisdom.

  The pulsing quickened as she crossed the bridge, the ground beneath her feet wet and gritty. Occasionally the pulsing would slow and requicken, evidence that Taraschi was moving around in the structure. But there was no real escape for him now. He could arrange to be met on the roof of the Monument, perhaps, but in utilising aerial transport he would forfeit the terms of the contract. In the parlours of the Canopy, the shame of that might be less desirable than being killed.

  She walked through into the atrium within the Monument’s supporting pyramid. It was dark inside and it took a few moments for her eyes to adjust. She slipped the toxin gun out of her coat and checked the exit in case Taraschi had planned to sneak out. His absence was unsurprising, the atrium almost empty, ransacked by looters. Rain drummed on metal. She looked up into a suspended cloud of rusted, damaged sculptures hung on copper cables from the ceiling. A few had fallen to the marbled terrazzo, metal birds’ wings stabbing into the ground with the impact. They were softly defined in dust, its whiteness like mortar between the primary feathers.

  She looked towards the ceiling.

  ‘Taraschi?’ she called. ‘Can you hear me yet? I’m coming.’

  She wondered, briefly, why the television people had not yet arrived. It was strange to be this close to the termination of the kill and not have them baying for blood around her, along with the usual impromptu crowd which they invariably drew.

  He had not answered her. But she knew he was above the ceiling, somewhere. She walked across the atrium, towards the spiral staircase that led higher. She climbed quickly, then cast around for large objects she could budge, to obstruct Taraschi’s escape route. There were plenty of ruined exhibits and pieces of furniture. She began to assemble an obstructing pile atop the staircase. It would hinder Taraschi more than block his exit completely, but that was all she needed.

  By the time it was half done she was sweating and her back was stiff. She took a moment to collect herself and take in her surroundings; the constant arpeggiating note in her head confirming that Taraschi was still nearby.

  The upper part of the pyramid had been dedicated to individual shrines to the Eighty. These little memorials were set in recesses within the impressive black marble walls which rose partway to the dizzyingly high ceilings, framed by pillars adorned with suggestively posed caryatids. The walls, pierced by corniced archways, blocked her view for a few tens of metres in any direction. The three triangular sides of the ceiling had been punctured in places; sepia shafts of light entering the chamber. Rain fell in steady streamers from the larger rents. Khouri saw that many of the recesses were empty; evidently, those shrines had either been looted or the families of those members of the Eighty had decided to remove their memorials to some safer place. Perhaps half remained. Of those, roughly two-thirds had been arranged in a similar manner — images, biographies and keepsakes of the dead, placed in a standard fashion. Other exhibits were more elaborate. There were holograms or statues, even, in one or two grisly cases, the embalmed corpses of the actual people being celebrated, doubtless subjected to some skilled taxidermy to offset the worst damage wrought by the procedure which had killed them.

  She left the well-tended shrines alone, plundering only those that were obviously derelict, even then uncomfortable with the act of vandalism. The busts were useful — just large enough to move if she got both fingers under the base. Rather than placing them in an ordered pile at the top of the stairs, she just let them drop. Most of them had had their jewelled eyes gouged out already. The full-size statues were much harder to move, and she managed to shift only one of them.

  Soon her barricade was done. For the most part it was a rubble-like pile of toppled heads, dignified faces unembarrassed by what she had done to them. The pile was surrounded by smaller, foot-tangling bric-a-brac: vases, Bibles and loyal servitors. Even if Taraschi began to dismantle the pile to reach the stairs, she was sure she would hear him doing it and be able to reach the site long before he was finished. It might even be good to kill him on that pile of heads, since it did slightly resemble Golgotha.

  All this time she had been listening to his ponderous footsteps somewhere behind the black dividing walls.

  ‘Taraschi,’ she called. ‘Make this easy for yourself. There’s no escape from here.’

  His reply sounded remarkably strong and confident. ‘You’re so wrong, Ana. The escape’s why we’re here.’

  Shit. He was not supposed to know her name.

  ‘Escape is death, right?’

  He sounded amused. ‘Something like that.’

  It was not the first time she had heard such eleventh-hour bravado. She rather admired them for it. ‘You want me
to come find you, is that it?’

  ‘Now that we’ve come this far, why not?’

  ‘I understand. You want your money’s worth. A contract with as many clauses in it as this one couldn’t have come cheap.’

  ‘Clauses?’ — the pulse in her head shifting minutely, rhapsodically.

  ‘This weapon. The fact that we’re alone.’

  ‘Ah,’ Taraschi said. ‘Yes. That did cost. But I wanted this to be a personal matter. When it came to finalities.’

  Khouri was getting edgy. She had never had an actual conversation with one of her targets. Usually it would have been impossible, in the roaring bloodlust of the crowd she generally attracted. Readying the toxin gun, she began to walk slowly down the aisle. ‘Why the privacy clause?’ she asked, unable to sever the contact.

  ‘Dignity. I may have played this game, but I didn’t have to dishonour myself in the process.’

  ‘You’re very close,’ Khouri said.

  ‘Yes, very close.’

  ‘And you’re not frightened?’

  ‘Naturally. But of living, not dying. It’s taken me months to reach this state.’ His footsteps stopped. ‘What do you think of this place, Ana?’

  ‘I think it needs a bit of attention.’

  ‘It was well chosen, you must admit.’

  She turned the aisle. Her target was standing next to one of the shrines, looking preternaturally calm, almost calmer than one of the statues which watched the encounter. The interior rain had darkened the burgundy fabric of his Canopy finery, his hair was plastered unglamorously to his forehead. In person he looked younger than any of her previous kills, which meant he was either genuinely younger or rich enough to afford the best longevity therapies. Somehow she knew it was the former.

  ‘You do remember why we’re here?’ he asked.

  ‘I do, but I’m not sure I like it.’

  ‘Do it anyway.’

  One of the shafts of light falling from the ceiling shifted magically onto him. It was only an instant, but long enough for her to raise the toxin gun.

  She fired.

  ‘You did well,’ Taraschi said, no pain showing in his voice. He reached out with one hand to steady himself against the wall. The other touched the swordfish protruding from his chest and prised it free, as if picking a thistle from his clothes. The pointed husk dropped to the floor, serum glistening from the end. Khouri raised the toxin gun again, but Taraschi warded her off with a blood-smeared palm. ‘Don’t overdo it,’ he said. ‘One should be sufficient.’

  Khouri felt nauseous.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be dead?’

  ‘Not for a little while. Months, to be precise. The toxin is very slow-acting. Plenty of time to think it over.’

  ‘Think what over?’

  Taraschi raked his wet hair and wiped dust and blood from his hands onto the shins of his trousers.

  ‘Whether I follow her.’

  The pulsing stopped and the sudden absence of it was enough to make Khouri dizzy. She fell in a half-faint to the floor. The contract was over, she grasped. She had won — again. But Taraschi was still alive.

  ‘This was my mother,’ Taraschi said, gesturing at the nearest shrine. It was one of the few that were well-tended. There was no dust at all on the woman’s alabaster bust, as if Taraschi had cleaned it himself just before their meeting. Her skin was uncorrupted and her jewelled eyes were still present, aristocratic features unmarred by dent or blemish. ‘Nadine Weng-da Silva Taraschi.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She died, of course, in the process of being scanned. The destructive mapping was so swift that half her brain was still functioning normally while the other half was torn apart.’

  ‘I’m sorry — even though I know she volunteered for it.’

  ‘Don’t be. She was actually one of the lucky ones. Do you know the story, Ana?’

  ‘I’m not from around here.’

  ‘No; that was what I heard — that you were a soldier once, and that something terrible happened to you. Well, let me tell you this much. The scannings were all successful. The problem lay in the software which was supposed to execute the scanned information; to allow the alphas to evolve forward in time and experience awareness, emotion, memory — everything that makes us human. It worked well enough until the last of the Eighty had been scanned, a year after the first. But then strange pathologies began to emerge amongst the early volunteers. They crashed irrecoverably, or locked themselves in infinite loops.’

  ‘You said she was lucky?’

  ‘A few of the Eighty are still running,’ Taraschi said. ‘They’ve managed to keep doing so for a century and a half. Even the plague didn’t hurt them — they’d already migrated to secure computers in what we now call the Rust Belt.’ He paused. ‘But they’ve been out of direct contact with the real world for some time now — evolving themselves in increasingly elaborate simulated environments.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Suggested I join her. Scanning technology’s better now; it doesn’t even have to kill you.’

  ‘Then what’s the problem?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be me, would it? Just a copy — and my mother would know it. Whereas now…’ He fingered the tiny wound again. ‘Whereas now, I will definitely die in the real world, and the copy will be all that’s left of me. There’s time enough for me to be scanned before the toxin leads to any measurable deterioration in my neural structure.’

  ‘Couldn’t you just have injected it?’

  Taraschi smiled. ‘That would have been too clinical. I am killing myself, after all — nothing anyone should take lightly. By involving you, I prolonged the decision and introduced an element of chance. I might decide life was preferable and resist you, and yet you might still win.’

  ‘Russian roulette would have been cheaper.’

  ‘Too quick, too random, and not nearly so stylish.’ He stepped towards her and — before she could draw back — reached for her hand and shook it, for all the world like someone concluding an auspicious business deal. ‘Thank you, Ana.’

  ‘Thank you?’

  Without answering he walked past her, towards noise. The sacrificial mound of heads was tumbling, footsteps clattering on the staircase. A cobalt vase shattered as the barricade gave way.

  Khouri heard the whisper of floatcams, but when the people emerged, they had none of the faces she expected. They were respectably dressed without being ostentatious, old-money Canopy. Three older men wore ponchos and fedoras and tortoiseshell floatcam glasses, the cameras hovering above them like attendant familiars. Two bronze palanquins rose behind them, one small enough to have held a child. A man with a plum matador’s jacket carried a tiny hand-held camera. Two teenage girls carried umbrellas painted with watercolour cranes and Chinese pictograms. Between the girls was an older woman, her face so colourless she might as well have been a lifesize origami toy, infolded, white and easily crushed. She fell to her knees in front of Taraschi, weeping. Khouri had never seen the woman before, but she knew intuitively that this was Taraschi’s wife and that the little toxin-filled swordfish had robbed her of him.

  She looked at Khouri, her eyes limpid smoke-grey. Her voice, when she spoke, was bleached of anger. ‘I hope they paid you well.’

  ‘I just did my job,’ Khouri said, but she hardly managed to force the words out. The people were helping Taraschi towards the stairs. She watched them descend out of sight, the wife turning to direct one last reproachful glance at Khouri. She heard the reverberation of their retreat and the sound of footsteps across the terrazzo. Minutes passed, and then she knew that she was completely alone.

  Until something moved behind her. Khouri spun round, automatically bringing the toxin gun to bear, another dart in the chamber.

  A palanquin emerged from between two shrines.

  ‘Case?’ She lowered the gun — it was of little use anyway, with the toxin keyed so precisely to Taraschi’s biochemistry.

  But this was not Cas
e’s palanquin: it was unmarked, unornamented black. And now it opened — she had never seen a palanquin do that — divulging a man who stepped fearlessly towards her. He wore a plum matador’s jacket; not the hermetic clothing she might have expected from someone who feared the plague. In one hand he carried a fashion accessory: a tiny camera.

  ‘Case has been taken care of,’ the man said. ‘He’s of no concern to you from now on, Khouri.’

  ‘Who are you — someone connected to Taraschi?’

  ‘No — I just came along to see if you were as efficient as your reputation implied.’ The man spoke with a soft accent which was not local — not from this system, nor the Edge. ‘And, I’m afraid, you were. Which means — as of now — you’re working for the same employer as myself.’

  She wondered if she could put a dart in his eye. It would not kill him, but it might take the edge off his cockiness. ‘And who would that be?’

  ‘The Mademoiselle,’ the man said.

  ‘I’ve never heard of her.’

  He raised the lensed end of the little camera. It split open like a particularly ingenious Faberge egg, hundreds of elegant jade fragments sliding to new positions. Suddenly she was looking down the barrel of a gun.

  ‘No, but she’s heard of you.’

  THREE

  Cuvier, Resurgam, 2561

  He was woken by shouting.

  Sylveste checked his tactile bedside clock, feeling the position of the hands. He had an appointment today; in less than an hour. The commotion outside had beaten the alarm by a few minutes. Curious, he threw aside the sheets of his bunk and fumbled towards the high, barred window. He was always half-blind first thing in the morning, as his eyes stammered through their wake-up systems check. They threw planar sheets of primary colour across his surroundings, making it seem as if the room had been redecorated overnight by a squad of overenthusiastic cubists.

  He pulled aside the curtain. Sylveste was tall, but he could not see through the little window — at least not at a useful angle — unless he stood on a pile of books appropriated from his shelves; old printed facsimile editions. Even then the view was less than inspiring. Cuvier was built in and around a single geodesic dome, most of which was occupied with six — or seven — storey rectangular structures thrown up in the first days of the mission, designed for durability rather than aesthetic appeal. There had been no self-repairing structures, and the need to safeguard against a dome failure had resulted in buildings which were not only able to withstand razorstorms, but which could also be pressurised independently. The grey, small-windowed structures were linked by roadways, along which a few electric vehicles would normally be moving.