The Revelation Space Collection

us to make a start. Recently, progress has been gratifyingly swift. Did you notice how easily my ships outran the Convention, how easily they slipped unnoticed through tightly policed airspace?’

Clavain nodded, remembering how quick the journey to Yellowstone had appeared. ‘You’ve learned how to do it too.’

‘In a very modest fashion, I admit. But yes, we’ve installed inertia-suppressing technology on some of our ships. Simply reducing the mass of a ship by four-fifths is enough to give us an edge over a Convention cutter. I imagine the Conjoiners have done rather better than that.’

Grudgingly, Clavain admitted, ‘Perhaps.’

‘Then they’ll know that the technology is extraordinarily dangerous. The quantum vacuum is normally in a very stable minimum, Mr Clavain, a nice deep valley in the landscape of possible states. But as soon as you start tampering with the vacuum — cooling it, to damp the fluctuations that give rise to inertia — you change the entire topology of that landscape. What were stable minima become precarious peaks and ridges. There are adjacent valleys that are associated with very different properties of immersed matter. Small fluctuations can lead to violent state transitions. Shall I tell you a horror story?’

‘I think you’re going to.’

‘I recruited the very best, Mr Clavain, the top theorists from the Rust Belt. Anyone who had shown the slightest interest in the nature of the quantum vacuum was brought here and made to understand that their wider interests would be best served by helping me.’

‘Blackmail?’ Clavain asked.

‘Good grief, no. Merely gentle coercion.’ H glanced back at Clavain and grinned, revealing sharply pointed incisors. ‘For the most part it wasn’t even necessary. I had resources that the Demarchists lacked. Their own intelligence network was crumbling, so they knew nothing of the grub. The Conjoiners had their own programme, but to join them would have meant becoming Conjoined as well — no small price for scientific curiosity. The workers I approached were usually more than willing to come to the Chateau, given the alternatives. ’ H paused, and his voice took on an elegiac tone it had lacked before. ‘One amongst their number was a brilliant defector from the Demarchists, a woman named Pauline Sukhoi.’

‘Is she dead?’ Clavain asked. ‘Or something worse than dead?’

‘No, not at all. But she has left my employment. After what happened — the disturbing event — she couldn’t bring herself to continue. I understood perfectly and made sure that Sukhoi found alternative employment back in the Rust Belt.’

‘Whatever happened, it must have been truly disturbing,’ Clavain said.

‘Oh, it was. For all of us, but especially for Sukhoi. Many experiments were in progress,’ said H. ‘Down here, in the basement levels of the Chateau, there were a dozen little teams working on different aspects of the grub technology. Sukhoi had been on the project for a year, and had shown herself to an excellent if fearless researcher. It was Sukhoi who explored some of the less stable state transitions.’

H led him past several doors that opened into large dark chambers, until they arrived at one in particular. He did not enter the room. ‘Something terrible happened here. No one associated with the work would ever go into this room afterwards. They say damp records the past. Do you feel it also, Mr Clavain? A sense of foreboding, an animal instinct that you should not enter?’

‘Now that you’ve planted the suggestion that there’s something odd about the room, I can’t honestly say what I feel.’

‘Step inside,’ H said.

Clavain entered the room, stepping down to the smooth flat floor. The room was cold, but then again, the entire basement level had been cold. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, picking out the generous dimensions of the chamber. Here and there the floor and walls and ceiling were interrupted by metal struts or sockets, but no apparatus or analysis equipment remained. The room was completely empty and very clean.

He walked around the perimeter. He could not say that he enjoyed being in the room, but everything he felt — a mild sense of panic, a mild sense of presence — could have been psychosomatic. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

H spoke from the door. ‘There was an accident in this room, involving only Sukhoi’s project. Sukhoi was injured, but not critically, and she soon made a good recovery.’

‘And none of the other people in Sukhoi’s team were injured?’

‘That was the odd thing. There were no other people — Sukhoi had always worked alone. We had no other victims to worry about. The technology was slightly damaged, but soon showed itself to be capable of limited self-repair. Sukhoi was conscious and coherent, so we assumed that when she was on her feet again she would go back down to the basement.’

‘And?’

‘She asked a strange question. One that, if you will pardon the expression, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.’

Clavain rejoined H near the door. ‘Which was?’

‘She asked what had happened to the other experimenter.’

‘Then there was some neurological damage. False memories.’ Clavain shrugged. ‘Hardly surprising, is it?’

‘She was quite specific about the other worker, Mr Clavain. Even down to his name and history. She said that the man had been called Yves, Yves Mercier, and that he had been recruited from the Rust Belt at the same time that she had.’

‘But there was no Yves Mercier?’

‘No one of that name, or any name like it, had ever worked in the Chateau. As I said, Sukhoi had always tended to work alone.’

‘Perhaps she felt the need to attach the blame for the accident to another person. Her subconscious manufactured a scapegoat.’

H nodded. ‘Yes, we thought that something like that might have happened. But why transfer blame for a minor incident? No one had been killed, and no equipment had been badly damaged. As a matter of fact, we had learned much more from the accident that we had with weeks of painstaking progress. Sukhoi was blameless, and she knew it.’

‘So she made up the name for another reason. The subconscious is an odd thing. There doesn’t have to be a perfectly obvious rationale for anything she said.’

‘That’s precisely what we thought, but Sukhoi was adamant. As she recovered, her memories of working with Mercier only sharpened. She recalled the minutest details about him — what he had looked like, what he had liked to eat and drink, his sense of humour, even his background; what he had done before he came to the Chateau. The more we tried to convince her that Mercier had not been real, the more hysterical she became.’

‘She was deranged, then.’

‘Every other test said she wasn’t, Mr Clavain. If she had a delusional system, it was focused solely on the prior existence of Mercier. And so I began to wonder.’

Clavain looked at H and nodded for him to continue.

‘I did some research,’ H added. ‘It was easy enough to dig into Rust Belt records — those that had survived the plague, anyway. And I found that certain aspects of Sukhoi’s story checked out with alarming accuracy.’

‘Such as?’

‘There had been someone named Yves Mercier, born in the same carousel that Sukhoi claimed.’

‘It can’t be that unusual a name amongst Demarchists.’

‘No, probably not. But in fact there was only one. And his date of birth accorded precisely with Sukhoi’s recollections. The only difference was that this Mercier — the real one — had died many years earlier. He had been killed shortly after the Melding Plague destroyed the Glitter Band.’

Clavain forced a shrug, but with less conviction that he would have wished. ‘A coincidence, then.’

‘Perhaps. But you see, this particular Yves Mercier was already a student at the time. He was well advanced on studies into exactly the same quantum-vacuum phenomena that would, according to Sukhoi, eventually bring him into my orbit.’

Clavain no longer wanted to be in the room. He stepped up, back into the blue-lanterned corridor. ‘You’re saying her Mercier really existed?’