The Revelation Space Collection

Is the body still here?

[Yes.]

I’d like to see it.

[There isn’t an awful lot left to see.]

But the man unplugged his compad and led the way, shuffling sideways in a crablike manner. Skade followed him. They moved from one hideaway to another, occasionally having to inch through constrictions caused by protruding elements of the machinery. It was all around them, exerting its subtle but undeniable effect on the very space-time in which they were embedded.

No one, not even Skade, really understood quite how the machinery worked. There were guesses, some of them very scholarly and plausible, but at heart there remained a gaping chasm of conceptual ignorance. Much of what Skade knew about the machinery consisted only of documented cause and effect, with little understanding of the physical mechanisms underpinning its behaviour. She knew that when the machinery was functioning it tended to settle into several discrete states, each of which was associated with a measurable change in the local metric… but the states were not rigidly isolated, and it had been known for the device to oscillate wildly between them. Then there was the associated problem of the various field geometries, and the tortuously complex way they fed back into the state stability…

State two, you said? Exactly what mode were you in before the accident?

[State one, as per instructions. We were exploring some of the nonlinear field geometries.]

What was it this time? Heart failure, like the last one?

[No, at least, I don’t think heart failure was the main cause of death. Like I said, there isn’t much left to go on.]

Skade and the technician pushed ahead, wriggling through a tight elbow between adjoining chunks of the machinery. The field was in state zero at the moment, for which there were no measurable physiological effects, but Skade could not entirely shake a feeling of wrongness, a nagging sense that the world had been skewed minutely away from normality. It was illusory; she would have needed highly sensitive quantum-vacuum probes to detect the device’s influence. But the feeling was there all the same.

[Here we are.]

Skade looked around. They had emerged into one of the larger open spaces in the bowels of the device. It was a scalloped black-walled chamber just large enough to stand up in. Numerous compad input sockets woodwormed the walls.

This is where it happened?

[Yes. The field shear was at its highest here.]

I’m not seeing a body.

[You’re just not looking closely enough.]

She followed his gaze. He was focusing on a particular part of the wall. Skade moved over and touched the wall with the gloved tips of her fingers. What had looked like the same gloss-black as the rest of the chamber revealed itself to be scarlet and cloying. There was perhaps a quarter of an inch of something glued to most of the wall on one side of the chamber.

Please tell me this isn’t what I think it is.

[I’m afraid it’s exactly what you think it is.]

Skade stirred her hand through the red substance. The covering had enough adhesion to form a single sticky mass, even in zero gravity. Now and then she felt something harder — a shard of bone machinery — but nothing larger than a thumbnail had remained one piece.

Tell me what happened.

[He was near the field focus. The excursion to state two was only momentary, but it was enough to make a difference. Any movement would have been fatal, even an involuntary twitch. Maybe he was already dead before he hit the wall.]

How fast was he moving?

[Kilometres per second, easily.]

It would have been painless, I suppose. Did you feel him hit?

[Throughout the ship. It was like a small bomb going off.]

Skade willed her gloves to clean themselves. The residue flowed back on to the wall. She thought of Clavain, wishing that she had some of his tolerance for sights like this. Clavain had seen horrid things during his time as a soldier, enough that he had developed the necessary mental armour to cope. With one or two exceptions, Skade had fought all her battles at a distance. [Skade… ?]

Her crest must have reflected her discomposure. Don’t worry about me. Just try to find out what went wrong, and make sure it doesn’t happen ain.

[And the testing programme?]

The programme continues, of course. Now get this mess cleaned up.

Felka floated in another chamber of her quiet residential spar. Where tools had been tethered to her waist earlier many small metal cages now orbited her, clacking gently against each other when she moved. Each cage contained a clutch of white mice, scratching and sniffing at their constraints. Felka paid them no attention; they had not been caged for long, they were well fed and shortly they would all enjoy a sort of freedom.

She squinted into gloom. The only source of light was the faint radiance of the adjacent room, separated from this one by a twisting throat of highly polished wood the colour of burned caramel. She found the UV lamp attached to one wall and flicked it on.

One side of the chamber — Felka had never bothered deciding which way was up — was sheeted over with bottle-green glass. Behind the glass was something that at first glance resembled a convoluted wooden plumbing system, a palimpsest of pipes and channels, gaskets and valves and pumps. Diagonals and doglegs of wood spanned the maze, bridging different regions, their function initially unclear. The pipes and channels had only three wooden sides, with the glass forming the fourth wall so that whatever flowed or scurried along them would be visible.

Felka had already introduced about a dozen mice to the system via one-way doors near the edge of the glass. They had quickly taken divergent paths at the first few junctions and were now metres apart, nosing through their own regions of the labyrinth. The lack of gravity did not bother them at all; they could obtain enough traction against the wood to scamper freely in any direction. The more experienced mice, in fact, eventually learned the art of coasting down pipes, minimising the frictional area they exposed to the wood or glass. But they seldom learned that trick until they had been in the maze for several hours and through several reward cycles.

Felka reached for one of the cages attached to her waist, flipping open the catch so that the contents — three white mice — spilled into the maze. Away they went, momentarily gleeful to have escaped the metal prisons.

Felka waited. Sooner or later one of the mice would run into a trapdoor or flap that was connected to a delicate system of springloaded wooden levers. When the mouse pushed past the flap, the movement caused the levers to shift. The movement would often be transmitted across the maze, causing a shutter to open or close one or two metres away from the original trigger point. Another mouse, working its way through a remote stretch of the maze, might suddenly find its way blocked where previously it had been clear. Or the mouse might be forced to make a decision where previously none had been required, anxieties of possibility momentarily clouding its tiny rodent brain. It was quite probable that the choices of the second mouse would activate another trigger system, causing a distant reconfiguration of another part of the maze. Floating in the middle, Felka would watch it happen, the wood shifting through endless permutations, running a blind program whose agents were the mice themselves. It was fascinating enough to watch, after a fashion.

But Felka was easily bored. The maze, for her, was just the start of things. She would run the maze in semi-darkness, with the UV lamp burning. The mice had genes that expressed a set of proteins that caused them to fluoresce under ultraviolet illumination. She could see them clearly through the glass, moving smudges of bright purple. Felka watched them with ardent, but perceptibly waning, fascination.

The maze was entirely her invention. She had designed it and fashioned its wooden mechanisms herself. She had even tinkered with the mice to make them glow, though that had been the easy bit compared with all the fettling and filing that had been needed to get the traps and levers to work properly. For a while she even thought it