The Revelation Space Collection

them right this moment.’

‘Because of my baby,’ Khouri said.

Clavain nodded politely. ‘Your baby.’

‘My daughter. Her name’s Aura. She’s here, on… what did you say this place was called?’

‘Ararat,’ Clavain said.

‘OK, she’s here on Ararat. And I’ve come to rescue her.’

Clavain glanced at his companions. ‘And where would your daughter be, exactly?’

‘About eight hundred kilometres away,’ Khouri said. ‘Now get me those weps. And an incubator. And someone who knows field surgery.’

‘Why field surgery?’ Clavain asked.

‘Because,’ Khouri replied, ‘you’re going to have to get her out of Skade first.’

ELEVEN

Hela, 2727

Rashmika looked up at the scuttler fossil. A symbol of conspicuous wealth, it hung from the ceiling in a large atrium area of the caravan vehicle. Even if it was a fake, or a semi-fake botched together from incompatible parts, it was still the first apparently complete scuttler she had ever seen. She wanted to find a way to climb up there and examine it properly, taking note of the abrasion patterns where the hard carapacial sections slid against each other. Rashmika had only ever read about such things, but she was certain that with an hour of careful study she would be able to tell whether it was authentic, or at the very least exclude the possibility of its being a cheap fake.

Somehow she didn’t think it was very likely to be either cheap or fake.

Mentally, she classified the scuttler body morphology. DK4V8M, she thought. Maybe a DK4V8L, if she was being confused by the play of dust and shadows around the trailing tail-shell. At least it was possible to apply the usual morphological classification scheme. The cheap fakes sometimes threw body parts together in anatomically impossible formations, but this was definitely a plausible assemblage of components, even if they hadn’t necessarily come from the same burial site.

The scuttlers were a taxonomist’s nightmare. The first time one had been unearthed, it had appeared to be a simple case of reassembling the scattered body parts to make something that looked like a large insect or lobster. The scuttler exhibited a complexity of body sections, with many different highly specialised limbs and sensory organs, but they had all snapped back together in a more or less logical fashion, leaving only the soft interior organs to be conjectured.

But the second scuttler hadn’t matched the first. There were a different number of body sections, a different number of limbs. The head and mouth parts looked very dissimilar. Yet — again — all the pieces snapped together to make a complete specimen, with no embarrassing bits left over.

The third hadn’t matched the first or second. Nor the fourth or fifth.

By the time the remains of a hundred scuttlers had been unearthed and reassembled, there were a hundred different versions of the scuttler body-plan.

The theorists groped for an explanation. The implication was that no two scuttlers were born alike. But two simultaneous discoveries shattered that idea overnight. The first was the unearthing of an intact clutch of infant scuttlers. Though there were some differences in body-plan, there were identical infants. Based on their frequency of occurrence, statistics argued that at least three identical adults should already have been discovered. The second discovery — which happened to explain the first — was the unearthing of a pair of adult scuttlers in the same area. They had been found in separated but connected chambers of an underground tunnel system. Their body parts were reassembled, providing another two unique morphologies. But upon closer examination something unexpected was discovered. A young researcher named Kimura had begun to take a particular interest in the patterns caused by the body sections scraping against each other. Something struck her as not quite right about the two new specimens. The scratch marks were inconsistent: a scrape on the edge of one carapace had no matching counterpart on the adjoining one.

At first, Kimura assumed the two clusters of body parts were hoaxes; there was already a small market for that kind of thing. But something made her dig a little deeper. She worried at the problem for weeks, convinced that she was missing something obvious. Then one night, after a particularly busy day examining the scratches at higher and higher magnifications, she slept on it. She dreamed feverish dreams, and when she woke she dashed back to her lab and confirmed her nagging suspicion.

There was a precise match for every scratch — but it was always to be found on the other scuttler. The scuttlers interchanged body parts with each other. That was why no two scuttlers were ever alike. They made themselves dissimilar: swapping components in ritualised ceremonies, then crawling away to their own little hollows to recuperate. As more scuttler pairs were unearthed, so the near- infinite possibilities of the arrangement became apparent. The exchange of body parts had pragmatic value, allowing scuttlers to adapt themselves for particular duties and environments. But there was also an aesthetic purpose to the ritualised swapping: a desire to be as atypical as possible. Scuttlers that had deviated far from the average body plan were socially successful creatures, for they must have participated in many exchanges. The ultimate stigma — so far as Kimura and her colleagues could tell — was for one scuttler to be identical to another. It meant that at least one of the pair was an outcast, unable to find a swap-partner.

Bitter arguments ensued among the human researchers. The majority view was that this behaviour could not have evolved naturally; that it must stem from an earlier phase of conscious bioengineering, when the scuttlers tinkered with their own anatomies to allow whole body parts to be swapped from creature to creature without the benefit of microsurgery and antirejection drugs.

But a minority of researchers held that the swapping was too deeply ingrained in scuttler culture to have arisen in their recent evolutionary history. They suggested that, billions of years earlier, the scuttlers had been forced to evolve in an intensely hostile environment — the evolutionary equivalent of a crowded lobster pot. So hostile, in fact, that there had been a survival value not just in being able to regrow a severed limb, but also in actually being able to reattach a severed limb there and then, before it was eaten. The limbs — and later, major body parts — had evolved in turn, developing the resilience to survive being ripped from the rest of the body. As the survival pressure increased, the scuttlers had evolved inter-compatibility, able to make use not just of their own discarded parts but those of their kin.

Perhaps even the scuttlers themselves had no memory of when the swapping had begun. Certainly, there was no obvious allusion to it in the few symbolic records that had ever been found on Hela. It was too much a part of them, too fundamentally a part of the way they viewed reality, for them to have remarked upon it.

Looking up at the fantastic creature, Rashmika wondered what the scuttlers would have made of humanity. Very probably they would have found the human race just as bizarre, regarding its very immutability horrific, like a kind of death.

Rashmika knelt down and propped the family compad on the slope of her legs. She flipped it open and pulled the stylus from its slot in the side. It wasn’t comfortable, but she would only be sitting like that for a few minutes.

She began to draw. The stylus scratched against the compad with each fluid, confident stroke of her hand. An alien animal took shape on the screen.

* * *

Linxe had been right about the caravan: no matter how frosty the reception had been, it still afforded them all the chance to get out of the icejammer for the first time in three days.

Rashmika was surprised at the difference it made to her general mood. It wasn’t just that she had stopped worrying about the attention of the Vigrid constabulary, although the question of why they had come after her continued to nag at her. The air was fresher in the caravan, with interesting breezes and varying smells, none of which were as unpleasant as those aboard the icejammer.

There was room to stretch her legs, as well: the interior of just this one caravan vehicle was generously laid out, with wide, tall gangways, comfortable rooms and bright lights. Everything was spick-and-span and — compared at least to the welcome — the amenities were more than adequate. Food and drink were provided, clothes could be