The Revelation Space Collection (264 page)

Now all that remained was a husk of tectonically unstable core matter spinning close to its own fragmentation speed. The machines were surrounding it even as Thorn spoke, processing and refining. In the nebula, revealed as shadowy knots of coherent shape and density, other structures were taking shape, larger than worlds in their own right.

Thorn said again, ‘I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t think anyone does. But I do have an idea. What they’ve done so far has been very hierarchical. The machines are awesome, but they have limitations. Matter has to come from somewhere, and they couldn’t immediately start smashing apart the gas giant. They had to make the tools to do that, and that meant smashing three smaller worlds first. They need raw material, you see. Energy doesn’t seem to be a problem - maybe they can draw it directly from the vacuum - but they obviously can’t condense it back down into matter with any precision or efficiency. So they have to work in stages, one step at a time. Now they’ve ripped apart a gas giant, liberating perhaps one-tenth of one per cent of the entire useful mass in this system. Based on what we’ve seen so far, that liberated mass will be used to make something else. What, I don’t know. But I’m willing to hazard a guess. There’s only one place to go now, only one hierarchy above a gas giant. It has to be the sun. I think they’re going to take it apart.’

‘You’re not serious,’ someone said.

‘I wish I wasn’t. But there has to be a reason why they haven’t smashed Resurgam yet. I think it’s obvious: they don’t have to. In a while, perhaps much sooner than we’d like, there won’t be any need for them to worry about it. It’ll be gone. They’ll have ripped this solar system apart.’

‘No ...’ someone exclaimed.

Thorn started to answer, ready to work on their understandable doubts. He had been through this before, and he knew the truth took a while to sink in. That was why he told them about the shuttles first, so that there would be something they could pin their hopes on. It was the end of the world, he would say, but that didn’t mean they all had to die. There was an escape route. All anyone needed was the courage to trust him, the courage to follow him.

But then Thorn realised that the person had said ‘no’ for an entirely different reason. It had nothing to do with his presentation.

It was the police. They were coming through the door.

Act as you would if you thought your life was in danger
, Khouri had told him.
It has to look totally credible. If this is going to work - and it has to work, for all our sakes - they have to believe that you’ve been arrested without any foreknowledge of what was going on. You had better struggle, Thorn, and be prepared to get hurt.

He jumped from the podium. The police were masked, unrecognisable. They came in with sprays and pacifiers at the ready, moving through the stunned and frightened audience with quick jerky movements and no audible communication. Thorn hit the ground and dashed towards the escape route, the one that would lead to the getaway car two blocks away. Make it look real. Make it look bloody real. He heard chairs scraping as people stood or tried to stand. The crack of fear-gas grenades and the buzz-snap of stun guns filled the room. He heard someone cry out, followed by the sound of armour on bone. There had been a moment of near calm; now it was over. The room erupted into a panicked frenzy as everyone tried to get out.

His exit was blocked. The police were coming in that way as well. Thorn spun around. Same story the other way. He started coughing, feeling panic rise in him unexpectedly, like a sudden urge to sneeze. The effect of the fear-gas was so absolute that it made him want to crawl into a corner and cower rather than stand his ground. But Thorn fought through it. He grabbed one of the chairs and raised it aloft as a shield as the police stormed towards him.

The next thing he knew he was on his knees, and then his hands, and the police were hitting him with sticks, expertly aimed so that he would have bruises but no major broken bones or internal injuries.

Out of the corner of his eye, Thorn saw another group of police laying into the woman with the bad teeth. She disappeared under them, like something mobbed by rooks.

While it waited for the singer to finish building itself, the overseer dug playfully through the stratalike memories of its earlier incarnations.

The overseer did not exist in any single Inhibitor machine. That would have been too vulnerable a concentration of expertise. But when a swarm was drawn to the site where a local cleansing would be required - typically a volume of space no more than a few light-hours wide - a distributed intelligence would be generated from many less than sentient subminds. Light-speed communications bound together the dumb elements, weaving slow, secure thoughts. More rapid processing was assigned to individual units. The overseer’s larger thought processes were necessarily sluggish, but this was a limitation that had never handicapped the Inhibitors. Nor had they ever attempted to weave together an overseer’s subelements with superluminal communication channels. There were too many warnings in the archive concerning the hazards of such experiments, entire species that had been edited out of galactic history because of a single foolish episode of causality violation.

The overseer was not only slow and distributed. It was also temporary, permitted to achieve only fleeting consciousness. Even as its sense of self had come into being it had known with grim fatality that it would die once its duties were accomplished. But it felt no sense of bitterness at the inevitability of this fate, even after it had sifted through archived memories of its previous apparitions, memories laid down during other cleansings. It was simply the way things had to be. Intelligence, even machine intelligence, was something that could not be allowed to infect the galaxy until the coming crisis had been averted. Intelligence was, quite literally, its own worst enemy.

It found itself remembering some of the earlier cleansings. Of course, it had not really been the same overseer that had masterminded those extinction episodes. When Inhibitor swarms met, which was rarely, they traded knowledge of recent kills and outbreaks, methods and anecdotes. Lately, those meetings had become more rare, which was why there had been only one significant addition to the library of starcide techniques in the last five hundred million years. Swarms, isolated from each other for so long, reacted cautiously when they met. There were even rumours of different Inhibitor factions clashing over extinction rights.

Something had certainly gone wrong since the old days, when the kills had happened cleanly and methodically, and no major outbreaks slipped through the net. The overseer could not avoid drawing conclusions. The great galaxy-encompassing machine for holding back intelligence - the machine of which the overseer was one dutiful part - was failing. Intelligence was starting to slip through the cracks, threatening infestation. The situation had certainly worsened in the last few million years, and yet this was nothing compared with the thirteen Galactic Turns - the three billion years - that lay ahead, before the time of crisis arrived. The overseer had grave doubts that intelligence could be held in check until then. It was almost enough to make it give up now, and let this particular species go uncleansed. They were quadrupedal vertebrate oxygen-breathers, after all. Mammals. It felt a distant echo of kinship, something that had never troubled it when it was extinguishing ammonia-breathing gasbags or spiny insectoids.

The overseer forced itself out of this mood. Very probably it was just this sort of thinking that was decreasing the success rate of cleansings.

No, the mammals would die. That was the way, and that was how it would be.

The overseer looked on the extent of its works around Delta Pavonis. It knew of the previous cleansing, the wiping out of the avians who had last inhabited this local sector of space. The mammals had probably not even evolved locally, meaning that this would only be phase one of a more protracted cleansing. The last lot had really botched things up, it thought. Of course, there was always a desire to perform a cleansing with the minimum amount of environmental damage. Worlds and suns were not to be converted into weapons unless a class-three breakout was imminent, and even then it was to be avoided wherever possible. The overseer did not like inflicting unnecessary devastation. It had a keen sense of the irony of ripping apart stars now, when the whole point of its work was to avoid greater destruction three billion years down the line. But what was done was done. A certain amount of additional damage had now to be tolerated.

Messy. But that, as the overseer reflected, was ‘life’.

The Inquisitor looked out across rain-soaked Cuvier. Her own reflection hovered beyond the window, a spectral figure stalking the city.

‘Will you be all right with this one, ma’am?’ the guard who had brought him asked.

‘I’ll cope,’ she said, not yet turning around. ‘If I can’t, you’re only a room away. Undo his cuffs and then leave us alone.’

‘Are you certain, ma’am?’

‘Undo his cuffs.’

The guard wrenched the plastic restraints apart. Thorn stretched his arms and touched his face nervously, like an artist checking paint that might not have dried.

‘You can go now,’ the Inquisitor said.

‘Ma’am,’ the guard replied, closing the door after him.

There was a seat waiting for Thorn. He collapsed into it. Khouri continued to look out of the window, her hands clasped behind her back. The rain drooled in great curtains from the overhang above the window. The night sky was a featureless haze somewhere between red and black. There were no stars tonight, no troubling omens in the sky.

‘Did they hurt you?’ she asked.

He remembered to keep in character. ‘What do you think, Vuilleumier? That I did this to myself because I like the sight of blood?’

‘I know who you are.’

‘So do I - I’m Renzo. Congratulations.’

‘You’re Thorn. The one they’ve been looking for.’ Her voice was raised a little bit louder than normal. ‘You’re very lucky, you know.’

‘I am?’

‘If Counter-Terrorism had found you, you’d be in a morgue by now. Maybe several morgues. Luckily the police who arrested you had no idea who they were dealing with. I doubt they’d have believed me if I’d told them, quite frankly. Thorn’s like the Triumvir to them, a figure of myth and revulsion. I think they were expecting a giant among men, someone who could pull them apart with his bare hands. But you’re just a normal-looking man who could walk unnoticed down any street in Cuvier.’

Thorn rummaged around in his mouth with the tip of one finger. ‘I’d apologise for being such a disappointment if I was Thorn.’

She turned around and walked towards him. Her bearing, her expression, even the aura she radiated, was not of Khouri. Thorn experienced a dreadful moment of doubt, the thought flashing through his mind that perhaps everything that had happened since his last meeting here had been a fantasy, that there was no Khouri at all.

But Ana Khouri was real. She had told him her secrets, not just concerning her identity and the identity of the Triumvir, but the hurting secrets that went deeper, those that concerned her husband and the way they had been cruelly separated. He never doubted for one instant that she was still terribly in love with the man. At the same time he desperately wanted to break her away from her own past, to make her see that she had to accept what had happened and move on. He felt bad about it because he knew that there was a streak of self-justification in what he wanted to do, that it was not all about - or even mainly about - helping Khouri. He also wanted to make love to her. He despised himself for it, but the urge was still there.

‘Can you stand?’ she asked.

‘I walked in here.’

‘Come with me, then. Do not attempt anything, Thorn. It will be very bad for you if you do.’

‘What do you want with me?’

‘There’s a matter we need to discuss in private.’

‘Here’s fine by me,’ he said.

‘Would you like me to turn you over to Counter-Terrorism, Thorn? It’s very easily arranged. I’m sure they’d be delighted to see you.’

She took him into the room he remembered from his first visit, with the walls covered in shelves loaded with bulging paperwork. Khouri shut the door behind her - it sealed tightly and hermetically - and then removed a slim silver cylinder the size of a cigar from a desk drawer. She held it aloft and slowly turned around in the centre of the room, while tiny lights buried in the cigar flicked from red to green.

‘We’re safe,’ she said, after the lights had remained green for three or four minutes. ‘I’ve had to take extra precautions lately. They got a bug in here when I was up on the starship.’

Thorn said, ‘Did they learn much?’

‘No. It was a crude device and by the time I got back it was already faulty. But they’ve made another attempt since, a bit more sophisticated. I can’t take any chances, Thorn.’

‘Who is it? Another branch of government?’

‘Perhaps. Could be this one, even. I promised them the Triumvir’s head on a plate and I haven’t delivered. Someone’s getting suspicious. ’

‘You’ve got me.’

‘Yes, so I suppose there are some consolations. Oh, shit.’ It was as if she had only noticed him properly then. ‘Look at what they did to you, Thorn. I’m so sorry you had to go through this.’ From another drawer she produced a small medical kit. Khouri tipped disinfectant into a wad of cotton wool and jammed it against Thorn’s split eyebrow.