The Revelation Space Collection (288 page)

‘You cared for her enough to risk your life rescuing her. That was a difficult choice as well. But it doesn’t make you unique.’ Scorpio scratched at the upraised snout of his nose. ‘We’ve all made difficult choices around here. Look at Antoinette. I know her story, Clavain. Set out to do a good deed - burying her father the way he wanted - and she ends up entangled in a battle for the entire future of the species. Pigs, humans ... everything. I bet she didn’t have that in mind when she set out to salve her conscience. But we can’t guess where things will take us, or the harder questions that will follow on from one choice. You thought defecting would be an act in and of itself, but it was just the start of something much larger.’

Clavain sighed. Perhaps it was imagination, but Scorpio thought that he detected the slightest lightening of the man’s mood. His voice was softer when he spoke. ‘What about you, Scorpio? Did you have choices to make as well?’

‘Yeah. Whether I threw my weight in with you human sons of bitches.’

‘And the consequences?’

‘Some of you are still sons of bitches that deserve to die in the most painful and slow way I can envisage. But not all of you.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

‘Take it while you can. I might change my mind tomorrow.’

Clavain sighed again, scratched his beard and then said, ‘All right. Do it. Transmit a beta-level proxy.’

‘We’ll need a statement to accompany it,’ Scorpio said. ‘A laying-down of terms, if you like.’

‘Whatever it takes, Scorp. Whatever the hell it takes.’

In their long, crushing reign, the Inhibitors had learned of fifteen distinct ways to murder a dwarf star.

Doubtless, the overseer thought to itself, there were other methods, more or less efficient, which might turn out to have been invented or used at various epochs in galactic history. The galaxy was very large, very old, and the Inhibitors’ knowledge of it was far from comprehensive. But it was a fact that no new technique for starcide had been added to their repository for four hundred and forty million years. The galaxy had finished two rotations since that last methodological update. Even by the Inhibitors’ glacial reckoning, it was quite a worryingly long time during which not to learn any new tricks.

Singing a star apart was the most recent method to be entered into the Inhibitor library of xenocide techniques, and though it had achieved that status four hundred and forty million years earlier, the overseer could not help view it with a trace of bemused curiosity. It was the way an aged butcher might view some newfangled apparatus designed to improve the productivity of an abbatoir. The current cleansing operation would provide a useful test-bed for the technique, a chance to fully evaluate it. If the overseer was not satisfied, it would leave a record in the archive recommending that future cleansing operations employ one of the fourteen older methods of starcide. But for now it would place its faith in the efficacy of the singer.

All stars already sang to themselves. The outer layers of every star rang constantly at a multitude of frequencies, like an eternally chiming bell. The great seismic modes tracked oscillations that plunged deep into the star, down to the caustic surface just above its fusing core. Those oscillations were modest in a star of dwarf type, like Delta Pavonis. But the singer tuned itself to them, swinging around the star in its equatorial rotation frame, pumping gravitational energy into the star at precisely the right resonant frequencies to enhance the oscillations. The singer was what the mammals would have called a graver, a gravitational laser.

In the heart of the singer a microscopic closed cosmic string, a tiny relic of the rapidly cooling early universe, had been tugged out of the seething foam of the quantum vacuum. The string was barely a scratch compared with the largest cosmic flaws, but it would suffice for the singer’s purposes. It was tugged and elongated like a loop of toffee, inflated with the same vacuum phase energy that the singer tapped for all its needs, until it had macroscopic size and macroscopic mass-energy density. Then the string was deftly knotted into a figure-of-eight configuration and plucked, generating a narrow cone of throbbing gravitational waves.

The oscillations increased in amplitude, slowly but surely. At the same time, chirping gravitational pulses with precision and elegance, the singer sculpted the patterns themselves, causing new vibrational modes to spring into play, enhancing some and suppressing others. The star’s rotation had already destroyed any spherical symmetry in the original oscillation modes, but the modes had still been symmetric with respect to the star’s axis of spin. Yet now the singer worked to instil more profoundly asymmetric modes in the star, focusing its efforts on a single equatorial point immediately between the singer and the star’s centre of mass. It increased its power and focus, the closed cosmic string oscillating even more vigorously. Immediately below the singer, on the outer envelope of the star, mass flows were pinched and reflected, heating and compressing surface hydrogen to near-fusion conditions. Fusion did indeed erupt in three or four concentric rings of stellar matter, but that was incidental. What mattered, what the singer intended, was that the star’s spherical envelope should begin to pucker and distort. Something like a navel was appearing in the star’s seething hot surface, an inward dimple wide enough to swallow a whole rocky world. Concentric rings of fusion, circles of searing brightness, spread out from the dimple, squalling X-rays and neutrinos into space. Still the singer continued pulsing the star with gravitational energy, the timing surgically acute, and still the dimple sank deeper, as if an invisible finger were pushing against the pliant skin of a balloon. Around the dimple the star was bulging higher into space as matter was redistributed. The matter had to go somewhere, for the singer was excavating a hole deep into the star’s interior.

It would continue until it had reached the star’s nuclear-burning core.

It was a fifteen-hour trip from Resurgam orbit to
Nostalgia for Infinity
and Khouri spent every minute of it in a state of extreme apprehension. It was not simply the strange and worrying thing that had started to happen to Delta Pavonis, although that was certainly a significant part of it. She had seen the Inhibitor weapon start its work, pointing like a great flared bugle at the surface of the star, and she had seen the star respond by growing a furious hot eye on its surface. Magnification showed the eye to be a zone of fusion, several zones, in fact, which surrounded a deepening pit in the star’s envelope. It was in the face of the star that was turned towards Resurgam, which did not seem likely to be accidental. And whatever the weapon was doing, it was doing it with astonishing speed. The weapon had taken so long to reach readiness that Khouri had mistakenly assumed that the final destruction of Delta Pavonis would take place on the same leisurely timescale. This was clearly not going to be the case. She would have been better thinking of an elaborate build-up to an execution, with many legal hurdles and delays, but which would conclude in a single bullet shot or killing surge of electrical current. That was how it was going to be with the star: a long, grave preparation followed by an extremely swift execution.

And they had still evacuated only two thousand people - in fact, it was far worse: they had transported two thousand people from the surface of Resurgam, but none of those had yet seen
Nostalgia for Infinity
, or had any idea of what they were going to find when they stepped aboard it. Khouri hoped that none of her nervousness was apparent, since the passengers were volatile enough already.

It was not simply the fact that the transfer craft was designed to take far fewer occupants, and so they were forced to endure the journey in cramped, prisonlike conditions, with the environmental systems strained to the limit just to provide sufficient air, water and refrigeration. These people were taking a tremendous risk, putting their faith in forces utterly beyond their control. The only thing holding them together was Thorn, and even Thorn appeared on the edge of nervous exhaustion. There were constant squabbles and minor crises breaking out all over the ship, and whenever they happened Thorn was there, soothing and reassuring, only to dash off somewhere else as soon as the trouble had been allayed. His charisma was being stretched butter-thin. He had not only been awake for the entire trip, but also for the day before the lift-off of the final shuttle flight and the six hours it had taken to find places for the five hundred new arrivals.

It was taking too long; Khouri could see that. There would have to be another ninety-nine flights like this before the evacuation operation was done, ninety-nine further opportunities for all hell to break loose. It might get easier once word got back to Resurgam that there was a starship at the end of the journey, rather than some diabolical government trap. On the other hand, when the precise nature of the starship became clearer things might get an awful lot worse. And there was every likelihood that the weapon would soon finish whatever it had initiated around Delta Pavonis. When that happened, every other problem would suddenly look very slight indeed.

But at least they were nearly home and dry with this trip.

The transfer ship was not designed for transatmospheric flight. She was a graceless sphere with a cluster of motors at one pole and the dimple of a flight deck at the other. The first five hundred passengers had spent many days aboard, exploring every grubby cranny of her austere interior. But at least they had had some room to spare. When the next load came up, things became a little more difficult. Food and water had to be rationed and each passenger assigned a specific cubbyhole. But it was still tolerable. Children had still been able to run around and make nuisances of themselves, and adults had still been able to find a little privacy when they needed it. Then the next shipment had come up - another five hundred - and the whole tone of the ship had changed subtly, and for the worse. Rules had to be enforced rather than politely suggested. Something very close to a miniature police state had been created aboard the ship, with a harsh scale of penalties for various crimes. So far there had been only minor infringements of the draconian new laws, but Khouri doubted that every trip would run as smoothly. Sooner or later she would probably be required to make an example of someone, for the benefit of the others.

The final five hundred had been the greatest headache. Slotting them in had resembled a fiendish puzzle: no matter how many permutations they tried, there were always fifty people still waiting on the shuttle, glumly aware that they had been reduced to irksome surplus units in a problem that would have been a great deal more tractable had they not existed.

And yet, finally, a way had been found to get everyone aboard. That part at least would be simpler next time, but the rule of discipline might have to be even stricter. The people could be allowed no rights aboard the transfer craft.

Thirteen hours out, a kind of exhausted calm fell across the ship. She met Thorn by a porthole, just out of earshot of the nearest huddle of passengers. Ashen light made his face statuelike. He looked utterly dejected, sapped of any joy in what they had achieved.

‘We’ve done it,’ she said. ‘No matter what happens now, we’ve saved two thousand lives.’

‘Have we?’ he asked, keeping his voice low.

‘They’re not going back to Resurgam, Thorn.’

They spoke like business associates, avoiding physical contact. Thorn was still a ‘guest’ of the government and there must not appear to be any ulterior motive behind his co-operation. Because of that necessary distance, an act that had to be maintained at all times aboard the shuttle, she felt the urge to sleep with him more strongly than she had ever done before. She knew that they had come very close aboard the ship after the encounter with the Inhibitor cubes in Roc’s atmosphere. But they had not done it then, and nor had they when they were on Resurgam. The erotic tension that had existed between them ever since had been thrilling and painful at the same time. Her attraction to him had never been stronger, and she knew that he wanted her at least as much. It would happen, she knew. It was just a question of accepting what she had long known she had to accept, which was that one life was over and another must begin. It was about making the choice to discard her past, and accepting - forcing herself to believe - that she was not dishonouring her husband by that act of disavowal. She just hoped that wherever he was, alive or dead now, Fazil Khouri had come to the same realisation and had found the strength to close the chapter on the part of his life that had included Ana Khouri. They had been in love, desperately in love, but the universe cared nothing for the vicissitudes of the human heart. Now they both had to follow their own paths.