Terminal World

by Alastair Reynolds

‘How much of that is natural talent, and how much did she learn from her father?’

  ‘Anyone’s guess. All I know is that ship listens to her hand on the helm like it wants her to command it. I’ve taken her out once - Painted Lady, I mean. She fought me all the way. Oh, I got her under control eventually - but it was more brute force than airmanship. Then Curtana takes over and it’s like she’s soothing an animal. That was when I knew I’d never have what she has.’ He said this in the relieved tones of a man who had not only abandoned an impossible goal, but realised that there was no humiliation in doing so.

  By way of consolation Quillon offered, ‘I’m sure it would be the same if she tried to fly your ship.’

  ‘That’s the point, though. I’ve seen her take command of Iron Prominent - that’s my ship. She’s got her own quirks, her own temper. And Curtana just shrugged and took the reins, and she was flying almost as well as if I’d been at the helm. Not as well, but damned close. She’s born to it, Doctor. She’s a creature of the air, like yourself.’ He shook his head in marvel and wonderment. ‘We’re lucky to have her. We’re lucky we even live in the same century she does.’

  ‘You don’t mind the time apart?’

  ‘We make up for it.’ Agraffe hesitated. They were on one of the balconies, watching the refuelling operations from what was either a generously safe distance or a perilously close vantage point, depending on Quillon’s vacillating state of mind. The air smelled charged and flammable, waiting for a spark, a mistake, a moment’s inattention. ‘What about you, Doctor? Was there anyone in Spearpoint?’

  ‘There was, once.’

  ‘I don’t even know if angels have lovers, or whether the sexes come into it.’

  ‘It’s rather complicated.’

  ‘As I suspected.’

  ‘We have sexes. There are male angels and female angels. We have other sexes. We have reproductive organs and we look different from each other, at least in our own eyes. But those differences are subtle enough that a human physician wouldn’t necessarily see them. We’re ... aerodynamic. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.’

  Agraffe gave an uncertain smile. ‘But when you came down to Neon Heights—’

  ‘I was human enough to pass close physical examination, yes. Now I’m in a state of transition. I’m not sure if I’ll ever look exactly like an angel again. But I will certainly look ... unusual.’

  ‘And this other angel ... was she ... was the angel ... a woman?’

  ‘Her name was Aruval. I loved her when she was an angel, and I loved her when we had both been changed to look human. We were sent down together, part of the same infiltration party.’ He swallowed, conscious of a sudden dryness in his throat. Below, one of the airships was undocking from its refuelling point, pushing back like a pollen-laden bee departing a flower. ‘Aruval didn’t know the whole truth about the infiltration programme. Nor did I. We thought the purpose was merely to prove that it could be done, and then leave it at that. But our masters wanted to go much further. They wanted to engineer an army of infiltrators, an invading force that could sweep through Neon Heights and the rest of Spearpoint. The cosmetic modifications were almost an irrelevance. What really mattered was our enhanced zone tolerance.’

  ‘Aruval found this out?’

  ‘Almost by accident. The other two were in on the secret. Aruval grew suspicious when she caught them concealing extra drugs and weapons that we knew nothing about. She revealed her fears to me, but neither of us was ready to act until we knew more about what was going on. Then they killed Aruval. They tried to make it look like an accident, of course, and perhaps I’d have believed them if she hadn’t already confided in me. But by then I knew.’

  ‘How did they kill her?’

  ‘The three of them were off on a mission. One of our drug supplies had become tainted so we needed to obtain more stocks. Fortunately it was one of the less complicated drugs and there was a close commercial analogue in Neon Heights. They went to break into a pharmaceutical warehouse in the Second District. I stayed behind in the safe house, as I usually did. I was the medical specialist, you see. I’d been closely involved in the infiltration programme all along, working with the surgeons, the machine-programmers and the drug developers. I knew what had been done to us, and I knew what we all needed to stay alive. I monitored the others - and myself, of course - and made tiny adjustments to our therapeutic regime.’ Quillon took a heavy breath of cold, faintly toxic air. ‘Anyway: Aruval was pushed down a lift shaft in the warehouse. They said they’d run into security guards, had to make a quick exit, become separated, and Aruval had mistaken a service door for the open lift shaft. They were supposed to go back the next day and recover the body, or at least burn the warehouse down - anything to prevent Aruval from ending up on an autopsy table. But I knew the truth. I also knew that, once I’d helped with the disposal of her body, I’d be next. They were preparing to go deep, and I was a very conspicuous loose end. So that night I informed them that I needed to correct a slight imbalance in their medication. They submitted, as they always did. They had no reason to presume I suspected a thing. That may seem strange to you, but you must bear one thing in mind. Our faces were not our own. We had complete muscular control of them, but they were not the faces we had been born with. Nor did we have a lifetime’s experience reading nuances of expression, or hearing deception in each other’s voices. It was easier than you’d think to lie to each other.’ Quillon looked down at his gloved hands, tight on the railing. ‘I murdered my colleagues. I mixed fatal doses. I administered them. It was not a good way to die.’

  ‘You had no other choice.’

  ‘That made precious little difference, when they started dying.’

  ‘And afterwards?’

  ‘I attempted to hide the evidence of their crime, and mine. I was only partially successful. A man - a good man - came after me. He was a policeman, and he knew only that at least one murder had taken place. He had no way of knowing that this was an internal matter amongst the angels, so he pursued his case with a certain dogged relentlessness. And it led him to me. His name was Fray.’

  ‘I guess he didn’t turn you in.’

  ‘We came to an arrangement. I always wondered if he might betray me, but he never did. It was not his fault that I had to leave Spearpoint. In fact, I’d have been dead if he hadn’t helped me escape. So I don’t hate all humans. I don’t even hate most of them.’

  ‘I guess you’re wondering what’s happened to Fray, and anyone else you left behind.’

  ‘It’s crossed my mind.’

  ‘There’ll have been emergency provisions, Doctor. Spearpoint isn’t Swarm, but it still has governments and committees and civil contingency plans. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘I didn’t see much evidence of civil contingency plans taking hold after I left. I saw what looked like a city taking its terminal breath.’

  ‘Then you were lucky to get out when you did. So was Meroka.’

  ‘Strangely enough, that’s not quite how it feels.’ Quillon reached up to steady his airman’s cap, which a freak gust had threatened to dislodge. Day by day, even the cap seemed to fit him less tightly, the bones of his skull contracting. ‘But I don’t suppose I should be surprised. I can’t be the only exile who’s ever felt like a traitor, and I doubt I’ll be the last.’

  ‘Incoming,’ Agraffe said quietly, as if it was a response to Quillon’s statement.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Incoming,’ he repeated, and directed Quillon’s attention to an almost invisibly small dot on the horizon.

  ‘Is it one of ours?’

  ‘Of course,’ Agraffe said, mildly affronted. ‘It’s not on fire.’

  The new ship was Brimstone, and Brimstone brought news. She had caught up with Swarm, having returned to the earlier rendezvous point a day after the other ships had departed. A tethered balloon had been left in the crater, loaded with a coded message informing Brimstone of Swarm’s intentions.

  L
ike the other returning scouts, she had seen close action. Her envelope, gondola and control surfaces were peppered with bullet and shell holes. Half her empennage had been torn bloodily away. She was down one engine, and had been forced to thrash the others to stand a chance of making this rendezvous. Injury and sickness had depleted her crew, taking her captain and senior officer, as well as many hands. Months of work would be required to return Brimstone to operable condition, assuming she was not retired and recycled and her name attached to some newer, if not markedly superior, craft.

  None of that was of any particular consequence, however, compared to the information she conveyed.

  The intelligence was twofold. Partly it concerned improved data on the new zone patterns. Brimstone had surveyed change boundaries across several thousand leagues and had detected that the habitable zones now pushed some way - possibly all the way - into what had once been the Bane. Much was still unknown, the global charts largely useless, but it was a start on remapping the world. Across Swarm, cartographers were busy inking in the new boundaries: solid where they were certain, dashed where they were questionable, a series of dots where they were little more than conjecture. Hatched lines and inked shades indicated the probable conditions within each zone, annotated with symbolic summaries of what would and wouldn’t work.

  More crucially, Brimstone had intercepted a semaphore transmission. Far to the east of Swarm’s present position, at least one signalling chain had resumed - or perhaps never entirely ceased - transmission. The guilds on Radial Nine were keeping the Skullboys at bay, at least for now. A number of repeating stations had been lost, but when atmospheric conditions were favourable, messages could be leapfrogged across twice the usual distance. The towers were therefore not sending at anything like their usual rate, but they were working, and something like news - albeit scrappy and disjointed - was flowing along the chain. The direction of transmission was almost entirely away from Spearpoint, to an even greater extent than before the storm. Even if that news had been indecipherable, it would have confirmed that someone was still alive, someone very desirous of communicating with the outside world.

  But the news was decipherable, and the news was not good. Spearpoint was in agony, just as Quillon had suspected. The only saving grace was that it hadn’t died yet.

  Across the structure, the old zones had shifted convulsively, making a mockery of the old districts, the old certainties. It was pointless now to speak of any difference between Neon Heights and Steamtown. Steamtown’s zone had swelled and now encompassed a much greater volume of Spearpoint, both up and down. The former zones of Neon Heights and Circuit City had shrunk, and what had been the Celestial Levels was now distended, stretched to the point of rupture, its frayed extremities reaching much further down. Horsetown had fractured, meaning that there was no longer a low-technology moat surrounding Spearpoint; no longer any effective barrier to mechanised incursion. Already there were reports of Skullboys massing around the base, and beginning to launch raids onto the low-lying ledges, one or two turns up the spiral. By the same token, angels - or creatures very like angels - had been reported descending beneath the old limit of the Celestial Levels. They were pushing into zones that, ordinarily, would have proven lethal. They weren’t dying, yet.

  But the city was dark and almost without power, amenities and transportation. Systems that had been highly tuned to one zone no longer functioned. For all that the angels were descending, the Celestial Levels were devoid of light and the flickering indicators of ceaseless, soul-catching computation. Electrical generators lay silent and smoking in the former Neon Heights, the trains and slot-cars and funiculars deathly inert. The steam stations lower down were still theoretically viable, but there was no ready supply of wood to feed them, and their workforces had been decimated by crippling zone sickness. Against this background, the civil contingency schemes stood little chance of being implemented according to plan. Even if there were stockpiles of antizonals secreted around Spearpoint, it was all but impossible to organise their efficient distribution and dispensation. The very people who were supposed to coordinate the effort were themselves victims of the storm, and the hospitals and clinics where the drugs were meant to be doled out in orderly fashion were now little more than dank, terror-filled asylums, crammed with panicked, dying or hallucinating citizens, the staff and patients all but indistinguishable from each other. Unsurprisingly, those precious stockpiles of drugs were being pilfered enthusiastically. There was no central authority operating in any of the former zones, no effective police force or martial law. In this power void, criminal elements were seizing what they could, and leveraging themselves into positions of local influence, however tenuous and short-lived it might prove. They were intercepting antizonals and fuel. No one dared guess how long Spearpoint had before the drugs ran out, and zone sickness took its inevitable toll. Spearpoint might endure for weeks, maybe - depending on certain barely known variables - months. It was almost certainly not going to see out the winter.

  Sooner or later Radial Nine would succumb. Sooner or later there would be no one capable of transmitting from any of the sender stations in Spearpoint. Until such a time arrived, there was only one rational thing left to do. It might be pointless, it might be in vain, it might be a shout into uncaring silence, it might be an abnegation of centuries of proud independence. Still it had to be done.

  Spearpoint was doing the one thing it had never done in its existence. It was asking for help.

  Later that day, while the refuelling operation was still underway, Quillon was called to Ricasso’s stateroom. He had been asking after Meroka, gladdened to hear that her progress was continuing, disappointed that she still did not wish to speak to him. It was earlier than they usually met and he wondered exactly what Ricasso wanted to discuss. Even as he ruminated over the possibilities, sifting through the many questions he meant to ask Ricasso, he felt a stirring tingle of disquiet. Nothing about the atmosphere in the stateroom seemed calculated to dispel his unease. Ricasso stood at his usual window, but there was a tension emanating from his portly figure that Quillon had not detected before. He conjectured that Brimstone must have brought some other news, something so utterly, viciously demoralising that it could only be shared at this level, between people already bound by one secret. Then he saw that the room also contained Curtana, Agraffe, Doctor Gambeson and Commander Spatha, and also a seated Meroka - who did not look at all happy about having to be within ten spans of him - and he began to suspect that Brimstone had very little to do with his problems.

  ‘Sit down, Doctor,’ Ricasso said, failing to turn from the window. It was nearing dusk and the ships were still gathering around their feeding points, the operation even more fraught than it had been during the hours of clear daylight. Worse, a milk-white fog was curling in from the north-west, pushing exploratory fingertips over the surrounding hills. It would be on them soon. That probably accounted for some of Ricasso’s mood, but not all of it.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ Quillon asked, sinking into his customary seat. The furnishings had not been altered, but the chair felt noticeably less accommodating than before.

  ‘Tell him,’ Curtana said.

  ‘We know about the girl,’ Doctor Gambeson said. ‘We know about the mark on her head, and we know what it means.’

  ‘A tectomancer,’ Ricasso said, drawling the word out syllable by syllable.

  ‘Can we take it as a given,’ Gambeson went on, ‘that this was the matter you were so keen for us not to discover, Doctor? So much so that you placed your own life at risk, by revealing your own nature, in the hope that it would distract us?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about the girl,’ Quillon said.

  Spatha walked around to where he was seated and leaned in until his breath was warm in Quillon’s face. ‘Let’s skip this part, shall we? The bit where you feign ignorance, until you realise how futile it’s going to be? You examined the mother and the girl, Quillon. You can’t have missed that mark
, or failed to realise its significance.’

  ‘He saw the mark,’ Meroka said, speaking for the first time since Quillon had entered. ‘He just didn’t take it as seriously as you stupid dumb fucks are taking it.’

  Something like a smile twitched across Spatha’s face. ‘Then why did he hide it from us?’

  ‘Because he knew how you’d react.’ Despite her bandages, Meroka sat with her arms folded across her chest, looking as if she was ready to pick a fight - and continue it, and probably win it—with anyone in the room foolish enough to make eye contact with her. ‘I took a bullet for you idiots, all right? I helped defend your piece-of-shit blimp. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re all a bunch of superstitious, hypocritical fuckheads. You’ve got your guns and your clever gyroscopes, but you’re still only one scary little birthmark away from wetting yourselves. Me and Cutter, we don’t have much to say to each other right now. But I’ll give the lying, treacherous bastard this much: he knows you better than you know yourselves. Reason he protected that girl wasn’t because he believes in all that witchery hokum. He did it because he knew you wouldn’t be able to stop yourselves, and he didn’t like to think what you’d do to her.’

  ‘Oh, we’re a bit more educated than that.’ Curtana said. ‘And incidentally, they’re dirigibles, not blimps.’

  ‘Whatever you say, little Miss Sky-Princess. But I’ll tell you one thing. Where I’m sitting, I’m seeing a lot of scared, fidgety Swarmers.’

  At last, and with imperial slowness, Ricasso turned from the window. ‘I take it you’re not a believer, Meroka?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I don’t believe.’ He paused theatrically. ‘In anything. I question. I doubt. I doubt and I doubt consistently and systematically. It’s called thinking scientifically.’

  ‘I hope you understand what the fuck that means,’ Meroka said, ‘because I sure don’t.’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect you to, my dear. The world isn’t exactly conducive to scientific thinking. Not in its present condition. But it’s changing, and so must we. Those of us who can, anyway.’