Revelation Space

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘If it was conventional Amarantin script, perhaps.’ What Sylveste did not add was that he felt that the message was exactly what Calvin had implied, though there was no way he could rationalise that feeling. It did not deter him, though. Instead, he found himself wondering just what could have driven the Amarantin to this; what was so bad that it had to be encased in a facsimile of a world and defended by the most awesome weapons known to a civilisation? What was so unspeakable that it could not simply be destroyed? What kind of monster had they created?

  Or found?

  The thought jarred home, seeming to find a vacant hole in his mind where it fitted precisely. As if it belonged there. They found something; Sun Stealer’s flock. Far out on the edge of the system, they found something.

  He was still trying to deal with the certainty of that feeling when the closest of the graphicforms detached from the shaft, leaving a hollow recess where it had been a second earlier. Others followed; whole words, clauses and sentences unpeeled from the shaft and loomed around him, vast as buildings, circling Sajaki and Sylveste with raptorial patience. They floated free, suspended by some unguessable mechanism invisible to the suit defences; no gravitational or magnetic fluctuation. For a moment Sylveste was stunned at the sheer alienness behind the objects, but then he grasped that there was a kind of indisputable logic at play here. What made more sense than a warning message which, when transgressed, enforced itself?

  But suddenly there was no time for detached consideration.

  ‘Suit defences to automatic,’ Sajaki said, voice rising an octave only above his routine implacable calm. ‘I believe these things seek to crush us to death.’

  As if he really needed telling.

  The floating words had them spherically corralled now, and had commenced a ponderous spiralling-in. Sylveste let his suit do its thing, visual shields snicking down to guard against the retina-melting glare of plasma-bursts, all manual control modes temporarily suspended. It was for the best: the last thing his suit needed was a human being trying to do the job better than it could do. Even with the dense shielding in place, Sylveste’s vision was aflame with fireworks, photon events triggering his circuits, and he knew that there must have been fryingly intense multi-spectrum radiation just beyond the skin of his suit. He registered bucking surges of motion; episodes of up/down thrust (he assumed) so intense that he passed in and out of consciousness like a train threading a series of short mountain tunnels. He assumed that his suit was trying to cut and run, and with each crushing deceleration was being thwarted.

  Finally he blacked out long and hard.

  Volyova ramped up the Melancholia’s thrust, until it was nudging four gees of steady acceleration, with intermittent random-swerves programmed in for extra effect, in case the lighthugger launched any kinetics. It was the most they could withstand without protective suits or tabards; more than was comfortable, especially for Pascale, who was even less accustomed to this sort of thing than Khouri. It meant they could not leave their seats, and that movement of their arms had to be restricted to a minimum. But they could speak, after a fashion, and even hold something approximating a coherent discussion.

  ‘You spoke to him, didn’t you?’ Khouri said. ‘Sun Stealer. I could tell by the look on your face when you rescued us from the rats in the infirmary. I’m right, aren’t I?’

  Volyova’s voice sounded slightly choked, as if she were in the process of slow strangulation.

  ‘If I had any doubts about your story, they vanished the instant I looked into his face. There was never any question that I was confronting something alien. And I began to understand some of what Boris Nagorny must have gone through.’

  ‘What drove him mad, you mean.’

  ‘Believe me, I think I’d have suffered something similar if I’d had that in my head. What worries me, too, is that some of Boris might have corrupted Sun Stealer.’

  ‘Then how do you think I feel?’ Khouri asked. ‘I have got that thing in my head.’

  ‘No, you haven’t.’

  Volyova was shaking her head now, a gesture which verged on the reckless in the four-gee field. ‘You had him in your head for a while, Khouri — just long enough for him to crush what remained of the Mademoiselle. But then he got out.’

  ‘Got out when?’

  ‘When Sajaki trawled you. It was my fault, I suppose. I should not have allowed him even to switch on the trawl.’ For someone admitting guilt she sounded remarkably devoid of repentance. Perhaps for Volyova the act of admission was enough in itself. ‘When your neural patterns were scanned, Sun Stealer embedded himself in them and reached the trawl, encoded in the data. From there it was only a short hop to every other system in the ship.’

  They absorbed that in silence, until Khouri said, ‘Letting Sajaki do that wasn’t your smartest ever move, Ilia.’

  ‘No,’ she said, as if the thought had only just struck her. ‘I don’t think it was.’

  When he came round — it might have been tens of seconds later, or tens of minutes — the visual shields had retracted and he was falling unimpeded down the shaft. He looked up, and though it was now kilometres overhead, he saw the residual glow of their skirmish, the shaft walls pocked and scarred by energy impacts. Some of the words were still circling, but parts of them had been chipped off so that they no longer made much sense. As if in recognition that their warning was now hopelessly corrupted, the words seemed to have given up being weapons. Even as he watched, they were returning to their hollows, like sullen rooks returning to the rookery.

  But something was wrong.

  Where was Sajaki?

  ‘What the hell happened?’ he asked, hoping that his suit would interpret the query successfully. ‘Where’s he gone?’

  ‘There was an engagement against an autonomous defence system,’ the suit informed him, as if commenting on the weather earlier that morning.

  ‘Thank you, I realised that, but where’s Sajaki?’

  ‘His suit sustained critical damage during the evasive action. Crypted telemetry squirts indicate extensive and possibly irreparable damage to both primary and secondary thrust units.’

  ‘I said where is he?’

  ‘His suit would not have been able to restrict his rate of fall or counteract Coriolis drift towards the wall. Telemetry bursts indicate he is fifteen kilometres below and still falling, with a blueshift relative to your position of one point one kilometres a second and climbing.’

  ‘Still falling?’

  ‘It is likely that, owing to the non-functionality of his thruster units, and the inability to deploy a monofilament braking line at his current speed, he will fall until further descent is inhibited by the termination of the shaft.’

  ‘You mean he’s going to die?’

  ‘At his predicted terminal velocity, survival is excluded in all models except as an extreme statistical outlier.’

  ‘One chance in a million,’ Calvin said.

  Sylveste angled himself so that he was able to peer vertically down the shaft. Fifteen kilometres — more than seven times the shaft’s echoless width. He looked and looked, all the while falling himself… and thought that perhaps he saw a flash, once or twice, at the extreme limit of his vision. He wondered if the flash had been the spark of friction, as Sajaki brushed against the walls in his unstoppable descent. If he had seen it at all, it was fainter each time, and soon he stopped seeing anything except the uninterrupted walls of the shaft.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Cerberus/Hades Orbit, 2567

  ‘You learnt something,’ Pascale said. ‘Sun Stealer told you something. That’s why you’ve been so desperate to stop him ever since.’

  She was addressing Volyova, who had begun to feel slightly less vulnerable once the shuttle had passed turnover, midway between Cerberus and the point where she had increased the thrust to four gees. Now, with the drive flame pointing away from the pursuing lighthugger, they would make a far less conspicuous target. The downside of this, of course, was that
the drive flame was now wafting towards Cerberus, and might be interpreted as a sign of hostility by the planet itself, if it had not already got the message that its recent human visitors did not necessarily have its best interests at heart.

  But there was nothing any of them could do about that.

  The lighthugger was sustaining a comfortable six gees now; enough to steadily whittle the distance down, bringing it within kill-range of the shuttle in five hours. Sun Stealer could have pushed the ship faster, which suggested to her that he was still cautiously exploring the limits of the drive. It was not, she thought, that he particularly cared about his own survival, but if the lighthugger was destroyed, the bridgehead would quickly follow. And although Sylveste was now inside, perhaps the alien needed to know that the objective had been achieved, which presumably required the prolonged opening of the crustal breach, so that some signal could return to outside space. She did not believe for one instant that Sylveste’s safe return had any place in Sun Stealer’s plans.

  ‘Was it what the Mademoiselle showed me?’ Khouri asked. After hours of sustained gee-load, her voice sounded like someone after a heavy drinking session. ‘The thing I could never get quite right in my head — was it that?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure,’ Volyova said. ‘All I know is what he showed me. I believe it was the truth — but I doubt that we’ll ever know for sure.’

  ‘You could start by telling me what it was,’ Pascale said. ‘Seeing as I’m the one among us who definitely doesn’t know. Then you can fight over the details between yourselves.’

  The console chimed, as it had done once or twice in the last few hours, signifying that a radar beam had just swept across them from aft, directed from the lighthugger. For the moment, it was not especially valuable data, since light-travel delay between the ship and the shuttle was still in the order of seconds, long enough for the shuttle to displace itself from its radar-tagged position with a burst of lateral thrust. But it was unnerving, since it confirmed that the lighthugger was indeed chasing them, and that it was indeed attempting to get a sufficiently accurate positional fix to justify opening fire. It would be hours before that situation came to pass, but the machine’s intent was grimly obvious.

  ‘I’ll start with what I know,’ Volyova said, drawing in a generous inhalation of breath. ‘Once, the galaxy was a lot more populous than it is now. Millions of cultures, though only a handful of big players. In fact, just the way all the predictive models say the galaxy ought to be today, based on the occurrence rates of G-type stars and terrestrial planets in the right orbits for liquid water.’ She was digressing, but Pascale and Khouri decided not to fight it. ‘That’s always been a major paradox, you know. On paper, life looks a lot commoner than we find it to be. Theories for the developmental timescales for tool-using intelligence are a lot harder to quantify, but they suffer from much the same problem. They predict too many cultures.’

  ‘Hence the Fermi paradox,’ Pascale said.

  ‘The what?’ asked Khouri.

  ‘The old dichotomy between the relative ease of interstellar flight, especially for robotic envoys — and the complete absence of any such envoys turning up from non-human cultures. The only logical conclusion was that no one else was around to send them, anywhere in the galaxy.’

  ‘But the galaxy’s a big place,’ Khouri said. ‘Couldn’t there be cultures elsewhere, except that we just don’t know about them yet?’

  ‘Doesn’t work,’ Volyova said emphatically, Pascale nodding in agreement. ‘The galaxy’s big, but not that big — and it’s also very old. Once a single culture decided to send out probes, everyone else in the galaxy would know about it within a few million years. And the galaxy happens to be several thousand times older than that. Granted, several generations of stars had to live and die before there were enough heavy elements to sustain life, but even if machine-building cultures only arise once every million years or so, they’ve had thousands of opportunities to dominate the entire galaxy.’

  ‘To which there have always been two answers,’ Pascale said. ‘Firstly, that they are here, but we just haven’t ever noticed them. Maybe that was conceivable a few hundred years ago, but no one takes it seriously now; not when every square inch of every asteroid belt in about a hundred systems has been mapped.’

  ‘Then maybe they never existed in the first place?’

  Pascale nodded at Khouri. ‘Which was perfectly tenable until we knew more about the galaxy, which begins to look suspiciously accommodating of life, at least in the essentials; what Volyova just said — the right types of stars, and the right kind of planets in the right places. And the biological models were still arguing for a higher occurrence rate, right on up to intelligent cultures.’

  ‘So the models were wrong,’ Khouri said.

  ‘Except they probably weren’t.’ Volyova was speaking now. ‘Once we got into space, once we left the First System, we began to find dead cultures all over the place. None had survived until much more recently than a million years ago, and some had gone out a lot earlier than that. But they all pointed to one thing. The galaxy had been a lot more fecund in the past. So why not now? Why was it suddenly so lonely?’

  ‘The war,’ Khouri said, and for a moment no one spoke. The silence was only interrupted when Volyova began speaking, softly and reverently, as if they were discussing something sacred. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The Dawn War — that was what they called it, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I remembered that much.’

  ‘When was this?’ Pascale asked, and for a moment Volyova sympathised with her, caught between two who had been vouchsafed glimpses of something extraordinary, and who were less interested in adumbrating the whole of it than in exploring each other’s ignorances, shoring up each other’s doubts and misconceptions. But Pascale knew none of it; not yet.

  ‘It was a billion years ago,’ Khouri said, and for a moment Volyova let her speak without interruption. ‘And it sucked up all those cultures and spat them out in shapes and forms a lot different to the ones they’d had when they went in. I don’t think we can really understand what it was about, or who or what exactly survived it — except that they were more like machines than living creatures, although as far beyond anything we can envisage as our machines are beyond stone tools. But they had a name, or they were given it — I don’t really remember the details. But I do remember the name.’

  ‘The Inhibitors,’ Volyova said.

  Khouri nodded. ‘And they deserved it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was what they did afterwards,’ Khouri said. ‘Not during the war, but in its aftermath. It was like they subscribed to a creed; a rule of discipline. Intelligent, organic life had given rise to the Dawn War. What they were now was something different; post-intelligent, I guess. Anyway, it made what they did a lot easier.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Inhibition. Literally: they inhibited the rise of intelligent cultures around the galaxy, so that nothing like the Dawn War could ever happen again.’

  Volyova took over now. ‘It wasn’t just a case of annihilating any extant cultures which might have survived war. They also set about disturbing the conditions which could lead to intelligent life ever arising again. Not stellar engineering — I think that would have been too great an interference; too much an act which contradicted their own strictures — but inhibition on a lesser scale. They could have done it without tampering in the evolution of a single star, except in extreme cases — by altering cometary orbits, for instance, so that episodes of planetary bombardment lasted much longer than the norm. Life probably would have found niches in which to survive — deep underground, or around hydrothermal vents — but it would never have become very complex. Certainly nothing which would threaten the Inhibitors.’

  ‘You said this was a billion years ago,’ Pascale said. ‘And yet we’ve come all that way since then — from single-celled creatures right up to Homo sapiens. Are you saying we slipped through
the net?’

  ‘Exactly that,’ Volyova said. ‘Because the net was falling apart.’

  Khouri nodded. ‘The Inhibitors seeded the galaxy with machines, designed to detect the emergence of life and then suppress it. For a long time it looked like they worked as planned — that’s why the galaxy isn’t teeming today, although all the preconditions look favourable.’ She shook her head. ‘I sound like I actually know this stuff.’

  ‘Maybe you do,’ Pascale said. ‘In any case, I want to hear what you have to say. All of it.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Khouri fidgeted in her acceleration couch, doubtless trying to do what Volyova had been doing for the last hour: avoiding putting pressure on the bruises she had already gained. ‘Their machines worked fine for a few hundred million years,’ she said. ‘But then stuff started to go wrong. They started failing; not working as efficiently as intended. Intelligent cultures began to emerge which would have previously been suppressed at birth.’

  There was a look on Pascale’s face which showed that she had just made a connection. ‘Like the Amarantin…’

  ‘Just like the Amarantin. They weren’t the only culture to slip through the net, but they did happen to lie close to us in the galaxy, which is why what happened to them has had such an… impact on us.’ Volyova was doing the talking now. ‘Maybe there should have been an Inhibition device keeping a close watch on Resurgam, but that one either never existed or stopped working long before they emerged to intelligence. So they ascended to civilisation, and later budded off a starfaring sub-species — all without attracting the attention of the Inhibitors.’

  ‘Sun Stealer.’

  ‘Yes. He took the Banished with him into space — changed them biologically and mentally, until they had little but their ancestry and language in common with the Amarantin who had stayed at home. And of course they explored, reaching out into their solar system, and later to its periphery.’