The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space)

by Alastair Reynolds

‘This isn’t good,’ Vasko said.

  ‘Tell me what’s happening,’ Khouri said, standing next to him.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Scorpio said. ‘It started an hour or so ago. The sea thickened around the base, and the ring of material started swallowing the ship. Now it looks as if the Jugglers are trying to topple it.’

  ‘Could they?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. The ship must weigh a few million tonnes. But the mass of all that Juggler material isn’t exactly negligible. I wouldn’t worry about the ship toppling, though.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I’d be more worried about it snapping. That’s a lighthugger. It’s designed to tolerate one or more gees of acceleration along its axis. Standing on the surface of a planet doesn’t impose any more stress on it than normal starflight. But they don’t build those ships to handle lateral stresses. They’re not designed to stay in one piece if the forces are acting sideways. A couple more degrees and I’ll start worrying. She might come down.’

  Khouri said, ‘We need that ship, Scorp. It’s our only ticket out of here.’

  ‘Thanks for the newsflash,’ he said, ‘but right now I’d say there isn’t a lot I can do about it — unless you want me to start fighting the Pattern Jugglers.’

  The very notion was extreme, almost absurd. The Pattern Jugglers were harmless to all but a few unfortunate individuals. Collectively, they had never indicated any malicious intentions towards humanity. They were archives of lost knowledge, lost minds. But if the Pattern Jugglers were trying to destroy the Nostalgia for Infinity, what else could the humans do but retaliate? That simply could not be allowed to happen.

  ‘Do you have weapons on this shuttle?’ Khouri asked.

  ‘Some,’ Scorpio said. ‘Light ship-to-ship stuff, mainly.’

  ‘Anything you could use against that biomass?’

  ‘Some particle beams which won’t work too well in Ararat’s atmosphere. The rest? Too likely to take chunks out of the ship as well. We could try the particle beams…’

  ‘No!’

  The voice had come from Khouri’s mouth. But it had emerged explosively, like a vomit of sound. It almost didn’t resemble her voice at all.

  ‘You just said…’ Scorpio began.

  Khouri sat down suddenly, falling — as if exhausted — into one of the couches that the shuttle had provided. She pressed a hand to her brow.

  ‘No,’ she said again, less stridently this time. ‘No. Leave. Leave alone. Help us.’

  Wordlessly, Vasko, Scorpio, Valensin — and Khouri too — turned to look at the incubator, where Aura lay entombed in the care of machines. The tiny red-pink form within was moving, writhing gently against those restraints.

  ‘Help us?’ Vasko asked.

  Khouri answered, but again the words seemed to emerge without her volition. She had to catch her breath between them. ‘They. Help us. Want to.’

  Vasko moved over to the incubator. He had one eye on Khouri, another on her daughter. Valensin’s machines shuffled agitatedly. They did not know what to do, and their jointed arms were jerking with nervous indecision.

  ‘They?’ Vasko asked. ‘They as in the Pattern Jugglers?’

  The pink form kicked her little legs, the tiny, perfectly formed nub of a fist clenched in front of the miniature scowl of her face. Aura’s eyes were sealed slits.

  ‘Yes. They. Pattern Jugglers,’ Khouri said.

  Vasko turned to Scorpio. ‘I think we’ve got this all wrong,’ he said.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Wait. I need to talk to Antoinette.’

  He went forward to the bridge without waiting for the pig’s permission. In the shuttle’s cockpit he found Antoinette and the pilot strapped into their command couches. They had turned the entire cockpit transparent, so that they appeared to be floating in midair, accompanied only by various disembodied read-out panels and controls. Vasko took a dizzy step back and then collected himself.

  ‘Can we hover?’ he asked.

  Antoinette looked at him over her shoulder. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then bring us to a stop. Do you have any ranging equipment? Anticollision sensors, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said again, as if both questions were amongst the least intelligent she had heard in a long while.

  ‘Then shine something on the ship.’

  ‘Any particular reason, Vasko? We can all see that the damned thing’s tilting.’

  ‘Just do it, all right?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said. Her small hands, clinking with jewellery, worked the controls floating above her couch. Vasko felt the ship nudge to a halt. The view ahead rotated, bringing the leaning tower directly in front of them.

  ‘Hold it there,’ Vasko said. ‘Now get that ranging thing — whatever it is — on to the ship. Somewhere near the base if you can manage it.’

  ‘That isn’t going to help us figure out the tilt angle,’ Antoinette said.

  ‘It’s not the tilt I’m interested in. I don’t think they’re really trying to topple it.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  Vasko smiled. ‘I think it’s just a by-product. They’re trying to move it.’

  He waited for her to set up the ranging device. A pulsing spherical display floated in front of her, filled with smoky green structures and numbers. ‘There’s the ship,’ she said, pointing to the thickest return in the radar plot.

  ‘Good. Now tell me how far away it is.’

  ‘Four hundred and forty metres,’ she said, after a moment. ‘That’s an average. The green stuff is changing in thickness all the while.’

  ‘All right. Keep an eye on that figure.’

  ‘It’s increasing,’ the pilot said.

  Vasko felt hot breath on his neck. He turned around to see the pig looking over his shoulder.

  ‘Vasko’s on to something,’ Antoinette said. ‘Distance to the spire is now… four hundred and fifty metres.’

  ‘You’re drifting,’ Scorpio said.

  ‘No, we’re not.’ She sounded the tiniest bit affronted. ‘We’re rock steady, at least within the errors of measurement. Vasko’s right, Scorp — the ship’s moving. They’re dragging it out to sea.’

  ‘How fast is it moving?’ Scorpio asked.

  ‘Too soon to say with any certainty. A metre, maybe two, per second.’ Antoinette checked her own communicator bracelet. ‘The neutrino levels are still going up. I’m not sure exactly how long we have left, but I don’t think we’re looking at more than a few hours.’

  ‘In which the case the ship isn’t going to be more than a few kilometres further away when it launches,’ Scorpio said.

  ‘That’s better than nothing,’ Antoinette said. ‘If they can at least get it beyond the curve of the bay, so that we have some shelter from the tidal waves… that’s got to be better than nothing, surely?’

  ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ the pig replied.

  Vasko felt a thrilling sense of affirmation. ‘Aura was right. They don’t want to hurt us. They only want to save us, by getting the ship away from the bay. They’re on our side.’

  ‘Nice theory,’ Scorpio said, ‘but how did they know we were in this mess in the first place? It’s not as if anyone went down into the sea and explained it to them. Someone would have had to swim for that.’

  ‘Maybe someone did,’ Vasko said. ‘Does it matter now? The ship’s moving. That’s all that counts.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Scorpio said. ‘Let’s just hope it isn’t too late to make a difference.’

  Antoinette turned to the pilot. ‘Think you can get us close to that thing? The green stuff doesn’t seem too thick near the top. It might still be possible to get into the usual landing bay.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ the pilot said, incredulously.

  Antoinette shook her head. She was already assigning full control back to the regular pilot. ‘’Fraid not, fella. If we want John to hold his horses until the ship’s clear of the bay, someone’s going to have go down and t
alk to him. And guess who just drew that straw?’

  ‘I think she’s serious,’ Vasko said.

  ‘Do it,’ Scorpio said.

  Hela, 2727

  The caravan threaded cautiously through tunnels and inched along ridiculously narrow ledges. It twisted and turned, at points doubling back on itself so that the rear parts advanced while the lead machines retreated. Once, navigating a rising hairpin, engines and traction limbs labouring, part of the caravan passed over itself, letting Rashmika look down on the racked Observers.

  All the while the bridge grew larger. When she had first seen it, the bridge had the appearance of something lacy and low-relief, painted on a flat black backdrop in glittering iridescent inks. Now, slowly, it was taking on a faintly threatening three-dimensional solidity. This was not some mirage, some peculiar trick of lighting and atmospherics, but a real object, and the caravan was really going to cross it.

  The three-dimensionality both alarmed and comforted Rashmika. The bridge now appeared to be more than just an assemblage of infinitely thin lines, and although many of its structural parts were still very fine in cross section, now that she was seeing them at an oblique angle the structural components didn’t look quite so delicate. If the bridge could support itself, surely it could support the caravan. She hoped.

  ‘Miss Els?’

  She looked around. This time it really was Quaestor Jones. ‘Yes,’ she said, unhappy at his attention.

  ‘We’ll be over it before very long. I promised you that the experience would be spectacular, didn’t I?’

  ‘You did,’ she said, ‘but what you didn’t explain, Quaestor, was why everyone doesn’t take this short cut, if it’s as useful as you claim.’

  ‘Superstition,’ he said, ‘coupled with excessive caution.’

  ‘Excessive caution sounds entirely appropriate to me where this bridge is involved.’

  ‘Are you frightened, Miss Els? You shouldn’t be. This caravan weighs barely fifty thousand tonnes, all told. And by its very nature, the weight is distributed along a great length. It isn’t as if we’re taking a cathedral across the bridge. Now that would be folly.’

  ‘No one would do that.’

  ‘No one sane. And especially not after they saw what happened last time. But that needn’t concern us in the slightest. The bridge will hold the caravan. It has done so in the past. I would have no particular qualms about taking us across it during every expedition away from the Way, but the simple truth is that most of the time it wouldn’t help us. You’ve seen how laborious the approach is. More often than not, using the bridge would cost us more time than it would save. It was only a particular constellation of circumstances that made it otherwise on this occasion.’ The quaestor clasped his hands decisively. ‘Now, to business. I believe I have secured you a position in a clearance gang attached to an Adventist cathedral.’

  ‘The Lady Morwenna?’

  ‘No. A somewhat smaller cathedral, the Catherine of Iron. Everyone has to start somewhere. And why are you in such a hurry to reach the Lady Morwenna? Dean Quaiche has his foibles. The Catherine’s dean is a good man. His safety record is very good, and those who serve under him are well looked after.’

  ‘Thank you, Quaestor,’ she said, hoping her disappointment was not too obvious. She had still been hoping he might be able to find her a solid clerical job, something well away from clearance work. ‘You’re right. Something is better than nothing.’

  ‘The Catherine is amongst the main group of cathedrals, moving towards the Rift from the western side. We will join them when we have completed our crossing of the bridge, shortly before they begin their descent of the Devil’s Staircase. You are privileged, Miss Els: very few people get the chance to cross Absolution Gap twice in one year, let alone within a matter of days.’

  ‘I’ll count myself lucky.’

  ‘Nonetheless, I will repeat what I said before: the work is difficult, dangerous and poorly rewarded.’

  ‘I’ll take what’s available.’

  ‘In which case you will be transferred to the relevant gang as soon as we reach the Way. Keep your nose clean, and I am sure you will do very well.’

  ‘I will certainly bear that in mind.’

  He touched a finger to his lips and made to turn away, as if remembering some other errand, then halted. The eyes of his green pet — it had been on his shoulder the whole time — remained locked on to her, blank as gun barrels.

  ‘One other matter, Miss Els,’ the quaestor said, looking back at her over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The gentleman you were speaking to earlier?’ His eyes narrowed as he studied her expression. ‘Well, I wouldn’t, if I were you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t what?’

  ‘Have anything to do with his sort.’ The quaestor stared vaguely into the distance. ‘As a rule, it’s never wise to circulate amongst Observers, or any other pilgrims of a similarly committed strain of faith. But in my general experience it is especially unwise to associate with those who are vacillating between faith and denial.’

  ‘Surely, Quaestor, it is up to me who I talk to.’

  ‘Of course, Miss Els, and please don’t take offence. I offer only advice, from the bottomless pit of goodness which is my heart.’ He popped a morsel into the mouthpiece of his pet. ‘Don’t I, Peppermint?’

  ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,’ the creature observed.

  The caravan surmounted the eastern approach to the bridge. A kilometre from the eastern abutment, the road had veered back into the side of the cliff, ascending a steep defile that — via scraping hairpins, treacherous gradients and brief interludes of tunnel and ledge — brought it to the level of the bridge deck. Behind them, the landscape was an apparently impassable chaos of ice boulders. Ahead, the road deck stretched away like a textbook example of perspective, straight as a rifle barrel, unfenced on either side, gently cambered towards the middle, gleaming with the soft diamond lustre of starlit ice.

  Gathering speed now that it was on a level surface with no immediate worry of obstructions, the caravan sped towards the point where the ground fell away on either side. The road beneath the procession became smoother and wider, no longer furrowed or interrupted by rock-falls or man-deep fissures. And here there were, finally, very few pilgrims to be avoided. Most of them did not take the bridge, and so there was minimal risk of any unfortunates being trundled to death beneath the machines.

  Rashmika’s grasp of the scale of the structure underwent several ratchetting revisions. She recalled that, from a distance, the deck of the bridge had formed a shallow arc. From this approach, however, it appeared flat and straight, as if aligned by laser, until the point where it vanished into convergence, far ahead. She was trying to resolve this paradox when she realised — dizzyingly — that at that moment she must only be seeing a small fraction of the distance along the deck. It was like climbing a dome-shaped hill: the summit was always tantalisingly out of reach.

  She walked to another viewing point and looked back. The first half-dozen vehicles of this flank of the caravan were now on the bridge proper, and the sheer walls of the cliff were dropping back to the rear, offering her the first real opportunity to judge the depth of the Rift.

  It fell away with indecent swiftness. The cliff walls were etched and gouged with titanic geological clawmarks, here vertical, there horizontal, elsewhere diagonal or curled and folded into each other in a display of obscene liquidity. The walls sparkled and spangled with blue-grey ice and murkier seams of darker sediment. The ledge that the caravan had traversed, visible now to the left, appeared far too narrow and hesitant to be used as a road, let alone by something weighing fifty thousand tonnes. Beneath the ledge, Rashmika now saw, the cliff often curved in to a worrying degree. She had never exactly felt safe during the traverse, but she had convinced herself that the ground beneath them continued down for more than a few dozen metres.

  She did not see the quaestor again during the rest
of the crossing. Within an hour she judged that the opposite wall of the Rift looked only slightly further away than the one that was receding behind them. They must be nearing the midpoint of the bridge. Quickly, therefore, but with the minimum of fuss, Rashmika put on her vacuum suit and stole up through the caravan to its roof.

  From the top of the vehicle things looked very different from the sanitised, faintly unreal scene she had observed from the pressurised compartment. She now had a panoramic view of the entire Rift, and it was much easier to see the floor, which was a good dozen kilometres below. From this perspective, the Rift floor almost appeared to be creeping forwards as the flat ribbon of the road bed streaked backwards beneath the caravan. This contradiction made her feel immediately dizzy, and she was gripped by an urgent desire to flatten herself on the roof of the machine, spread-eagled so that she could not possibly topple over the edge. But although she bent her knees, lowering her centre of gravity, Rashmika managed to screw up the courage to remain standing.

  The road bed appeared only slightly wider than the caravan. They were moving down the middle of it, only occasionally veering to one side or the other to avoid a patch of thickened ice or some other obstruction. There were rocks on the frozen surface of the road, deposited there from volcanic plumes elsewhere on Hela. Some of them were half as high as the caravan’s wheels. The fact that they had managed to smash on to the road without shattering the bridge gave her a tiny flicker of reassurance. And if the road bed was just wide enough to accommodate the two rows of vehicles that made up the caravan, then it was clearly absurd to think of a cathedral making the same journey.

  That was when she noticed something down in the floor of the Rift. It was a huge smear of rubble, kilometres across. It was dark and star-shaped, and as far as she could tell the epicentre of the smear lay almost directly beneath the bridge. Near the centre of the star were vague suggestions of ruined structures. Rashmika saw what she thought might be the uppermost part of a spire, leaning to one side. She made out sketchy hints of smashed machinery, smothered in dust and debris.

  So someone had tried to cross the bridge with a cathedral.