Revelation Space

THIRTY-NINE

The jewel shone with a noticeable bluish radiance now, as if his proximity had stilled its spectral transformations; forced it towards some temporary quiescence. Sylveste still felt that it was wrong to approach it, but now his own curiosity—and a sense of predestiny—was impelling him forwards. Maybe it was something springing from the basal parts of his mind; a need to confront the dangerous and thereby tame it. It was an instinct which must have driven the first touching of fire, the first flinch of pain and the wisdom that came with that pain.

The jewel unfolded before him, undergoing geometric transformations to which he did not dare devote too much attention, for fear that understanding them would cleave his mind open along similar fault lines.

“Are you sure this is wise?” Calvin asked, his utterances now more than ever forming part of the normal background of Sylveste’s inner dialogue.

“It’s too late to return now,” said a voice.

A voice which belonged neither to Calvin nor Sylveste, but which seemed deeply familiar, as if it had long been a part of him, merely silent.

“Sun Stealer, isn’t it?”

“He’s been with us all along,” Calvin said. “Haven’t you?”

“Longer than you imagine. Since you returned from Lascaille’s Shroud, Dan.”

“Then everything Khouri said was right,” he said, while already knowing the truth of it. If Sajaki’s empty suit had not confirmed it, then the revelations he had shared in the white light had ended his doubts, completely.

“What do you want of me?”

“Only that you enter the—jewel—as you call it.” The creature’s voice, and its voice was the only thing that he heard, was sibilant; chillingly so. “You have nothing to fear. You will not be harmed by it, nor will you be prevented from leaving.”

“You would say that, wouldn’t you?”

“Except that it is the truth.”

“What about the bridgehead?”

“The device is still operational. It will remain so until you have left Cerberus.”

“There’s no way of knowing,” Calvin said. “Whatever he—it—says, could well be a lie. He’s deceived and manipulated us at every step; all to bring you here. Why should he suddenly start telling the truth now?”

“Because it is of no consequence,” Sun Stealer said. “Now that you have reached this far, your own desires play no further part in the matter.”

And Sylveste felt the suit surge forward, directly into the opened jewel, along a brilliantly faceted, ever-flickering corridor which extended into the structure.

“What—” Calvin began.

“I’m not doing anything,” Sylveste said. “The bastard must have control of my suit!”

“Stands to reason. He could control Sajaki’s, after all. Must have preferred to sit back and let you do all the work until now. Lazy bastard.”

“At this point,” Sylveste said, “I don’t think insulting him’s going to make a great deal of difference.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“As a matter of fact—”

The corridor surrounded him completely now, a glowing tracheal tunnel which twisted and turned until it seemed impossible that he could still be inside the jewel. But then, he told himself, he had never come to a clear conclusion as to its true size—it might have been anywhere between a few hundred metres across or tens of kilometres. Its fluctuating shape made it impossible to know, and perhaps meant that there was no meaningful answer; in the same way that one could not specify the volume of a fractal solid.

“Uh, you were saying?”

“I was saying…” Sylveste trailed off. “Sun Stealer, are you listening to me?”

“As always.”

“I don’t understand why I had to come here. If you managed to animate Sajaki’s suit—and you had conscious control of mine all this time—why did I have to come along in the first place? If there’s something you want inside this thing, something you want to bring out, you could do it without me being here at all.”

“The device will only respond to organic life. An empty suit would be interpreted as machine sentience.”

“This—thing—is a device? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It is an Inhibitor device.”

For a moment the words seemed meaningless, but only for a moment. Then—fuzzily—the words attached to some of the memories he retained from his time in the white light; the portal to the Hades matrix. Those memories attached to others; an endless braid of association.

And he came to a kind of understanding.

More than ever, he knew that he should not continue; that if he reached the inner realm of the jewel—of the Inhibitor device, as he now knew it to be—things would be very, very bad. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine how things could be worse.

“We can’t go on,” Calvin said. “I understand now what this is.”

“Me too, belatedly.”

The device had been left here by the Inhibitors. They had placed it in orbit around Hades, next to the glimmering white portal; something older even than the Inhibitors. It did not bother them that they did not properly understand its function, or have any real inkling of who had placed it there, next to the neutron star which—according to some puzzling indications they had allowed to linger unexplored—was not quite as it should be. But, the enigma of its origin aside, it entirely suited their plans. Their own devices were constructed to lure the sentient, and by placing one of them next to an entity even more perplexing, they were guaranteed visitors. It was a strategy they followed across the galaxy, in fact: leaving Inhibitor devices in close proximity to objects of astrophysical interest, or near the ruins of extinct cultures. Anywhere where they were likely to draw attention.

And the Amarantin had come, and tinkered, and made themselves known to the device. It had studied them, and learned their weaknesses.

And it had wiped them out—all except for a handful of descendants of the Banished, who found two means to escape the ruthless predation of the Inhibitors. Some had used the portal itself, mapping themselves into the crustal matrix, where they continued to run as simulations, preserved in the impervious amber of nuclear matter enslaved for computational purposes.

It was hardly living, Sylveste thought, but at least something of them had been preserved.

And then there were the others: the others who had found the other way to escape the Inhibitors. Their mode of escape had been no less drastic, no less irreversible…

“They became the Shrouders, didn’t they?” Calvin was speaking now—or was it Sylveste, voicing his own thoughts, the way he sometimes did, in the heat of concentration? He could barely tell, much less care. “This was in the last days; when Resurgam was already gone, and most of the spaceborn had already been tracked down and annihilated. One faction went into the Hades matrix. Another learned what they could about manipulating spacetime, probably from the transformations near the portal. And they found a solution; a way to barricade themselves against the Inhibitor weapons. They found a way to wrap spacetime around themselves; a way to curdle and solidify it, until it formed an impervious shell. And they retreated behind those shells and sealed them for eternity.

“But at least it was better than dying.”

Everything, for an instant, was clear in his head. How those behind the Shrouds had waited, and waited, barely cognisant of the outside universe; barely able to communicate with it, so secure were the walls they had wrapped around themselves.

And they had waited.

They had known, even at the time of enclosure, that the systems left behind by the Inhibitors were slowly failing; slowly losing their ability to suppress intelligence. Not soon enough, for them—-but after a million years of waiting, trapped in their bubble of spacetime, they began to wonder if the threat had now diminished…

They could not simply dismantle the Shrouds and look around—far too hazardous; especially as the Inhibitor machines were nothing if not patient. Their apparent silence might only be part of the trap, a waiting game designed to entice the Amarantin—who were now the Shrouders—out of their shells, into the open arena of naked space, where they could be destroyed with ease, terminating the million-year purge against their kind.

Yet, in time, others came.

Perhaps there was something about this region of space which favoured the evolution of vertebrate life, or perhaps it was only coincidence, but in the newly starfaring humans, the Shrouders saw echoes of what they had once been. Something of the same psychosis, almost: the simultaneous craving for solitude and companionship; the need for the comfort of society and the open steppes of space; a schism which drove them onwards, outwards.

Philip Lascaille had been the first to meet them, around the Shroud which now bore his name.

The tortured spacetime around the Shroud had ripped his mind open, twisted it and reassembled it, into a drooling travesty of what it had once been. But it was a travesty shot with brilliance. They had put something in him; the knowledge that was needed for someone else to get much closer… and the lie that would make him do it.

Just before he died, Lascaille had communicated this to the young Dan Sylveste.

Go to the Jugglers, he had said.

Because the Amarantin had once visited them; once imprinted their neural patterns into the Juggler ocean. Those patterns stabilised the spacetime around the Shroud; enabled one to penetrate deeper into its thickening folds without being torn asunder by the stresses. It was how Sylveste, having accepted the Juggler transform, was able to ride the storms into the depths of the Shroud itself.

He came out alive.

But changed.

Something had come back with him; something which called itself Sun Stealer, though he knew now that this was no more than a mythname; that the thing which had lived within him ever since was better thought of as an assemblage; an artificial personality woven into the shell of the Shroud, put there by those within who wanted Sylveste to act as their emissary; to extend their influence beyond the curtain of impassable spacetime.

What they wanted him to do was very simple, in hindsight.

Travel to Resurgam, where the bones of their corporeal ancestors were buried.

Find the Inhibitor device.

Place himself in a position where, if the device was still functioning, it would activate and identify him as a member of a newly uprisen intelligent culture.

If the Inhibitors were still around, humanity would be identified as the next species to be put to the slaughter.

If not, the Shrouders could emerge into safety. Now the bluish light which surrounded him seemed evil; unspeakably so. He knew that simply by entering this place he might have already done too much; already exhibited enough apparent intelligence to convince the Inhibitor device that he represented a breed worthy of extinction.

He hated what the Amarantin had become; hated himself for devoting so much of his life to their study. But what could he do now? It was far too late for second thoughts.

The tunnel had widened, and where he found himself—still without any conscious control of the suit—was in a faceted chamber, bathed in the same putrid blue glow. The chamber was filled with odd hanging shapes, reminding him of reconstructions he had seen of the inside of a human cell. The shapes were all rectilinear, complexly interconnected rectangles and squares and rhomboids, forming hanging sculptures which subscribed to no recognisable aesthetic tendency.

“What are they?” he breathed.

“Think of them as puzzles,” Sun Stealer said. “The idea is that, as an intelligent explorer, you feel a curious urge to complete them, to move the shapes into the geometric configurations which are implied in the pieces.”

He could see what Sun Stealer meant. The nearest assemblage, for instance. It was obvious that with a few manipulations he could make the shapes into a tesseract… almost tempting…

“I won’t do it,” he said.

“You won’t have to.” And in demonstration, Sun Stealer made the limbs of his suit reach out towards the assemblage, which was much closer than he had first guessed. The suit fingers grasped for the first piece, swinging it effortlessly into place. “There will be other tests, other chambers,” the alien said. “Your mental processes will be subjected to rigid scrutiny, and—later—your biology. I do not expect that the latter procedure will be especially pleasant. But neither will it be fatal. That would deter others, from which a broader picture of the enemy could be assembled.” There was something almost like humour in the thing’s voice now; as if he had been long enough in human company to glean some of their manners. “You, alas, will be the only human representative to enter this device. But rest assured you will prove an excellent specimen.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Sylveste said.

The first hint of alarm entered Sun Stealer’s implacable, noiseless voice. “Please explain.”

For a moment Sylveste did not oblige. “Calvin,” he said. “There’s something I have to say.” Even as he spoke, he was not really sure why he was doing so, not really sure who he was addressing. “When we were in the white light—when we shared everything, in the Hades matrix—there was something I found out; something I should have known years ago.”

“About you, that is.”

“About me, yes. About what I am.” Sylveste wanted to cry, now, knowing that this would be his last chance, but his eyes did not allow that; they never had. “About why I can’t hate you, unless I want to turn that hatred against myself. If I ever really hated you in the first place.”

“It didn’t really work, did it? What I made of you. It wasn’t the way I planned it. But I can’t say I’m disappointed with the way you turned out.” Calvin corrected himself. “The way I turned out.”

“I’m glad I found out, even if it has to be now.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You already know. We shared everything, didn’t we?” Sylveste found himself laughing. “Now you know my secrets, as well.”

“Ah. You’re talking about that little secret, aren’t you?”

“What?” hissed Sun Stealer; voice like the radio crackle of distant quasars.

“I guess you were privy to the conversations I had on the ship,” he said, addressing the alien again. “When I let them think I’d been bluffing.”

“Bluffing?” it asked. “About what?”

“About the hot-dust in my eyes,” Sylveste said.

He laughed, louder this time. And then executed the series of neural triggers, long committed to memory, which initiated a cascade of events in the circuitry of his eyes, and—finally—in the tiny motes of contained antimatter embedded within them.

There was a light purer than any he had known, even in the portal which led to Hades.

And then there was nothing.

Volyova saw it first.

She was waiting for the Infinity to finish her off; watching the vast conic form of the vessel, dark as night, visible only because it blocked starlight, edging closer towards her with sharklike deliberation. Doubtless somewhere in its hugeness, systems were pondering over the matter of how to expedite her death in the most interesting manner. That was the only explanation for why it had not already killed her, since she was within strike-range of every one of its weapons. Perhaps Sun Stealer’s presence aboard the ship had given it a kind of sick sense of humour; a desire to put her to death with sadistic slowness; a process that commenced with this deathly wait for something to happen. Her imagination was now her worst enemy, efficiently reminding her of all the systems which might suit Sun Stealer’s purpose; the defences which could boil her over hours, or dismember her without killing her immediately (lasers which were tuned to cauterise flesh, for instance), or crush her (a squad of external servitors, for instance). Oh, the processes of her mind were a glorious thing. And it was, by and large, that same fertility which had given rise to so many possible modes of execution.

But then she saw it.

The flash, sparking from the surface of Cerberus, briefly marking the spot where the bridgehead was installed. It was as if, for a split second, a tremendous light had ignited within the world, only to be immediately dimmed.

Or a tremendous explosion.

She watched entrails of rock and scalded machinery puff into space.

Khouri took a moment to come to terms with the fact that she was not actually dead, despite the certainty she had felt that this would come to pass. At the very least, she had expected to wake transiently to pain, her last moments of consciousness before Hades pulled her apart; body and soul flensed by the monstrous talons of gravity around the neutron star. She had also expected to wake to the worst headache since the Mademoiselle had invoked her buried memories of the Dawn War. But this time it would be a headache of purely chemical origin.

They had found the drinks cabinet in the spider-room.

And they had drunk it empty.

But her head felt achingly clear of any intoxication, like a freshly scrubbed window. She had come to consciousness swiftly as well, with no groggy transition, as if there had been no existence in the instant before her eyes opened. But it was not in the spider-room. Now that she thought about it, she remembered waking; remembered the terrible onset of those tides; how she and Pascale had crawled to the midpoint of the room to lessen the differential stresses. But it had surely failed; they had known at that point there was no possible way to survive; that the only thing they could do was to somehow lessen the pain—

Where in hell’s name was she?

She had awakened with her back against a hard surface, unyielding as concrete. Above, the stars cartwheeled with insane speed through the sky, and there was something wrong with the way they moved; as if seen through a thick lens which stretched from horizon to horizon. She found she could move and struggled to her feet, almost toppling back as she did so.

She was wearing a suit.

She had not been wearing one in the spider-room. It was the same kind that she had used during her surface activities on Resurgam; the same kind that Sylveste would have taken with him into Cerberus. How could this be? If this experience was a dream, then it was unlike any she had known, because she could consciously question its contradictions without the whole edifice crumbling around her.

She was on a plain. It was the colour of cooling metal; almost but not quite bright enough to hurt the eye. It was as flat as a beach after the tide had retreated. The plain, now that she looked at it more closely, was patterned; not randomly, but in the intricately ordered manner of a Persian carpet. Between each level of patterning was another, until the ordering teetered on the edge of the microscopic and probably plunged down to even smaller realms, towards the subnuclear and the quantum. And it was shifting; blurring in and out of focus, never the same from moment to moment. Eventually it started to make her feel vaguely unwell, so she snapped her attention away to the horizon.

It seemed very close indeed.

She started walking. Her feet crunched into the flickering ground. The patterns rearranged themselves to create smooth stepping stones where she could plant her feet.

Something lay ahead.

It rose above the close curve of the horizon: a slight mound, a raised plinth stark against the tumbling starscape. She approached it, and as she neared it she saw movement. The raised part was like the entrance to a subway, three low walls enclosing a series of descending steps, burrowing into the world.

The movement was a figure emerging from the depths; a woman. She heaved herself up the steps with strength and patience, as if she were taking the morning air for the first time. Unlike Khouri, she wore no spacesuit. In fact, she was dressed in exactly the way Khouri remembered her from the last time they were together.

It was Pascale Sylveste.

“I’ve been waiting a long time,” she said, her voice carrying across the airless black space between them.

“Pascale?”

“Yes,” she said, and then qualified herself. “In a manner of speaking. Oh dear; this isn’t going to be easy to explain—and I’ve had so long to rehearse it…”

“What happened, Pascale?” It seemed impudent to ask her why she wasn’t wearing a suit; why she wasn’t dead. “Where is this?”

“Haven’t you guessed yet?”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

Pascale smiled sympathetically. “You’re on Hades. Remember that? The neutron star; the one which was pulling us in. Well, it wasn’t. A neutron star, I mean.”

“On it?”

“On it, yes. I don’t think you were expecting that.”

“No; you could say that.”

“I’ve been here as long as you have,” Pascale said. “Which is only a few hours. But I’ve spent the time beneath the crust, where things happen a bit quicker. So it seems like considerably more than a few hours to me.”

“How much more?”

“Try a few decades… although time really doesn’t pass at all here, in some respects.”

Khouri nodded, as if all this made perfect sense. “Pascale… I think you need to explain…”

“Good idea. I’ll do it on the way down.”

“The way down where?”

She beckoned Khouri towards the stairs which descended into the cherry-red plain, as if she were inviting a neighbour indoors for cocktails.

“Inside,” Pascale said. “Into the matrix.” Death had still not come.

Over the next hour, using the suit’s image-zoom overlay, Volyova watched the bridgehead slowly lose its form, like a piece of pottery being inexpertly shaped. Gradually it began to dissolve into the crust. It was being digested, having finally lost the battle against Cerberus.

Too soon; too soon.

The wrongness of it gnawed into her. She might be about to die, but she did not like seeing one of her creations fail, and—dammit—fail so prematurely.

Finally, unable to take any more, she turned towards the ship, pointing towards her with daggerlike intent, and spread her arms wide. She had no idea if the ship was capable of reading her vocal transmissions.

“Come on then, svinoi. Finish me off. I’ve had enough. I don’t want to see any more. Get it over with.”

A hatch opened somewhere down the ship’s conic flank, briefly aglow with orange interior lighting. She half expected some nasty and dimly remembered weapon to cruise out; perhaps something she had knocked together in a spasm of drunken creativity.

Instead a shuttle emerged, and powered slowly towards her.

The way Pascale told it to Khouri, the neutron star was in fact nothing of the sort. Or at least it had been once, or would have been—had it not been for interference by some third party Pascale declined to talk about in any great detail. But the gist was simple. They had converted the neutron star into a giant, blindingly fast computer—one that, in some bizarre manner, was able to communicate with its own past and future selves.

“What am I doing here?” Khouri asked, as they descended the stairway. “No, better question: what are we doing here? And how do you know so much more than me all of a sudden?”

“I told you; I was in the matrix for longer.” Pascale paused on one of the steps. “Listen, Khouri—you might not like what I’m about to tell you. Namely, that you’re dead—for now, at least.”

Khouri was less surprised by this than she had expected. It seemed almost predictable.

“We died in the gravitational tides,” Pascale said matter-of-factly. “We got too close to Hades, and the tides pulled us apart. It wasn’t very pleasant, either—but most of your memories of it were never captured, so you don’t recall them now.”

“Captured?”

“According to all the normal laws, we should have been crushed to atoms. And in a sense we were. But the information which described us was preserved in the flow of gravitons between what remained of us and Hades. The force that killed us also recorded us, transmitted that information to the crust…”

“Right,” Khouri said slowly, prepared to take this as given for the time being. “And once we were transmitted into the crust?”

“We were—um—simulated back to life. Of course, computation in the crust happens much faster than realtime—which is why I’ve spent several decades of subjective time in it.”

She sounded almost apologetic.

“I don’t remember spending several decades anywhere.”

“That’s because you didn’t. You were brought to life, but you didn’t want to stay here. You don’t remember any of that; you chose not to, in fact. There was nothing to keep you here.”

“Implying there was something to keep you here?”

“Oh yes,” Pascale said, with wonder. “Oh yes. We’ll come to that.”

The stairwell reached its foot now, leading into a lanterned corridor, bright with randomly strewn fairytale lights. The walls, when she looked at them, were alive with the same computational shimmer she had seen on the surface. An impression of intense busyness; of unguessably complex machine algebra constantly churning just beyond her reach.

“What am I?” Khouri said. “What are you? You said I was dead. I don’t feel it. And I don’t feel like I’m being simulated in any matrix. I was out on the surface, wasn’t I?”

“You’re flesh and blood,” Pascale said. “You died, and you were recreated. Your body was reconstructed from the chemical elements already present in the matrix’s outer crust, and then you were reanimated, and quickened to consciousness. The suit you’re wearing—that came from the matrix as well.”

“You mean someone wearing a suit got close enough to be killed by the tides?”

“No…” Pascale said carefully. “No; there’s another way into the matrix. A much easier way—or at least it once was.”

“I should still be dead. Nothing can live on a neutron star. Or in it, for that matter.”

“I told you; it isn’t one.” And then she explained how it was possible; how the matrix itself was generating a pocket of tolerable gravity in which she could live; how it was achieved by the circulation deeper in the crust of awesome quantities of degenerate matter; perhaps as a computational by-product; perhaps not. But like a diverging lens, the flow focused gravity away from her, while equally ferocious forces kept the walls from crushing in at only fractionally less than the speed of light.

“What about you?”

“I’m not like you,” Pascale said. “This body I’m wearing—that’s all it is, something to puppet; something in which to meet you. It’s formed from the same nuclear material as the crust. The neutrons are bound together by strange quarks, so I don’t fly apart under my own quantum pressure.” She touched her forehead. “But I’m not doing any thinking. That’s going on all around you, in the matrix itself. You’ll excuse me—and this is going to sound terribly rude—but I’d find it mind-numbingly boring if I was forced into doing nothing except talk to you. As I said, our computational rates are highly divergent. You’re not offended, are you? I mean, it’s nothing personal, I hope you understand.”

“Forget it,” Khouri said. “I’m sure I’d feel the same.”

The corridor widened out now, into what seemed to be a well-appointed scientific study, from any time in the last five or six centuries. The room’s predominant colour was brown, the brown of age: on the wooden shelves which ran along its walls, on the browning spines of the ancient paper books arrayed along those shelves, the lustrous brown of the mahogany desk, and the golden-brown metal of the antique scientific tools placed around the desk’s periphery for effect. Wooden cabinets buttressed the walls which did not carry shelves, and in them hung yellowing bones; alien bones which at first glance might be mistaken for the fossils of dinosaurs or large, extinct flightless birds, provided one did not pay undue attention to the capaciousness of the alien skull, the roominess of the mind it had surely once entrapped.

There were examples of modern apparatus too: scanning devices, advanced cutting instruments, racks of eidetics and holographic storage wafers. A servitor of intermediate modernity waited inertly in one corner, head slightly bowed, like a trusty retainer taking a well-earned snooze while still on his feet.

In one wall, slatted windows overlooked an arid, windswept terrain of mesas and precarious rock formations, bathed in the reddish light of a setting sun, already disappearing behind the chaotic horizon.

And at the desk—rising from it as they entered the room, as if disturbed from concentration—was Sylveste.

She looked into his eyes—human eyes—for the first time, in what passed for the flesh.

For a moment he looked annoyed by their intrusion, but his expression softened until half a smile played across his features. “I’m glad you took the time to visit us,” he said. “And I hope Pascale has explained all that you asked of her.”

“Most of it,” Khouri said, stepping further into the study, marvelling at the fastidiousness of its recreation. It was as good as any simulation she had ever experienced. Yet—and the thought was as impressive as it was frightening—every single object in this room was moulded from nuclear matter, at densities so large that, ordinarily, the smallest paperweight on his desk would have exerted a fatal gravitational pull, even from halfway across the room. “But not all of it. How did you get here?”

“Pascale probably mentioned that there was another way into the matrix.” He offered her the palms of his hands. “I found it, that’s all. Passed through it.”

“And what happened to your…”

“My real self?” The smile had a quality of self-amusement now, as if he were enjoying some private joke too subtle to share. “I doubt that he survived. And frankly, it doesn’t really concern me. I’m the real me now. I’m all that I ever was.”

“What happened in Cerberus?”

“That’s a very long story, Khouri.”

But he told her anyway. How he had travelled into the world; how Sajaki’s suit had turned out to be an empty shell; how that realisation had done nothing but strengthen his resolve to push on further, and what, finally, he had found, in the final chamber. How he had passed into the matrix—at which point, his memories diverged from his other self. But when he told her he was sure that his other self was dead, he did so with such conviction that Khouri wondered if there was not another way of knowing; if some other, less tangible bond had linked them, right until the end.

There were things even Sylveste did not really understand; that much she sensed. He had not achieved godhead—or at least, not for more than an instant, when he bathed in the portal. Had that been a choice he had made subsequently? she wondered. If the matrix was simulating him; and if the matrix was essentially infinite in its computational capacity… what limits had been imposed on him, other than those he had consciously selected?

What she learnt was this: Carine Lefevre had been kept alive by part of the Shroud, but there had been nothing accidental about it.

“It’s as if there were two factions,” Sylveste said, toying with one of the brass microscopes on his desk, angling its little mirror this way and that, as if trying to catch the last rays of the setting sun. “One that wanted to use me to find out if the Inhibitors were still around, still capable of posing a threat to the Shrouders. And the other faction, which I don’t think cared for humanity any more than the first. But they were more cautious. They thought there had to be a better way, other than goading the Inhibitor device to see if it still generated a response.”

“But what happens to us now? Who actually won? Was it Sun Stealer or the Mademoiselle?”

“Neither,” Sylveste said, placing the microscope back down again, its velvet base softly bumping against the desk. “At least, that’s my instinctual feeling. I think we—I—came close to triggering the device, close to giving it the stimulus it needed to alert the remaining devices and begin the war against humanity.” He laughed. “Calling it a war implied it might have been a two-sided thing. But I don’t think it would have been like that at all.”

“But you don’t think it got that far?”

“I hope and I pray, that’s all.” He shrugged. “Of course, I could be wrong. I used to say I was never wrong about anything, but that’s one lesson I have learnt.”

“And what about the Amarantin, the Shrouders?”

“Only time will tell.”

“That’s all?”

“I don’t have all the answers, Khouri.” He looked around the room, as if appraising the volumes on the shelves, reassuring himself that they were still present. “Not even here.”

“It’s time to go,” Pascale said, suddenly. She had appeared at her husband’s side with a glass of something clear; vodka, maybe. She placed it on the desk, next to a polished skull the colour of parchment.

“Where?”

“Back into space, Khouri. Isn’t that what you want? You surely don’t want to spend the rest of eternity here.”

“There’s nowhere to go,” Khouri said. “You should know that, Pascale. The ship was against us; the spider-room destroyed; Ilia killed—”

“She made it, Khouri. She wasn’t killed when the shuttle was destroyed.”

So she had managed to get into a suit—but what good did that do her? Khouri was about to question Pascale further, when she realised that whatever the woman told her was very likely to be true, no matter how unbelievable it seemed—and no matter how useless the truth, no matter how little difference it could possibly make.

“What are you two going to do?”

Sylveste reached for the vodka glass and took a discreet sip. “Haven’t you guessed yet? This room isn’t just for your benefit. We inhabit it as well, except that we inhabit a simulated version in the matrix. And not just this room, but the rest of the base; just as it always was—except now we have it all to ourselves.”

“Is that all?”

“No… not quite.”

And then Pascale moved to his side and he put an arm around her waist and the two of them turned towards the slatted window; towards the red-drenched alien sunset, the arid landscape of Resurgam stretching away, lifeless.

And then it changed.

It began at the horizon; a sweeping wave of transformation which raced towards them with the speed of an oncoming day. Clouds burst into the sky, vast as empires; now the sky was bluer, even though the sun was still sinking towards dusk. And the landscape was no longer arid, but erupting into tumultuous greenery, a verdant tidal wave. She could see lakes, and trees, alien trees, and now roads, winding between egglike houses, clustered into hamlets and, on the horizon, a larger community, rising towards a single slender spire. She stared into the distance, and stared, struck dumb by the immensity of what she was seeing, which was an entire world returned to life, and—perhaps it was a trick of the eye; she would never know—she thought she saw them moving between the houses, moving with the speed of birds, but never leaving the ground; never reaching the air.

“Everything that they ever were,” Pascale said, “or most of it, at any rate, is stored in the matrix. This isn’t some archaeological reconstruction, Khouri. This is Resurgam, as they inhabit it now. Brought into being by sheer force of will, by those who survived. It’s a whole world, down to the smallest detail.”

Khouri looked around the room, and now she understood. “And you’re going to study it, aren’t you?”

“Not just study it,” Sylveste said, draining a little more of his vodka. “But live in it. Until it bores us, which—I suspect—won’t be any time now.”

And then she left them, in their study, to resume whatever deep and meaningful conversation they had put in abeyance while they entertained her.

She finished climbing the stairwell, stepping once more onto the surface of Hades. The crust was still aglow with red fire, still alive with computation. Now that she had been here for long enough to attune her senses, she realised that, all along, the crust had been drumming beneath her feet, as if a titanic engine were roaring in a basement. That, she supposed, was not far from the truth. It was an engine of simulation.

She thought of Sylveste and Pascale, commencing another day’s exploration of their fabulous new world. In the time since she had left them, years might have passed for them. That seemed to matter very little. She had the suspicion that they would only choose death when all else had ceased to hold their fascination. Which, as Sylveste had said, was not going to happen any time soon.

She turned on the suit communicator.

“Ilia… can you hear me? Shit; this is stupid, but they said you might still be alive.”

There was nothing but static. Hopes crushed, she looked around at the searing plain and wondered what she was meant to do next.

Then: “Khouri, is that you? What business have you got still being alive?”

There was something very odd about her voice. It kept speeding up and slowing down, like she was drunk, but too ominously regular for that.

“I could ask you the same thing. Last thing I remember is the shuttle going belly-up. You telling me you’re still out there, drifting?”

“Better than that,” Volyova said, voice whooshing up and down the spectrum. “I’m aboard a shuttle; do you hear that? I’m aboard a shuttle.”

“How the—”

“The ship sent it. The Infinity.” For once, Volyova sounded breathless with excitement; as if this was something she had been desperately anxious to tell someone. “I thought it was going to kill me. That’s all I was waiting for; that final attack. But it didn’t come. Instead, the ship sent out a shuttle for me.”

“This doesn’t make any sense. Sun Stealer should still be running it; should still be trying to finish us off…”

“No,” Volyova said, still with the same tone of childish delight, “no; it makes perfect sense—provided what I did worked, which I think it must have—”

“What did you do, Ilia?”

“I—um—let the Captain warm.”

“You did what?”

“Yes; it was rather a terminal approach to the problem. But I thought if one parasite was trying to gain control of the ship, the surest way to fight it was by unleashing an even more potent one.” Volyova paused, as if awaiting Khouri’s confirmation that this had indeed been a sensible thing to do. When none came, she continued, “This was barely a day ago—do you know what that means? The plague must have transformed a substantial mass of the ship in only a few hours! The speed of the transformation must have been incredible; centimetres a second!”

“Are you sure it was wise?”

“Khouri, it’s probably the least wise thing I’ve ever done in my life. But it does seem to have worked. At the very least, we’ve swapped one megalomaniac for another—but this one doesn’t seem quite so dedicated to our destruction.”

“I guess that’s a step in the right direction. Where are you now? Have you been back aboard yet?”

“Hardly. No, I’ve spent the last few hours searching for you. Where the hell are you, Khouri? I can’t seem to get a meaningful fix on your location.”

“You don’t really want to know.”

“Well, we’ll see. But I want you aboard this ship as soon as possible. I’m not going back into the lighthugger alone, in case you had any doubts. I don’t think it’s going to look quite the way we remembered it. You—uh—can reach me, can’t you?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Khouri did what she had been told she should do, when she wanted to leave the surface of Hades. It made very little sense, but Pascale had been quite insistent—she had said it was a message that the matrix would understand; one that would cause it to project its bubble of lowfield gravity into space; a bottle in which she could ride to safety.

She spread arms wide, as if she had wings; as if she could fly.

The red ground—fluctuating, shimmering as ever—dropped smoothly away.