The Revelation Space Collection

‘We’re not all vampires. Anyway, we had to stop for another reason, not just because our sleepers wanted to come here as pilgrims. We had shield difficulties. We can’t make another interstellar transit without major repairs.’

‘Costly ones, I’d imagine,’ Quaiche said.

The Triumvir bowed his head. ‘That is why we are having this conversation, Dean Quaiche. We heard that you had need of the services of a good ship. A matter of protection. You feel yourself threatened.’

‘It’s not a question of feeling threatened,’ he said. ‘It’s just that in these times… we’d be foolish not to want to protect our assets, wouldn’t we?’

‘Wolves at the door,’ the Ultra said.

‘Wolves?’

‘That’s what the Conjoiners named the Inhibitor machines, just before they evacuated human space. That was a century ago. If we’d had any sense we’d all have followed them.’

‘God will protect us,’ Quaiche said. ‘You believe that, don’t you? Even if you don’t, your passengers do, otherwise they wouldn’t have embarked upon this pilgrimage. They know something is going to happen, Triumvir. The series of vanishings we have witnessed here is merely the precursor — the countdown — to something truly miraculous.’

‘Or something truly cataclysmic,’ the Ultra said. ‘Dean, we are not here to discuss the interpretation of an anomalous astronomical phenomenon. We are strict positivists. We believe only in our ship and its running costs. And we need a new shield very badly. What are your terms of employment?’

‘You will bring your ship into close orbit around Hela. Your weapons will be inspected for operational effectiveness. Naturally, a party of Adventist delegates will be stationed aboard your ship for the term of the contract. They will have complete control of the weapons, deciding who and what constitutes a threat to the security of Hela. In other respects, they won’t get in your way at all. And as our protectors, you will be in a very advantageous position when it comes to matters of trade.’ Quaiche waved his hand, as if brushing away an insect. ‘You could walk away from here with a lot more than a new shield if you play your cards right.’

‘You make it sound very tempting.’ The Ultra drummed his fingernails against the chest-plate of his mobility device. ‘But don’t underestimate the risk that we perceive in bringing our ship close to Hela. We all know what happened to the…’ He paused. ‘The Gnostic Ascension.’

‘That’s why our terms are so generous.’

‘And the matter of Adventist delegates? You should know how unusual it is for anyone to be permitted aboard one of our ships. We could perhaps accommodate two or three hand-picked representatives, but only after they had undergone extensive screening…’

‘That part isn’t negotiable,’ Quaiche said abruptly. ‘Sorry, Triumvir, but it all boils down to one thing: how badly do you want that shield?’

‘We’ll have to think about it,’ the Ultra said.

Afterwards, Quaiche asked Rashmika for her observations. She told him what she had picked up, restricting her remarks to the things she was certain she had detected rather than vague intuitions.

‘He was truthful,’ she said, ‘right up to the point where you mentioned his weapons. Then he was hiding something. His expression changed, just for a moment. I couldn’t tell you what it was, exactly, but I do know what it means.’

‘Probably a contraction of the zygomaticus major,’ Grelier said, sitting with his fingers knitted together before his face. He had removed his vacuum suit while he was away and now wore a plain grey Adventist smock. ‘Coupled with a depressing of the corners of the lips, using the risorius. Some flexion of the mentalis — chin elevation.’

‘You saw all that, Surgeon-General?’ Rashmika asked.

‘Only by slowing down the observation camera and running a tedious and somewhat unreliable interpretive routine on his face. For an Ultra he was rather expressive. But it wasn’t in real-time, and even when the routine detected it, I didn’t see it for myself. Not viscerally. Not the way you saw it, Rashmika: instantly, written there as if in glowing letters.’

‘He was hiding something,’ she said. ‘If you’d pushed him on the topic of the weapons, he’d have lied to your face.’

‘So his weapons aren’t what he makes them out to be,’ Quaiche said.

‘Then he’s no use to us,’ Grelier said. ‘Tick him off the list.’

‘We’ll keep him on just in case. The ship’s the main thing. We can always augment his weapons if we decide we have to.’

Grelier looked up at his master, peering over the steeple of his fingers. ‘Doesn’t that rather defeat the purpose?’

‘Perhaps.’ Quaiche seemed irritated by his surgeon’s needling. ‘In any case, there are other candidates. I have two more waiting in the cathedral. I take it, Rashmika, that you’d be willing to sit through another couple of interviews?’

She poured herself some more tea. ‘Send them in,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if I have anything else to do.’

THIRTY-FOUR

Interstellar Space, Near p Eridani 40, 2675

Scorpio had been walking through the ship for hours. It was still chaotic in the high levels, where the latest arrivals were being processed. There were smaller pockets of chaos at a dozen other locations. But the Nostalgia for Infinity was a truly enormous spacecraft, and it was remarkable how little evidence there was of the seventeen thousand newcomers once he moved away from the tightly policed processing zones. Throughout much of the ship’s volume, things were as empty and echoing as they had ever been, as if all the newcomers had been imagined spectres.

But the ship was not completely deserted, even away from the processing zones. He paused now at a window that faced on to a deep vertical shaft. Red light bathed the interior, throwing a roseate tint on the metallic structure taking form within it. The structure was utterly unfamiliar. And yet it reminded him, forcefully, of something — one of the trees he had seen in the glade. Only this was a tree made from countless bladelike parts, foil-thin leaves arranged in spiralling ranks around a narrow core that ran the length of the shaft. There was too much detail to take in; too much geometry; too much perspective. His head hurt to look at the treelike object, as if the whole sculptural form was a weapon designed to shatter perception.

Servitors scuttled amongst the leaves like black bugs, their movements methodical and cautious, while black-suited human figures hung from harnesses at a safe distance from the delicate convolutions of the forming structure. The servitors carried metal-foil parts on their backs, slotting them into precisely machined apertures. The humans — they were Conjoiners — appeared to do very little except hang in their harnesses and observe the machines. But they were undoubtedly directing the action at a fundamental level, their concentration intense, their minds multitasking with parallel thought threads.

These were just some of the Conjoiners aboard the ship. There were dozens more. Hundreds, even. He could barely tell them apart. Except for minor variations in skin tone, bone structure and sex, they all appeared to have stepped from the same production line. They were of the crested kind, advanced specimens from Skade’s own taskforce. They said nothing to each other and were uncomfortable when forced to talk to the non-Conjoined. They stuttered and made elementary errors of pronunciation, grammar and syntax: things that would have shamed a pig. They functioned and communicated on an entirely non-verbal level, Scorpio knew. To them, verbal communication — even when speeded up by mind-to-mind linkage — was as primitive as communication by smoke signal. They made Clavain and Remontoire look like grunting Stone-Age relics. Even Skade must have felt some itch of inadequacy around these sleek new creatures.

If the wolves lost, Scorpio thought, but the only people left to celebrate were these silent Conjoiners, would it have been worth it?

He had no easy answer.