Revelation Space

by Alastair Reynolds

  Sylveste grabbed his mask, regarded it disdainfully, then left it on the seat. He needed no help making it the short distance to the building, and if he did, no one was going to know about it.

  The militia escorted them into the shack. It was years since Sylveste had been this close to Girardieau. He was shocked at how small his adversary now seemed. Girardieau was built like some piece of squat mining machinery. He looked capable of scrabbling his way through solid basalt. His red hair was short and wirelike, sprinkled with white. His eyes were wide and quizzical, like a startled Pekinese pup.

  ‘Strange allegiances,’ he said, as one of the guards sealed the door behind them. ‘Who’d have thought you and I would ever find ourselves with so much in common, Dan?’

  ‘Less than you imagine,’ Sylveste said.

  Girardieau led the team forward through a ribbed corridor lined with discarded machines, grimed beyond recognition. ‘I suppose you’re wondering what all this is about.’

  ‘I have my suspicions.’

  Girardieau’s laughter boomed off the derelict equipment around them. ‘Remember that obelisk they dug up hereabouts? Of course — it was you who pointed out the phenomenological difficulty with the TE dating method used on the rock.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sylveste said tartly.

  The implications of the TE dating had been enormous. No natural crystalline structure was ever completely perfect in its lattice geometry. There would always be gaps in the lattice where atoms were missing, and in those holes, electrons would gradually build up over time, knocked out of the rest of the lattice by cosmic-ray bombardments and natural radioactivity. Since the holes tended to fill up with electrons at a steady rate, the number of trapped electrons provided a dating method which could be used on inorganic artefacts. There was a catch, of course: the TE method was only useful if the traps had been emptied at some point in the past. Luckily, firing or exposure to light was enough to bleach – empty — the outermost traps in the crystal. TE analysis of the obelisk had shown that all the surface-layer traps had been bleached at the same time, which happened to be nine hundred and ninety thousand years earlier, within the errors of the measurement. Only something like the Event could have bleached an object as large as the obelisk.

  There was nothing new in this; thousands of Amarantin artefacts had been dated back to the Event using the same technique. But none of them had been buried deliberately. The obelisk, on the other hand, had been emplaced deliberately in a stone sarcophagus after it had been bleached.

  After the Event.

  Even in the new regime, this realisation had been enough to draw attention to the obelisk. It had stimulated renewed interest in the inscriptions over the last year. On his own, Sylveste’s interpretation had been sketchy at best, but now what remained of the archaeological community came to his aid. There was a new freedom in Cuvier; Girardieau’s regime had relaxed some of its proscriptions on Amarantin research, even as the True Path opposition grew more fanatical.

  Strange allegiances, as Girardieau had said.

  ‘Once we had an idea of what the obelisk was telling us,’ Girardieau said, ‘we sectioned the whole area and excavated down sixty or seventy metres. We found dozens more of them — all bleached prior to burial, all carrying basically the same inscriptions. It isn’t a record of something that happened in this area at all. It’s a record of something buried here.’

  ‘Something big,’ Sylveste said. ‘Something they must have planned before the Event — perhaps even buried before it, and then placed the markers afterwards. The last cultural act of a society poised on annihilation. Just how big, Girardieau?’

  ‘Very.’ And then Girardieau told him how they had surveyed the area first using an array of thumpers: devices for generating ground-penetrating Rayleigh waves, sensitive to the density of buried objects. They’d had to use the largest thumpers, Girardieau said, which meant that the depth of the object had to be at the extreme range of the technique; hundreds of metres down. Later they had brought in the colony’s most sensitive imaging gravitometers, and only then had they gained any idea of what it was they were seeking.

  It was nothing small.

  ‘Is this dig connected with the Inundationist program?’

  ‘Completely independent. Pure science, in other words. Does that surprise you? I always promised we’d never abandon the Amarantin studies. Maybe if you’d believed me all those years ago we’d be working together now, opposing the True Pathers — the real enemy.’

  Sylveste said, ‘You showed no interest in the Amarantin until the obelisk was discovered. But that scared you, didn’t it? Because for once it was incontrovertible evidence; nothing I could have faked or manipulated. For once you had to allow the possibility that I might have been right all along.’

  They stepped into a capacious elevator, outfitted with plush seats, Inundationist aquatints on the walls. A thick metal door hummed shut. One of Girardieau’s aides flipped open a panel and palmed a button. The floor fell away sickeningly, their bodies only sluggishly catching up.

  ‘How far down are we going?’

  ‘Not far,’ Girardieau said. ‘Only a couple of kilometres.’

  When Khouri awakened they had already left orbit around Yellowstone. She could see the planet through a porthole in her quarters, much smaller than it had looked before. The region around Chasm City was a freckle on the surface. The Rust Belt was only a tawny smoke ring, too far away for any of its component structures to be visible. There would be no stopping the ship now: it would accelerate steadily at one gee until it had left the Epsilon Eridani system completely, and it would not stop accelerating until it was moving barely a whisker below the speed of light. It was no accident that they called these vessels lighthuggers.

  She had been tricked.

  ‘It’s a complication,’ the Mademoiselle said, after long minutes of silence. ‘But no more than that.’ Khouri rubbed at the painful lump on her skull where the Komuso — Sajaki was his name, she now knew — had knocked her out with his shakuhachi.

  ‘What do you mean, a complication?’ she shouted. ‘They’ve kidnapped me, you stupid bitch!’

  ‘Keep your voice down, dear girl. They don’t know about me now and there’s no reason they have to in the future.’ The entoptic image smiled jaggedly. ‘In fact, I’m probably your best friend right now. You should do your best to safeguard our mutual secret.’ She examined her fingernails. ‘Now, let’s approach this rationally. What was our objective?’

  ‘You know damn well.’

  ‘Yes. You were to infiltrate this crew and travel with them to Resurgam. What is now your status?’

  ‘The Volyova bitch keeps calling me her recruit.’

  ‘In other words, your infiltration has been spectacularly successful.’ She was strolling nonchalantly around the room now, one hand on her hip, the other tapping an index finger against her lower lip. ‘And where exactly are we now headed?’

  ‘I’ve no reason to suspect it isn’t still Resurgam.’

  ‘So in all the essential details, nothing has happened to compromise the mission.’

  Khouri wanted to strangle the woman, except it would have been like strangling a mirage. ‘Has it occurred to you that they might have their own agenda? You know what Volyova said just before I was knocked out? She said I was the new Gunnery Officer. What do you suppose she meant by that?’

  ‘It explains why they were looking for military experience in your background.’

  ‘And what if I don’t go along with her plans?’

  ‘I doubt it matters to her.’ The Mademoiselle stopped her strolling, adopting an expression of seriousness from her internal compendium of facial modes. ‘They’re Ultras, you see. Ultras have access to technologies considered taboo on colony worlds.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Instruments for manipulating loyalty might be among them.’

  ‘Well, thanks for giving me this important information well in advance.’

  ‘D
on’t worry — I always knew there was a chance of this.’ The Mademoiselle paused and touched the side of her own head. ‘I took precautions accordingly.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’

  ‘The implant I put inside you will fabricate antigens for their neural medichines. More than that, it will also broadcast subliminal reinforcement messages into your subconscious mind. Volyova’s loyalty therapies will be completely neutralised.’

  ‘So why bother even telling me this is going to happen?’

  ‘Because, dear girl, once Volyova begins the treatment, you’ll have to let her think it’s working.’

  The descent took only a few minutes, the air-pressure and temperature stabilised at surface normal. The shaft which the car descended was walled in diamond, ten metres wide. Occasionally there were recesses, stash-holes for equipment or small operations shacks, or switching points where two elevators could squeeze past one another before continuing their journeys. Servitors were working the diamond, extruding it in atomic-thickness filaments from spinnerettes. The filaments zipped neatly into place under the action of protein-sized molecular machines. Looking through the glass ceiling, the faintly translucent shaft seemed to reach towards infinity.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d found this?’ Sylveste asked. ‘You must have been here for months at the very least.’

  ‘Let’s just say your input wasn’t critical,’ Girardieau said, and then added, ‘until now, that is.’

  At the shaft’s bottom, they exited into another corridor, silver-clad, cleaner and cooler than the one they had walked through at ground level. Windows along its length offered glimpses into a disarmingly large cavern filled with geodesic scaffolding and industrial structures. Sylveste was able to freezeframe the view with his eyes, then do some image-processing and expand the captured view when he was ten paces further along the corridor. For that he offered grudging thanks to Calvin.

  What he saw was enough to quicken his heartbeat.

  Now they pushed through a pair of armoured doors ghosted by security entoptics, writhing snakes which seemed to hiss and spit at the group. They trooped on through into an ante-room with another set of doors at the far end, flanked by militia. Girardieau waved them aside, then turned to Sylveste. The roundness of his eyes, the Pekinese aspect of his features, suddenly made him think of a painted Japanese devil on the point of belching fire.

  ‘Now this,’ Girardieau said, ‘is where you either ask for your money back or stand in awed silence.’

  ‘Impress me,’ Sylveste said, with as much droll nonchalance as he could muster, despite his racing pulse and feverish internal excitement.

  Girardieau opened the rear doors. They walked into a room half the size of the freight elevator, empty apart from a row of simple escritoires inlaid into the wall. A headset and wraparound mike lay on one of them, next to a compad displaying pencil-sketch engineering diagrams. The walls sloped outwards, the area of the ceiling greater than the floor. Combined with the huge glass windows set in three of the walls, it made Sylveste feel as if he was in the gondola of an airship, cruising under a starless night sky across an unnavigated ocean.

  Girardieau killed the lights, enabling them to see what lay beyond the glass.

  Floods swung from the roof of the chamber beyond, curving down towards the Amarantin object which lay below. It was emerging from one nearly sheer wall of the cave; a hemisphere of pure black, hemmed by gantries and geodesic scaffolding. Scabrous lumps of hardened magma still clung to it, yet across the large areas where the magma had been chipped away, the thing was as smooth and dark as obsidian. The underlying shape was spherical; at least four hundred metres wide, although more than half still lay entombed.

  ‘You know who made this?’ Girardieau said, finally whispering. He did not wait for an answer: ‘It’s older than human language, but my goddamn wedding ring has more scratches on it.’

  Girardieau led the party back to the elevator shaft for the final short descent down to the operations floor of the hollowed-out chamber. The ride lasted no more than thirty seconds, but for Sylveste it seemed like a grindingly slow Homeric odyssey. The object felt like his own personal prize; as hard-won as if he had unearthed it with his own bloodied fingernails. It loomed over them now, its curved, rock-encrusted side jutting unsupported into the air. There was a faint groove scored around the object, running obliquely from one side to the other. It looked like little more than a shallow hairline fracture from where he was, but it was a metre or so wide, and probably just as deep.

  Girardieau led them into the nearest chock: a concrete structure with its own inner rooms and operations levels abutting the object. Inside they took another elevator, rising up through the building into the haze of scaffolding which erupted from it. Sylveste’s stomach crawled with conflicting impulses of claustro- and agoraphobia. He felt hemmed in by the unthinkable megatonnes of rock looming hundreds of metres over his head, while simultaneously racked with vertigo as they ascended the scaffolding high up the side of the object.

  Small shacks and equipment huts floated in the geodesic framework. The lift connected with one of these structures and they trooped out into a complex of rooms still abuzz with the afterhum of recently curtailed activity. All the warning signs and notices were decals or painted, the area too makeshift for entoptic generators.

  They walked over a tremoring girderwork bridge which extended through a loom of scaffolding towards the black skin of the Amarantin object. They were halfway up the object’s height, level with the groove. The object no longer seemed spherical; they were too close for that. It was a single black wall blocking their progress, as vast and depthless as the view of Lascaille’s Shroud he remembered after he had travelled from Spindrift. They walked onwards, until the bridge took them into the groove.

  The path immediately swung to the right. On three sides — to the left, and above and below — they were hemmed in by the eerily unmarked black substance of the artefact. They walked on a trelliswork path fixed to the underlying floor via suction pads, since the alien material was nearly frictionless. To the right was a waist-high safety railing and then several hundred metres of nothing. Every five or six metres on the inside wall was a lamp, attached via epoxy pads, and every twenty or so metres was a panel marked with cryptic symbols.

  They continued along the steep incline of the groove for three or four minutes until Girardieau brought them to a halt. The place where they had arrived was a tangled nexus of power lines, lamps and communications consoles. The left-hand wall of the groove folded inwards here.

  ‘Took us weeks to find the way in,’ Girardieau said. ‘Originally the trench was plugged by basalt. It was only after we’d chipped it all out that we found this one place where the basalt seemed to continue inwards, as if it were plugging some kind of radial tunnel which emerged in the trench.’

  ‘You’ve been busy little beavers, I can see.’

  ‘Digging it out was hard work,’ Girardieau said. ‘Excavating the trench was easy by comparison, but here we had to drill and remove material through the same tiny hole. Some of us wanted to use boser torches to cut a few secondary tunnels in to make the job easier, but we never went that far. And our mineral-tipped drills couldn’t touch the stuff.’

  Sylveste’s scientific curiosity momentarily beat his urge to belittle Girardieau’s attempts at impressing him. ‘You know what this material is?’

  ‘Basically carbon, with some iron and niobium and a few rare metals as trace elements. But we don’t know the structure. It’s not simply some allotropic form of diamond we haven’t invented yet, or even hyperdiamond. Maybe the top few tenths of a millimetre are close to diamond, but the stuff seems to undergo some kind of complex lattice transformation deeper down. The ultimate form — far deeper than we’ve yet sampled — may not even be a true crystal at all. It could be that the lattice breaks up into trillions of carbon-heavy macromolecules, locked together in a co-acting mass. Sometimes these molecules seem to work their way to
the surface along lattice flaws, which is the only time we see them.’

  ‘You’re talking as if it’s purposeful.’

  ‘Maybe it is. Maybe the molecules are like little enzymes tooled-up to repair the diamond crust when it becomes damaged.’ He shrugged. ‘But we’ve never isolated one of the macromolecules, or at least not in a stable form. They seem to lose coherence as soon as they’re removed from the lattice. They fall apart before we can get a look inside them.’

  ‘What you’re describing,’ Sylveste said, ‘sounds very much like a form of molecular technology.’ Girardieau smiled at Sylveste, seeming to acknowledge the private game in which they were enmeshed.

  ‘Except we know that the Amarantin were far too primitive for such a thing.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ Girardieau smiled again, only this time to the group as a whole. ‘Shall we forge inwards?’

  Navigating the tunnel system which led from the groove was trickier than Sylveste had at first imagined. He had assumed that the radial tunnel would continue inwards for the necessary distance to traverse the shell of the object, and they would then enter the thing’s hollow interior. But it was not like that at all. The thing was a deliberate labyrinth. The path did progress radially, for perhaps ten metres, but then it jerked to the left and soon branched into multiple tunnel systems. The routes were colour-coded with adhesive markers, but the coding system was too cryptic to make much sense to Sylveste. Within five minutes he was thoroughly disorientated, though he had the suspicion that they had not strayed very deep into the object. It was as if the tunnel system was the work of a demented maggot which preferred the part of the apple immediately under the skin. Eventually, however, they crossed what seemed to be a regular fissure in the fabric of the object. Girardieau explained that the thing was structured in a series of concentric shells. They continued to worm their way through another confusing tunnel system while Girardieau regaled them with dubious stories about the initial exploration of the object.