The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space)

by Alastair Reynolds

  One of the attackers stood behind her, one hand drawing her head back by a clump of scalp-hair, the other holding a wickedly serrated knife to the convex whiteness of her throat.

  She made no scream now. The only sounds she allowed herself were small and snatched, like someone choking.

  The man holding her had removed his helmet. He was not Reivich, just some mildly competent thug who might have fought with or against me during the war, or against both sides. His face was lined and his black hair was tied back in a topknot, like a Samurai. He was not exactly grinning — the situation was too tense for that — but there was something in his expression which suggested he was enjoying it.

  ‘You can stop or you can take a step closer,’ he said, his rough voice accentless and surprisingly reasonable. ‘Either way I’m going to kill her. It’s just a matter of time.’

  ‘Your friend’s dead,’ Cahuella said, needlessly. ‘If you kill Gitta, I’ll kill you as well. Except for every second she suffers, I’ll make it an hour for you. How’s that for generosity?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ the man said, and drew the blade across her throat. A caterpillar of blood formed beneath the track of the incision, but he had been careful not to draw too deeply. Good with his knife, I thought. How many ways had he practised to cut with such precision?

  Gitta, to her credit, hardly flinched.

  ‘I’ve got a message for you,’ he said, lifting the blade slightly from her skin, so that the scarlet bloom on its edge was clearly visible. ‘It’s from Argent Reivich. Does that surprise you in any way? It shouldn’t, because I understand you were expecting him. Only just not so soon.’

  ‘The Ultras lied to us,’ Cahuella said.

  The man smiled now, but only briefly. The pleasure was all in his eyes, narrowed to ecstatic slits. I realised we were dealing with a psychopath and that his actions were essentially random.

  There was not going to be a negotiated settlement.

  ‘There are factions amongst them,’ the man said. ‘Especially between crews. Orcagna lied to you. You needn’t take it personally. ’ His fist tensed on the knife again. ‘Now, would you be so good as to put down that gun, Cahuella?’

  ‘Do it,’ I whispered, still standing behind him. ‘No matter how good your vision is, there’s only a tiny area of him not covered by Gitta, and I doubt you’re that confident of your aiming just yet.’

  ‘Don’t you know it’s rude to whisper?’ the man said.

  ‘Do it,’ I hissed. ‘I can still save her.’

  Cahuella dropped the gun.

  ‘Good,’ I said, still whispering. ‘Now listen carefully. I can hit him from here, without harming Gitta. But you’re in the way.’

  ‘Talk to me, you fuck.’ The man pushed the knife against her skin so that the blade depressed a valley of flesh without actually breaking it. It would only take a flick now and he would sever her carotid artery.

  ‘I’m going to shoot through you,’ I said to Cahuella. ‘It’s a beam weapon, so it’s only the line of sight that matters. From the angle where I’m going to fire, I won’t hit any vital organs. But be ready for it.’

  The man’s hand brought the knife deeper, so that the valley was suddenly rivened, and blood welled from its depths. Time slowed down, and I watched him begin to drag the knife across her throat.

  Cahuella started to speak.

  I fired.

  The pencil-thin particle beam chewed through him, entering his back an inch or so to the left of his spine, in the upper lumbar region, around the twentieth or twenty-first vertebra. I hoped I missed the right common iliac vein, and that the beam angle would direct its energies between the left lung and the stomach. But it was not precision surgery, and I knew that Cahuella would have to count himself lucky if this did not actually kill him. I also knew that, if it were a question of dying to save Gitta, he would accept that wholeheartedly, and would even order me to make it so. I paid very little attention to Cahuella anyway, since Gitta’s position effectively limited the range of angles I could select. It was simply a matter of saving her, no matter what it did to her husband.

  The particle beam fired for less than a tenth of a second, although the ion trail lingered long after, in addition to the track it had seared on my vision. Cahuella fell to the ground in front of me, like a sack of corn dropped from the ceiling.

  And so did Gitta, with a hole bored neatly in her forehead, her eyes still open and seemingly alert, and the blood still oozing from the partial throat-wound.

  I had missed.

  * * *

  There was no avoiding that; no softening or sweetening of that one acidic message. I had meant to save her, but intention meant nothing. What mattered was the red weal above her eyes where I had hit her, meaning to hit the man holding a knife to her throat.

  The beam had missed him completely.

  I had failed. In the one moment where failure mattered most; in the one moment of my life where I actually thought I could win — I had failed. Failed myself, and Cahuella, by betraying the terrible burden of trust he had implicitly placed in me, without saying a word. His wound was serious, but with the proper attention, I had had little doubt that he would live.

  But there was no saving Gitta. I wondered who was the luckier.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Zebra asked. ‘Tanner, what’s wrong? Don’t look at me like that, please. I’m beginning to think you might actually do it.’

  ‘Can you give me a good reason why I shouldn’t?’

  ‘Only the truth.’

  I shook my head minutely. ‘Sorry, but you’ve just given it to me, and it wasn’t anywhere near enough.’

  ‘It wasn’t everything.’ Her voice was quiet and somehow relieved. ‘I’m not working for him any more, Tanner. He thinks I am, but I’ve betrayed him.’

  ‘Reivich?’

  She nodded, face down, so that I could barely see her eyes. ‘Once you stole from me, I knew you were the man Reivich was running from. I knew you were the assassin.’

  ‘It didn’t take a great deal of deduction, did it?’

  ‘No, but it was important to be sure. Reivich wanted the man isolated and removed from the picture. Killed, not to put too fine a point on it.’

  I nodded. ‘That would make sense.’

  ‘I was meant to do it as soon as I had definite evidence you were the killer. That way Reivich would be able to put the matter out of his mind for good — he wouldn’t have to worry that the wrong man had been killed and that the real assassin was still out there somewhere.’

  ‘You had more than a few opportunities to kill me.’ My hand softened on the gun now. ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘I almost did.’ Zebra was talking quicker now, voice hushed even though no one was remotely within earshot. ‘I could have done it in the apartment, but I hesitated. You can’t blame me. So then I let you take the gun and the car, knowing I could trace either.’

  ‘I should have realised. It seemed easy at the time.’

  ‘Credit me with more sense than to let that happen by accident. Of course, there was another way to trace you if that failed. You still had the Game implant.’ She paused. ‘But then you crashed the car, had the implant taken out. That only left the gun, and I wasn’t getting a very clear trace from it. Maybe you damaged it in the car crash.’

  ‘Than I called you from the station, after I’d visited Dominika.’

  ‘And told me where you’d be later on. I hired Pransky to help me. He’s good, don’t you think? Admittedly his socials skills could use a little work, but you don’t pay people like that for their charm and diplomacy.’ Zebra took a breath and wiped a film of accumulated rain from her brows, exposing a strip of clean flesh beneath the caul of sooty water. ‘Not as good as you, though. I saw you attack the Gamers — the way you injured three of them and then kidnapped the fourth, the woman. I had you targeted the whole time that was happening. I could have opened your cranium from a kilometre away, and you wouldn’t have felt an itch before your brai
ns hit the street. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just kill you like that. And that’s when I betrayed Reivich.’

  ‘I felt someone watching me. I never guessed it was you.’

  ‘And even if you had, would you have guessed I was a twitch of an eyelid away from killing you?’

  ‘Eyelid-triggered sniper’s rifle? Now what would a nice girl like you be doing with something like that?’

  ‘What now, Tanner?’

  I withdrew my empty hand from my pocket, like a conjuror whose trick had gone spectacularly wrong.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But it’s wet out here and I need a drink.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  Methuselah looked very much the same as when I had last seen him, floating in his tank like a monstrous piscine iceberg. There was a small crowd around him, just as before — people who would linger for a few minutes at the marvel of the age before realising that, really, all it was was a large old fish, and that, size apart, there was really nothing about Methuselah which was intrinsically more interesting than the younger, leaner, nimbler koi which thrived in the ponds. Worse than that, in fact, since the one thing I noticed was that no one turned away from Methuselah looking quite as happy as when they had arrived. Not only was there something disappointing about the fish, there was something ineluctably sad as well. Maybe they were too scared that in Methuselah they glimpsed the inert grey hulk of their own futures.

  Zebra and I drank tea, and no one paid us any attention.

  ‘The woman you met — what was her name again?’

  ‘Chanterelle Sammartini,’ I said.

  ‘Pransky never explained what happened to her. Were you together when he found you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We’d argued.’

  Zebra did a creditable double-take. ‘Wasn’t arguing part of the bargain? I mean, if you kidnap someone, don’t you generally assume that there’s going to be some arguing?’

  ‘I didn’t kidnap her, no matter what you think. I invited her to take me to the Canopy.’

  ‘With a gun.’

  ‘She wasn’t going to accept the invitation otherwise.’

  ‘Good point. And did you keep this gun on her the whole time you were up here?’

  ‘No,’ I said, not entirely comfortable with this line of debate. ‘No, not at all. It turned out not be necessary. We found we could tolerate each other’s company without it.’

  Zebra arched an eyebrow. ‘You and the Canopy rich kid actually hit it off?’

  ‘After a fashion,’ I said, feeling oddly defensive.

  From across the atrium, Methuselah flicked a pelvic fin and the suddenness of the gesture — no matter how feeble or involuntary — generated a mild frisson amongst the onlookers, as if a statue had just twitched. I wondered what kind of synaptic process had triggered that gesture, whether there was any intention behind it, or whether — like the creaking of an old house — Methuselah occasionally just moved, no closer to thought than wood.

  ‘Did you sleep with her?’ Zebra asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but there just wasn’t time.’

  ‘You’re not comfortable talking about this, are you?’

  ‘Would you be?’ I shook my head, as much to clear it of confusion as to deny anything deeper about my relationship with Chanterelle. ‘I expected to hate her for what she did; the way she played the game. But as soon as I started talking to her I realised it wasn’t that simple. From her point of view there was nothing barbaric about it at all.’

  ‘Nice and convenient, that.’

  ‘I mean she didn’t realise — or believe — that the victims were not the kind of people she’d been told they were.’

  ‘Until she met you.’

  I nodded carefully. ‘I think I gave her pause for thought.’

  ‘You’ve given us all pause for thought, Tanner.’ And then Zebra drank what remained of her tea in silence.

  ‘You again,’ the Mixmaster said, in a tone which conveyed neither pleasure nor disappointment, but a highly refined amalgam of the two. ‘I had imagined that I had answered all your questions satisfactorily during your last visit. Evidently I was mistaken.’ His heavy-lidded gaze alighted on Zebra, a twinge of non-recognition disturbing the genetically enhanced placidity of his expression. ‘Madame, I see, has had a considerable makeover since the last occasion.’

  It had been Chanterelle, of course, but I decided to let the bastard have his amusement.

  ‘She had the number of a good bloodcutter,’ I said.

  ‘And you emphatically didn’t,’ the Mixmaster said, sealing the outer door of his parlour against other visitors. ‘I’m talking about the eyework, of course,’ he said, ensconcing himself behind his floating console while the two of us stood. ‘But why don’t we dispense with the lie that this work had any connection with bloodcutters?’

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ Zebra asked, entirely with justification.

  ‘A small internal matter,’ I said.

  ‘This gentleman,’ the Mixmaster said, with laboured emphasis on the last word, ‘visited me a day ago, to discuss some genetic and structural anomalies in his eyes. At the time he claimed that the anomalies were the result of inferior intervention by bloodcutters. I was even prepared to believe him, though the edited sequences bore none of the usual signatures of bloodcutter work.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I believe that the changes were done by another faction entirely. Shall I spell it out?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘The work bears certain signatures which suggest that the sequences were inserted using the genetics techniques common to Ultras. Neither more nor less advanced than bloodcutter or Mixmaster work — just different, and highly individual. I should have realised much sooner.’ He allowed himself a smile, obviously impressed by his own deductive skills. ‘When Mixmasters perform a genetic service, it’s essentially permanent, unless the client specifies otherwise. That doesn’t mean that the work isn’t reversible, in most cases — it just means that the genetic and physiological changes will be stable against reversion to the older form. Bloodcutter work is the same, for the simple reason that bloodcutter sequences are generally bootlegged from Mixmasters, and the ’cutters haven’t the ingenuity to embed obsolescence into those same sequences. They steal code, but they don’t hack it. But Ultranauts do things rather differently.’ The Mixmaster cradled his long and elegant fingers before his chin. ‘Ultras sell their services with an in-built obsolescence; a mutational clock if you will. I’ll spare you the details; suffice to say that, within the viral and enzymic machinery which mediates the expression of the new genes inserted into your own DNA, there is a time-keeping mechanism, a clock which functions by counting the accumulation of randomness in a strand of foreign reference DNA. Needless to say, once these errors exceed a pre-defined limit, cellular machinery is unshackled which suppresses or corrects the altered genes.’ Again the Mixmaster smiled. ‘Of course, I’m simplifying tremendously. For a start, the clocks are set to trigger gradually, so that production of the new proteins and the division of cells into new types doesn’t cease suddenly. Otherwise it could be fatal — especially if the changes allowed you to live in an otherwise hostile environment, like oxygenated water or an ammonia atmosphere.’

  ‘You’re saying Tanner’s eyes were touched by Ultras?’

  ‘You catch on extraordinarily swiftly. But there’s rather more to it than that.’

  ‘There generally is,’ I said.

  The Mixmaster danced his hands over the console, fingers plucking at invisible harp strings, causing reams of genetics data to spring into the air, particular sequences of Ts and As and Gs and Cs highlighted and cross-linked to a series of physiological and functional maps of the human eye and the associated brain regions of visual comprehension. He looked like a wizard suddenly accompanied by ghostly — and gory — familiars.

  ‘Something very odd has happened here,’ the man said, his fingers ceasing thei
r too-dexterous dance. He sketched a particular block of base-pairs, the cross-linking rungs of DNA. ‘These are the pairs which are allowed to grow progressively more random; the internal clock.’ His finger moved to another highlighted block which looked superficially identical. ‘And this is the reference map, the unmutated DNA. It’s by comparing these — by noting the number of mutational changes — that the clock is driven.’

  ‘There don’t seem to be very many changes,’ Zebra said.

  ‘A few statistically minor point deletions or frame shifts,’ the Mixmaster said. ‘But nothing significant.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ I asked.

  ‘Meaning that the clock has not had very long to run. The two sets of DNA have hardly begun to diverge.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘That means that the work was done very recently; definitely within the last year, and perhaps only a few months ago.’

  ‘Why is that a problem?’ Zebra asked.

  ‘Because of this.’ Now his finger moved across a densely tangled blob, rendered in lilac. ‘This is a transcription factor; a protein that regulates the expression of a particular set of genes. It is not, however, a normally occurring human protein. Its only function — and it has been engineered for this purpose — is to suppress the newly inserted genes in your eye. It should not be present in large quantities until the mutational clock has been triggered. Yet I found it in abundance.’

  ‘Could the Ultras have deceived Tanner?’

  The Mixmaster shook his head. ‘Not likely. There’d be no economic gain in doing so. The genetics changes would still have been made, so it’s not as if it would be cheaper for them to reset the clock. In fact it would harm their longterm profits, because Tanner — if that’s your name — would have sought the services of another crew.’

  ‘I take it you have an alternative explanation?’

  ‘I do, but you may not like it.’ Once again he delivered a smile of utter salaciousness. ‘It would be exceedingly difficult to reset the mutational clock to zero without triggering all sorts of secondary anti-tamper safeguards. Even for a Mixmaster. I could do it, but it would be far from trivial work. But the opposite procedure would be considerably simpler.’