The Revelation Space Collection (274 page)

The balcony was surrounded by a low fretted wall. Thorn walked to the edge and looked over, peering down towards street level. Khouri followed him, Triumvir Volyova remaining out of sight.

‘It’s time,’ Thorn said. ‘I need to speak to the people in person. That way they’ll know the statement wasn’t faked up.’

He knew that all he needed to do was shout and someone would hear him, even if it were only one person in the crowd. Before very long everyone would be looking upwards, and they would know, even before he spoke, who he was.

‘Make it good,’ Volyova said, barely raising her voice above a whisper. ‘Make it very good, Thorn. A lot will depend on this little performance.’

He looked back at her. ‘Then you’ll reconsider?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Irina . . .’ Khouri said. ‘Please think about this. At least give us a chance here, before you use the weapons.’

‘You’ll have a chance,’ Volyova said. ‘Before I use the weapons, I’ll move them across the system. That way, even if there is a response from the Inhibitors,
Infinity
won’t be the obvious target.’

‘That will take some time, won’t it?’ Khouri asked.

‘You have a month, no more than that. Of course, I’m not expecting you to have the entire planet evacuated by then. But if you’ve kept to the agreed schedule - and perhaps improved on it a little - I may consider delaying the use of the weapons a while longer. That’s reasonable, isn’t it? I can be flexible, you see.’

‘You’re asking too much of us,’ Khouri said. ‘No matter how efficient our operation on the surface is, we can’t move more than two thousand people at a time between low orbit and the starship. That’s an unavoidable bottleneck, Ilia.’ She seemed unaware that she had spoken the Triumvir’s real name.

‘Bottlenecks can always be worked around, if it matters enough,’ she said. ‘And I’ve given you every incentive, haven’t I?’

‘It’s Thorn, isn’t it?’ Khouri said.

Thorn glanced back at her. ‘What about me?’

‘She doesn’t like the way you’ve come between us,’ Khouri told him.

The Triumvir made the same derisive snort he had heard before.

‘No. It’s true,’ Khouri said. ‘Isn’t it, Ilia? You and I had a perfect working relationship until I brought Thorn into the arrangement. You’ll never forgive either me or him for destroying that beautiful little partnership.’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ Volyova said.

‘I’m not being absurd, I’m just...’

But the Triumvir whipped past her.

‘Where are you going?’ Khouri asked.

She stopped long enough to answer her. ‘Where do you think, Ana? Back to my ship. I have work to do.’

‘
Your
ship, suddenly? I thought it was
our
ship.’

But Volyova had said all she was going to say. Thorn heard her footsteps recede back into the building.

‘Is that true?’ he asked Khouri. ‘Do you really think she’s resentful of me?’

But she said nothing either. Thorn, after a long moment, turned back to the city. He leaned out into the night, formulating the crucial speech he was about to deliver. Volyova was right: a lot depended on it.

Khouri’s hand closed around his own.

The air reeked of fear-gas. Thorn felt it worming into his brain, brewing anxiety.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Skade stalked around her ship. Nothing felt right aboard
Nightshade
now. The pressure on her spine had eased and her eyeballs had returned to more or less the right shape, but those were the only real compensations. Every living thing inside the ship was now within the field’s detectable sphere of influence, embedded in a bubble of artificially modified quantum vacuum. Nine-tenths of the inertial mass of every particle in the field no longer existed.

The ship was hurling itself towards Resurgam at ten gees.

Even though Skade had her armour, and was therefore insulated from the more physiologically upsetting effects of the field, she still moved around as little as possible. Walking was not in itself difficult since the acceleration that the armour felt was only a gee, a tenth of the actual value. The armour no longer laboured under the extra load, and Skade had lost the feeling that a fall would automatically dash her brains out. But everything else was worse. When she willed the armour to move a limb, it accommodated her wishes too quickly. When she moved what should have been a heavy piece of equipment, it shifted too easily. It was as if the apparently substantial furniture of the ship had been replaced by a series of superficially convincing paper-thin façades. Even changing the direction of her gaze took care. Her eyeballs, no longer distorted by gravity, were now too responsive and tended to overshoot and then overcompensate for the overshooting. She knew this was because the muscles that steered them, which were anchored to her skull, had evolved to move a sphere of tissue with a certain inertial mass; now they were confused. But knowing all this did not make dealing with it any easier. She had turned off her
Area Postrema
permanently, since her inner ear was profoundly disturbed by the modified inertial field.

Skade reached Felka’s quarters. She entered and found Felka where she had left her last time, sitting cross-legged on a part of the floor that she had instructed to become soft. Her clothes had a stale, crumpled look. Her flesh was pasty and her hair was a nestlike tangle of greasy knots. Here and there Skade saw patches of raw pink scalp, where Felka had tugged out locks of her own hair. She sat perfectly still, one hand on either knee. Her chin was raised slightly and her eyes were closed. There was a faint glistening trail of mucus leading from one nostril to the top of her lip.

Skade audited the neural connections between Felka and the rest of the ship. To her surprise, she detected no significant traffic. Skade had assumed that Felka must have been roaming through a cybernetic environment, as had been the case on her last two visits. Skade had explored them for herself and found vast puzzlelike edifices of Felka’s own making. They were clearly surrogates for the Wall. But this was not the case on this occasion. After abandoning the real, Felka had taken the next logical step, back to the place where it had all begun.

She had gone back into her skull.

Skade lowered herself to Felka’s level, then reached out and touched her brow. She expected Felka to flinch against the cold metal contact, but she might as well have been touching a wax dummy.

Felka . . . can you hear me? I know you’re in there somewhere. This is Skade. There is something you need to know.

She waited for a response; none came.
Felka. It concerns Clavain. I’ve done what I can to make him turn away, but he hasn’t responded to any of my attempts at persuasion. My last effort was the one I thought most likely to persuade him. Shall I tell you what it was?

Felka breathed in and out, slowly and regularly.

I used you. I promised Clavain that if he turned back, I’d give you back to him. Alive, of course. I thought that was fair. But he wasn’t interested. He made no response to my overture. Do you see, Felka? You can’t mean as much to him as his beloved mission.

She stood up and then strolled around the seated meditative figure.
I hoped you would, you know. It would have been the best solution for both of us. But it was Clavain’s call, and he showed where his priorities lay. They weren’t with you, Felka. After all those years, all those centuries, you didn’t mean as much to him as forty mindless machines. I’ll admit, I was surprised.

Still Felka said nothing. Skade felt an urge to dive into her skull and find the warm and comforting place into which she had retreated. Had Felka been a normal Conjoiner, it would have been within Skade’s capabilities to invade her most private mental spaces. But Felka’s mind was put together differently. Skade could skim its surface, occasionally glimpse its depths, but no more than that.

Skade sighed. She had not really wanted to torment Felka, but she had hoped to prise her out of her withdrawal by turning her against Clavain.

It had not worked.

Skade stood behind Felka. She closed her eyes and issued a stream of commands to the spinal medical device she had attached to Felka. The effect was immediate and gratifying. Felka collapsed, sagging in on herself. Her mouth lolled open, oozing saliva.

Delicately, Skade picked her up and carried her out of the room.

The silver sun burned overhead, a blank coin shining through a caul of grey sea fog. Skade settled into a flesh-and-blood body, as she had before. She was standing on a flat-topped rock; the air was cold to the bone and prickled with ozone and the briny stench of rotting seaweed. In the distance, a billion pebbles sighed orgasmically under the assault of another sea wave.

It was the same place again. She wondered if the Wolf was becoming just the tiniest bit predictable.

Skade peered into the fog around her. There, no more than a dozen paces from her, was another human figure. But it was neither Galiana nor the Wolf this time. It was a small child, crouched on a rock about the same size as the one Skade stood on. Cautiously, Skade hopped and skipped her way from rock to rock, dancing across the pools and the razor-edged ridges that linked them. Being fully human again was both disturbing and exhilarating. She felt more fragile than she had ever done before Clavain had hurt her, conscious that beneath her skin was only soft muscle and brittle bone. It was good to be invincible. But at the same time it was good to feel the universe chemically invading her through every pore of her skin, to feel the wind stroking every hair on the back of her hand, to feel every ridge and crack of the seaworn rock beneath her feet.

She reached the child. It was Felka - no surprise there - but as she must have been on Mars, when Clavain rescued her.

Felka sat cross-legged, much as she had been in the cabin. She wore a damp, filthy, seaweed-stained torn dress that left her legs and arms bare. Her hair, like Skade’s, was long and dark, falling in lank strands across her face. The sea fog lent the scene a bleached, monochrome aspect.

Felka glanced up at her, made eye contact for a second and then returned to the activity she had been engaged in before. Around her, forming a ragged ring, were many tiny parts of hard-shelled sea-creatures: legs and pincers, claws and tail pieces, whiplike antennae, broken scabs of carapacial shell, aligned and orientated with maniacal precision. The conjunctions of the many pale parts resembled a kind of anatomical algebra. Felka stared at the arrangement silently, occasionally pivoting around on her haunches to examine a different part of it. Only now and then would she pick up one of the pieces - a hinged, barbed limb, perhaps - and reposition it elsewhere. Her expression was blank, not at all like a child at play. It was more as if she was engaged in some task that demanded her solemn and total attention, an activity too intense to be pleasurable.

Felka . . .

She looked up again, questioningly, only to return to her game.

The distant waves crashed again. Beyond Felka the grey wall of mist lost some of its opacity for a moment. Skade could still not make out the sea, but she could see much further than had been possible before. The pattern of rockpools stretched into the distance, a mind-wrenching tessellation. But there was something else out there, at the limit of vision. It was only slightly darker than the grey itself, and it shifted in and out of existence, but she was certain that there was something there. It was a grey spire, a vast towerlike thing ramming into the greyness of the sky. It appeared to lie a great distance away, perhaps beyond the sea itself, or thrusting out of the sea some distance from land.

Felka noticed it too. She looked at the object, her expression unchanging, and only when she had seen enough of it did she return to her animal parts. Skade was just wondering what it could be when the fog closed in again and she became aware of a third presence.

The Wolf had arrived. It - or she - stood only a few paces beyond Felka. The form remained indistinct, but whenever the fog abated or the form became more solid, Skade thought she saw a woman rather than an animal.

The roar of the waves, which had always been there, shifted into language again. ‘You brought Felka, Skade. I’m pleased.’

‘This representation of her,’ Skade asked, remembering to speak aloud as the Wolf had demanded of her before. She nodded towards the girl. ‘Is that how she sees herself now - as a child again - or how
you
wish
me
to see her?’

‘A little of both, perhaps,’ said the Wolf.

‘I asked for your help,’ Skade said. ‘You said that you would be more co-operative if I brought Felka with me. Well, I have. And Clavain is still behind me. He hasn’t shown any sign of giving up.’

‘What have you tried?’

‘Using her as a bargaining chip. But Clavain didn’t bite.’

‘Did you imagine he ever would?’

‘I thought he cared about Felka enough to have second thoughts.’

‘You misunderstand Clavain,’ the Wolf said. ‘He won’t have given up on her.’