The Revelation Space Collection (306 page)
Well, in twenty years they’d find out whether
that
had been the case.
Antoinette pushed a mug of green-coloured tea in front of him. ‘Drink up, Clavain.’
He sipped at it, wrinkling his nose against the miasma of pungent, briny fumes that hovered above the drink. ‘What if I’m drinking a Pattern Juggler?’
‘Felka says you won’t be. She should know, I think - I gather she’s been itching to meet these bastards for quite a while, so she knows a thing or two about them.’
Clavain gave the tea another go. ‘Yes, that’s true, isn’t . . .’
But Felka had gone. She had been in the tent a moment ago, but now she wasn’t.
‘Why does she want to meet them so badly?’ Antoinette asked.
‘Because of what she hopes they’ll give her,’ Clavain said. ‘Once, when she lived on Mars, she was at the core of something very complex - a vast, living machine she had to keep alive with her own willpower and intellect. It was what gave her a reason to live. Then people - my people, as a matter of fact - took the machine away from her. She nearly died then, if she had ever truly been alive. And yet she didn’t. She made it back to something like normal life. But everything that has followed, everything that she has done since, has been a way to find something else that she can use and that will use her in the same way; something so intricate that she can’t understand all its secrets in a single intuitive flash, and something that, in its own way, might be able to exploit her as well.’
‘The Jugglers.’
Still clasping the tea - and it wasn’t so bad, really, he noted - he said, ‘Yes, the Jugglers. Well, I hope she finds what she’s looking for, that’s all.’
Antoinette reached beneath the table and hefted something up from the floor. She placed it between them: a corroded metal cylinder covered in a lacy froth of calcified micro-organisms.
‘This is the beacon. They found it yesterday, a mile down. There must have been a tsunami which washed it into the sea.’
He leaned over and examined the hunk of metal. It was squashed and dented, like an old rations tin that had been stepped on. ‘It could be Conjoiner,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sure. There aren’t any markings which have survived.’
‘I thought the code was Conjoiner?’
‘It was: it’s a simple in-system transponder beacon. It’s not meant to be detected over much more than a few hundred million kilometres. But that doesn’t mean it was put here by Conjoiners. Ultras could have stolen it from one of our ships, perhaps. We’ll know a little more when we dismantle it, but that has to be done carefully.’ He rapped the rough metal husk with his knuckles. ‘There is antimatter in here, or it wouldn’t be transmitting. Not much, maybe, but enough to make a dent in this island if we don’t open it properly.’
‘Rather you than me.’
‘Clavain . . .’
He looked around; Felka had returned. She looked even wetter than when they had arrived. Her hair was glued to her face in lank ribbons, and the black fabric of her dress was tight against one side of her body. She should have been pale and shivering, by Clavain’s estimation. But she was flushed red, and she looked excited.
‘Clavain,’ she repeated.
He put down the tea. ‘What is it?’
‘You have to come outside and see this.’
He stepped out of the tent. He had warmed up just enough to feel a sudden spike of cold as he did so, but something in Felka’s manner made him ignore it, just as he had long ago learned to selectively suppress pain or discomfort in the heat of battle. It did not matter for now; it could, like most things in life, be dealt with later, or not at all.
Felka was looking out to sea.
‘What is it?’ he asked again.
‘Look. Do you see?’ She stood by him and directed his gaze. ‘Look. Look hard, where the mist thins out.’
‘I’m not sure if—’
‘Now.’
And he did see it, if only fleetingly. The local wind direction must have changed since they had arrived in the tent, enough to push the fog around into a different configuration and allow brief openings that reached far out to sea. He saw the mosaic of sharp-edged rockpools, and beyond that the boat they had come in on, and beyond that a horizontal stroke of slate-grey water which turned fainter as his eye skidded toward the horizon, becoming the pale milky grey of the sky itself. And there, for an instant, was the upright spire of
Nostalgia for Infinity
, a tapering finger of slightly darker grey rising from just below the horizon line itself.
‘It’s the ship,’ Clavain said mildly, determined not to disappoint Felka.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s the ship. But you don’t understand. It’s more than that. It’s much, much more.’
Now he was beginning to feel slightly worried. ‘It is?’
‘Yes. Because I’ve seen it before.’
‘Before?’
‘Long before we ever came here, I saw it.’ She turned to him, peeling hair from her eyes, squinting against the sting of the spray. ‘It was the Wolf, Clavain. It showed me this view when Skade coupled us together. At the time I didn’t know what to make of it. But now I understand. It wasn’t really the Wolf at all. It was Galiana, getting through to me even though the Wolf
thought
it was in control.’
Clavain knew what had happened aboard Skade’s ship while Felka was her hostage. He had been told about the experiments, and the times when Felka had glimpsed the Wolf’s mind. But she had never mentioned this before.
‘It must be a coincidence,’ he said. ‘Even if you did get a message from Galiana, how could she have known what was going to happen here?’
‘I don’t know, but there must have been a way. Information has already reached the past, or none of this would have happened. All we know now is that somehow, our memories of this place - whether they’re yours or mine -
will reach the past
. More than that, they
will
reach Galiana.’ Felka leaned down and touched the rock beneath her. ‘Somehow this is the crux, Clavain. We haven’t just stumbled on this place. We’ve been led here by Galiana because she knows that it matters that we find it.’
Clavain thought back to the beacon he had just been shown. ‘If she had been here ...’
Felka completed the thought. ‘If she came here, she would have attempted communion with the Pattern Jugglers. She would have tried swimming with them. Now, she may not have succeeded ... but just supposing she did, what would have happened?’
The mist had closed in completely now; there was no sign of the looming sea-tower.
‘Her neural patterns would have been remembered,’ Clavain said, as if speaking in a dream. ‘The ocean would have recorded her essence, her personality, her memories. Everything that she was. She’d have left it physically, but also left behind a holographic copy of herself, in the sea, ready to be imprinted on another sentience, another mind.’
Felka nodded emphatically. ‘Because that’s what they do, Clavain. Pattern Jugglers store all who swim in their oceans.’
Clavain looked out, hoping to glimpse the ship again. ‘Then she’d still be here.’
‘And we can reach her ourselves if we swim as well. That’s what she knew, Clavain. That’s the message she slipped past the Wolf.’
His eyes were stinging as well. ‘She’s a clever one, that Galiana. What if we’re wrong?’
‘We’ll know. Not necessarily the first time, but we’ll know. All we have to do is swim and open our minds. If she’s in the sea, in their collective memory, the Jugglers will bring her to us.’
‘I don’t think I could stand for this to be wrong, Felka.’
She took his hand and squeezed it tighter. ‘We won’t be wrong, Clavain. We won’t be wrong.’
He hoped against hope that she was right. She tugged his hand harder, and the two of them took the first tentative steps towards the sea.
Table of Contents
ONE - Ararat, p Eridani A System, 2675
TWO - Lighthugger Gnostic Ascension, Interstellar Space, 2615
THREE - Lighthugger Gnostic Ascension, Interstellar Space, 2615
SEVEN - Approaching Hela, 2615
TWENTY-TWO - p Eridani 40, 2675
THIRTY-ONE - Near Ararat, 2675
THIRTY-THREE - Near Ararat, 2675
THIRTY-FOUR - Interstellar Space, Near p Eridani 40, 2675
THIRTY-SIX - Interstellar Space, Near Epsilon Eridani, 2698
THIRTY-SEVEN - Interstellar Space, Epsilon Eridani, 2698