Authors: Alastair Reynolds

Tags: #02 Science-Fiction

Zima Blue and Other Stories (56 page)

BOOK: Zima Blue and Other Stories

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'What about our wasps?'

'Isn't it obvious? A while later the wasps here made the same jump to sentience - presumably because they'd been shown the right moves by the others. Difference was, ours kept it quiet. Can't exactly blame them, can you?'

There was nothing from Quillin for a while, both of us concentrating on the last patch of ice before Wendigo's ship.

'I suppose you have an explanation for this too,' she said eventually, swiping her tail against the ground. 'C'mon, blow my mind.'

So I told her what I knew. 'They're bringing life to the Swirl. Sooner than you think too. Once this charade of a war is done, the wasps will breed in earnest. Trillions out there now, but in a few decades it'll be billions of trillions. They'll outweigh a good-sized planet. In a way the Swirl will have become sentient. It'll be directing its own evolution.'

I spared Quillin the details - how the wasps would arrest the existing processes of planetary formation so that they could begin anew, only this time according to a plan. Left to its own devices, the Swirl would contract down to a solar system comprised solely of small, rocky planets - but such a system could never support life over billions of years. Instead, the wasps would exploit the system's innate chaos to tip it towards a state where it would give rise to at least two much larger worlds - planets as massive as Jupiter or Saturn, capable of shepherding leftover rubble into tidy, world-avoiding orbits. Mass extinctions had no place in the Splinterqueens' vision of future life.

But I guessed Quillin probably didn't care.

'Why are you hurrying, Spirey?' she asked between harsh grunts as she propelled herself forwards. 'The ship isn't going anywhere.'

The edge of the open airlock was a metre above the ice. My fingers probed over the rim, followed by the crest of my battered helmet. Just lifting myself into the lock's lit interior seemed to require all the energy I'd already expended in the crawl. Somehow I managed to get half my body length into the lock.

Which is when Quillin reached me.

There wasn't much pain when she dug the bayonet into my ankle, just a form of cold I hadn't imagined before, even lying on the ice. Quillin jerked the embedded blade to and fro, and the knot of cold seemed to reach out little feelers into my foot and lower leg. I sensed she wanted to retract the blade for another stab, but my suit armour was gripping it tight.

The bayonet taking her weight, Quillin pulled herself up to the rim of the lock. I tried kicking her away, but the skewered leg no longer felt a part of me.

'You're dead,' she whispered.

'News to me.'

Her eyes rolled wide, then locked on me with renewed venom. She gave the bayonet a violent twist. 'So tell me one thing. That story - bullshit, or what?'

'I'll tell you,' I said. 'But first consider this.' Before she could react I reached out and palmed a glowing panel set in the lock wall. The panel whisked aside, revealing a mushroom-shaped red button. 'You know that story they told about Wendigo, how she lost her arms?'

'You weren't meant to swallow that hero guff, Spirey.'

'No? Well, get a load of this, Quillin. My hand's on the emergency pressurisation control. When I hit it, the outer door's going to slide down quicker than you can blink.'

She looked at my hand, then down at her wrist, still attached to my ankle via the jammed bayonet. Slowly the situation sank in. 'Close the door, Spirey, and you'll be a leg short.'

'And you an arm, Quillin.'

'Stalemate, then.'

'Not quite. See, which of us is more likely to survive? Me inside, with all the medical systems aboard this ship, or you all on your lonesome outside? Frankly, I don't think it's any contest.'

Her eyes opened wider. Quillin gave a shriek of anger and entered one final, furious wrestling match with the bayonet.

I managed to laugh. 'As for your question, it's true, every word of it.' Then, with all the calm I could muster, I thumbed the control. 'Pisser, isn't it?'

I made it, of course.

Several minutes after the closing of the door, demons had lathered a protective cocoon around the stump and stomach wound. They allowed me no pain - only a fuzzy sense of detachment. Enough of my mind remained sharp to think about my escape - problematic given that the ship still wasn't fixed.

Eventually I remembered the evac pods.

They were made to kick away from the ship fast, if some quackdrive system went on the fritz. They had thrusters for that - nothing fancy, but here they'd serve another purpose. They'd boost me from the splinter, punch me out of its grav well.

So I did it.

Snuggled into a pod and blew out of the wreck, feeling the gee-load even within the thick. It didn't last long. On the evac pod's cam I watched the splinter drop away until it was pebble-sized. The main body of the kinetic attack was hitting it by then, impacts every ten or so seconds. After a minute of that the splinter just came apart. Afterwards, there was only a sooty veil where it had been, and then only the Swirl.

I hoped the Queen had made it. I guess it was within her power to transmit what counted of herself out to sisters in the halo. If so, there was a chance for Yarrow as well. I'd find out eventually. Then I used the pod's remaining fuel to inject me into a slow, elliptical orbit, one that would graze the halo in a mere fifty or sixty years.

That didn't bother me. I wanted to close my eyes and let the thick nurse me whole again - and sleep for an awfully long time.

After a lean period, I broke back into
Interzone
in the mid-nineties. 'Spirey and the Queen' is a story from that second, more sustained burst of success, and one that I'm really fond of even now. Maybe that's because the story was such a pig to write that it was a relief to get it out of my system, maybe because it appeared with some very striking illustrations, and maybe because it was the first story of mine that seemed to be received enthusiastically by at least some readers. I'd started it quite a few years earlier, and the story had been through numerous aborted versions before I found the right angle of attack. Things were complicated by the fact that I was also working on the novel
Revelation Space
at the time, and beginning to have some thoughts about the wider future history into which that book slotted. At various times 'Spirey and the Queen' was part of that history, then it was out, then it was in again . . . until I decided that the story really worked best as a stand-alone piece, unrelated to anything else I was working on. Typically for me, the motor of plot only kicked in when I started looking at the story in thriller terms: spies, defectors, that kind of thing. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the identity of the two warring combines featured in the story; suffice it to say that there are clues in both their names and symbols. As for Spirey herself, I took her name from a sign I spotted in Australia, which indicated the way to a certain 'Spirey Creek'.
I always had the vague intention of returning to Spirey's universe at some point or another. Perhaps I will, one day . . . if only to find out for myself what happens after the last line of this story.

UNDERSTANDING SPACE AND TIME

PART ONE

Something very strange appeared in the outer recreation bubble on the day that Katrina Solovyova died. When he saw it, John Renfrew rushed back to the infirmary where he had left her. Solovyova had been slipping in and out of lucidity for days, but when he arrived he was glad to find her still conscious. She seldom turned her face away from the picture window, transfixed by the silent and vast twilight landscape beyond the armoured glass. Hovering against the foothills of Pavonis Mons, her reflection was all highlights, as if sketched in bold strokes of chalk.

Renfrew caught his breath before speaking.

'I've seen a piano.'

At first he did not think she had heard him. Then the reflection of Solovyova's mouth formed words.

'You've seen a
what
?'

'A piano,' Renfrew said, laughing. 'A big, white Bosendorfer grand.'

'You're crazier than me.'

'It was in the recreation bubble,' Renfrew said. 'The one that took a lightning hit last week. I think it fried something. Or unfried something, maybe. Brought something back to life.'

'A piano?'

'It's a start. It means things aren't totally dead. That there's a glimmer of . . . something.'

'Well, isn't that the nicest timing,' Solovyova said.

With a creak of his knees Renfrew knelt by her bedside. He'd connected Solovyova to a dozen or so medical monitors, only three of which were working properly. They hummed, hissed and bleeped with deadening regularity. When it began to seem like music - when he started hearing hidden harmonies and tonal shifts - Renfrew knew it was time to get out of the infirmary. That was why he had gone to the recreation bubble; there was no music there, but at least he could sit in silence.

'Nice timing?' he said.

'I'm dying. Nothing that happens now will make any difference to me.'

'But maybe it would,' Renfrew said. 'If the rec systems are capable of coming back online, what else might be? Maybe I could get the infirmary up and running . . . the diagnostic suite . . . the drug synth . . .' He gestured at the banks of dead, grey monitors and cowled machines parked against the wall. They were covered with scuffed decals and months of dust.

'Pray for another lightning strike, you mean?'

'No . . . not necessarily.' Renfrew chose his words with care. He did not want to offer Solovyova false optimism, but the apparition had made him feel more positive than at any time he could remember since the Catastrophe. They could not unmake the deaths of all the other colonists, or unmake the vastly larger death that even now was difficult to mention. But if some of the base systems they had assumed broken could be restarted, he might at least find a way to keep Solovyova alive.

'What, then?'

'I don't know. But now that I know things aren't as bad as we feared . . .' he trailed off. 'There are lots of things I could try again. Just because they didn't work the first time--'

'You probably imagined the piano.'

'I know I didn't. It was a genuine projection, not a hallucination.'

'And this piano . . .' The reflection froze momentarily. 'How long did it last, Renfrew? I mean, just out of curiosity?'

'Last?'

'That's what I asked.'

'It's still there,' he said. 'It was still there when I left. Like it was waiting for someone to come and play it.'

The figure in the bed moved slightly.

'I don't believe you.'

'I can't show you, Solovyova. I wish I could, but--'

'I'll die? I'm going to die anyway, so what difference does it make?' She paused, allowing the melancholic chorus of the machines to swell and fill the room. 'Probably by the end of the week. And all I've got to look forward to is the inside of this room or the view out of this window. At least let me see something different.'

'Is this what you really want?'

Solovyova's reflection tipped in acknowledgement. 'Show me the piano, Renfrew. Show me you aren't making this shit up.'

He thought about it for a minute, perhaps two, and then dashed back to the recreation bubble to check that the piano was still there. The journey seemed to take for ever, even at a sprint, through sunken tunnels and window-lined connecting bridges, up and down grilled ramps, through ponderous internal airlocks and sweltering aeroponics labs, taking this detour or that to avoid a blown bubble or failed airlock.

Parts of the infrastructure creaked ominously as he passed through. Here and there his feet crunched through the sterile red dust that was always finding ways to seep through seals and cracks. Everything was decaying, falling apart. Even if the dead had been brought back to life the base would not have been able to support more than a quarter of their number. But the piano represented something other than the slow grind of entropy. If one system had survived apparent failure, the same might be true of others.

He reached the bubble, his eyes closed as he crossed the threshold. He half-expected the piano to be gone, never more than a trick of the mind. Yet there it was: still manifesting, still hovering a few centimetres from the floor. Save for that one suggestion of ghostliness, it appeared utterly solid, as real as anything else in the room. It was a striking pure white, polished to a lambent gloss. Renfrew strode around it, luxuriating in the conjunction of flat planes and luscious curves. He had not noticed this detail before, but the keys were still hidden under the folding cover.

He admired the piano for several more minutes, forgetting his earlier haste. It was as beautiful as it was chilling.

Remembering Solovyova, he returned to the infirmary.

'You took your time,' she said.

BOOK: Zima Blue and Other Stories

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