Revelation Space rs-1

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Well?” Pascale said.

  “There’s someone I need to talk to,” Sylveste said.

  Sylveste climbed the ramp into his crawler. The other was crammed with equipment racks and sample containers, with hammocks for his students pressed into the tiny niches of unoccupied space. They had to sleep aboard the machines because some of the digs in the sector—like this one—were over a day’s travel from Mantell itself. Sylveste’s crawler was considerably better appointed, with over a third of the interior dedicated to his own stateroom and quarters. The rest of the machine was taken up with additional payload space and a couple of more modest quarters for his senior workers or guests: in this case Sluka and Pascale. Now, however, he had the whole crawler to himself.

  The stateroom’s decor belied the fact that it was aboard a crawler. It was walled in red velvet, the shelves dotted with facsimile scientific instruments and relics. There were large, elegantly annotated Mercator maps of Resurgam dotted with the sites of major Amarantin finds; other areas of wall were covered in slowly updating texts: academic papers in preparation. His own beta-level was doing most of the scutwork on the papers now; Sylveste had trained the simulation to the point where it could imitate his style more reliably than he could, given the current distractions. Later, if there was time, he would need to proof those texts, but for now he gave them no more than a glance as he moved to the room’s escritoire. The ornate writing desk was decorated in marble and malachite, inset with japanwork scenes of early space exploration.

  Sylveste opened a drawer and removed a simulation cartridge, an unmarked grey slab, like a ceramic tile. There was a slot in the escritoire’s upper surface. He would only have to insert the cartridge to invoke Calvin. He hesitated, nonetheless. It had been some time—months, at least—since he had brought Calvin back from the dead, and that last encounter had gone spectacularly badly. He had promised himself he would only invoke Calvin again in the event of crisis. Now it was a matter of judging whether the crisis had really arrived—and if it was sufficiently troublesome to justify an invocation. The problem with Calvin was that his advice was only reliable about half the time.

  Sylveste pressed the cartridge into the escritoire.

  Fairies wove a figure out of light in the middle of the room: Calvin seated in a vast seigneurial chair. The apparition was more realistic than any hologram—even down to subtle shadowing effects—since it was being generated by direct manipulation of Sylveste’s visual field. The beta-level simulation represented Calvin the way fame best remembered him, as he had been when he was barely fifty years old, in his heyday on Yellowstone. Strangely, he looked older than Sylveste, even though the image of Calvin was twenty years younger in physiological terms. Sylveste was eight years into his third century, but the longevity treatments he had received on Yellowstone had been more advanced than any available in Calvin’s time.

  Other than that, their features and build were the same, both of them possessing a permanent amused curve to the lips. Calvin wore his hair shorter and was dressed in Demarchist Belle Epoque finery, rather than the relative austerity of Sylveste’s expeditionary dress: billowing frock shirt and elegantly chequered trousers hooked into buccaneer-boots, his fingers aglint with jewels and metal. His impeccably shaped beard was little more than a rust-coloured delineation along the line of his jaw. Small entoptics surrounded his seated figure, symbols of Boolean and three-valued logics and long cascades of binary. One hand fingered the bristles beneath his chin, while the other toyed with the carved scroll that ended the seat’s armrest.

  A wave of animation slithered over the projection, the pale eyes gaining a glisten of interest.

  Calvin raised his fingers in lazy acknowledgement. “So…” he said. “The shit’s about to match coordinates with the fan.”

  “You presume a lot.”

  “No need to presume anything, dear boy. I just tapped into the net and accessed the last few thousand news reports.” He craned his neck to survey the stateroom. “Nice pad you’ve got here. How are the eyes, by the way?”

  “They’re functioning as well as can be expected.”

  Calvin nodded. “Resolution’s not up to much, but that was the best I could do with the tools I was forced to work with. I probably only reconnected forty per cent of your optic nerve channels, so putting in better cameras would have been pointless. Now if you had halfway decent surgical equipment lying around on this planet, I could perhaps begin to do something. But you wouldn’t give Michelangelo a toothbrush and expect a great Sistine Chapel.”

  “Rub it in.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Calvin said, all innocence. “I’m just saying that if you had to let her take the Lorean, couldn’t you at least have persuaded Alicia to leave us some medical equipment?”

  His wife had led the mutiny against him twenty years earlier; a fact Calvin never allowed Sylveste to forget.

  “So I made a kind of self-sacrifice.” Sylveste waved an arm to silence the image. “Sorry, but I didn’t invoke you for a fireside chat, Cal.”

  “I do wish you’d call me Father.”

  Sylveste ignored him. “Do you know where we are?”

  “A dig, I presume.” Calvin closed his eyes briefly and touched his fingers against his temples, affecting concentration. “Yes. Let me see. Two expeditionary crawlers out of Mantell, near the Ptero Steppes… a Wheeler grid… how inordinately quaint! Though I suppose it suits your purpose well enough. And what’s this? High-res gravitometer sections… seismograms… you’ve actually found something, haven’t you?”

  At that moment the escritoire popped up a status fairy to tell him there was an incoming call from Mantell. Sylveste held a hand up to Calvin while he debated whether or not to accept the call. The person trying to reach him was Henry Janequin, a specialist in avian biology and one of Sylveste’s few outright allies. But while Janequin had known the real Calvin, Sylveste was fairly sure he had never seen Calvin’s beta-level… and most certainly not in the process of being solicited for advice by his son. The admission that he needed Cal’s help—that he had even considered invoking the sim for this purpose—could be a crucial sign of weakness.

  “What are you waiting for?” Cal said. “Put him on.”

  “He doesn’t know about you… about us.”

  Calvin shook his head, then—shockingly—Janequin appeared in the room. Sylveste fought to maintain his composure, but it was obvious what had just happened. Calvin must have found a way to send commands to the escritoire’s private-level functions.

  Calvin was and always had been a devious bastard, Sylveste thought. Ultimately that was why he remained of use.

  Janequin’s full-body projection was slightly less sharp than Calvin’s, for Janequin’s image was coming over the satellite network—patchy at best—from Mantell. And the cameras imaging him had probably seen better days, Sylveste thought—like much else on Resurgam.

  “There you are,” Janequin said, noticing only Sylveste at first. “I’ve been trying to reach you for the last hour. Don’t you have a way of being alerted to incoming calls when you’re down in the pit?”

  “I do,” Sylveste said. “But I turned it off. It was too distracting.”

  “Oh,” Janequin said, with only the tiniest hint of annoyance. “Very shrewd indeed. Especially for a man in your position. You realise what I’m talking about, of course. There’s trouble afoot, Dan, perhaps more than you…” Then Janequin must have noticed Cal for the first time. He studied the figure in the chair for a moment before speaking. “My word. It is you, isn’t it?”

  Cal nodded without saying a word.

  “This is his beta-level simulation,” Sylveste said. It was important to clear that up before the conversation proceeded any further; alphas and betas were fundamentally different things and Stoner etiquette was very punctilious indeed about distinguishing between the two. Sylveste would have been guilty of an extreme social gaffe had he allowed Janequin to think that this was the long-lost alpha-le
vel recording.

  “I was consulting with him… with it,” Sylveste said.

  Calvin pulled a face.

  “About what?” Janequin said. He was an old man—the oldest person on Resurgam, in fact—and with each passing year his appearance seemed to approach fractionally closer to some simian ideal. His white hair, moustache and beard framed a small pink face in the manner of some rare marmoset. On Yellowstone, there had been no more talented expert in genetics outside of the Mixmasters, and there were some who rated Janequin a good deal cleverer than any in that sect, for all that his genius was of the undemonstrative sort, accumulating not in any flash of brilliance, but through years and years of quietly excellent work. He was well into his fourth century now, and layer upon layer of longevity treatment was beginning to crumble visibly. Sylveste supposed that before very long Janequin would be the first person on Resurgam to die of old age. The thought filled him with sadness. Though there was much upon which Janequin and he disagreed, they had always seen eye to eye on all the important things.

  “He’s found something,” Cal said.

  Janequin’s eyes brightened, years lifting off him in the joy of scientific discovery. “Really?”

  “Yes, I…” Then something else odd happened. The room was gone now. The three of them were standing on a balcony, high above what Sylveste instantly recognised as Chasm City. Calvin’s doing again. The escritoire had followed them like an obedient dog. If Cal could access its private-level functions, Sylveste thought, he could also do this kind of trick, running one of the escritoire’s standard environments. It was a good simulation, too: down to the slap of wind against Sylveste’s cheek and the city’s almost intangible smell, never easy to define but always obvious by its absence in more cheaply done environments.

  It was the city from his childhood: the high Belle Epoque. Awesome gold structures marched into the distance like sculpted clouds, buzzing with aerial traffic. Below, tiered parks and gardens stepped down in a series of dizzying vistas towards a verdant haze of greenery and light, kilometres beneath their feet.

  “Isn’t it great to see the old place?” Cal said. “And to think that it was almost ours for the taking; so much within reach of our clan… who knows how we might have changed things, if we’d held the city’s reins?”

  Janequin steadied himself on the railing. “Very nice, but I didn’t come to sight-see, Calvin. Dan, what were you about to tell me before we were so…”

  “Rudely interrupted?” Sylveste said. “I was going to tell Cal to pull the gravitometer data from the escritoire, as he obviously has the means to read my private files.”

  “There’s really nothing to it for a man in my position,” Cal said. There was a moment while he accessed the smoky imagery of the buried thing, the obelisk hanging in front of them beyond the railing, apparently life-size.

  “Oh, very interesting,” Janequin said. “Very interesting indeed!”

  “Not bad,” Cal said.

  “Not bad?” Sylveste said. “It’s bigger and better preserved than anything we’ve found to date by an order of magnitude. It’s clear evidence of a more advanced phase of Amarantin technology… perhaps even a precursor phase to a full industrial revolution.”

  “I suppose it could be quite a significant find,” Cal said, grudgingly. “You—um—are planning to unearth it, I assume?”

  “Until a moment ago, yes.” Sylveste paused. “But something’s just come up. I’ve just been… I’ve just found out for myself that Girardieau may be planning to move against me a lot sooner than I had feared.”

  “He can’t touch you without a majority in the expeditionary council,” Cal said.

  “No, he couldn’t,” Janequin said. “If that was how he was going to do it. But Dan’s information is right. It looks as if Girardieau may be planning on more direct action.”

  “That would be tantamount to some kind of… coup, I suppose.”

  “I think that would be the technical term,” Janequin said.

  “Are you sure?” Then Calvin did the concentration thing again, dark lines etching his brow. “Yes… you could be right. A lot of media speculation in the last day concerning Girardieau’s next move, and the fact that Dan’s off on some dig while the colony stumbles through a crisis of leadership… and a definite increase in encrypted comms among Girardieau’s known sympathisers. I can’t break those encryptions, of course, but I can certainly speculate on the reason for the increase in traffic.”

  “Something’s being planned, isn’t it?” Sluka was right, he thought to himself. In which case she had done him a favour, even as she had threatened to abandon the dig. Without her warning he would never have invoked Cal.

  “It does look that way,” Janequin said. “That’s why I was trying to reach you. My fears have only been confirmed by what Cal says about Girardieau’s sympathisers.” His grip tightened on the railing. The cuff of his jacket—hanging thinly over his skeletal frame—was patterned with peacocks’ eyes. “I don’t suppose there’s any point my staying here, Dan. I’ve tried to keep my contact with you below suspicious levels, but there’s every reason to think this conversation is being tapped. I shouldn’t really say any more.” He turned away from the cityscape and the hanging obelisk, then addressed the seated man. “Calvin… it’s been a pleasure to meet you again, after such a long time.”

  “Look after yourself,” Cal said, elevating a hand in Janequin’s direction. “And good luck with the peacocks.”

  Janequin’s surprise was evident. “You know about my little project?”

  Calvin smiled without answering; Janequin’s question had been superfluous after all, Sylveste thought.

  The old man shook his hand—the environment ran to full tactile interaction—and then stepped out of range of his imaging suite.

  The two of them were left alone on the balcony.

  “Well?” Cal asked.

  “I can’t afford to lose control of the colony.” Sylveste had still been in nominal command of the entire Resurgam expedition, even after Alicia’s defection. Technically, those who had chosen to stay behind on the planet rather than return home with her should have been his allies, meaning that his position should have been strengthened. But it had not worked like that. Not everyone who was sympathetic to Alicia’s side of the argument had managed to get aboard the Lorean before it left orbit. And amongst those who had stayed behind, many previously sympathetic to Sylveste felt he had handled the crisis badly, or even criminally. His enemies said that the things the Pattern Jugglers had done to his head before he met the Shrouders were only now emerging into the light; pathologies that bordered on madness. Research into the Amarantin had carried on, but with slowly lessening momentum, while political differences and enmities widened beyond repair. Those with residual loyalty to Alicia—chief among them Girardieau—had amalgamated into the Inundationists. Sylveste’s archaeologists had become steadily embittered, a siege-mentality setting in. There had been deaths on both sides which were not easily explained as accidents. Now things had reached a head, and Sylveste was in nowhere like the right place to resolve the crisis. “But I can’t let go of that, either,” he said, indicating the obelisk. “I need your advice, Cal. I’ll get it because you depend on me absolutely. You’re fragile; remember that.”

  Calvin stirred uneasily in the chair. “So basically you’re putting the squeeze on your old dad. Charming.”

  “No,” Sylveste said, through clenched teeth. “What I’m saying is that you could fall into the wrong hands unless you give me guidance. In mob terms you’re just another member of our illustrious clan.”

  “Although you wouldn’t necessarily agree, would you? By your reckoning I’m just a program, just evocation. When are you going to let me take over your body again?”

  “I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

  Calvin raised an admonishing finger. “Don’t get stroppy, son. It was you who invoked me, not the other way around. Put me back in the lantern if you want. I’m happy
enough.”

  “I will. After you’ve advised me.”

  Calvin leaned forward in the seat. “Tell me what you did with my alpha-level simulation and I might consider it.” He grinned, impishly. “Hell, I might even tell you a few things about the Eighty you don’t know.”

  “What happened,” Sylveste said, “is seventy-nine innocent people died. There’s no mystery to it. But I don’t hold you responsible. It would be like accusing a tyrant’s photograph of war crimes.”

  “I gave you sight, you ungrateful little sod.” The seat swivelled so that its high solid back was facing Sylveste. “I admit your eyes are hardly state of the art, but what could you expect?” The seat spun round. Calvin was dressed like Sylveste now, his hair similarly styled and his face possessing the same smooth cast. “Tell me about the Shrouders,” he said. “Tell me about your guilty secrets, son. Tell me what really happened around Lascaille’s Shroud, and not the pack of lies you’ve been spinning since you got back.”

  Sylveste moved to the escritoire, ready to flip out the cartridge. “Wait,” Calvin said, holding up his hands suddenly. “You want my advice?”

  “Finally, we’re getting somewhere.”

  “You can’t let Girardieau win. If a coup’s imminent, you need to be back in Cuvier. There you can muster what little support you may have left.”

  Sylveste looked through the crawler’s window, towards the box grid. Shadows were crossing the baulks—workers deserting the dig, moving silently towards the sanctuary of the other crawler. “This could be the most important find since we arrived.”

  “And you may have to sacrifice it. If you keep Girardieau at bay, you’ll at least have the luxury of returning here and looking for it again. But if Girardieau wins, nothing you’ve found here will matter a damn.”

  “I know,” Sylveste said. For a moment there was no animosity between them. Calvin’s reasoning was flawless, and it would have been churlish to pretend otherwise.