The Revelation Space Collection

‘Is that so?’ the quaestor asked.

Rashmika nodded. As far as she was concerned, the church-sponsored study groups were a joke, existing only to rubber-stamp current Quaicheist doctrine regarding the scuttlers; but she had to start somewhere. Her real goal was to reach Harbin, not to advance her study of the scuttlers. However, it would be much easier to find him if she began her service in a clerical position — such as one of the study groups — rather than with lowly work like Way repair.

‘I think I could be of value,’ she said.

‘Knowing a great deal about the study of a subject is not the same as knowing anything about the subject itself,’ the quaestor told her with a sympathetic smile. He pulled his hand from his breast pocket, a small pinch of seeds between forefinger and thumb. The jointed green thing on his shoulder stirred, moving with a curious stiffness that reminded Rashmika of something inflated, like a balloon-creature. It was an animal, but unlike any that Rashmika — in her admittedly limited experience — remembered seeing. She saw now that at one end of its thickest tube was a turretlike head, with faceted eyes and a delicate, mechanical-looking mouth. The quaestor offered his fingers to the creature, pursing his lips in encouragement. The creature stretched itself down his arm and attacked the pinch of seeds with a nibbling politeness. What was it? she wondered. The body and limbs were insectile, but the elongated coil of its tail, which was wrapped around the quaestor’s upper arm several times, was more suggestive of a reptile. And there was something uniquely birdlike about the way it ate. She remembered birds from somewhere, brilliant crested strutting things of cobalt blue with tails that opened like fans. Peacocks. But where had she ever seen peacocks?

The quaestor smiled at his pet. ‘Doubtless you have read many books,’ he said, looking sidelong at Rashmika. ‘That is to be applauded.’

She looked at the animal warily. ‘I grew up in the digs, Quaestor. I’ve helped with the excavation work. I’ve breathed scuttler dust from the moment I was born.’

‘Unfortunately, though, that’s hardly the most unique of claims. How many scuttler fossils have you examined?’

‘None,’ Rashmika said, after a moment.

‘Well, then.’ The quaestor dabbed his forefinger against his lip, then touched it against the mouthpiece of the animal. ‘That’s enough for you, Peppermint.’

Crozet coughed. ‘Shall we continue this discussion aboard the caravan, Quaestor? I don’t want to have too great a journey back home, and we still have a lot of business to attend to.’

The creature — Peppermint — retreated back along the quaestor’s arm now that its feast was over. It began to clean its face with tiny scissoring forelimbs.

‘The girl’s your responsibility, Crozet?’ the quaestor asked.

‘Not exactly, no.’ He looked at Rashmika and corrected himself.

‘What I mean is, yes, I’m taking care of her until she gets where she’s going, and I’ll take it personally if anyone lays a hand on her. But what she does with herself after that is none of my business.’

The quaestor’s attention snapped back to Rashmika. ‘And how old are you, exactly?’

‘Old enough,’ she said.

The green creature turned the turret of its head towards her, its blank faceted eyes like blackberries.

Hela Surface, 2615

Quaiche slipped in and out of consciousness. With each transition, the difference between the two states became less clear cut. He hallucinated, and then hallucinated that the hallucinations were real. He kept seeing rescuers scrabbling over the scree, picking up their pace as they saw him, waving their gloved hands in greeting. The second or third time, it made him laugh to think that he had imagined rescuers arriving under exactly the same circumstances as the real ones. No one would ever believe him, would they?

But somewhere between the rescuers arriving and the point where they started getting him to safety, he always ended up back in the ship, his chest aching, one eye seeing the world as if through a gauze.

The Dominatrix kept arriving, sliding down between the sheer walls of the rift. The long, dark ship would kneel down on spikes of arresting thrust. The mid-hull access hatch would slide open and Morwenna would emerge. She would come out in a blur of pistons, racing to his rescue, as magnificent and terrible as an army arrayed for battle. She would pull him from the wreck of the Daughter, and with a dreamlike illogic he would not need to breathe as she helped him back to the other ship through a crisp, airless landscape of shadow and light. Or she would come out in the scrimshaw suit, somehow managing to make it move even though he knew the thing was welded tight, incapable of flexing.

Gradually the hallucinations took precedence over rational thought. In a period of lucidity, it occurred to Quaiche that the kindest thing would be for one of the hallucinations to occur just as he died, so that he was spared the jolting realisation that he had still to be rescued.

He saw Jasmina coming to him, striding across the scree with Grelier lagging behind. The queen was clawing out her eyes as she approached, banners of gore streaming after her.

He kept waking up, but the hallucinations blurred into one another, and the feelings induced by the virus became stronger. He had never known such intensity of experience before, even when the virus had first entered him. The music was behind every thought, the stained-glass light permeating every atom of the universe. He felt intensely observed, intensely loved. The emotions did not feel like a facade any more, but the way things really were. It was as if until now he had only been seeing the reflection of something, or hearing the muffled echo of some exquisitely lovely and heart-wrenching music. Could this really just be the action of an artificially engineered virus on his brain? It had always felt like that before, a series of crude mechanically induced responses, but now the emotions felt like an integral part of him, leaving no room for anything else. It was like the difference between a theatrical stage effect and a thunderstorm.

Some dwindling, rational part of him said that nothing had really changed, that the feelings were still due to the virus. His brain was being starved of oxygen as the air in the cabin ran out. Under those circumstances, it would not have been unusual to feel some emotional changes. And with the virus still present, the effects could have been magnified many times.

But that rational part was quickly squeezed out of existence.

All he felt was the presence of the Almighty.

‘All right,’ Quaiche said, before passing out, ‘I believe now. You got me. But I still need a miracle.’

TEN

Hela, 2615

He woke. He was moving. The air was cold but fresh and there was no pain in his chest. So this is it, he thought. The last hallucination, perhaps, before his brain slid into the trough of cascading cell-death. Just make it a good one, and try to keep it up until I die. That’s all I’m asking for.

But it felt real this time.

He tried looking around, but he was still trapped inside the Daughter . Yet his view of things was moving, the landscape bouncing and jolting. He realised that he was being dragged across the scree, down to the level part of the floor. He craned his neck and through his good eye he saw a commotion of pistons, shining limb joints.

Morwenna.

But it wasn’t Morwenna. It was a servitor, one of the repair units from the Dominatrix. The spiderlike robot had attached adhesive traction plates to the Scavenger’s Daughter and was hauling it across the ground, with Quaiche still in it. Of course, of course, of course: how else was it going to get him out of there? He felt stupid now. He had no suit and no airlock. For all intents and purposes, in fact, the ship was his vacuum suit. Why had this never occurred to him before?

He felt better: clear-headed and sharp. He noticed that the servitor had plugged something into one of the Daughter’s umbilical points. Feeding fresh air back into it, probably. The