The Revelation Space Collection (189 page)

It might have been Tanner.

Maybe it was me.

Refuge was sufficiently small that there was no real drawback in walking from point to point within its interior; a fact aided by the relatively weak artificial gravity which the habitat’s lazy spin imparted. We were led into one of the connecting tunnels: a three-metre-wide tube fashioned from thick smoky glass, with intermittent glass irises spaced along its length, dilating open and shut to allow us passage and to make abundantly clear the fact that we were being shepherded, like food passing along the gullet. The walk took us further along the main axis of the spindle, gravity rising as we descended from the endcap, but never reaching anything like one gee. The unlit structures of Refuge towered over us like canyon walls at night, and there was no sense whatsoever that anyone else inhabited the place. The truth was that the kind of clientèle which Refuge serviced were the kind of people who demanded absolute discretion, even from others like themselves.

‘Has Reivich been mapped yet?’ I asked, realising that it was an obvious question which so far hadn’t occurred to me. ‘After all, that’s why he’s here.’

‘Not yet,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘There are all sorts of physiological tests which need to be made first, to ensure that the mapping is optimised - cell membrane chemistry, neurotransmitter properties, glial cell structure, blood-brain volume, that kind of thing. You only get one shot at it, you see.’

‘Reivich’s going for the full destructive scan?’

‘Something very close to it. It’s still the way to get the best resolution, they say.’

‘Once he’s scanned, he won’t have to worry about an irritation like Tanner.’

‘Not unless Tanner follows him.’

I laughed - before I realised that Quirrenbach wasn’t making a joke.

‘Where do you think Tanner’s now?’ Zebra said, walking to my left, her heels clicking on the floor, her elongated reflection like dancing scissors in the wall’s reflection.

‘Somewhere Reivich has his eye on him,’ I said. ‘Along with Amelia, I hope.’

‘Is she really to be trusted?’

‘She might be the only person who hasn’t betrayed one of us,’ I said. ‘At least not intentionally. But I’m sure of one thing. Tanner’s stringing her along only until she ceases to be of use to him. Once that moment comes - and it might be soon - she’ll be in very great danger.’

Chanterelle said, ‘You came here to save her?’

For a moment I wanted to answer in the affirmative; to dredge up some tiny crumb of self-respect and pretend that I was a human being capable of something other than wickedness. And maybe it wouldn’t have been entirely untrue - maybe Amelia was a large part of the reason I’d come here, knowing it was everything that Tanner wanted. But she wasn’t the largest part, and the last thing I felt like doing was lying any more, least of all to myself.

‘I came here to end what Cahuella started,’ I said. ‘It’s as simple as that.’

The smoked-glass tunnel wound its way up again, towards the far endcap of Refuge, and then punched its way into the lightless side of one of the looming airtight structures. At the end of this particular stretch of tunnel was another iris, currently sealed. But this one was gloss-black, and it was impossible to see what lay beyond it.

I walked up to it and pressed my cheek against the unyielding metal, straining to hear something.

‘Reivich?’ I called. ‘We’re here! Open up!’

The door irised open, more ponderously than those we’d passed through earlier on.

Cool green light streamed through the opening arcs, bathing us in its insipidity. Suddenly the fact that I didn’t have a weapon - that none of us were armed - hit home. I might die in a second, I thought - and probably not even know it when it happened. I had allowed myself to be admitted into the lair of a man who had everything to fear from me, and no reason in the universe to trust me. Did that make Reivich or myself the bigger fool? I couldn’t begin to guess. All I knew was that I wanted to get out of Refuge as quickly as possible.

The door opened fully, revealing a bronze-walled antechamber, with vivid green lamps hanging from the ceiling. Bas-relief gold symbols scurried around the walls, iterating similar mathematical statements to those I had seen when I’d spoken to Reivich; the incantations which could shatter a mind into ones and zeros; pure number.

There was no doubt that he was here.

The door closed behind us and another irised ahead, revealing a much larger space, like the inside of a cathedral. The room was bathed in golden light, yet its extremities were so far away that they were lost in shadow. I could see the slight curvature of Refuge’s floor, an effect accentuated by the interlocking bronze and silver chevrons which patterned the floor.

The air smelled of incense.

A man sat in the distance, in the middle of a pool of brighter light shafting from a stained-glass window far above. He sat facing away from us, in a high-backed chair of ornate construction, wreathed in gold. A trio of slender bipedal servitors stood a few metres from the chair, presumably awaiting instructions. I studied the shape of his head, almost lost in shadow itself, and knew that I was standing behind Reivich.

I remembered when I thought I had seen him, near the immortal fish in Chasm City. How quickly I had reacted, slipping out my gun and chasing around the fish tank to confront and kill him. I was sure that I would have done so if Voronoff had not been a second faster than I.

Now I didn’t feel any pressing need to kill him.

A voice, like sandpaper rasping against sandpaper, said, ‘Turn me around so that I may face my guests, please.’ The statement itself was a laboured thing, punctuated by wheezes and words less spoken than whispered.

One of the servitors stepped forward, treading with the inhuman silence of their kind, and swivelled Reivich around.

What faced us was not what I was expecting.

It was not possible . . .

Reivich looked like a corpse: a cadaver briefly animated by the application of electrical puppetry. He did not look like anything living. He did not look like anything which had a right to speak, or to be able to curve his mouth in the semblance of a smile.

He reminded me of a less healthy version of Marco Ferris. We could see only his head and the tips of his fingers. The rest of him was lost beneath a thick quilted blanket, from which trailed medical feedlines, curving around into a compact life-support module clamped to one arm of the chair, a smaller version of the cuirass which I had used to keep Gitta ‘alive’ while I returned her body to the Reptile House. His head was little more than a skull around which skin had been draped; skin which was mottled black where it wasn’t already a shade of bruised purple. His eyesockets had been enucleated; fine cables trailed from the darkness between his lids, running into the same life-support module. There were only a few wisps of hair left on his crown, like the few trees which will always remain standing directly under an airblast. His jaw hung slackly open, his tongue a black slug filling his mouth.

He raised a hand. Apart from a few liver spots, it was that of a much younger man.

‘I see you’re disturbed,’ Reivich said.

I realised now that the voice didn’t come from him at all, but from the life-support module. It still sounded feeble. Presumably even the act of subvocalising was an effort to him.

‘You did it,’ Quirrenbach said, stepping closer to the man he still worked for. ‘You took the scan.’

‘Either that or I didn’t get enough sleep last night,’ Reivich said, his voice like wind. ‘On balance I’m inclined to think the former.’

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘What went wrong?’

‘Nothing went wrong.’

‘You shouldn’t look like this,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘You look like a man on the edge of death.’

‘Perhaps because I am.’

‘The scan failed?’ Zebra said.

‘No, Taryn, it didn’t. The scan was a complete success, I’m told. My neural structure was acquired flawlessly.’

‘You did it too soon,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘That’s right, isn’t it? You couldn’t wait for all the medical checks. And this is what it did to you.’

Reivich’s head approximated a nod. ‘People like myself, and Tanner - and yourself,’ he said, directing his gaze at me, ‘lack medichines. Almost no one on Sky’s Edge has it in their cells, except for the very few who were able to afford the services of the Ultras. And even those that could often chose some other kind of longevity procedure.’

‘We had other things to concern us,’ I said.

‘Of course we did. Which is why we dispensed with such luxuries. The trouble was, I’d need medichines to protect my cells against the effect of the scan.’

‘The old style? Hard and fast?’ I said.

‘The best, if you listen to the theorists. Everything else is a compromise. The simple fact is that if you want to get your soul into the machine - and not just some blurred impression - you have to die in the process. Or at least suffer what would ordinarily be lethal injury.’

‘So why didn’t you protect yourself with medichines?’ Quirrenbach said.

‘There wasn’t time to do it properly. Medichines have to be carefully matched to the user, and introduced into the body slowly. Otherwise the effect is massive toxic shock. You die before the medichines can aid you.’

‘If you used Sylveste’s equipment,’ I said carefully, remembering what I’d been told of those experiments, ‘you shouldn’t even be breathing.’

‘It was an updated process, based on Sylveste’s original work. But you’re right - even allowing for technical refinements, I should be quite dead. As it happens, I was administered with enough broad-spectrum medichinery to survive the scan - at least temporarily.’ He waved his hand at the life-support module and the three attendant servitors. ‘Refuge supplies these machines. They’re trying to stabilise the cellular damage and introduce more refined variants of medichines, but I suspect they’re only doing it out of obligation.’

‘You think you’re going to die?’ I said.

‘I feel it in my bones.’

I tried to imagine what it would have been like for him; that agonising instant of neural capture, like being caught in the glare of the brightest flare imaginable; a radiance which shone beneath the skin, into the marrow itself, turning him into a smoky glass sculpture of himself, for that piercing instant.

The rapid analytic beams of the scan, focused down to cellular-resolution, would have swept through his brain at a speed only fractionally faster than the speed of synaptic impulses, keeping slightly ahead of the cortical messages proclaiming the havoc spreading through his mind. By the time the scan reached his brain-stem, no information would have yet reached that part regarding the disruption being suffered by the layers of his mind situated above. Because of that slight edge, the overall snapshot of his brain would have been completely normal, apart from the slight blurring caused by the finite spatio-temporal resolution of the process. The scan would have been finished before Reivich had recognised that it had begun - and by the time his mind began to keel over under the shock of the procedure, whole neural routines crashing into coma, it would not matter at all.

He would have been captured.

And even the damage should not have mattered; should not have been anything which the medichines could not have repaired, almost as swiftly as the injuries took place. Like shelling a building, dislodging bricks, but with a team of fanatical builders inside, putting right the harm before the next shell arrived . . .

But Reivich had never taken that path.

Reivich had opted to die; had opted to suffer assault on every cell in his brain and surrounding tissue, but knowing that, no matter what the consequences for his physical body, his essence would remain, captured for eternity and - at last - recorded in a form which could not be erased by anything as trivial as assassination or war.

Part of him had made it.

But not the part we were looking at.

‘If you’re going to die,’ I said, ‘if you accept that it’s inevitable - and that you must have known this would happen before the scan - why didn’t you just die in the scan?’

‘I did,’ Reivich said. ‘By at least a dozen medical criteria which would satisfy courts of law in other systems. But I also knew that Refuge’s machines could bring me back to life, albeit transiently.’

‘You could have waited,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘Another few days, and they could have matched your medichine requirements perfectly. ’

Reivich’s bony shoulders moved beneath the quilt; a shrug. ‘But then I would have been forced to accept a less accurate scan, in order to give the medichines a chance to function. It wouldn’t have been me.’

‘I don’t suppose Tanner’s arrival had anything to do with it?’ I asked.

Reivich seemed to find that amusing; the curve of his smile increasing minutely. Soon, I thought, we would all see the real smile beneath his face; the one written in bone. He could not have very long left now.

‘Tanner made my choice rather easier,’ Reivich said. ‘I won’t dignify him with any influence on my circumstances beyond that.’

‘Where is he?’ Chanterelle asked.

‘He’s here,’ the withered creature in the chair said. ‘He’s been here - in Refuge - for more than a day. We haven’t met yet, though.’