The Revelation Space Collection (65 page)

‘She was pretty damn clear he shouldn’t be allowed aboard the ship.’

‘The Mademoiselle told you that before you joined us?’

‘No; afterwards.’ She told Volyova about the implant in her head; how the Mademoiselle had downloaded an aspect of herself into Khouri’s skull for the purposes of the mission. ‘She was a pain,’ she said. ‘But she made me immune to your loyalty therapies, which I suppose was something to be grateful for.’

‘The therapies worked as intended,’ Volyova said.

‘No, I just pretended. The Mademoiselle told me what to say and when, and I guess she didn’t do too bad a job, or else we wouldn’t be having this discussion.’

‘She can’t rule out the possibility that the therapies worked partially, can she?’

Khouri shrugged again. ‘Does it matter? What kind of loyalty would make any sense now? You’ve as good as told me you’re waiting for Sajaki to make the wrong move. The only thing holding this crew together is Sylveste’s threat to kill us all if we don’t do what he wants. Sajaki’s a megalomaniac - maybe he should have double-checked the therapies he was running on you.’

‘You resisted Sudjic when she tried to kill me.’

‘Yeah, I did. But if she’d told me she was going after Sajaki - or even that prick Hegazi - I don’t know what I would have said.’

Volyova spent a moment in consultation with herself.

‘All right,’ she said finally. ‘I suppose the loyalty issue is moot. What else did the implant do for you?’

‘When you hooked me into the weapons,’ Khouri said, ‘she used the interface to inject herself - or a copy of herself - into the gunnery. To begin with I think she just wanted to assume control of as much of the ship as possible, and the gunnery was her only point of entry.’

‘The architecture wouldn’t have allowed her to reach beyond it.’

‘It didn’t. To the best of my knowledge, she never gained control of any part of the ship other than the weapons.’

‘You mean the cache?’

‘She was controlling the rogue weapon, Ilia. I couldn’t tell you at the time, but I knew what was happening. She wanted to use the weapon to kill Sylveste at long-range, before we’d ever arrived at Resurgam.’

‘I suppose,’ Volyova said, heavy with resignation, ‘that it makes a kind of twisted sense. But to use that weapon just to kill a man . . . I told you, you’re going to have to tell me why she wanted him dead so badly.’

‘You won’t like it. Especially not now, with what Sylveste wants to do.’

‘Just tell me.’

‘I will, I will,’ Khouri said. ‘But there’s one other thing - one other complicating factor. It’s called Sun Stealer, and I think you may already be acquainted with it.’

Volyova looked as if some recently healed internal injury had just relapsed; as if some painful seam had opened in her like ripping cloth. ‘Ah,’ she said eventually. ‘That name again.’

TWENTY-ONE

Approaching Cerberus/Hades, 2566

Sylveste had always known this point would come. But until now he had managed to keep it quarantined from his thoughts, acknowledging its existence without focusing his attention on what it actually entailed, the way a mathematician might ignore an invalidated part of a proof until the rest was rigorously tested and found to be free not just of glaring contradictions but of the least hint of error.

Sajaki had insisted that they journey alone to the Captain’s level, forbidding Pascale or any of the crew to accompany them. Sylveste did not argue the point, although he would have preferred his wife to be with him. It was the first time that Sylveste had been alone with Sajaki since arriving on the
Infinity
, and as they took the elevator downship, Sylveste ransacked his mind for something to talk about; anything except the atrocity that lay ahead of them.

‘Ilia says her machines aboard the
Lorean
will need another three or four days,’ Sajaki said. ‘You’re quite certain you wish her work to continue?’

‘I have no second thoughts,’ Sylveste said.

‘Then I have no choice but to comply with your wishes. I’ve weighed the evidence and decided to believe your threat.’

‘You imagine I hadn’t worked that out for myself already? I know you too well, Sajaki. If you didn’t believe me, you’d have forced me into helping the Captain while we were still around Resurgam, and then quietly disposed of me.’

‘Not true, not true.’ Sajaki’s voice had an amused quality to it. ‘You underestimate my sheer curiosity. I think I’d have indulged you this far just to see how much of your story was true.’

Sylveste was incapable of believing that for a moment, but equally, he saw no point in debating it. ‘Just how much of it don’t you believe, now that you’ve seen Alicia’s message?’

‘But that could so easily have been faked. The damage to her ship could have been inflicted by her own crew. I shan’t believe things entirely until something jumps out of Cerberus and starts attacking us.’

‘I rather suspect you’ll get your wish,’ Sylveste said. ‘In four or five days. Unless Cerberus really is dead.’

They spoke no more until they had reached their destination.

It was not, of course, the first time he had seen the Captain - not even during this visit. But the totality of what had become of the man was still shocking; each time it was as if Sylveste had never properly set eyes on the scene before. True enough: this was his first visit to the Captain’s level since Calvin had renewed his eyes using the ship’s superior medical capabilities, but there was more to it than that. It was also the case that the Captain had changed since last time; perceptibly now - as if his rate of spread was accelerating, racing towards some unguessable future state even as the ship raced towards Cerberus. Perhaps, Sylveste thought, he had arrived in the nick of time - assuming that any intervention at all could help the Captain now.

It was tempting to think that this quickening was significant; perhaps even symbolic. The man, after all, had been sick - if one could properly call this state sickness - for many decades, and yet he had chosen this period in which to enter a new phase of his malady. But that was an erroneous view. One had to consider the Captain’s time-frame: relativistic flight had compressed those decades to a mere handful of years. His latest blooming was less unlikely than it seemed; there was nothing ominous about it.

‘How does this work?’ Sajaki asked. ‘Do we follow the same procedures as last time?’

‘Ask Calvin - he’ll be running things.’

Sajaki nodded slowly, as if the point had only just occurred to him. ‘You should have a say in things, Dan. It’s you he’ll be working through.’

‘Which is exactly why you don’t need to consider my feelings - I won’t even be present.’

‘I don’t believe that for one moment. You’ll be there, Dan - fully aware, too, from what I remember last time. Maybe not in control, but you’ll be participating. And you won’t like it - we know that much from last time.’

‘You’re an expert all of a sudden.’

‘If you didn’t hate this, why would you have kept away from us?’

‘I didn’t. I wasn’t in any position to run.’

‘I’m not just talking about the time when you were in prison. I’m talking about you coming here in the first place; to this system. What were you doing if you weren’t running from us?’

‘Maybe I had reasons for coming here.’

For a moment Sylveste wondered if Sajaki was going to push the matter further, but the moment passed and the Triumvir seemed to mentally discard that line of enquiry. Perhaps the topic bored him. It struck Sylveste that Sajaki was a man who existed in the present and thought largely about the future, and for whom the past held few enticements. He was not interested in sifting through possible motivations or might-have-beens, perhaps because, on some level, Sajaki was not really capable of grasping these issues.

Sylveste had heard that Sajaki had visited the Pattern Jugglers, as he himself had done prior to the Shrouder mission. There was only one reason for visiting the Jugglers, which was to submit oneself to their neural transformations, opening the mind to new modes of consciousness unavailable through human science. It was said - rumoured, perhaps - that no Juggler transform was without its deficits; that there was no resculpting of the human mind which did not result in some pre-existing faculty being lost. There were, after all, only a finite number of neurones in the human brain, and a corresponding finite limit to the number of possible interneuronal connections. The Jugglers could rewire that network, but not without destroying prior connectional pathways. Perhaps Sylveste himself had lost something, but if that were the case, he could not locate the absence. In Sajaki’s case, it might be more obvious. The man was missing some instinctive grasp of human nature, almost an autism. There was an aridity in his conversations, but it was only clear if one paid proper attention. In Calvin’s laboratories back on Yellowstone, Sylveste had once spoken to an early, historically preserved computer system which had been created several centuries before the Transenlightenment, during the first flourishing of artificial intelligence research. The system purported to mimic natural human language, and initially it did, answering inputted questions with apparent cognisance. But the illusion lasted for no more than a few exchanges; eventually one realised that the machine was steering the conversation away from itself, deflecting questions with a sphinxlike impassiveness. It was far less extreme with Sajaki, but the same sense of evasion was present. It was not even particularly artful. Sajaki made no effort to disguise his indifference to these matters; there was no sociopathic gloss of superficial humanity. And why should Sajaki even bother to deny his nature? He had nothing to lose, and in his own way, he was no more or less alien than any of the other crew.

Eventually, when it became obvious that he was not going to pursue Sylveste any further about his reasons for coming to Resurgam, Sajaki addressed the ship, asking it to invoke Calvin and project his simulated image onto the Captain’s level. The seated figure appeared almost immediately. As usual Calvin subjected his witnesses to a brief pantomime of burgeoning awareness, stretching in his seat and looking around him, though without a glimmer of real interest.

‘Are we about to begin?’ he asked. ‘Am I about to enter you? Those machines I used on your eyes were like a tantalus, Dan - for the first time in years I remember what I’ve been missing.’

‘’Fraid not,’ Sylveste said. ‘This is just a - how should we call it? Exploratory dig?’

‘Then why bother invoking me?’

‘Because I’m in the unfortunate position of requiring your advice.’ As he spoke, a pair of servitors emerged from the darkness along the corridor. They were hulking machines which rode on tracks and whose upper torsos sprouted a glistening mass of specialised manipulators and sensors. They were antiseptically clean and highly polished, but they looked about a thousand years old, as if they had just trundled out of a museum. ‘There’s nothing in them that the plague can touch,’ Sylveste said. ‘No components small enough to be invisible to the naked eye; nothing replicating, self-repairing or shape-shifting. All the cybernetics are elsewhere - kilometres away upship, with only optical connections to the drones. We won’t hit him with anything replicating until we use Volyova’s retrovirus.’

‘Very thoughtful.’

‘Of course,’ Sajaki said, ‘for the delicate work, you’ll have to hold the scalpel yourself.’

Sylveste touched his brow. ‘My eyes aren’t so immune. You’ll have to be very careful, Cal. If the plague touches them . . .’

‘I’ll be more than careful, believe me.’ From the monolithic enclosure of his seat, Calvin threw back his head and laughed like a drunkard amused by his own drollery. ‘If your eyes go up, even I won’t get a chance to put my affairs in order.’

‘Just so long as you appreciate the risk.’

The servitors lurched forwards, approaching the shattered angel of the Captain. More than ever he looked like something which had not so much crept with glacial slowness from his reefer, but had burst with volcanic ferocity, only to be frozen in a strobe flash. He radiated in every direction parallel to the wall, extending far into the corridor on either side, for dozens of metres. Nearest to him, his growth consisted of trunk-thick cylinders, the colour of quicksilver, but with the texture of jewel-encrusted slurry, constantly shimmering and twinkling, hinting at phenomenally industrious buried activity. Further away, on his periphery, the branches subdivided into a bronchial-like mesh. At its very boundary, the mesh grew microscopically fine and blended seamlessly with the fabric of its substrate: the ship itself. It was glorious with diffraction patterns, like a membrane of oil on water.

The silver machines seemed to dissolve into the silver background of the Captain. They positioned themselves on either side of the wrecked shell of the reefer unit at his heart, no more than a metre from the violated carapace. It was still cold there - if Sylveste had touched any part of the Captain’s reefer, his flesh would have stayed there, soon to be incorporated into the chimeric mass of the plague. When the operation proper began, they would have to warm him just to work. He would quicken then - or rather, the plague would seize the opportunity to increase its rate of transformation - but there was no other way to work on him, for at the temperature he had reached now, all but the crudest of tools would themselves become inoperable.