Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Don’t you get it? It’s a ruse, a trick. Our engines were fine until we let her aboard. Then all of a sudden they start misbehaving, and she turns out to be the only one who can help us.”

  “There’s also the matter of the other ship Weps says is closing on us.”

  “That ship might not even exist. It could be a sensor ghost, a hallucination she’s making the Petronel see.”

  “Captain—”

  “That would work for her, wouldn’t it? It would be exactly the excuse she needs to force our hands.”

  We were in his cabin, with the door locked: I’d warned him I had a matter of grave sensitivity that we needed to discuss. “I don’t think this is any of her doing,” I said calmly, vowing to hold my temper under better control than before. “She’s too far from the engines or sensor systems to be having any mental effect on them, even if we hadn’t locked her in a room that’s practically a Faraday cage to begin with. She says one or other of the engines was damaged during the engagement with the Cockatrice, and I’ve no reason to disbelieve that. I think you’re wrong about her.”

  “She’s got us right where she wants us, lad. She’s done something to the engines, and now—if you get your way—we’re going to let her get up close and personal with them.”

  “And do what?” I asked.

  “Whatever takes her fancy. Blowing us all up is one possibility. Did you consider that?”

  “She’d blow herself up as well.”

  “Maybe that’s exactly the plan. Could be that she prefers dying to staying alive, if being shut out from the rest of the Spiders is as bad as you say it is. She didn’t seem to be real keen on being rescued from that wreck, did she? Maybe she was hoping to die aboard it.”

  “She looked like she was trying to stay alive to me, Captain. There were a hundred ways she could have killed herself aboard the Cockatrice before we boarded, and she didn’t. I think she was just scared of us, scared that we were going to be like all the other Ultras. That’s why she kept running.”

  “A nice theory, lad. It’s a pity so much is hanging on it, or I might be inclined to give it a moment’s credence.”

  “We have no choice but to trust her. If we don’t let her try something, most of us won’t ever see another system.”

  “Easy for you to say, son.”

  “I’m in this as well. I’ve got just as much to lose as anyone else on this ship.”

  Van Ness studied me for what felt like an eternity. Until now his trust in my competence had always been implicit, but Weather’s arrival had changed all that.

  “My wife didn’t die in a terraforming accident,” he said slowly, not quite able to meet my eyes as he spoke. “I lied to you about that, probably because I wanted to start believing the lie myself. But now it’s time you heard the truth, which is that the Spiders took her. She was a technician, an expert in Martian landscaping. She’d been working on the Schiaparelli irrigation scheme when she was caught behind Spider lines during the Sabaea Offensive. They stole her from me, and turned her into one of them. Took her to their recruitment theatres, where they opened her head and pumped it full of their machines. Rewired her mind to make her think and feel like them.”

  “I’m sorry,” I began. “That must have been so hard—”

  “That’s not the hard part. I was told that she’d been executed, but three years later I saw her again. She’d been taken prisoner by the Coalition for Neural Purity, and they were trying to turn her back into a person. They hadn’t ever done it before, so my wife was to be a test subject. They invited me to their compound in Tychoplex, on Earth’s Moon, hoping I might be able to bring her back. I didn’t want to do it. I knew it wasn’t going to work; that it was always going to be easier thinking that she was already dead.”

  “What happened?”

  “When she saw me, she remembered me. She called me by name, just as if we’d only been apart a few minutes. But there was a coldness in her eyes. Actually, it was something beyond coldness. Coldness would mean she felt some recognisably human emotion, even if it was dislike or contempt. It wasn’t like that. The way she looked at me, it was as if she was looking at a piece of broken furniture, or a dripping tap, or a pattern of mould on the wall. As if it vaguely bothered her that I existed, or was the shape I was, but that she could feel nothing stronger than that.”

  “It wasn’t your wife any more,” I said. “Your wife died the moment they took her.”

  “That’d be nice to believe, wouldn’t it? Trouble is, I’ve never been able to. And trust me, lad: I’ve had long enough to dwell on things. I know a part of my wife survived what they did to her in the theatres. It just wasn’t the part that gave a damn about me any more.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, feeling as if I’d been left drifting in space while the ship raced away from me. “I had no idea.”

  “I just wanted you to know: with me and the Spiders, it isn’t an irrational prejudice. From where I’m sitting, it feels pretty damn rational.” Then he drew an enormous intake of breath, as if he needed sustenance for what was to come. “Take the girl to the engine if you think it’s the only way we’ll get out of this mess. But don’t let her out of your sight for one second. And if you get the slightest idea that she might be trying something—and I mean the slightest idea—you kill her, there and then.”

  I CLAMPED THE collar around Weather’s neck. It was a heavy ring fashioned from rough black metal. “I’m sorry about this,” I told her, “but it’s the only way Van Ness will let me take you out of this room. Tell me if it hurts, and I’ll try to do something about it.”

  “You won’t need to,” she said.

  The collar was a crude old thing that had been lying around the Petronel since her last bruising contact with pirates. It was modified from the connecting ring of a space helmet, the kind that would amputate and shock-freeze the head if it detected massive damage to the body below the neck. Inside the collar was a noose of monofilament wire, primed to tighten to the diameter of a human hair in less than a second. There were complicated moving parts in the collar, but nothing that a Conjoiner could influence. The collar trailed a thumb-thick cable from its rear, which ran all the way to an activating box on my belt. I’d only need to give the box a hard thump with the heel of my hand, and Weather would be decapitated. That wouldn’t necessarily mean she’d die instantly—with all those machines in her head, Weather would be able to remain conscious for quite some time afterwards—but I was reasonably certain it would limit her options for doing harm.

  “For what it’s worth,” I told her as we made our way out to the connecting spar, “I’m not expecting to have to use this. But I want you to be clear that I will if I have to.”

  She walked slightly ahead of me, the cable hanging between us. “You seem different, Inigo. What happened between you and the captain, while you were gone?”

  The truth couldn’t hurt, I decided. “Van Ness told me something I didn’t know. It put things into perspective. I understand now why he might not feel positively disposed towards Conjoiners.”

  “And does that alter the way you think about me?”

  I said nothing for several paces. “I don’t know, Weather. Until now I never really gave much thought to those horror stories about the Spiders. I assumed they’d been exaggerated, the way things often are during wartime.”

  “But now you’ve seen the light. You realise that, in fact, we are monsters after all.”

  “I didn’t say that. But I’ve just learned that something I always thought untrue—that Conjoiners would take prisoners and convert them into other Conjoiners—really happened.”

  “To Van Ness?”

  She didn’t need to know all the facts. “To someone close to him. The worst was that he got to meet that person after her transformation.”

  After a little while, Weather said, “Mistakes were made. Very, very bad mistakes.”

  “How can you call taking someone prisoner and stuffing their skull full of C
onjoiner machinery a ‘mistake,’ Weather? You must have known exactly what you were doing, exactly what it would do to the prisoner.”

  “Yes, we did,” she said, “but we considered it a kindness. That was the mistake, Inigo. And it was a kindness, too: no one who tasted Transenlightenment ever wanted to go back to the experiential mundanity of retarded consciousness. But we did not anticipate how distressing this might be to those who had known the candidates beforehand.”

  “He felt that she didn’t love him any more.”

  “That wasn’t the case. It’s just that everything else in her universe had become so heightened, so intense, that the love for another individual could no longer hold her interest. It had become just one facet in a much larger mosaic.”

  “And you don’t think that was cruel?”

  “I said it was a mistake. But if Van Ness had joined her…if Van Ness had submitted to the Conjoined, known Transenlightenment for himself…they would have reconnected on a new level of personal intimacy.”

  I wondered how she could be so certain. “That doesn’t help Van Ness now.”

  “We wouldn’t make the same mistake again. If there were ever to be… difficulties again, we wouldn’t take candidates so indiscriminately.”

  “But you’d still take some.”

  “We’d still consider it a kindness,” Weather said.

  Not much was said as we traversed the connecting spar out to the starboard engine. I watched Weather alertly, transfixed by the play of colours across her cooling crest. Eventually she whirled around and said, “I’m not going to do anything, Inigo, so stop worrying about it. This collar’s bad enough, without feeling you watching my every move.”

  “Maybe the collar isn’t going to help us,” I said. “Van Ness thinks you want to blow up the ship. I guess if you had a way to do that, we wouldn’t get much warning.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. But I’m not going to blow up the ship. That’s not within my power, unless you let me turn the input dials all the way into the red. Even Voulage wasn’t that stupid.”

  I wiped my sweat-damp hand on the thigh of my trousers. “We don’t know much about how these engines work. Are you sensing anything from them yet?”

  “A little,” she admitted. “There’s crosstalk between the two units, but I don’t have the implants to make sense of that. Most Conjoiners don’t need anything that specialised, unless they work in the drive creches, educating the engines.”

  “The engines need educating?”

  Not answering me directly, she said, “I can feel the engine now. Effective range for my implants is a few dozen metres under these conditions. We must be very close.”

  “We are,” I said as we turned a corner. Ahead lay the hexagonal arrangement of input dials. They were all showing blue-green now, but only because I’d throttled the engine back to a whisper of thrust.

  “I’ll need to get closer if I’m going to be any use to you,” Weather told me.

  “Step up to the panel. But don’t touch anything until I give you permission.”

  I knew there wasn’t much harm she could do here, even if she started pushing the dials. She’d need to move more than one to make things dangerous, and I could drop her long before she had a chance to do that. But I was still nervous as she stood next to the hexagon and cocked her head to one side.

  I thought of what lay on the other side of that wall. Having traversed the spar, we were now immediately inboard of the engine, about halfway along its roughly cylindrical shape. The engine extended for one hundred and ten metres ahead of me, and for approximately two hundred and fifty metres in either direction to my left and right. It was sheathed in several layers of conventional hull material, anchored to the Petronel by a shock-absorbing cradle and wrapped in a mesh of sensors and steering-control systems. Like any shipmaster, my understanding of those elements was so total that it no longer counted as acquired knowledge. It had become an integral part of my personality.

  But I knew nothing of the engine itself. My log book, with its reams of codified notes and annotations, implied a deep and scholarly grasp of all essential principles. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Conjoiner drive was essentially a piece of magic we’d been handed on a plate, like a coiled baby dragon. It came with instructions on how to tame its fire, and make sure it did not come to harm, but we were forbidden from probing its mysteries. The most important rule that applied to a Conjoiner engine was a simple one: there were no user-serviceable components inside. Tamper with an engine—attempt to take it apart, in the hope of reverse-engineering it—and the engine would self-destruct in a mini-nova powerful enough to crack open a small moon. Across settled space, there was no shortage of mildly radioactive craters testifying to failed attempts to break that one prohibition.

  Ultras didn’t care, as a rule. Ultras, by definition, already had Conjoiner drives. It was governments and rich planet-bound individuals who kept learning the hard way. The Conjoiner argument was brutal in its simplicity: there were principles embodied in their drives that “retarded” humanity just wasn’t ready to absorb. We were meant to count ourselves lucky that they let us have the engines in the first place. We weren’t meant to go poking our thick monkey fingers into their innards.

  And so long as the engines kept working, few of us had any inclination to do so.

  Weather took a step back. “It’s not good news, I’m afraid. I thought that perhaps the dial indications might be in error, suggesting that there was a fault where none existed…but that isn’t the case.”

  “You can feel that the engine is really damaged?”

  “Yes,” she told me. “And it’s this one, the starboard unit.”

  “What’s wrong with it? Is it anything we can fix?”

  “One question at a time, Inigo.” Weather smiled tolerantly before continuing, “There’s been extensive damage to critical engine components, too much for the engine’s own self-repair systems to address. The engine hasn’t failed completely, but certain reaction pathways have now become computationally intractable, which is why you’re seeing the drastic loss in drive efficiency. The engine is being forced to explore other pathways, those that it can still manage given its existing resources. But they don’t deliver the same output energy.”

  She was telling me everything and nothing. “I don’t really understand,” I admitted. “Are you saying there’s nothing that can be done to repair it?”

  “Not here. At a dedicated Conjoiner manufacturing facility, certainly. We’d only make things worse.”

  “We can’t run on just the port engine, either—not without rebuilding the entire ship. If we were anywhere near a moon or asteroid, that might just be an option, but not when we’re so far out.”

  “I’m sorry the news isn’t better. You’ll just have to resign yourselves to a longer trip than you were expecting.”

  “It’s worse than that. There’s another ship closing in on us, probably another raider like Voulage. It’s very close now. If we don’t start running soon, they’ll be on us.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me this sooner?”

  “Would it have made any difference?”

  “To the trust between us, possibly.”

  “I’m sorry, Weather. I didn’t want to distract you. I thought things were bad enough as they were.”

  “And you thought I’d be able to work a miracle if I wasn’t distracted?”

  I nodded hopelessly. I realised that, as naive as it might seem, I’d been expecting Weather to wave a hand over the broken engine and restore it to full, glittering functionality. But knowing something of the interior workings of the drive was not the same as being able to fix it.

  “Are we really out of options?” I asked.

  “The engine is already doing all it can to provide maximum power, given the damage it has taken. There really is no scope to make things better.”

  Desperate for some source of optimism, I thought back to what Weather had said a few mome
nts before. “When you talked about the computations, you seemed to be saying that the engine needed to do some number-crunching to make itself work.”

  Weather looked conflicted. “I’ve already said too much, Inigo.”

  “But if we’re going to die out here, it doesn’t matter what you tell me, does it? Failing that, I’ll swear a vow of silence. How does that sound?”

  “No one has ever come close to working out how our engines function,” Weather said. “We’ve played our hand in that, of course: putting out more than our share of misinformation over the years. And it’s worked, too. We’ve kept careful tabs on the collective thinking concerning our secrets. We’ve always had contingencies in place to disrupt any research that might be headed in the right direction. So far we’ve never had cause to use a single one of them. If I were to reveal key information to you, I would have more to worry about than just being an outcast. My people would come after me. They’d hunt me down, and then they’d hunt you down as well. Conjoiners will consider any necessary act, up to and including local genocide, to protect the secrets of the C-drive.” She paused for a moment, letting me think she was finished, before continuing on the same grave note, “But having said that, there are layers to our secrets. I can’t reveal the detailed physical principles upon which the drive depends, but I can tell you that the conditions in the drive, when it is at full functionality, are enormously complex and chaotic. Your ship may ride a smooth thrust beam, but the reactions going on inside the drive are anything but smooth. There is a small mouth into hell inside every engine: bubbling, frothing, subject to vicious and unpredictable state-changes.”

  “Which the engine needs to smooth out.”

  “Yes. And to do so, the engine needs to think through some enormously complex, parallel computational problems. When all is well, when the engine is intact and running inside its normal operational envelope, the burden is manageable. But if you ask too much of the engine, or damage it in some way, that burden becomes heavier. Eventually it exceeds the means of the engine, and the reactions become uncontrolled.”