Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘This is my laboratory,’ Ricasso said proudly, doing a little about-turn on his heels. ‘It’s where I attempt to do my ... what I like to call “science”.’ He paused meaningfully, studying Quillon’s reaction. ‘Are you familiar with the word?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Frankly, I’d be surprised if you were. There’s not a lot of it about these days.’

  Quillon smiled tightly. He had snatched a sidelong glance at the contents of the cages and was unnerved by what he had seen.

  ‘You’ll have to enlighten me.’

  ‘We conduct applied science, Doctor, all of us. We live in a world surrounded by technologies, and we know how these technologies work and equally importantly we know when they won’t. We train people to make the best of use of them. We put them in guilds and military organisations. Some of them we put in hospitals and morgues. We place absolute, unflinching faith in their abilities. We - generally speaking - can repair or rebuild or duplicate almost anything, from a flintlock pistol to a piston-engine to an electric train or television set, a neural-imaging device or energy-discharge weapon. It allows us a lustre of competence. But that’s all it is. Scratch beneath our superficial understanding, and all you’ll find is a yawning void of ignorance. We don’t truly understand any of it. It’s all just toys we’ve been handed down to play with.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to be doing us any harm.’

  ‘Yes, or we wouldn’t be here. But that’s only because the world has been stable for thousands of years, so we haven’t been tested. We’ve been let off the hook. But now the world is changing, and we haven’t got a clue as to how it works or what we can do about it, and what worries me most of all is that there isn’t going to be much time to get back up to speed. Hence,’ he said with a small gestural flourish at his surroundings, ‘science, or at least the pathetically small area of it to which I am able to make some tiny, trifling contributions.’

  ‘I’m still not quite sure I understand.’

  ‘I want to make sense of the world, Doctor. I want to undo the screws, take off its elegant face, glimpse the glittering movement, poke around in the gears and then decide if it’s broken or not. Then I want to know if there is anything we can do to put it back together again. There may not be, but at least we’d have the satisfaction of knowing.’

  ‘We’d be satisfied by our own impotence?’

  ‘We won’t know unless we try.’ Ricasso stroked his hands against an assemblage of glassware, a thing of spiral tubes, cone-shaped retorts and slowly dripping filters. Something thick and clear and resinous was building up in a catchment flask, drop by laboured drop. ‘Look, it’s not as if I blame us for not taking much interest in science. Intellectual curiosity will only get you so far. The zones, by their nature, place bedevilling restrictions on what we can hope to do. Every workable device has already been incorporated into our arsenal of useful gadgets. We’ve worked through the permutations over and over again. There’s no point speculating about what you’d do if you didn’t have to work under the constraints of the zones, because we do, and that’s God-given. Or so it appears.’

  One of the caged things stirred predatorily. ‘You think otherwise.’

  ‘The zones aren’t stable. We know that. But what if the zones are radically, catastrophically unstable? The storm’s already plunged Spearpoint into squalor and darkness. It’s already shaken up the Skullboys and made our existence more precarious than it was before. Everything we’ve seen to date, though, may be nothing compared to what could be on its way. For now, people are able to survive almost everywhere on the planet, but there’s no reason that has to be the case for ever. What if the Bane swelled to encompass the territories that are now habitable?’

  ‘We’d move,’ Quillon said.

  ‘Until we couldn’t move any more. And then what? Just give up and die, like the angels did?’

  ‘There’s no reason to expect anything like that’s going to happen soon.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, Doctor, with every atom of my existence. Whatever atoms are. But that’s not the only danger we face. The zones might stay the way they are now, and we’d still be in trouble. The world is cooling, the atmosphere thinning, the forests dying. That’s got nothing to do with zones or storms. But it narrows our options just as effectively.’

  ‘And your solution?’

  ‘I don’t have one. Yet.’ Ricasso started towards the leftmost cage. ‘But I’m directing my efforts in that direction. It seems to me that however you look at it, it’s a problem of zone tolerance. If the zones change, we need to be able to withstand whatever fate throws at us. And if the world becomes progressively less habitable, we have to find a way to survive without it.’ He read something in Quillon’s face. ‘You think I’m joking.’

  ‘Where do we go, if we don’t have the world?’

  ‘Somewhere else. We’ve done it before; we can do it again. The Testament tells us that we were once allowed through the gates of paradise. Beyond the gates, it also tells us, lay numberless gardens, each with its own sun and moon. Other worlds, Doctor! Other planets, like our own, but elsewhere in space.’

  ‘That’s one interpretation.’

  ‘Some of the older ground-based cultures maintain that Spearpoint was once a bridge, or ladder, to the stars, before it was decreed that the stars were not for us. It’s easy to laugh at such beliefs. But what is Spearpoint, if not a very tall structure that pierces the atmosphere? It’s situated almost on the equator - you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Quillon said. ‘What bearing does that have?’

  ‘It might be telling us something, something very useful indeed. To construct a cosmic funicular you must first—’

  Quillon almost laughed. ‘A what?’

  ‘You’ve been up there, Doctor. You know that even the Celestial Levels are only the start of it. It goes on and on, rising into the airless void. No one can live up there, so there must be another reason for its existence. What is to say that men did not climb up the tower - or ride up it by means of a winch, and launch themselves into the gulf between the worlds?’

  ‘Common sense?’

  Ricasso shook his head in gentle disappointment. ‘You’re too much a prisoner of your times, Doctor. You can’t see through the prism of the present. I don’t blame you for that; I was much the same, once upon a time. But you have to train yourself to see further.’ Ricasso paused and smiled. ‘Enough speculation; I’ve undoubtedly said too much. Let us instead deal with something inarguably concrete and practical.’ He touched the side of the cage, and the thing inside stirred languidly, metal grating on metal like a steel chain being gradually unwound. The vorg had been relieved of its rear limbs, but it still maintained a degree of ambulatory prowess by virtue of its blue-clawed forelimbs. The elongated, tapering head had locked on to Quillon. It was tracking his movements. The segmented metal tail scraped the ground, swishing from side to side. It smelled of burning oil and rotten meat.

  ‘Give/brain/tissue/vorg. Vorg/want/feed. Vorg/make/good/drug. Vorg/ help.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be safer just to kill it?’

  ‘It would. But they’re useful to me, and potentially vital to all of us. They used to be robots, I think. Perhaps they were our slaves, before the zones came. Mechanical workers, serving human and angel masters. They were obviously given a degree of cleverness, so that they didn’t have to be told how to do everything. And, perhaps, a measure of adaptability and self-repair, so they weren’t always breaking down. After the change, some of the robots were able to keep on as they were. Others stopped working more or less immediately, because they ended up in zones where complex machines simply couldn’t function. And some were on the border. They didn’t die out immediately, but their circuits didn’t work as well as they used to. So they adapted. They found that they could incorporate organic matter into their mechanisms, using living tissue to bypass systems that no longer functioned. It was probably only a small substitution to b
egin with, but it allowed the vorgs to operate where other machines couldn’t, and where humans found it uncomfortable. So they kept altering themselves, until they ended up the way we see them now. Half-machine, half-flesh. Flesh that’s almost always dying and decaying, so they have to keep replenishing it. So they became carnivorous cyborgs, or carnivorgs.’

  ‘You can’t tell me there’s some good in these horrors.’

  ‘Only in the sense that they’re rather adept at chemical synthesis,’ Ricasso said. ‘Feed them what they need, and they’ll make almost anything for you in return. It’s how they trade.’

  ‘They were making something for the Skullboys.’

  ‘A kind of antizonal medicine,’ Ricasso said. ‘They can do that, certainly. But that’s not what we need now. We need something better, something more potent and long-lasting. An antizonal’s only effective until it wears off, and even then it has to be tailored carefully to the patient, the change-vector and the zone conditions. Is that not so, Doctor?’

  ‘It’s true enough.’

  ‘And we accept it, because it’s what we’ve learned to accept. Most of us keep to our zones. We cross over occasionally, but very seldom with the intention of staying. Antizonals suffice. They let you leave Spearpoint. They allow us to take Swarm through zone changes, when we’re forced into it, which I assure you is not very often. Your city, your Spearpoint, is structured into districts by virtue of the zones. There’s an entire economy dependent on what can and can’t be moved from zone to zone. Sure, the zone boundaries shift around sometimes, but can you imagine the wonderful, unholy chaos if people didn’t have to obey them any more? If people could live where they wanted to, instead of where they’ve ended up as an accident of birth?’

  ‘I’d like to see it happen,’ Quillon said. ‘I wouldn’t necessarily want to be there when it did.’

  ‘Chaos, undoubtedly. But that doesn’t change my larger point. A drug that allows us to ignore the zones would be of enormous benefit in the future. Even if the zones don’t alter, the world is still changing, and the zones prevent us from leaving. We need that drug whatever happens.’

  ‘I don’t disagree. But I’m afraid there’s no such thing.’

  ‘There soon will be. That’s what I’ve been working on down here. I’m very close, Doctor. Quite spectacularly close.’

  Quillon noticed now that there was a fine transparent line reaching into the cage. It plunged through the vorg’s metal ribcage, into the glistening mass of organs that enabled the semi-living entity to function. Something pale and watery oozed along the line into one of the glass retorts, drip-drip-dripping through a filtration device.

  ‘You milk them.’

  ‘Something like that. They produce secretions. I refine and analyse the secretions. We’re on the sixteenth batch now—I call it Serum-16. It’s a slow, painstaking process, getting anywhere near a useful drug. The vorgs aren’t clever enough to work out the molecular formula of the compound they need to synthesise, so it’s a question of trial and error, working through the permutations.’ Ricasso scratched the white hair on the back of his neck. ‘It takes patience, and a ready supply of vorgs.’

  ‘And they just ... do this?’

  ‘They don’t have much choice. If they refuse, I kill them. Then I dismantle them and feed their remains to the other vorgs. They’re not fussy about a little biomechanical cannibalism.’

  ‘Even so.’

  ‘They have a highly developed survival instinct, so they don’t particularly want to die. I keep them alive, and they give me the drugs. It’s a very equitable arrangement. Secretly they harbour fantasies of taking over the ship, of course. They imagine they can assemble a fully operative vorg from the partially dismembered versions I have captive. Needless to say, it isn’t going to happen.’

  Quillon was glad to move away from the cages. ‘How do you test the drug?’

  ‘On rats and zebra finches, mainly, although anything with a reasonably developed nervous system will do. I mean actual rats, Doctor - not people from the ground. They have to come from outside our own zone, of course, or else they’re already too well adapted to be useful subjects. I place one control group on normal antizonals, another on no drugs at all, and I test the third group with the serum.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The results are ... encouraging. There’s still work to be done, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the project will succeed. Within twelve months I hope to test it on my first human subjects. Within a year I hope to begin widespread production and dispensing of the end-stage serum. I’ll need many more vorgs, of course, but that’s not an insurmountable problem. Freed of dependence on antizonals, there’ll be almost nowhere Swarm can’t reach.’

  ‘I could help you with this,’ Quillon said. ‘The testing of the batches must be laborious - wouldn’t you appreciate a second pair of hands down here?’

  ‘We barely know each other, Doctor.’

  ‘You know me well enough to show me all this. All I’m talking about is lifting some of the work from your shoulders. It’s not as if you’d need to teach me any medicine.’

  ‘You seem very keen.’

  ‘Of course I’m keen. Something like this could help the whole planet, not just Swarm.’

  ‘I don’t disagree. Equally, I see the need for caution and strict control. It’s both a cure and a weapon. We can’t go racing into this. If the Skullboys got their hands on it, there’d be nothing to contain them.’

  ‘But maybe they wouldn’t be Skullboys any more, if they had access to drugs that didn’t turn them into murderous, drooling lunatics.’

  ‘An experiment you’d be willing to sanction, Doctor?’ Ricasso’s tone showed that he had no great inclination to wait for an answer. ‘No; it’ll need to be dispensed with care. It’s chemical wildfire. Or it will be, when I reach the production batch.’

  ‘What happened to the previous runs?’

  ‘They just didn’t work out,’ Ricasso said. ‘You don’t need to worry about them.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  From a distance the fuel concentration depot was a dismal, rusting thicket of skeletal docking towers. It looked like a huddle of skyscrapers that had been flayed of glass and chrome and masonry, leaving only an armature of iron bones. They pushed up from a forlorn, mouse-grey landscape, a rugged, boulder-strewn steppe almost entirely denuded of vegetation. Only a few low-lying hills sheltered the towers from distant observation. Some had fallen, toppling onto the buildings and storage tanks below; others were leaning so precariously that it would have been brazen madness to bring an airship anywhere near them. That didn’t stop some of Swarm’s captains from doing just that. One by one the heavy tankers were brought in, engines droning against the prevailing wind, until they mated with the towers. Guylines were usually sufficient to stabilise the ships in favourable conditions. Here the towers flexed and swayed unnervingly under the varying loads, rivets popping free and girders springing away like flicked playing cards. Airmen scrambled down ladders to reach the pumps and valves on the ground. Some of the machines had been tested when Agraffe visited the site, but many had not been activated in years. They were iced over and seized tight with a thick caking of rust. Hammers clanged and flame-guns roared as the airmen tried to coax the petrified mechanisms back into something resembling serviceability. Even when it began to flow the fuel came desperately slowly, the ageing pumps barely able to lift it to the airships. The smaller craft could get in lower, nosing between the towers, but the tankers were much too big for that. Even now no one was exactly sure how much fuel remained in the tanks, or how much of that was not contaminated beyond the point of recovery. What was certain was that Swarm was not going anywhere for two or three days. All the while, the airworthy escort ships maintained a perimeter patrol, surveying the horizon for signs of enemy craft. This was a watering hole, and watering holes drew the hungry as well as the parched.

  It was a predictably nervous time. Painted Lady was still undergoing rep
airs, so she was not one of the ships tasked with protection duties. This chafed at Curtana almost as much as the fact that she had not been given permission to command another vessel in the interim. Quillon sensed her bristling impatience whenever they were together. She was glad to be with Agraffe, who was also ‘grounded’ aboard Purple Emperor while his ship was patched back together. But she was also itching to get away from Swarm’s hustle and bustle, back to the gin-clear skies where her hand was on the wheel and her authority total. When she wasn’t talking or listening, Curtana stole appraising glances through the nearest window, as if judging the meteorological conditions.

  He liked both of them. Agraffe was opinionated, hopelessly wedded to Swarm’s rightness in all things, but at no point had Quillon sensed even a speck of animosity in the man concerning his own nature. Agraffe didn’t like Spearpointers, that was clear, but it was a general prejudice and he was perfectly willing to make exceptions in individual cases. When Curtana or Ricasso or Gambeson were not around, Agraffe gave Quillon long and enthusiastic lectures on everything from the properties of high-altitude noctilucent clouds to the functioning of navigational gyroscopes and the business of aerial cartography. ‘I’m a good captain,’ he confessed to Quillon once, ‘but she’s better than me. Always will be. That’s no condemnation of my own abilities, though. It’s just that she’s Curtana and the rest of us aren’t. There’s only one Mother Goddess, and there’s only one Curtana. The rest of us are foothills.’ He smiled quickly. ‘Not that I’m putting her on a pedestal or anything.’