The Revelation Space Collection (438 page)

‘Trintignant found this outside, by the Spire. It’s what he left in my room. I think he was trying to tell us something. Trying to redeem himself. Do you recognise it, Richard?’

I zoomed in on the object. Numbers flickered around it. Enhancement phased in. Surface irregularity. Topological contours. Albedo. Likely composition. I drank in the data like a drunkard.

Data was what I lived for now.

‘No.’

ELEVEN

‘I can hear something.’

‘Of course you can. It’s the Spire, the same as it’s always been.’

‘No.’ I was silent for several moments, wondering whether my augmented auditory system was sending false signals into my brain.

But there it was again: an occasional rumble of distant machinery, but one that was coming closer.

‘I hear it now,’ Childe said. ‘It’s coming from behind us. Along the way we’ve come.’

‘It sounds like the doors opening and closing in sequence.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘Something must be coming through the rooms towards us.’

Childe thought about that for what felt like minutes, but was probably only a matter of actual seconds. Then he shook his head, dismissively. ‘We have eleven minutes to get through this door, or we’ll be punished. We don’t have time to worry about anything extraneous.’

Reluctantly, I agreed.

I forced my attention back to the puzzle, feeling the machinery in my head pluck at the mathematical barbs of the problem. The ferocious clockwork that Trintignant had installed in my skull spun giddily. I had never understood mathematics with any great agility, but now I sensed it as a hard grid of truth underlying everything: bones shining through the thin flesh of the world.

It was almost the only thing I was now capable of thinking of at all. Everything else felt painfully abstract, whereas before the opposite had been the case. This, I knew, must be what it felt like to an idiot savant, gifted with astonishing skill in one highly specialised field of human expertise.

I had become a tool shaped so efficiently for one purpose that it could serve no other.

I had become a machine for solving the Spire.

Now that we were alone - and no longer reliant on Celestine - Childe had revealed himself as a more than adequately capable problem-solver. Several times I had found myself staring at a problem, with even my new mathematical skills momentarily unable to crack the solution, when Childe had seen the answer. Generally he was able to articulate the reasoning behind his choice, but sometimes there was nothing for it but for me to either accept his judgement or wait for my own sluggard thought processes to arrive at the same conclusion.

And I began to wonder.

Childe was brilliant now, but I sensed there was more to it than the extra layers of cognitive machinery Trintignant had installed. He was so confident now that I began to wonder if he had merely been holding back before, preferring to let the rest of us make the decisions. If that was the case, he was in some way responsible for the deaths that had already happened.

But, I reminded myself, we had all volunteered.

With three minutes to spare, the door eased open, revealing the room beyond. At the same moment the door we had come through opened as well, as it always did at this point. We could leave now, if we wished. At this time, as had been the case with every room we had passed through, Childe and I made a decision on whether to proceed further or not. There was always the danger that the next room would be the one that killed us - and every second that we spent before stepping through the doorway meant one second less available for cracking the next problem.

‘Well?’ I said.

His answer came back, clipped and automatic. ‘Onwards.’

‘We only had three minutes to spare on this one, Childe. They’re getting harder now. A hell of a lot harder.’

‘I’m fully aware of that.’

‘Then maybe we should retreat. Gather our strength and return. We’ll lose nothing by doing so.’

‘You can’t be sure of that. You don’t know that the Spire will keep letting us make these attempts. Perhaps it’s already tiring of us.’

‘I still—’

But I stopped, my new, wasp-waisted body flexing easily at the approach of a footfall.

My visual system scanned the approaching object, resolving it into a figure, stepping over the threshold from the previous room. It was a human figure, but one that had, admittedly, undergone some alterations - although none that were as drastic as those that Trintignant had wrought on me. I studied the slow, painful way she made her progress. Our own movements seemed slow, but were lightning-fast by comparison.

I groped for a memory; a name; a face.

My mind, clotted with routines designed to smash mathematics, could not at first retrieve such mundane data.

Finally, however, it obliged.

‘Celestine,’ I said.

I did not actually speak. Instead, laser light stuttered from the mass of sensors and scanners jammed into my eyesockets. Our minds now ran too rapidly to communicate verbally, but, though she moved slowly herself, she deigned to reply.

‘Yes. It’s me. Are you really Richard?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because I can hardly tell the difference between you and Childe.’

I looked at Childe, paying proper attention to his shape for what seemed the first time.

At last, after so many frustrations, Trintignant had been given free rein to do with us as he wished. He had pumped our heads full of more processing machinery, until our skulls had to be reshaped to accommodate it, becoming sleekly elongated. He cracked our ribcages open and carefully removed our lungs and hearts, putting these organs into storage. The space vacated by one lung was replaced by a closed-cycle blood oxygenating system of the kind carried in spacesuit backpacks, so that we could endure vacuum and had no need to breathe ambient air. The other lung’s volume was filled by a device which circulated refrigerated fluid along a loop of tube, draining the excess heat generated by the stew of neural machines filling our heads. Nutrient systems crammed the remaining thoracic spaces; our hearts were tiny fusion-powered pumps. All other organs - stomach, intestines, genitalia - were removed, along with many bones and muscles. Our remaining limbs were detached and put into storage, replaced by skeletal prosthetics of immense strength, but which could fold and deform to enable us to squeeze through the tightest door. Our bodies were encased in exoskeletal frames to which these limbs were anchored. Finally, Trintignant gave us whiplike counterbalancing tails, and then caused our skins to envelop our metal parts, hardening here and there in lustrous grey patches of organic armour, woven from the same diamond mesh that had been used to reinforce Hirz’s suit.

When he was done, we looked like diamond-hided greyhounds.

Diamond dogs.

I bowed my head. ‘I am Richard.’

‘Then for God’s sake please come back.’

‘Why have you followed us?’

‘To ask you. One final time.’

‘You changed yourself just to come after me?’

Slowly, with the stone grace of a statue, she extended a beckoning hand. Her limbs, like ours, were mechanical, but her basic form was far less canine.

‘Please.’

‘You know I can’t go back now. Not when I’ve come so far.’

Her answer was an eternity arriving. ‘You don’t understand, Richard. This is not what it seems.’

Childe turned his sleek, snouted face to mine.

‘Ignore her,’ he said.

‘No,’ Celestine said, who must have also been attuned to Childe’s laser signals. ‘Don’t listen to him, Richard. He’s tricked and lied to you all along. To all of us. Even to Trintignant. That’s why I came back.’

‘She’s lying,’ Childe said.

‘No. I’m not. Haven’t you got it yet, Richard? Childe’s been here before. This isn’t his first visit to the Spire.’

I convulsed my canine body in a shrug. ‘Nor mine.’

‘I don’t mean since we arrived on Golgotha. I mean before that. Childe’s been to this planet already.’

‘She’s lying,’ Childe repeated.

‘Then how did you know what to expect, in so much detail?’

‘I didn’t. I was just prudent.’ He turned to me, so that only I could read the stammer of his lasers. ‘We are wasting valuable time here, Richard.’

‘Prudent?’ Celestine said. ‘Oh yes; you were damned prudent. Bringing along those other suits, so that when the first ones became too bulky we could still go on. And Trintignant - how did you know he’d come in so handy?’

‘I saw the bodies lying around the base of the Spire,’ Childe answered. ‘They’d been butchered by it.’

‘And?’

‘I decided it would be good to have someone along who had the medical aptitude to put right such injuries.’

‘Yes.’ Celestine nodded. ‘I don’t disagree with that. But that’s no more than part of the truth, is it?’

I looked at Childe and Celestine in turn. ‘Then what is the whole truth?’

‘Those bodies aren’t anything to do with Captain Argyle.’

‘They’re not?’ I said.

‘No.’ Celestine’s words arrived agonisingly slowly, and I began to wish that Trintignant had turned her into a diamond-skinned dog as well. ‘No. Because Argyle never existed. He was a necessary fiction - a reason for Childe knowing at least something about what the Spire entailed. But the truth . . . well, why don’t you tell us, Childe?’

‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’

Celestine smiled. ‘Only that the bodies are yours.’

His tail flexed impatiently, brushing the floor. ‘I won’t listen to this.’

‘Then don’t. But Trintignant will tell you the same thing. He guessed first, not me.’

She threw something towards me.

I willed time to move more slowly. What she had thrown curved lazily through the air, following a parabola. My mind processed its course and extrapolated its trajectory with deadening precision.

I moved and opened my foreclaw to catch the falling thing.

‘I don’t recognise it,’ I said.

‘Trintignant must have thought you would.’

I looked down at the thing, trying to see it anew. I remembered the Doctor fishing amongst the bones around the Spire’s base; placing something in one of his pockets. This hard, black, irregular, dully pointed thing.

What was it?

I half remembered.

‘There has to be more than this,’ I said.

‘Of course there is,’ Celestine said. ‘The human remains - with the exception of what’s been added since we arrived - are all from the same genetic individual. I know. Trintignant told me.’

‘That isn’t possible.’

‘Oh, it is. With cloning, it’s almost child’s play.’

‘This is nonsense,’ Childe said.

I turned to him now, feeling the faint ghost of an emotion Trintignant had not completely excised. ‘Is it really?’

‘Why would I clone myself?’

‘I’ll answer for him,’ Celestine said. ‘He found this thing, but long, long before he said he did. And he visited it, and set about exploring it, using clones of himself.’

I looked at Childe, expecting him to at least proffer some shred of explanation. Instead, padding on all fours, he crossed into the next room.

The door behind Celestine slammed shut like a steel eyelid.

Childe spoke to us from the next room. ‘My estimate is that we have nine or ten minutes in which to solve the next problem. I am studying it now and it strikes me as . . . challenging, to say the least. Shall we adjourn any further discussion of trivialities until we’re through?’

‘Childe,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t have done that. Celestine wasn’t consulted . . .’

‘I assumed she was on the team.’

Celestine stepped into the new room. ‘I wasn’t. At least, I didn’t think I was. But it looks like I am now.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Childe said. And I realised then where I had seen the small, dark thing that Trintignant had retrieved from the surface of Golgotha.

I might have been mistaken.

But it looked a lot like a devil’s horn.

TWELVE

The problem was as elegant, Byzantine, multi-layered and potentially treacherous as any we had encountered.

Simply looking at it sent my mind careering down avenues of mathematical possibility, glimpsing deep connections between what I had always assumed were theoretically distant realms of logical space. I could have stared at it for hours, in a state of ecstatic transfixion. Unfortunately, we had to solve it, not admire it. And we now had less than nine minutes.

We crowded around the door and for two or three minutes - what felt like two or three hours - nothing was said.

I broke the silence, when I sensed that I needed to think about something else for a moment.

‘Was Celestine right? Did you clone yourself?’

‘Of course he did,’ she said. ‘He was exploring hazardous territory, so he’d have been certain to bring the kind of equipment necessary to regenerate organs.’