The Revelation Space Collection

it could be steered to almost any point in the sphere. Hand under chin, she had been staring into the orrery for hours, like a child transfixed by some glittery toy.

Delta Pavonis was a chip of warm-red ambergris fixed at the middle, the system’s eleven major planets spaced around it on their respective orbits, positioned at their true positions; smears of asteroidal debris and comet-shards following their own ellipses; the whole orrery haloed by a tenuous Kuiper belt of icy flotsam; tugged into slight asymmetry by the presence of the neutron star which was Pavonis’s dark twin. The picture was a simulation, rather than an enlargement of what lay ahead. The ship’s sensors were acute enough to glean data at this range, but the view would have been distorted by relativistic effects, and — worse — would have been a snapshot of the system as it was years earlier, with the relative positions of the planets bearing no resemblance to the present situation. Since the ship’s approach strategy would depend critically on using the system’s larger gas giants for camouflage and gravitational braking, Volyova needed to know where things would be when they got there, not how they had been five years ago. And not only that. Before the ship arrived in the Resurgam system, its advance envoys would already have skimmed by invisibly, and it was just as crucial to arrange their passage at the optimum planetary alignment.

‘Release pebbles,’ she said, satisfied now that she had run enough simulations. Heeding her, Infinity deployed one thousand of the tiny probes, firing them ahead of the decelerating ship in a slowly spreading pattern. Volyova spoke a command into her bracelet and a window opened ahead of her, captured by a camera on the hull. The entire ensemble of pebbles contracted into the distance, apparently tugged away by an invisible force. The cloud diminished as it fell further and further ahead of the ship, until all Volyova could see was a blurred nimbus, diminishing quickly. The pebbles were moving at almost the speed of light, and would reach the Resurgam system months ahead of the ship. The swarm, by then, would be wider than the orbit of Resurgam around the sun. Each tiny probe would align itself towards the planet and catch photons across the electromagnetic spectrum. The data from each pebble would be sent in a tightly focused laser pulse back towards the ship. The resolution of any one unit in the swarm would be tiny, but by combining their results, a very sharp and detailed picture of Resurgam could be assembled. It would not tell Sajaki where Sylveste was, but it would give him an idea of the likely centres of power on the planet, and — more importantly — what kind of defences they were capable of mustering.

That was one thing on which Sajaki and Volyova had been in complete agreement. Even if they found Sylveste, it seemed unlikely that he would agree to come aboard without coercion.

‘Do you know what they did to Pascale?’ Sylveste said.

‘She’s safe,’ said the eye surgeon, as he led Sylveste along tracheal, rock-clad tunnels deep in Mantell. ‘That’s what I’ve heard, at least,’ he added, lessening Sylveste’s ease. ‘But I could be wrong. I don’t think Sluka would have killed her without good reason, but she may have had her frozen.’

‘Frozen?’

‘Until she’s useful. You’ll understand by now that Sluka thinks long-term.’

Continual waves of nausea kept threatening to overwhelm him. His eyes hurt, but, as he kept reminding himself, it was vision. That at least was something. Without it he was powerless, not even capable of effective disobedience. With it, escape might still be impossible, but at least he was spared the stumbling indignity of the blind. What vision he had, though, would have shamed the lowliest invertebrate. Spatial perception was haphazard, and colour existed in his world now only via nuances of grey-greens.

What he knew — what he remembered — was this.

He had not seen Mantell since the night of the coup twenty years earlier. The first coup, he corrected himself. Now that Girardieau had been overthrown, Sylveste had to get used to thinking of his own dethronement in purely historical terms. Girardieau’s regime had not immediately closed the place down, even though its Amarantin-directed research conflicted with their Inundationist agenda. For five or six years after the coup they had kept the place running, but one by one they had moved Sylveste’s best researchers back to Cuvier, replacing them with eco-engineers, botanists and geopower specialists. Finally, Mantell had been reduced to a skeleton-crewed test station, whole portions moth-balled or derelict. It should have stayed that way, but trouble was already looming from outside elements. For years it had been rumoured that True Path’s leaders in Cuvier, Resurgam City, or whatever they were calling it now, were under direction from individuals beyond, a clique of one- time Girardieau sympathisers who had fallen out of favour during the machinations of the first coup. Supposedly, these brigands had altered their physiologies to cope with the dusty, oxygen-depleted atmosphere beyond the domes, using biotech purchased from Captain Remilliod.

Stories like that could be expected. But after sporadic attacks against a number of outposts, they began to look far less speculative. Mantell had been abandoned at some point, Sylveste knew, which meant that the current occupants might have been here for much longer than the time since Girardieau’s assassination. Months, or possibly even years.

Certainly they acted as if they owned the place. He knew when they entered a room that it was the one where Gillian Sluka had addressed him upon his arrival, however long ago that was. He failed to recognise it, though: it was entirely possible that during his tenancy in Mantell he had known this room intimately, but there were no longer any points of reference to aid him. The room’s decor and furnishings — such as there were — had been completely replaced. She stood with her back to him, next to a table, gloved hands knitted primly above her hip. She wore a kneelength fluted jacket with leather shoulder patches, the colour rendered as murky olive by his eyes. Her hair was collected in a braided tail which hung between her shoulder blades. She was not projecting entoptics. On either side of the room, planetary globes orbited on slender, swan-necked plinths. Something approximating daylight slatted down from the ceiling, though his eyes leeched it of any warmth.

‘When we first spoke after your imprisonment,’ she said, in her croak of a voice, ‘I almost had the impression you couldn’t place me.’

‘I’d always assumed you were dead.’

‘That was what Girardieau’s people wished you to think. The story about our crawler being hit by a landslide — all lies. We were attacked — they thought you were aboard, of course.’

‘Why didn’t they kill me later, when they found me at the dig?’

‘They realised you were more useful to them alive than dead, of course. Girardieau was no fool — he always used you profitably.’

‘If you’d stayed with the dig, none of it would have happened. How did you survive, anyway?’

‘Some of us got out of the crawler before Girardieau’s henchmen reached it. We took what equipment we could; made it into the Bird’s Claw canyons and set up bubbletents. That’s all I saw for a year, you know: the inside of a bubbletent. I was hurt quite badly in the attack.’

Sylveste brushed his fingers over the mottled surface of one of Sluka’s pedestal-mounted globes. What they represented, he saw now, was the topography of Resurgam at different epochs during the planned Inundationist terraforming program. ‘Why didn’t you join Girardieau in Cuvier?’ he asked.

‘He considered me too embarrassing to admit back into his fold. He was prepared to let us live, but only because killing us would have attracted too much attention. There were lines of communication, but they broke down.’ She paused. ‘Fortunately we took some of Remilliod’s trinkets with us. The scavenger enzymes were the most useful. The dust doesn’t hurt us.’

He studied the globes again. With his impaired vision, he could only guess at the colours of the planetscapes, but he assumed that the spheres represented a steady march towards blue-green verdure. What were now merely upraised plateaux would become landmasses limned by ocean. Forests would fester across steppes. He looked to the furthest globes, which represented some remote version of Resurgam several centuries hence. Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit. How would that delicate future vision fare, he wondered, if Resurgam’s sun again erupted, as it had done nine hundred and ninety thousand years ago, just when Amarantin civilisation was approaching a human level of sophistication?

Not, he ventured, terribly well.

‘Apart from the biotech,’ he said, ‘what else did Remilliod give you? You appreciate I’m curious.’

She seemed ready to humour him.

‘You haven’t asked me about Cuvier. That surprises me.’ She added: ‘Or your wife.’

‘Falkender told me Pascale was safe.’