The Revelation Space Collection (101 page)

‘Oh, the dolphins, was it?’ His father sounded surprised, as if this was not quite the answer he had been expecting. ‘I thought it was the dead that interested you, Sky - our beloved momios.’

True enough, Sky thought - but one thing at a time.

‘And now you’re sorry,’ his father continued. ‘Because they weren’t what you were expecting, were they? I’m sorry, too. Sleek and the others are sick in the head. The kindest thing we could do would be to put them all to sleep, but they keep being allowed to raise young, and each generation’s more . . .’

‘Psychotic,’ Sky said.

‘. . . yes.’ His father regarded him strangely. ‘More psychotic than the last. Well, now that your vocabulary’s showing such tremendous growth, it would be a shame to stifle it, don’t you think? A shame to deny you the potential to enlarge it?’ He ruffled Sky’s hair. ‘I’m talking about the nursery, young man. A spell in it, where you can’t come into any harm.’

It was not that he hated the nursery, or even especially disliked it. But when he was banished there it could not help but feel like a punishment.

‘I want to see my mother.’

‘Your mother’s outside the ship, Sky, so there’s no use running to her for a second opinion. And you know if you did she’d say exactly the same thing. You’ve disobeyed us and you need to be taught a lesson.’ He turned to Constanza, shaking his head. ‘As for you, young madam, I think it might be for the best if you and Sky were not to play together for a period of time, don’t you think?’

‘We don’t play,’ Constanza said with a scowl. ‘We talk, and explore.’

‘Yes,’ Titus said, with a long-suffering sigh, ‘and visit parts of the ship you’re expressly not allowed to go to. That, I’m afraid, can’t go unpunished.’ He softened his voice now, as he always did when he was about to discuss something of genuine importance. ‘This ship is our home - our only real home - and we have to feel like we live here. That means feeling safe in the places where it’s right to do so - and knowing where it isn’t safe to go. Not because there are monsters or anything silly like that, but because there are dangers - adult dangers. Machinery and power systems. Robots and drop shafts. Believe me, I’ve seen what happens when people go into places they’re not meant to go, and it usually isn’t very pleasant.’

Sky did not doubt his father for an instant. As head of security aboard a ship which generally enjoyed political and social harmony, Titus Haussmann’s duties usually concerned accidents and the very occasional suicide. And although Titus had always spared Sky the more intimate details of how it was possible to die aboard a ship like the Santiago, Sky’s imagination had done all the rest.

‘I’m sorry,’ Constanza said.

‘Yes - I’m sure you are, but that doesn’t change the fact that you took my son into forbidden territory. I’ll be speaking to your parents, Constanza, and I don’t think they’ll be best pleased. Now run along home, and perhaps in a week or two we’ll review the situation. Very well?’

She nodded, said nothing, and left along one of the curving corridors which radiated away from the intersection where Titus had cornered them. It was not really far to her parents’ domicile - no part of the Santiago’s major habitation section was far from any other part - but the ship’s designers had cunningly avoided making any route too direct, except for the emergency crawlways and the train lines which reached down the spine. The snaking general-use corridors gave the illusion that the ship was considerably larger than its true size, and two families could live almost next to each other and feel that they lived in entirely different districts.

Titus escorted his son back to their dwelling. Sky was sorry that his mother was outside, for - despite what Titus had said - her punishments were generally a shade more lenient than those his father prescribed. He dared to hope that she was already back aboard ship, having returned from her shift early, the work on the hull completed ahead of schedule, and that she would be waiting for them when they reached the nursery. But there was no sign of her.

‘In,’ Titus said. ‘Clown will take care of you. I’ll be back to let you out in two, possibly three hours.’

‘I don’t want to go in.’

‘No - and if you did, it wouldn’t be much of a punishment, would it?’

The nursery door opened. Titus propelled his son into the room without stepping across the threshold himself.

‘Hello, Sky,’ said Clown, who was waiting for him.

There were many toys in the nursery, and some of them were capable of holding limited conversations - even, fleetingly, giving the impression of true intelligence. Sky sensed that these toys were built for children of about his age, designed to mesh with a typical three-year-old’s view of the world. In most cases, he had begun to find them simplistic and stupid not long after his second birthday. But Clown was different; not really a toy at all, although not quite a person either. Clown had been with Sky for as long as he remembered, confined to the nursery, but not always present even then. Clown could not touch things, or allow himself to be touched by Sky, and when Clown spoke, his voice did not come from quite the place where Clown stood - or seemed to be standing.

Which was not to say that Clown was a figment of his imagination; without influence. Clown saw everything that happened in the nursery and was punctilious in telling Sky’s parents when he had done something that required reprimanding. It was Clown who told his parents he had broken the rocking horse, that it had not been - as he had tried to make them think - the fault of one of the other smart toys. He had hated Clown for that betrayal, but not for long. Even Sky had understood that Clown was, apart from Constanza, the only real friend he had, and that there were some things Clown knew that were beyond even Constanza.

‘Hello,’ Sky said, mournfully.

‘You’ve been banished here, I see, for visiting the dolphins.’ Clown stood alone in the plain white room, the other toys concealed tidily away. ‘That wasn’t the right thing to do, was it, Sky? I could have shown you dolphins.’

‘Not the same ones. Not real ones. And you’ve shown them to me before.’

‘Not like this. Watch!’

And suddenly the two of them were standing up in a boat, out at sea, under a blue sky. All around them the waves were broken by cresting dolphins, their backs like wet pebbles in the sunlight. The illusion of being at sea was marred only by the narrow black windows which ran along one side of the room.

In a story book, Sky had once found a picture of someone else like Clown, dressed in puffed-out, striped clothes with big white buttons, with a comical, permanently smiling face framed by bouffant orange hair under a soft, sagging striped hat. When he touched the picture in the book, the clown moved and did the same kinds of tricks and vaguely amusing things that his own Clown did. Sky remembered, dimly, a time when his response to the Clown’s tricks had been to laugh and clap, as if there were nothing more that could be asked of the universe than to provide the antics of a clown.

Now, subtly, even Clown had begun to bore him. He humoured Clown, but their relationship had undergone a profound sea-change which could never be entirely reversed. To Sky, Clown had become something to be understood; something to be dissected and parameterised. Clown, he now recognised, was something like the bubble-drawing the dolphin had made in the water: a projection carved from light rather than sound. They were not really in a boat, either. Under his feet, the room’s floor felt as hard and flat as when his father had pushed him inside. Sky did not quite understand how the illusion was created, but it was perfectly realistic, the walls of the nursery nowhere to be seen.

‘The dolphins in the tank - Sleek and the others - had machines in them,’ Sky said. He might as well learn something while he was prisoner. ‘Why?’

‘To help them focus their sonar.’

‘No. I don’t mean what were the machines for. I mean, who had the idea to put them there in the first place?’

‘Ah. That would have been the Chimerics.’

‘Who were they? Did they come with us?’

‘No, to answer your last question, though they very much wanted to.’ Clown’s voice was slightly high-pitched and quavery - almost womanly - but never anything other than infinitely patient. ‘Remember, Sky, that when the Flotilla left Earth’s system - left the orbit of Mercury, and flew into interstellar space - the Flotilla was leaving from a system that was still technically engaged in war. Oh, most of the hostilities had ceased by then, but the terms of ceasefire had still not been completely thrashed out, and everyone was still very much on a war footing; ready to return to the fray at a moment’s notice. There were many factions who saw the closing stages of the war as their last chance to make a difference. Some of them, by this time, were little more than highly organised brigands. The Chimerics - or more precisely, the Chimeric faction that created the dolphins - were certainly one of those. The Chimerics in general had taken cyborgisation to new extremes, blending themselves and their animals with machines. This faction had pushed those limits even further, to the point where they were shunned even by the mainstream Chimerics.’

Sky listened and followed what Clown was telling him. Clown’s judgement of Sky’s cognitive skills was adept enough to prevent a lapse into incomprehensibility, while at the same time forcing Sky to concentrate intently on his every word. Sky was aware that not all three-year-olds could have understood what Clown was saying, but that did not concern him in the least.

‘And the dolphins?’

‘Engineered by them. For what purpose, we can’t begin to guess. Perhaps to serve as aquatic infantry, in some planned invasion of Earth’s oceans. Or perhaps they were simply an experiment which was never completed, interrupted by the war’s decline. Whatever the case, a family of dolphins was captured from the Chimerics by agents of the Confederacion Sudamericana.’

That, Sky well knew, was the organisation that had spearheaded the construction of the Flotilla. The Confederacion had remained studiously neutral for most of the war, concentrating on ambitions beyond the narrow confines of the solar system. After garnering a handful of allies, they had built and launched human-kind’s first serious attempt at crossing interstellar space.

‘We took the dolphins with us?’

‘Yes, thinking they’d come in useful at Journey’s End. But removing the augmentation that the Chimerics had added was a lot harder than it looked. In the end it was easier to leave it in place. Then when the next generation of dolphins was born, it was found that they couldn’t communicate with the adults properly unless they had the augmentation as well. So we copied it and implanted it in the young.’

‘But they ended up psychotic.’

Clown registered the tiniest flicker of surprise, his answer not immediately forthcoming. Later Sky would learn that in those frozen moments Clown was seeking advice from one of his parents, or one of the other adults, about how best to respond.

‘Yes . . .’ Clown said finally. ‘But that wasn’t necessarily our fault.’

‘What, not our fault to keep them down in the hold, with only a few cubic metres to swim around in?’

‘Believe me, the conditions we keep them in now are vastly preferable to the Chimerics’ experimentation lab.’

‘But the dolphins can’t be expected to remember that, can they?’

‘They’re happier, trust me.’

‘How can you know?’

‘Because I’m Clown.’ The mask of his face, ever-smiling, pulled into a more agonised smile. ‘Clown always knows.’ Sky was about to ask Clown exactly what he meant by that when there was a flash of light. It was very bright and sudden, but completely silent, and it had come from the window strip along one wall. When Sky blinked he could still see the after-image of the window: a hard-edged pink rectangle.

‘What happened?’ he asked, still blinking.

But there was something very wrong with Clown, and indeed, with the entire view. In the instant of the flash, Clown had become misshapen, stretched and malformed in all the wrong directions, painted across the walls, his expression frozen. The boat in which they had seemed to be standing curved away in sickeningly distorted perspective. It was as if the entire scene had been rendered in thick wet paint which someone had begun to stir with a stick.

Clown had never allowed that to happen before.

Worse still, the room’s source of illumination - the glowing imagery on the walls - became dark, then black. There was no light save for the faintest milky glow from the high-set window. But even that faded after a while, leaving Sky alone in utter darkness.

‘Clown?’ Sky said, at first quietly, and then with more insistence.

No answer came. Sky began to feel something odd and unwelcome. It came from deep within him; a welling-up of fear and anxiety that had everything to do with a typical three-year-old’s response to the situation and nothing to do with the gloss of adulthood and precosity which normally distanced Sky from other children of his age. He was suddenly a small child, alone in the dark, not understanding what was happening.

He asked for Clown again, but there was desperation in his voice; a realisation that Clown would already have answered him if that were possible. No; Clown was gone; the bright nursery had become dark and - yes - cold, and he could hear nothing; not even the normal background noises of the Santiago.

Sky crawled until he met the wall, and then navigated around the room, trying to find the door. But when the door shut, it sealed itself invisibly flush, and now he could not locate even the hair-thin crack which would have betrayed its position. There was no interior handle or control, for - had he not been banished to the room - Clown would normally have opened the door at his request.