The Revelation Space Collection

‘As firmly as I believe anything.’

‘In which case… if the true pattern of vanishings is different from the official story, then you believe that the true message is being suppressed, and the word of God isn’t being communicated to the people in its uncorrupted form.’

‘Exactly.’ He sounded very pleased with her, grateful that some vast chasm of understanding had now been spanned. She had the sense that a burden had been taken from him for the first time in ages. ‘And my mistake was to think I could silence those doubts by immersing myself in mindless observation. But it didn’t work. I saw you, standing there in all your fierce independence, and I realised I had to do this on my own.’

‘That’s… something like the way I feel.’

‘Tell me about your enquiry, Rashmika.’

She did. She told him about Harbin, and how she thought he had been taken away by one of the churches. More than likely, she said, he had been forcibly indoctrinated. This was not something she really wanted to consider, but the rational part of her could not ignore the possibility. She told him how the rest of her family had accepted Harbin’s faith some time ago, but that she had never been able to let him slip away that easily. ‘I had to do this,’ she said. ‘I had to make this pilgrimage.’

‘I thought you weren’t a pilgrim.’

‘Slip of the tongue,’ she said. But she wasn’t sure if she really meant it any more.

Ararat, 2675

The upper decks of the Nostalgia for Infinity were crammed with evacuees. Antoinette wanted to avoid thinking of them as so many cattle, but as soon as she hit the main cloying mass of bodies and found her own progress blocked or impeded, frustration overwhelmed her. They were human beings, she kept reminding herself, ordinary people caught up as she was in the ebb of events they barely comprehended. In other circumstances she could easily have been one of them, just as frightened and dazed as they were. Her father had always emphasised how easy it was to find oneself on the wrong side of the fence. It wasn’t necessarily a question of who had the quickest wits or the firmest resolve. It wasn’t always about bravery or some shining inner goodness. It could just as easily be about the position of your name in the alphabet, the chemistry of your blood, or whether you were fortunate enough to be the daughter of a man who happened to own a ship.

She forced herself not to push through the crowds of people waiting to be processed, doing her best to ease forward politely, making eye contact and apologies, smiling at and tolerating those who did not immediately step out of her way. But the mob — she could not help but think of them as such in spite of her best intentions — was so large, so collectively stupid, that her patience only lasted for about two decks. Then something inside her snapped and she was pushing through with all her strength, teeth gritted, oblivious to the insults and the spitting that followed in her wake.

She finally made it through the crowds and descended three blissfully deserted levels using interdeck ladders and stairwells. She moved in near darkness, navigating from one erratic light source to the next, cursing herself for not bringing a torch. Then her shoes sloshed through an inch of something wet and sticky she was glad she couldn’t see.

Finally she found a functioning main-spine elevator and operated the control to summon it. The ship’s lean was disturbingly apparent — it was part of the problem for the continued processing of the immigrants — but so far main ship functions did not appear to have been affected. She heard the elevator thundering towards her, clattering against its inductance rails, and took a moment to check the neutrino levels on her wrist unit. Assuming that the planetwide monitors could still be trusted, the ship was now only five or six per cent from drive criticality. Once that threshold was reached, the ship would have enough bottled energy to lift itself from the surface of Ararat and into orbit.

Only five or six per cent. There had been times when the neutrino flux had jumped that much in only a few minutes.

‘Take your time, John,’ she said. ‘None of us are in that much of a hurry.’

The elevator was slowing. It arrived in a self-important flutter of clanking mechanisms. The doors opened, fluid sluicing down the shaft as Antoinette stepped into the waiting emptiness of the elevator car. Again, why had she forgotten to bring a light with her? She was getting sloppy, taking it as read that the Captain would usher her into his realm like a familiar house guest. Come on in. Put your feet up. How’re things?

What if, this time, he was not so enthusiastic about having company?

None of the elevator voice-control systems worked properly. With practised ease Antoinette unlatched an access panel, exposing the manual controls. Her fingers dithered over the options. They were annotated in antiquated script, but she was familiar enough with them by now. This elevator would only take her part of the way down to the Captain’s usual haunts. She would have to change to another at some point, which would mean a cross-ship trek of at least several hundred metres, assuming no blockades had materialised along the way since her last visit. Would it be better to go up first, and take a different spine track down? For a moment the possibilities branched, Antoinette acutely aware that this time, literally, a minute here or there might make all the difference.

But then the elevator started moving. She had done nothing to it.

‘Hello, John,’ she said.

TWENTY-NINE

Ararat, 2675

The shuttle loitered over First Camp.

The sun was almost down. In the last, miserly light of the day, Vasko and his companions watched the green-clad spire slip beyond the headland. The towering thing had cast its own slanted shadow in the final minutes of daylight, a shadow that moved not just with the descent of the sun but also with the changing position and tilt of the ship. The movement was almost too slow to make out from moment to moment. It was like watching the hour hand of a clock: the movement was only really apparent when you looked away for a minute or two. But the ship was moving, being dragged along by that cloak of biomass, and now a tongue of land stood between the ship and the bay. It was not much of a tongue, just the last hundred metres of headland, and surely not enough to completely deflect the anticipated tidal waves; but it was bound to make some difference, and as the ship moved further along its course the sheltering effect would become larger and larger.

‘Did she make it aboard?’ Khouri asked, her eyes wide and unfocused. Aura seemed to be sleeping again, Khouri once more speaking for herself alone.

‘Yes,’ Vasko said.

‘I hope she can talk some sense into him.’

‘What happened back there…’ Vasko said. He looked at her, waiting for her to say something, but nothing came. ‘When Aura spoke to us… ?’

‘Yes?’

‘That was really her, right?’

Khouri looked at him, one eye slightly narrowed. ‘Does that bother you? Does my daughter disturb you?’

‘I just want to know. She’s sleeping now, isn’t she?’

‘She isn’t in my head, no.’

‘But she was?’

‘Where are you going with this, Malinin?’

‘I want to know how it works,’ he said. ‘I think she might be useful to us. She’s already helped us, but that’s only the start, isn’t it?’

‘I told you already,’ Khouri said, ‘Aura knows stuff. We just have to listen.’

Hela, 2727

Rashmika sat alone in her room, the night after the caravan had crossed the bridge. She opened the little metal canister that Pietr had given her with trembling hands, fearing — despite herself — some deception or trick.