The Revelation Space Collection (38 page)

Yet they had not been entirely idle; the atmosphere showed signs of extensive modification, with free oxygen now well above what Volyova would have expected. The infrared sensors revealed geothermal taps aligned along what were certainly continental subduction zones. Neutrino leakage from the polar zones hinted at oxygen factories; fusion-powered units which would crack open water-ice molecules to extract oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen would be bled into the atmosphere - or pumped to domed-over communities - while the hydrogen was cycled back into the fusors. Volyova identified upwards of fifty communities, but most were small affairs, and none approximated the size of the main settlement. She assumed there were other, tinier outposts - family-tended stations and homesteads - but the pebbles would miss these.

So what did she have to report? No orbital defences, almost certainly no capability for spaceflight, and most of the planet’s inhabitants still crammed into one community. At least from a standpoint of relative strengths, persuading the Resurgamites to give up Sylveste ought to be the simplest of matters.

But there was something else.

The Resurgam system was a wide binary. Delta Pavonis was the life-giving star, but - as she had known - it possessed a dead twin. The dark companion was a neutron star, separated by ten light-hours from Pavonis, far enough for stable planetary orbits to be possible around both stars. And indeed, the neutron star had claimed a planet of its own. The fact of the planet’s existence was known to her in advance of the information from the pebbles. All it warranted in the ship’s database was a line of comment and a scrawl of terse numerics. These worlds were invariably chemically dull, atmosphereless and biologically inert, flensed sterile by the wind that the neutron star had blown when it was a pulsar. Little more, Volyova thought, than lumps of stellar slag-iron, and about as interesting.

But near this world was a neutrino source. It was weak - almost at the limit of detectability - but nothing she could ignore. Volyova digested this knowledge for a few moments before regurgitating it as a tiny, troublesome cud of certainty. Only a machine could create such a signature.

And that worried her.

‘You’ve really been awake all this time?’ Khouri asked, shortly after waking herself, as she and Volyova journeyed down to see the Captain.

‘Not literally,’ Volyova said. ‘Even my body needs sleep occasionally. I tried dispensing with it once; there are drugs you can take. And implants which can be put into the RAS . . . that’s the reticular activating system, the region of the brain which mediates sleep - but you still need to clean out those fatigue poisons.’ She winced. It was evident to Khouri that Volyova found the topic of implants about as pleasant as toothache.

‘Much happen?’ Khouri asked.

‘Nothing you need concern yourself with,’ Volyova said, taking a drag on a cigarette. Khouri assumed that would be the end of it, but then her tutor fixed her with an uneasy expression. ‘Well, now you mention it, there was something. Two things, in fact, though I’m not sure to which I should attach the greater significance. The first need not concern you immediately. As for the second . . .’

Khouri searched Volyova’s face for concrete evidence of the seven additional years the woman had aged since their last meeting. There was nothing; not a hint of it, which meant that she had balanced the seven years with infusions of anti-senescence drugs. She looked different, but only because she had permitted her hair to grow out from her usual crop. It was still short, but the extra volume served to ameliorate the sharp lines of her jaw and cheekbones. If anything, Khouri thought, Volyova looked seven years younger, rather than older. Not for the first time, she attempted to assess the woman’s actual physiological age, and failed miserably.

‘What was it?’

‘There was something unusual about your neural activity while you were in reefersleep. There shouldn’t have been any. But what I saw didn’t even look normal for someone awake. It looked like a small war going on in your head.’

The elevator had arrived at the Captain’s level. ‘That’s an interesting analogy,’ Khouri said, stepping into the chill of the corridor.

‘Assuming it is one. I doubted that you’d have been aware of much, of course.’

‘I don’t remember anything,’ Khouri said.

Volyova was silent until they reached the human nebula which was the Captain. Glittering and uncomfortably mucoid, he less resembled a human being than an angel which had dropped from the sky onto a hard, splattering surface. The antiquated reefer which had until recently cased him was now shattered and fissured. It still functioned, but only barely, and the cold it offered was no longer adequate to stifle the plague’s relentless encroachment. Captain Brannigan had sunk dozens of tendril-like roots into the ship now, roots which Volyova tracked but was powerless to prevent spreading. She could sever them, but what effect would that have on the Captain? For all she knew, the roots were all that was keeping him alive, if she dared dignify his state with the word. Eventually, Volyova said, the roots would permeate the whole vessel, and by then it would probably be unwise to make much of a distinction between the ship and the Captain. Of course, she could arrest that spread if she wished, by the simple expedient of ejecting this portion of the ship; cutting it entirely free from the rest of the vessel, the way an oldtime surgeon might have dealt with a particularly voracious tumour. The volume Brannigan had subsumed was tiny now, and the ship would certainly not miss it. Undoubtedly his transformations would continue, but lacking sustaining material they would be turned incestuously inwards, until entropy drove the life from what he had become.

‘You’d consider doing that?’ Khouri asked.

‘Consider it, yes,’ Volyova replied. ‘But I’m hoping it won’t come to that. All these samples I’ve been taking - I think I’m actually getting somewhere. I’ve found a counteragent - a retrovirus which seems stronger than the plague. It subverts the plague machinery faster than the plague subverts it. Only tested it on tiny pieces so far - and there’s really no way I can do any better than that, because testing it on the Captain would be a medical matter, and I’m not qualified to do that.’

‘Of course,’ Khouri said hastily. ‘But if you won’t do that, you’re really trusting all on Sylveste, aren’t you?’

‘Maybe, but one shouldn’t underestimate his skills. Or Calvin’s, I should say.’

‘And he’ll help you, just like that?’

‘No, but he didn’t willingly help us the first time either, and we still found a way.’

‘Persuasion, you mean?’

Volyova took a moment to take a scraping from one of the pipelike tendrils, just before it dove into an intestinal mass of ship plumbing. ‘Sylveste is a man with obsessions,’ she said. ‘And people like that are more easily manipulated than they imagine. They’re so intent on whatever goal it is they have in mind that they don’t always notice that they’re being bent to someone else’s will.’

‘Like yours, for instance.’

She took the sliver-thin sample and popped it away for analysis. ‘Sajaki told you that we brought him aboard during his missing month?’

‘Thirty days in the wilderness.’

‘Stupid name, that,’ Volyova said, gritting her teeth. ‘Did they have to make it sound so damned Biblical? Wasn’t as if he didn’t already have a messiah complex, if you ask me. Anyway, yes, that was when we brought him aboard. And the interesting thing was, this was fully thirty years before the Resurgam expedition ever left Yellowstone. Now, I’ll let you in on a secret. Until we returned to Yellowstone and recruited you, we didn’t even know of the existence of this expedition. We still expected to find Sylveste on Yellowstone.’

Khouri knew well enough from her own experience with Fazil the kind of difficulty Volyova’s crew must have faced, but she decided a little fake ignorance would seem more plausible.

‘Careless of you not to check firsthand.’

‘Not at all. In fact we did - it was just that our best information was already decades old before we obtained it. And then by the time we’d acted on it - made the hop to Yellowstone - it was twice as old again.’

‘I suppose it wasn’t a bad gamble. The family had always been associated with Yellowstone, so you’d have expected to find the rich young brat still hanging around the old place.’

‘Except we were wrong. But the interesting thing is, it looks as if we could have spared ourselves the bother all along. Sylveste may have had the Resurgam expedition in mind when we first brought him aboard. If only we’d listened, we could have gone there directly.’

As they traversed the complicated series of elevators and access tunnels which led from the Captain’s corridor to the glade, Volyova spoke beneath audibility into the bracelet which she never let slip from her wrist. Khouri knew that she must be addressing one of the ship’s many artificial personae, but Volyova gave no hint of what it was she was arranging.

The green light of the glade was a sensual feast after the unremitting cold and gloom of the Captain’s corridor. The air was warm and bouquet-fresh, and the painted birds which owned the aerial spaces of the chamber were almost too gaudy for Khouri’s dark-adapted eyes. For a moment she was too overwhelmed to notice that Volyova and she were not alone. Then she saw the three other people who were present. The trio sat facing each other around a stump of wood, kneeling in the dew-moistened grass. Sajaki was one of them, though he wore his hair in a different style from those Khouri had seen before: he was entirely bald apart from a topknot. The second person she recognised was Volyova herself - hair short now, which accentuated the angular form of her skull and made her look older than the version of Volyova which was standing next to Khouri. The third person, Khouri realised, was Sylveste himself.

‘Shall we join them?’ Volyova said, leading the way down the rickety staircase which descended to the lawn.

Khouri followed. ‘This dates from . . .’ She paused and recalled the date when Sylveste had gone missing from Chasm City. ‘Around 2460, right?’

‘Spot on,’ Volyova said, turning to fix Khouri with a look of mild amazement. ‘What are you, an expert on Sylveste’s life and times? Oh, never mind. The point is, we recorded his entire visit, and I knew there was one particular remark he made which . . . well, in the light of what we now know, I find curious.’

‘Intriguing.’

Khouri jumped, because it was not she who had spoken, and the voice had appeared to come from behind her. It was then that she became conscious of the Mademoiselle, loitering some distance up the staircase.

‘I should have known you’d show your ugly face,’ Khouri said, not even bothering to subvocalise, since the constant chatter of the songbirds served to mask her words from Volyova, who had gone on ahead to the others. ‘You’re like a bad penny, you know.’

‘At least you know I’m still around,’ she said. ‘If I weren’t, you’d have real grounds to worry. It would mean Sun Stealer had overwhelmed my countermeasures. Your sanity would be next, and I hate to speculate about what that would do for your employment prospects where Volyova’s concerned.’

‘Shut up and let me concentrate on what Sylveste has to say.’

‘Be my guest,’ the Mademoiselle said curtly, not straying from her vantage point.

Khouri joined Volyova next to the trio.

‘Of course,’ the standing Volyova said, addressing Khouri, ‘I could have replayed this conversation from any point in the ship. But it took place here, so this is where I chose to re-enact it.’ As she spoke, she reached into her jacket pocket and slipped out a pair of smoke-coloured goggles which she proceeded to place over her eyes. Khouri understood: lacking implants, Volyova could only witness this playback with the aid of direct retinal projection. Until she slipped on the goggles, she would not have seen the figures at all.

‘So you see,’ Sajaki was saying, ‘it’s in your best interests to do what we want. You’ve made use of Ultra elements in the past - your trip out to Lascaille’s Shroud, for instance - and it’s highly probable you’ll want to do so in the future.’

Sylveste placed his elbows on the tree stump. Khouri studied the man. She had seen plenty of lifelike evocations of Sylveste before, but this image seemed more real than any she had yet experienced. She guessed it was because Sylveste was in conversation with two people she knew, rather than anonymous figures from Yellowstone’s history. That made a lot of difference. He was handsome; improbably so, in her opinion, but she doubted that the image had been cosmetically doctored. His long hair hung in tangles either side of his magisterial brow; his eyes were acutely green. Even if she had to look him in the eyes before killing him - and the Mademoiselle’s specifications about the killing did not make that unlikely - it would be something to see those eyes for real.

‘That sounds awfully like blackmail,’ Sylveste said, his voice the lowest of those present. ‘You talk as if you Ultras have some kind of binding agreement. It might fool some people, Sajaki, but I’m afraid I’m not one of them.’

‘Then you may be in for a surprise the next time you attempt to enlist Ultra assistance,’ Sajaki answered, toying with a splinter of wood. ‘Let’s be quite clear on this. If you refuse us - in addition to whatever else that might bring upon yourself - you’d ensure that you never leave your home planet.’

‘I doubt that that would greatly inconvenience me.’

Volyova - the seated version - shook her head. ‘Not what our spies tell us. Rumour has it you’re trying to find funding for an expedition to the Delta Pavonis system, Dr Sylveste.’