Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Nova.”

  “Quite,” Weather said, favouring my response with a tiny nod.

  “Then let me get this straight,” I said. “The engine’s damaged, but it could still work if the computations weren’t so complicated.”

  Weather answered me guardedly. “Yes, but don’t underestimate how difficult those computations have now become. I can feel the strain this engine is under, just holding things together as they are.”

  “I’m not underestimating it. I’m just wondering if we couldn’t help it do better. Couldn’t we load in some new software, or assist the engine by hooking in the Petronel’s own computers?”

  “I really wish it was that simple.”

  “I’m sorry. My questions must seem quite simple-minded. But I’m just trying to make sure we aren’t missing anything obvious.”

  “We aren’t,” she said. “Take my word on it.”

  I RETURNED WEATHER to her quarters and removed the collar. Where it had been squeezing her neck, the skin was marked with a raw pink band, spotted with blood. I threw the hateful thing into the corner of the room and returned with a medical kit.

  “You should have said something,” I told her as I dabbed at the abrasions with a disinfectant swab. “I didn’t realise it was cutting into you all that time. You seemed so cool, so focused. But that must have been hurting all the while.”

  “I told you I could turn off pain.”

  “Are you turning it off now?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you keep flinching.”

  Weather reached up suddenly and took my wrist, almost making me drop the swab. The movement was as swift as a snakebite, but although she held me firmly, I sensed no aggressive intentions. “Now it’s my turn not to understand,” she said. “You were hoping I might be able to do something for you. I couldn’t. That means you’re in as much trouble as you ever were. Worse, if anything, because now you’ve heard it from me. But you’re still treating me with kindness.”

  “Would you rather we didn’t?”

  “I assumed that as soon as my usefulness to you had come to an end—”

  “You assumed wrongly. We’re not that kind of crew.”

  “And your captain?”

  “He’ll keep his word. Killing you would never have been Van Ness’s style.” I finished disinfecting her neck and began to rummage through the medical kit for a strip of bandage. “We’re all just going to have to make do as best we can, you included. Van Ness reckoned we should send out a distress call and wait for rescue. I wasn’t so keen on that idea before, but now I’m beginning to wonder if maybe it isn’t so bad after all.” She said nothing. I wondered if she was thinking of exactly the same objections I’d voiced to Van Ness, when he raised the idea. “We still have a ship, that’s the main thing. Just because we aren’t moving as fast as we’d like—”

  “I’d like to see Van Ness,” Weather said.

  “I’m not sure he’d agree.”

  “Tell him it’s about his wife. Tell him he can trust me, with or without that silly collar.”

  I WENT TO fetch the captain. He took some persuading before he even agreed to look at Weather, and even then he wouldn’t come within twenty metres of her. I told her to wait at the door to her room, which faced a long service corridor.

  “I’m not going to touch you, Captain,” she called, her voice echoing from the corridor’s ribbed metal walls. “You can come as close as you like. I can barely smell you at this distance, let alone sense your neural emissions.”

  “This’ll do nicely,” Van Ness said. “Inigo told me you had something you wanted to say to me. That right, or was it just a ruse to get me near to you, so you could reach into my head and make me see and think whatever you like?”

  She appeared not to hear him. “I take it Inigo’s told you about the engine.”

  “Told me you had a good old look at it and decided there was nothing you could do. Maybe things would have been different if you hadn’t had that collar on, though, eh?”

  “You mean I might have sabotaged the engine, to destroy myself and the ship? No, Captain, I don’t think I would have. If I had any intention of killing myself, you’d already made it easy enough with that collar.” She glanced at me. “I could have reached Inigo and pressed that control box while the nervous impulse from his brain was still working its way down his forearm. All he’d have seen was a grey blur, followed by a lot of arterial blood.”

  I thought back to the speed with which she’d reached up and grabbed my forearm, and knew she wasn’t lying.

  “So why didn’t you?” Van Ness asked.

  “Because I wanted to help you if I could. Until I saw the engine—until I got close enough to feel its emissions—I couldn’t know for sure that the problem wasn’t something quite trivial.”

  “Except it wasn’t. Inigo says it isn’t fixable.”

  “Inigo’s right. The technical fault can’t be repaired, not without use of Conjoiner technology. But now that I’ve had time to think about it, mull things over, it occurs to me that there may be something I can do for you.”

  I looked at her. “Really?”

  “Let me finish what I have to say, Inigo,” she said warningly, “then we’ll go down to the engine and I’ll make everything clear. Captain Van Ness—about your wife.”

  “What would you know about my wife?” Van Ness asked her angrily.

  “More than you realise. I know because I’m a—I was—a Conjoiner.”

  “As if I didn’t know.”

  “We started on Mars, Captain Van Ness—just a handful of us. I wasn’t alive then, but from the moment Galiana brought our new state of consciousness into being, the thread of memory has never been broken. There are many branches to our great tree now, in many systems—but we all carry the memories of those who went before us, before the family was torn asunder. I don’t just mean the simple fact that we remember their names, what they looked like and what they did. I mean we carry their living experiences with us, into the future.” Weather swallowed, something catching in her throat. “Sometimes we’re barely aware of any of this. It’s as if there’s this vast sea of collective experience lapping at the shore of consciousness, but it’s only every now and then that it floods us, leaving us awash in sorrow and joy. Sorrow because those are the memories of the dead, all that’s left of them. Joy because something has endured, and while it does they can’t truly be dead, can they? I feel Remontoire sometimes, when I look at something in a certain analytic way. There’s a jolt of déjà vu and I realise it isn’t because I’ve experienced it before, but because Remontoire did. We all feel the memories of the earliest Conjoiners the most strongly.”

  “And my wife?” Van Ness asked, like a man frightened of what he might hear.

  “Your wife was just one of many candidates who entered Transenlightenment during the troubles. You lost her then, and saw her once more when the Coalition took her prisoner. It was distressing for you because she did not respond to you on a human level.”

  “Because you’d ripped everything human out of her,” Van Ness said.

  Weather shook her head calmly, refusing to be goaded. “No. We’d taken almost nothing. The difficulty was that we’d added too much, too quickly. That was why it was so hard for her, and so upsetting for you. But it didn’t have to be that way. The last thing we wanted was to frighten possible future candidates. It would have worked much better for us if your wife had shown love and affection to you, and then begged you to follow her into the wonderful new world she’d been shown.”

  Something of Weather’s manner seemed to blunt Van Ness’s indignation. “That doesn’t help me much. It doesn’t help my wife at all.”

  “I haven’t finished. The last time you saw your wife was in that Coalition compound. You assumed—as you continue to assume—that she ended her days there, an emotionless zombie haunting the shell of the woman you once knew. But that isn’t what happened. She came back to us, you see.”

&n
bsp; “I thought Conjoiners never returned to the fold,” I said.

  “Things were different then. It was war. Any and all candidates were welcome, even those who might have suffered destabilising isolation away from Transenlightenment. And Van Ness’s wife wasn’t like me. She hadn’t been born into it. Her depth of immersion into Transenlightenment was inevitably less profound than that of a Conjoiner who’d been swimming in data since they were a foetus.”

  “You’re lying,” Van Ness said. “My wife died in Coalition custody three years after I saw her.”

  “No,” Weather said patiently. “She did not. Conjoiners took Tychoplex and returned all the prisoners to Transenlightenment. The Coalition was suffering badly at the time and could not afford the propaganda blow of losing such a valuable arm of its research programme. So it lied and covered up the loss of Tychoplex. But in fact your wife was alive and well.” Weather looked at him levelly. “She is dead now, Captain Van Ness. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I hope it will not come as too shocking a blow, given what you have always believed.”

  “When did she die?”

  “Thirty-one years later, in another system, during the malfunction of one of our early drives. It was very fast and utterly painless.”

  “Why are you telling me this? What difference does it make to me, here and now? She’s still gone. She still became one of you.”

  “I am telling you,” Weather answered, “because her memories are part of me. I won’t pretend that they’re as strong as Remontoire’s, because by the time your wife was recruited, more than five thousand had already joined our ranks. Hers was one new voice amongst many. But none of those voices were silent: they were all heard, and something of them has reached down through all these years.”

  “Again: why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I have a message from your wife. She committed it to the collective memory long before her death, knowing that it would always be part of Conjoiner knowledge, even as our numbers grew and we became increasingly fragmented. She knew that every future Conjoiner would carry her message—even an outcast like me. It might become diluted, but it would never be lost entirely. And she believed that you were still alive, and that one day your path might cross that of another Conjoiner.”

  After a silence Van Ness said, “Tell me the message.”

  “This is what your wife wished you to hear.” Almost imperceptibly, the tone of Weather’s voice shifted. “I am sorry for what happened between us, Rafe—more sorry than you can ever know. When they recaptured me, when they took me to Tychoplex, I was not the person I am now. It was still early in my time amongst the Conjoiners, and—perhaps just as importantly—it was still early for the Conjoiners as well. There was much that we all needed to learn. We were ambitious then, fiercely so, but by the same token we were arrogantly blind to our inadequacies and failings. That changed, later, after I returned to the fold. Galiana made refinements to all of us, reinstating a higher degree of personal identity. I think she had learned something wise from Nevil Clavain. After that, I began to see things in the proper perspective again. I thought of you, and the pain of what I had done to you was like a sharp stone pushing against my throat. Every waking moment of my consciousness, with every breath, you were there. But by then it was much too late to make amends. I tried to contact you, but without success. I couldn’t even be sure if you were in the system any more. By then, even the Demarchists had their own prototype starships, using the technology we’d licensed them. You could have been anywhere.” Weather’s tone hardened, taking on a kind of saintlike asperity. “But I always knew you were a survivor, Rafe. I never doubted that you were still alive, somewhere. Perhaps we’ll meet again: stranger things have happened. If so, I hope I’ll treat you with something of the kindness you always deserved, and that you always showed me. But should that never happen, I can at least hope that you will hear this message. There will always be Conjoiners, and nothing that is committed to the collective memory will ever be lost. No matter how much time passes, those of us who walk in the world will be carrying this message, alert for your name. If there was more I could do, I would. But contrary to what some might think, even Conjoiners can’t work miracles. I wish that it were otherwise. Then I would clap my hands and summon you to me, and I would spend the rest of my life letting you know what you meant to me, what you still mean to me. I loved you, Rafe Van Ness. I always did, and I always will.”

  Weather fell silent, her expression respectful. It was not necessary for her to tell us that the message was over.

  “How do I know this is true?” Van Ness asked quietly.

  “I can’t give you any guarantees,” Weather said, “but there was one word I was also meant to say to you. Your wife believed it would have some significance to you, something nobody else could possibly know.”

  “And the word?”

  “The word is ‘mezereon.’ I think it is a type of plant. Does the word mean something to you?”

  I looked at Van Ness. He appeared frozen, unable to respond. His eye softened and sparkled. He nodded, and said simply, “Yes, it does.”

  “Good,” Weather answered. “I’m glad that’s done: it’s been weighing on all of our minds for quite some time. And now I’m going to help you get home.”

  Whatever “mezereon” meant to Van Ness, whatever it revealed to him concerning the truth of Weather’s message, I never asked.

  Nor did Van Ness ever speak of the matter again.

  SHE STOOD BEFORE the hexagonal arrangement of input dials, as I had done a thousand times before. “You must give me authorisation to make adjustments,” she said.

  My mouth was dry. “Do what you will. I’ll be watching you very carefully.”

  Weather looked amused. “You’re still concerned that I might want to kill us all?”

  “I can’t ignore my duty to this ship.”

  “Then this will be difficult for you. I must turn the dials to a setting you would consider highly dangerous, even suicidal. You’ll just have to trust me that I know what I’m doing.”

  I glanced back at Van Ness.

  “Do it,” he mouthed.

  “Go ahead,” I told Weather. “Whatever you need to do—”

  “In the course of this, you will learn more about our engines. There is something inside here that you will find disturbing. It is not the deepest secret, but it is a secret nonetheless, and shortly you will know it. Afterwards, when we reach port, you must not speak of this matter. Should you do so, Conjoiner security would detect the leak and act swiftly. The consequences would be brutal, for you and anyone you might have spoken to.”

  “Then maybe you’re better off not letting us see whatever you’re so keen to keep hidden.”

  “There’s something I’m going to have to do. If you want to understand, you need to see everything.”

  She reached up and planted her hands on two of the dials. With surprising strength, she twisted them until their quadrants shone ruby red. Then she moved to another pair of dials and moved them until they were showing a warning amber. She adjusted one of the remaining dials to a lower setting, into the blue, and then returned to the first two dials she had touched, quickly dragging them back to green. While all this was happening, I felt the engine surge in response, the deck plates pushing harder against my feet. But the burst was soon over. When Weather had made her last adjustment, the engine had throttled back even further than before. I judged that we were only experiencing a tenth of a gee.

  “What have you just done?” I asked.

  “This,” she said.

  Weather took a nimble, light-footed step back from the input controls. At the same moment a chunk of wall, including the entire hexagonal array, pushed itself out from the surrounding metallic-blue material in which it had appeared to have been seamlessly incorporated. The chunk was as thick as a bank-vault door. I watched in astonishment as the chunk slid in silence to one side, exposing a bulkhead-sized hole in the side of the engine wall.<
br />
  Soft red light bathed us. We were looking into the hidden heart of a Conjoiner drive.

  “Follow me,” Weather said.

  “Are you serious?”

  “You want to get home, don’t you? You want to escape that raider? This is how it will happen.” Then she looked back to Van Ness. “With all due respect…I wouldn’t recommend it. Captain. You wouldn’t do any damage to the engine, but the engine might damage you.”

  “I’m fine right here,” Van Ness said.

  I followed Weather into the engine. At first my eyes had difficulty making out our surroundings. The red light inside seemed to emanate from every surface, rather than from any concentrated source, so that there were only hints of edges and corners. I had to reach out and touch things more than once to establish their shape and proximity. Weather watched me guardedly, but said nothing.

  She led me along a winding, restrictive path that squeezed its way between huge intrusions of Conjoiner machinery, like the course etched by some meandering, indecisive underground river. The machinery emitted a low humming sound, and sometimes when I touched it I felt a rapid but erratic vibration. I couldn’t make out our surroundings with any clarity for more than a few metres in any direction, but as Weather pushed on I sometimes had the impression that the machinery was moving out of her way to open up the path, and sealing itself behind us. She led me up steep ramps, assisted me as we negotiated near-impassable chicanes, helped me as we climbed down vertical shafts that would be perilous even under one-tenth of a gee. My sense of direction was soon hopelessly confounded, and I had no idea whether we had travelled hundreds of metres into the engine, or merely wormed our way in and around a relatively localised region close to our entry point.