The Revelation Space Collection

Antoinette stood up. ‘I suppose not.’

Xavier looked at her expectantly. ‘Then… you’re OK about it?’

She turned around and looked him hard in the eyes. ‘No, Xave, I’m not OK about it. I understand it. I even understand why you lied to me all those years. But that doesn’t make it OK.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking down into his lap. ‘But all I ever did was make a promise to your father, Antoinette.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ she said.

Later, they made love. It was as good as any time she could remember with him; all the more so, perhaps, given the emotional fireworks that were still going off in her belly. And it was true what she had said to Xavier. Now that she had heard his side of the story, she understood that he could never have told her the truth, or at least not until she had figured out most of it for herself. She did not even particularly blame her father for what he had done. He had always looked after his friends, and he had always thought the world of his daughter. Jim Bax had done nothing out of character.

But that did not make the truth of it any easier to take. When she thought of all the time she had spent alone on Storm Bird now knowing that Lyle Merrick had been there, haunting her — perhaps even watching her — she felt a wrenching sense of betrayal and stupidity.

She did not think it was something she was capable of getting over.

A day later, Antoinette walked out to visit her ship, thinking that by entering it again she might find some forgiveness for the lie that had been visited on her by the one person in the universe she had thought she could trust. It hardly mattered that the lie had been a kind one, intended to protect her.

But when she reached the base of the scaffolding that embraced Storm Bird, she could go no further. She gazed up at the vessel, but the ship looked threatening and unfamiliar. It no longer looked like her ship, or anything that she wanted to be part of.

Crying because something had been stolen from her that could never be returned, Antoinette turned around and walked away.

Things moved with startling swiftness once the decision had been made. Skade throttled her ship down to one gee and then had the techs make the bubble contract to sub-bacterial size, maintained by only a trickle of power. This allowed much of the machinery to be disconnected. Then she gave the command that would cause a drastic reshaping of the ship, in accordance with the information that she had gleaned from Exordium.

Buried in the rear of Nightshade were many plague-hardened nanomachine repositories, dark tubers crammed with clades of low-level replicators. Upon Skade’s command the machines were released, programmed to multiply and diversify until they had formed a scalding slime of microscopic matter- transforming engines. The slime swarmed and infiltrated every niche of the rear part of the ship, dissolving and regurgitating the very fabric of the lighthugger. Much of the machinery of the device succumbed to the same transforming blight. In their wake, the replicators left glistening obsidian structures, filamental arcs and helices threading back into space behind the ship like so many trailing tentacles and stingers. They were studded with the nodes of subsidiary devices, bulging like black suckers and venom sacs. In operation, the machinery would move with respect to itself, executing a hypnotic thresherlike motion, whisking and slicing the vacuum. In the midst of that scything motion, a quark-sized pocket of state-four quantum vacuum would be conjured into existence. It would be a pocket of vacuum in which inertial mass was, in the strict mathematical sense, imaginary.

The quark-sized bubble would quiver, fluctuate and then — in much less than an instant of Planck time — it would engulf the entire spacecraft, undergoing an inflationary type phase transition to macroscopic dimensions. The machinery that would continue to hold it in check was engineered to astonishingly fine tolerances, down to the very threshold of Heisenberg fuzziness. How much of this was necessary, no one could guess. Skade was not prepared to second-guess what the whispering voices of Exordium had told her. All she could do was hope that any deviations would not affect the functioning of the machine, or at least affect it so profoundly that it did not work at all. The thought of it working, but working wrongly, was entirely too terrifying to contemplate.

But nothing happened the first time. The machinery had powered up and the quantum-vacuum sensors had picked up strange, subtle fluctuations… but equally precise measurements established that Nightshade had not moved an angstrom further than it would have under ordinary inertia-suppressing propulsion. Angry as much with herself as anyone else, Skade made her way through the interstices of the curved black machinery. Soon, she found the person she was looking for: Molenka, the Exordium systems technician. Molenka looked drained of blood.

What went wrong?

Molenka fumbled out an explanation, dumping reams of technical data into the public part of Skade’s mind. Skade absorbed the data critically, skimming it for the essentials. The configuration of the field-containment systems had not been perfect; the bubble of state-two vacuum had evaporated back into state zero before it could be pushed over the potential barrier into the magical tachyonic state four. Skade appraised the machinery. It appeared undamaged.

Then you’ve learned what went wrong, I take it? You can make the appropriate corrective changes and attempt the transition again?

[Skade…]

What?

[Something did happen. I can’t find Jastrusiak anywhere. He was much closer to the equipment than I was when we attempted the experiment. But he isn’t there now. I can’t find him anywhere, or even any evidence of him.]

Skade listened to this without registering any expression beyond tolerant interest. Only when the woman had finished speaking and there had been several seconds of silence did she reply. Jastrusiak?

[Yes… Jastrusiak.]

The woman seemed relieved. [My partner in this. The other Exordium expert.]

There was never anyone called Jastrusiak on this ship, Molenka.

Molenka turned — so it appeared to Skade — a shade paler. Her reply was little more than an exhalation. [No…]

I assure you, there was no one called Jastrusiak. This is a small crew, and I know everyone on it.

[That isn’t possible. I was with him not twenty minutes ago. We were in the machinery, readying it for the transition. Jastrusiak stayed there to make last-minute adjustments. I swear this!]

Perhaps you do. Skade was tempted, very tempted, to reach into Molenka’s head and install a mnemonic blockade, wiping out Molenka’s memory of what had just happened. But that would not bury the evident conflict between what she thought to be true and what was objective reality.

Molenka, I know this will be difficult for you, but you have to continue working with the equipment. I’m sorry about Jastrusiak — I forgot his name for a moment. We’ll find him, I promise you. There are many places where he could have ended up.

[I don’t…]

Skade cut her off, one of her fingers suddenly appearing beneath Molenka’s chin. No. No words, Molenka. No words, no thoughts. Just go back into the machinery and make the necessary adjustments. Do that for me, will you? Do it for me, and for the Mother Nest?

Molenka trembled. She was, Skade judged, quite exquisitely terrified. It was the resigned, hopeless terror of a small mammal caught in something’s claws. [Yes, Skade.]

The name Jastrusiak stuck in Skade’s mind, tantalisingly familiar. She could not dislodge it. When the opportunity presented itself, she tapped into the Conjoiner collective memory and retrieved all references connected to the name, or anything close to it. She was determined to understand what had made Molenka’s subconscious malfunction in such a singularly creative fashion, weaving a nonexistent individual out of nothing in a moment of terror.