The Revelation Space Collection

‘How did you get here? You still haven’t told me. If the door is closed—’

[The door was opened, briefly. During a difficult period with the supply of the virus, Quaiche endured a lapse of faith. In that crisis he began to doubt his own interpretation of the vanishings. He arranged for the firing of an instrument package into the face of Haldora, a simple mechanical probe crammed with electronic instrumentation.]

‘And?’

[He provoked a response. The probe was injected into Haldora during a vanishing. It caused the vanishing to last longer than usual, more than a second. In that hiatus, Quaiche was granted a glimpse of the machinery the scuttlers made to contact us across the bulk.]

‘So was everyone else who happened to see it.’

[That’s why that particular vanishing had to be stricken from the public record,] the voice said. [It couldn’t be allowed to have happened.]

She remembered what the shadows had told her about the mass-synthesiser. ‘Then the probe allowed you to cross over?’

[No. We are still not physically embodied in this brane. What it did re-establish was the communication link. It had been silenced since the last time the scuttlers spoke to us, but in the moment of Quaiche’s intervention it was reopened, briefly. In that window we transmitted an aspect of ourselves across the bulk, a barely sentient ghost, programmed only to survive and negotiate.]

So that was what she was dealing with: not the shadows themselves, but their stripped-down minimalist envoy. She did not suppose that it made very much difference: the voice was clearly at least as intelligent and persuasive as any machine she had ever encountered.

‘How far did you get?’ Rashmika asked.

[Into the probe, as it fell within the Haldora projection. From there — following the probe’s telemetry link — we reached Hela. But no further. Ever since then, we have been trapped within the scrimshaw suit.]

‘Why the suit?’

[Ask Quaiche. It has some deeply personal significance for him, irrevocably entwined with the nature of the vanishings and his own salvation. His lover — the original Morwenna — died in it. Afterwards, Quaiche couldn’t bring himself to destroy the suit. It was a reminder of what had brought him to Hela, a spur to keep looking for an answer, for Morwenna’s memory. When it came time to send the probe into Haldora, Quaiche filled the suit with the cybernetic control system necessary to communicate with the probe. That is why it has become our prison.]

‘I can’t help you,’ she said again.

[You must, Rashmika. The suit is strong, but it will not survive the destruction of the Lady Morwenna. Yet without us, you will have lost your one channel of negotiation. You might establish another, but you cannot guarantee it. In the meantime, you will be at the mercy of the Inhibitors. They’re coming closer, you know. There isn’t much time left.]

‘I can’t do this,’ she said. ‘You’re asking too much of me. You’re just a voice in my head. I won’t do it.’

[You will if you know what’s good for you. We don’t know all that we would like to know about you, Rashmika, but one thing is clear: you are most certainly not who you claim to be.]

She pulled her face from the pillow, brushed lank, damp hair from her eyes. ‘So what if I’m not?’

[It would probably be for the best if Quaiche didn’t find out, don’t you think?]

The surgeon-general sat alone in his private quarters in the Office of Bloodwork, high in the middle levels of the Clocktower. He hummed to himself, happy in his environment. Even the faint swaying motion of the Lady Morwenna — exaggerated now that she was moving over the rough ground of the ungraded and potholed road that led to the bridge — was pleasing to him, the sense of continuing motion spurring him to work. He had not eaten in many hours and his hands trembled with anticipation as he waited for the assay to finish. The task of prolonging Quaiche’s life had offered many challenges, but he had not felt this sense of intellectual excitement since his days in the service of Queen Jasmina, when he was the master of the body factory.

He had already pored over the results of Harbin’s blood analysis. He had been looking for some explanation in his genes for the gift that had been so strongly manifested in his sister. There had never been any suggestion that Harbin had the same degree of hypersensitivity to expressions, but that might simply mean that the relevant genes had only been activated in his sister’s case. Grelier did not know exactly what he was looking for, but he had a rough idea of the cognitive areas that ought to have been affected. What she had was a kind of inverse autism, an acute sensitivity to the emotional states of the people around her, rather than blank indifference. By comparing Harbin’s DNA against Bloodwork’s genetic database, culled not just from the inhabitants of Hela but from information sold to him by Ultras, he had hoped to see something anomalous. Even if it was not immediately obvious, the software ought to be able to tease it out.

But Harbin’s blood had turned out to be stultifyingly normal, utterly deficient in anything anomalous. Grelier had gone back into the library and found a back-up sample, just in case there had been a labelling error. It was the same story: there was nothing in Harbin’s blood that would have suggested anything unusual in his sister.

So perhaps, Grelier reasoned, there was something uniquely anomalous in her blood, the result of some statistical reshuffling of her parents’ genes that had somehow failed to manifest in Harbin. Alternatively, her blood could turn out to be just as uninteresting. In that case he would have to conclude that her hypersensitivity had in some way been learned, that it was a skill anyone could acquire, given the right set of stimuli.

The analysis suite chimed, signalling that it had finished its assay. He leant back in his chair, waiting for the results to be displayed. Harbin’s analysis — histograms, pie charts, genetic and cytological maps — were already up for inspection. Now the data from Rashmika Els’s blood appeared alongside it. Almost immediately the analysis software began to search for correlations and mismatches. Grelier crackled his knuckles. He could see his own reflection, the ghostly white nimbus of his hair floating in the display.

Something wasn’t right.

The correlation software was struggling. It was throwing up red error messages, a plague of them appearing all over the read-out. Grelier was familiar with this: it meant that the software had been told to hunt for correlations at a statistical threshold far above the actual situation. It meant that the two blood samples were far less alike than he had expected.

‘But they’re siblings,’ he said.

Except they weren’t. Not according to their blood. Harbin and Rashmika Els did not appear to be related at all.

In fact, it looked rather unlikely that Rashmika Els had even been born on Hela.

THIRTY-SIX

Interstellar Space, Near Epsilon Eridani, 2698

In the instant of awakening he assumed there had been a mistake. He was still in the black cabinet. Only a moment earlier the technicians had been cutting him open, stuffing tubes into him, pulling pieces out, examining and replacing them like children looking for treats. Now they were here again, white-hooded forms shuffling around him in a gauzy haze of vapour. He found it difficult to focus on them, the white forms blurring and joining like clouds.

‘What…’he started to say. But he couldn’t speak. There was something packed into his mouth, chafing his throat with sharp edges.

One of the technicians leant into his field of view. The blur of white relaxed into a face framed in a hood, the lower half concealed behind a surgical mask.

‘Easy, Scorp, don’t try talking for a moment.’

He made a sound that was both furious and interrogative. The technician appeared to understand. He pushed back his hood and lowered the mask, revealing a face that Scorpio almost recognised. A man, like the older brother of someone he knew.

‘You’re safe,’ the man said. ‘Everything worked.’