Revelation Space

TWENTY-FIVE

“I’m sorry,” Sylveste said. “But I don’t think this man can be cured.”

His only companions, save the Captain himself, were the two members of the Triumvirate other than Volyova.

The closest, Sajaki, stood with his arms folded in front of the Captain, as if inspecting a challengingly modern fresco, his head tilted just so. Hegazi maintained a respectful distance from the plague, refusing to approach within three or four metres of the outer extent of the Captain’s recently invigorated growth. He was doing his best to look nonchalant, but, despite the relatively sparse acreage of his face which was actually visible, fear was written across it like a tattoo.

“He’s dead?” Sajaki asked.

“No, no,” said Sylveste hastily. “Not at all. It’s just that all our therapies have failed, and our one best shot turned out to hurt him more than to heal him.”

“Your one best shot?” Hegazi parroted, his voice echoing from the walls.

“Ilia Volyova’s counteragent.” Sylveste knew he had to be very careful now; that it would not do for Sajaki to realise that his sabotage had come to light. “For whatever reason, it didn’t work in the way she thought it would. I don’t blame Volyova for that—how could she predict how the main body of the plague would behave, when all she had to work on was tiny samples?”

“How indeed,” Sajaki said, and in that short declamation, Sylveste decided that he hated the man, with a hatred as irrevocable as death. But he also knew that Sajaki was a man he could work with, and that—as much as he despised him—nothing that had occurred here would make any difference to the attack against Cerberus. It was better than that, in fact: much better. Now that he was certain that Sajaki had no desire to see the Captain healed—quite the opposite—there was nothing to prevent Sylveste from turning his full attention to the matter of the imminent attack. Perhaps he would have to endure Calvin’s presence in his head for a little while longer, until this charade had run its course, but that was a small price to pay, and he felt up to the task. Besides: now he rather welcomed Calvin’s intrusion. There was too much going on; too much to be assimilated, and for the time being it was good to have a second mind parasitising his own, gleaning patterns and forging inferences.

“He’s a lying bastard,” Calvin whispered. “I had my doubts before, but now I know for sure. I hope the plague consumes every atom of the ship and takes him with it. It’s all he deserves.”

Sylveste said to Sajaki, “It doesn’t mean we’ve given up hope. With your permission Cal and I will continue trying…”

“Do what you can,” Sajaki said.

“You want to let them continue?” Hegazi said. “After what they’ve almost done to him?”

“You’ve got a problem with that?” said Sylveste, feeling that the conversation was as ritualised as a play; its conclusion just as preordained. “If we don’t take risks…”

“Sylveste is right,” Sajaki said. “Who’s to say how the Captain would respond to the most innocent of interventions? The plague is a living thing—it isn’t necessarily obedient to any set of logical rules, so every act we make carries some risk, even something as seemingly harmless—as sweeping it with a magnetic field. The plague might interpret it as a stimulus to shift to a new phase of growth, or it might cause the plague to turn to dust in seconds. I doubt that the Captain would survive either scenario.”

“In which case,” Hegazi said, “we might as well give up now.”

“No,” Sajaki said, so calmly that Sylveste feared for the other man’s well-being. “It doesn’t mean that we give up. It means that we need a new paradigm—something beyond surgical intervention. Here we have the finest cyberneticist born since the Transenlightenment, and no one has a finer grasp of molecular weapons than Ilia Volyova. The medical systems we have aboard this ship are as advanced as any in existence. And yet we’ve failed; for the simple reason that we’re dealing with something stronger, faster and more adaptable than anything we can imagine. What we’ve always suspected is true: the Melding Plague is of alien origin. And that’s why it will always beat us. Provided, that is, we continue to wage war against it on our terms, rather than on its own.”

Now, Sylveste thought, this play had arrived at an unwritten epilogue all of its own.

“What kind of new paradigm do you have in mind?”

“The only logical answer,” Sajaki said, as if what he was about to reveal had always been blindingly obvious. “The only effective medicine against an alien illness would be an alien medicine. And that’s what we have to seek now, no matter how long it takes us, or how far.”

“Alien medicine,” Hegazi said, as if trying on the phrase for size. Perhaps he imagined that he would be hearing it rather frequently in the future. “And just what kind of alien medicine did you have in mind?”

“We’ll try the Pattern Jugglers first,” Sajaki said, absently, as if no one else were present, merely toying with the notion. “And if they can’t heal him, we’ll look further.” Suddenly his attention snapped back onto Sylveste. “We visited them once, you know, the Captain and I. You aren’t the only one to have tasted the brine of their ocean.”

“Let’s not spend a second longer in the company of this madman than absolutely necessary,” Calvin said, and Sylveste nodded silent assent.

Volyova checked her bracelet again, for the sixth or seventh time in the last hour, even though what it had to tell her had barely changed. What it told her—and what she already knew—was that the calamitous marriage of bridgehead and Cerberus was due to happen in just under half a day, and that no one looked likely to voice any objections, let alone make any attempt to avert the union.

“You looking at that thing every other second isn’t going to change anything,” said Khouri, who, together with Volyova and Pascale, remained in the spider-room. For most of the last few hours they had been beyond the outer hull, venturing inside only to return Sylveste into the ship so that he could meet the other Triumvirs. Sajaki had not queried Volyova’s absence: doubtless he assumed she was busy in her quarters, putting the finishing touches to her attack strategy. But in an hour or two she would need to show her face if she wished to avoid suspicion. Not long after that, she would need to begin the softening-up procedure, deploying elements of the cache against the point on Cerberus where the bridgehead was scheduled to arrive. As she glanced at the bracelet again—involuntarily, this time—Khouri said, “What are you hoping for?”

“Something unexpected from the weapon—a fatal malfunction would do very nicely.”

“Then you really don’t want this to succeed, do you?” Pascale said. “A few days ago you were gloating over that thing like it was your finest hour. This is quite some turnaround.”

“That was before I knew who the Mademoiselle was. If I’d had any idea earlier…” Volyova found herself running out of anything to say. It was obvious now that using the weapon was an act of almost staggering recklessness—but would knowing that have altered a thing? Would she have felt compelled to make the weapon just because she could; just because it was elegant and she wanted her peers to see what fabulous creatures could spring forth from her mind; what Byzantine engines of war? The thought that she might have done so was sickening, but—in its own way—entirely plausible. She would have given birth to the bridgehead and hoped that she could prevent it completing its mission at some later point. She would, in short, have been in exactly the position in which she now found herself.

The bridgehead—the converted Lorean—was nearing Cerberus now, slowing as it did so. By the time it touched Cerberus it would be moving no faster than a bullet, but it would be a bullet massing millions of tonnes. If the bridgehead hit an ordinary planetary surface at that speed, its kinetic energy would be converted into heat rather efficiently: there would be a colossal explosion and her toy would be destroyed in a flash. But Cerberus was not a normal planet. Her assumption—backed up by endless simulations—was that the sheer grinding bulk of the weapon would be sufficient to push it through the thin layer of artificial crust overlaying the world’s interior. Once it had thrust below that, once it had impaled the world, she had no real idea what it would encounter.

And now that scared her beyond words. Intellectual vanity had brought Sylveste to this point—and something else, perhaps—but she was not unguilty of obeying the same unquestioning drive. She wished she had taken the project less seriously; made the bridgehead less likely to succeed. It terrified her to think what would happen if her child did not disappoint her.

“Had I known…” she said, finally. “I don’t know. But I didn’t, so what does it matter?”

“If you’d listened to me,” Khouri said, “I told you we had to stop this madness. But my word wasn’t good enough; you had to let it come to this.”

“I was hardly going to confront Sajaki on the basis of a vision you had in the gunnery. He’d have killed both of us, I’m sure of it.” Although now, she thought, they might have to move against Sajaki anyway—they could only do so much from the spider-room, and soon that might not be nearly enough.

“You could have decided to trust me,” Khouri said.

If circumstances had been any different, Volyova thought, she might have hit Khouri at the point. Instead, mildly, she answered, “You can talk to me about trust when you haven’t lied and cheated your way aboard my ship, but not before.”

“What did you expect me to do? The Mademoiselle had my husband.”

“Did she?” Volyova leant forward now. “Do you know that for sure, Khouri? I mean, did you ever meet him, or was that another of the Mademoiselle’s little deceptions? Memories can be implanted easily enough, can’t they?”

Khouri’s voice was soft now; as if there had never been an angry word between the two of them. “What do you mean?”

“I mean maybe he never made it, Khouri. Did you ever consider that? Maybe he never left Yellowstone; the way you always believed it had happened.”

Pascale pushed her face between the two of them. “Look, stop arguing, will you? If something awful is going to happen here, the last thing we need is division amongst ourselves. In case it has escaped your attention, I’m the only person on this ship who didn’t ask or want to come aboard.”

“Yeah, well that’s just tough luck,” Khouri said.

Pascale glared at her. “Well maybe what I just said wasn’t all true. I am after something. I’ve got a husband as well, and I don’t want him to hurt himself—or anyone around him—just because of something he wants so bad. And that’s why I need you now—both of you, because you seem to be the only two around here who feel the same way I do.”

“How do you feel?” Volyova asked.

“That none of this is right,” she said. “Not from the moment you mentioned that name.”

Volyova didn’t have to ask what name Pascale meant. “You acted as if you recognised it.”

“We did—both of us. Sun Stealer’s an Amarantin name; one of their gods, or mythic figures—maybe even a real historical individual. But Dan was too pigheaded—or perhaps too scared—to admit it.”

Volyova checked her bracelet again, but there was still no news. Then she waited while Pascale told her story. She told it well; there was no preamble, no scene-setting, and with the few carefully chosen facts which Pascale deployed, Volyova found herself visualising all that was necessary; events sketched with artful economy. She could see now why Pascale had helmed Sylveste’s biography. What she had to say concerned the Amarantin, the extinct avian-descended creatures who had lived on Resurgam. By now the crew had absorbed enough knowledge from Sylveste to place this story in its proper context, but it was still disturbing to find a connection to the Amarantin. After all, Volyova had found it troubling enough to think that her problems were in some way associated with the Shrouders. At least there the causality was clear enough. But how did the Amarantin fit into everything? How could there be a link between two radically different alien species, both now long since vanished from galactic affairs? Even the timescales were in radical disagreement: according to what Lascaille had told Sylveste, the Shrouders had vanished—perhaps by retreating into their spheres of restructured spacetime—millions of years before the Amarantin had ever evolved, taking with them artefacts and techniques too hazardous to be left within the reach of less experienced species. That, after all, was what had driven Sylveste and Lefevre to the Shroud boundary: the lure of that stored knowledge. The Shrouders were as alien in form as anything in human experience—carapacial, multi-limbed things brewed from nightmares. The Amarantin, by contrast, with their avian ancestry and four-limbed, bipedal body-plan, were less shatteringly alien.

Yet Sun Stealer showed a link. The ship had never before visited Resurgam; had never had aboard it anyone openly familiar with any aspect of the Amarantin—and yet Sun Stealer had been part of Volyova’s life for subjective years, and several decades of planetary time. Sylveste was clearly the key—but any kind of logical connection steadfastly refused to reveal itself to Volyova.

Pascale continued, while an unsupervised part of Volyova’s mind raced ahead and tried to fit things into some kind of order. Pascale was talking about the buried city; a vast Amarantin structure discovered during Sylveste’s imprisonment. About how the city’s central feature, a huge spire, had been surmounted by an entity which was not quite Amarantin, but looked like the Amarantin analog of an angel—except that this was an angel designed by someone with a scrupulous attention to the limits of anatomy. An angel that almost looked like it could fly.

“And that was Sun Stealer?” Khouri asked, awed.

“I don’t know,” Pascale said. “All we know is that the original Sun Stealer was just an ordinary Amarantin, but one who formed a renegade flock—a renegade social clade, if you like. We think they were experimentalists, studying the nature of the world; questioners of myth. Dan had this theory that Sun Stealer was interested in optics; that he made mirrors and lenses; literally, that he stole the sun. He may also have experimented with flight; simple machines and gliders. Whatever it was, it was heresy.”

“So what was the statue?”

Pascale told them the rest; how the renegade flock became known as the Banished Ones; how they effectively disappeared from Amarantin history for thousands of years.

“If I can interject a theory at this point,” Volyova said, “is it possible that the Banished Ones went away to a quiet corner of the planet and invented technology?”

“Dan thought so. He thought they went the whole way—until they had the power to leave Resurgam entirely. And then one day—not long before the Event—they came back, but by then they were like gods compared to those who had stayed behind. And that was what the statue was—something raised in honour of the new gods.”

“Gods who became angels?” Khouri asked.

“Genetic engineering,” Pascale said, with conviction. “They could never have flown, even with those wings they gave themselves, but then again, they’d already left gravity behind; become spacefaring.”

“What happened?”

“Much later—centuries afterwards, or even thousands of years—Sun Stealer’s people returned to Resurgam. It was almost the end. We can’t resolve the archaeological timescale, it’s so short. But it’s as if they brought it with them.”

“Brought what?” Khouri said.

“The Event. Whatever it was that ended life on Resurgam.”

As they trudged through the effluent which lay ankle-deep along the corridor floor, Khouri said, “Is there a way to stop your weapon reaching Cerberus? I mean, you still have control of it, don’t you?”

“Be quiet!” Volyova hissed. “Anything we say down here…” She trailed off, pointing to the walls, presumably indicating all manner of concealed spy devices; part of the surveillance web she believed Sajaki controlled.

“Might get back to the rest of the Triumvirate. So what?” Khouri kept her voice low—no point in taking needless risks, but she spoke anyway. “The way things are going, we’re going to be openly resisting them before too long. My guess is Sajaki’s listening network isn’t as comprehensive as you think, anyway—that’s what Sudjic said. Even if it is, he’s likely to be preoccupied right now.”

“Dangerous, very dangerous.” But perhaps recognising the sense in what Khouri had said—that at some very imminent time subterfuge would have to become rebellion—she elevated the cuff of her jacket to reveal her bracelet, glowing with schematics and slowly updating numerics. “I can control almost everything with this. But what good does it do me? Sajaki’ll kill me if he thinks I’m trying to sabotage the operation—and he’ll know the instant the weapon deviates from its intended course. And let’s not forget that Sylveste is holding all of us to ransom—I don’t know how he’d react.”

“Badly, I suspect—but that doesn’t change anything.”

Now Pascale spoke. “He won’t do what he’s been threatening. There’s nothing in his eyes; he told me. But because Sajaki could never be sure—because it was possible—Dan said he was sure it would work.”

“And you’re absolutely certain he wasn’t lying to you?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

“A perfectly legitimate one, under the circumstances. I fear Sajaki, but I can confront him with force if the need arises. But not your husband.”

“It never happened,” Pascale said. “Trust me on that.”

“Like we’ve got a choice,” Khouri said. They had arrived at an elevator; the door opened and they had to step up to reach the elevator’s floor. Khouri kicked the slime from her boots, hammered the wall and said, “Ilia, you have to stop that thing. If it reaches Cerberus, we’re all dead. That’s what the Mademoiselle knew all along; that’s why she wanted to kill Sylveste. Because she knew that, one way or another, he was going to try and get there. Now, I haven’t got all of this straight in my head, but I do know one thing. The Mademoiselle knew it was going to be really bad news for all of us if he ever succeeded. And I mean really bad news.”

The elevator was rising now, but Volyova had not stated their destination.

“It’s like Sun Stealer was pushing him on,” Pascale said. “Putting ideas in his head, shaping his destiny.”

“Ideas?” Khouri asked.

“Like coming here in the first place—to this system.” Volyova was animated now. “Khouri; don’t you remember how we retrieved that recording of Sylveste from ship’s memory, from when he was last aboard?” Khouri nodded; she remembered it well enough: how she had looked into the eyes of the recorded Sylveste and imagined killing the real man. “And how he dropped hints that he was already thinking of the Resurgam expedition? And that bothered us because there was no logical way he could know about the Amarantin? Well, now it makes perfect sense. Pascale’s right. It was Sun Stealer, already in his head, pushing him here. I don’t think he even knew it was happening himself, but Sun Stealer was in control, all that time.”

Khouri said, “It’s like Sun Stealer and the Mademoiselle are fighting each other, but they need to use us to wage their war. Sun Stealer’s some kind of software entity, and she’s confined to Yellowstone, in her palanquin… so they’ve been pulling our strings, puppeting us against each other.”

“I think you’re right,” Volyova said. “Sun Stealer has me worried. Deeply worried. We haven’t heard from him since the cache-weapon went up.”

Khouri said nothing. What she knew was that Sun Stealer had entered her head during her last session in the gunnery. Later, during her final visitation, the Mademoiselle had appeared to tell her that Sun Stealer was consuming her; that he would inevitably overwhelm her in hours or—at most—-days. Yet that had been weeks earlier. According to her estimated rate of losses, the Mademoiselle should be now be dead, and Sun Stealer victorious. Yet nothing had changed. If anything, her head had been quieter than at any time since she had been revived around Yellowstone. No damn Shadowplay proximity implant; no damn midnight apparitions from the Mademoiselle. It was as if Sun Stealer had died just as he triumphed. Not that Khouri believed that, and his utter absence was all the more stressing; heightening the waiting until—as she was sure would happen—he appeared. And somehow she sensed he would be even less pleasant company than her previous lodger.

“Why should he show his face?” Pascale said. “He’s almost won, in any case.”

“Almost won,” Volyova agreed. “But what we’re about to do might make him intervene. I think we should be ready for that—you especially, Khouri. You know he found his way into Boris Nagorny, and you can take it from me, it wasn’t nice knowing either of them.”

“Maybe you should lock me up now, before it’s too late.” Khouri hadn’t given the statement much thought, but she said it with deadly seriousness. “I mean it, Ilia—I’d rather you did that than be forced into shooting me later.”

“I’d love to do that,” said her mentor. “But it isn’t as if we’re already vastly outnumbering the others. At the moment it’s the three of us against Sajaki and Hegazi—and God only knows whose side Sylveste will choose, if it comes to that.”

Pascale said nothing.

They reached the warchive, the destination Volyova had always had in mind, though she had said nothing until they arrived. Khouri had never been to this sector of the ship, but she did not need to have it identified to her. She had been in plenty of armouries before and there was a smell to them.

“This is some heavy shit we’re getting ourselves into,” she said. “Right?”

The vast oblong room constituted the display and dispensary section of the warchive, with somewhere in the region of a thousand weapons racked for immediate use. Tens of thousands more could be manufactured in short order, assembled according to blueprints distributed holographically through the mass of the ship.

“Yes,” Volyova said, with something worryingly close to relish. “In which case we’d better have some obnoxiously effective firepower at our disposal. So, use your skill and discretion, Khouri, and kit us up. And be quick about it—we don’t want Sajaki locking us out before we’ve got what we came for.”

“You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“Yes. And you know why? Suicidal or not, we’re finally doing something. It might get us killed—and it might not do any good—but at least we’ll go out with a fight, if it comes to that.”

Khouri nodded slowly. Now that Volyova put it like that, she was right. It was a soldier’s prerogative not to let events take their course without some kind of intervention, no matter how futile. Quickly Volyova showed her how to use the warchive’s lower-level functions—luckily, it was almost intuitive—then took Pascale by the arm and turned to leave.

“Where are you going?”

“The bridge. Sajaki will want me there for the softening-up operation.”