The Revelation Space Collection

‘I was trying to cheer you up.’

‘It’s worse than that?’

Valensin pointed at the reefersleep casket. ‘You climb into that box one more time, we might as well paint it black and put handles on it.’

But the true state of his current health, even when he filtered out Valensin’s usual tendency to put a positive spin on things, was still bad. In some respects it was as if he had not been in the casket at all; as if the flow of time had operated on him with stealthy disregard for the supposed effects of cryogenic stasis. His vision and hearing had degenerated further. He could barely see anything in his peripheral vision now, and even in full view, things that had been sharp before now appeared granular and milky. He kept having to ask Valensin to speak up above the churn of the room’s air conditioners. He had never had to do that before. When he walked around he found himself tiring quickly, always looking for somewhere to rest and catch his breath. His heart and lung capacities had weakened. Pig cardiovascular systems had been engineered by commercial interests for maximum ease of transgenic transplantation. The same interests hadn’t been overly concerned about the longevity of their products. Planned obsolescence, they called it.

He had been fifty when he left Ararat. To all intents and purposes he was still fifty: he had lived through only a few subjective weeks of additional time. But the transitions to and from reefersleep had put another seven or eight years on the clock, purely because of the battering his cells had taken. It would have been worse if he had stayed awake, living through all those years of shiptime, but not by very much.

Still, he was alive. He had lived through more years of worldtime than most pigs. So what if he was pushing the envelope of pig longevity? He was weakened, but he wasn’t on his back just yet.

‘So where are we?’ he asked Valensin. ‘I take it we’re around 107 Piscium. Or did you just wake me up to tell me how bad an idea it was to wake me up?’

‘We’re around 107 Piscium, yes, but you still need to do a little catching up.’ Valensin helped him off the examination couch, Scorpio noticing that the two old servitors had finally broken down and been consigned to new roles as coat racks, standing guard on either side of the door.

‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ Scorpio said. ‘How long has it been? What’s the year?’

‘Twenty-seven twenty-seven,’ Valensin said. ‘And no, I don’t like the sound of that any more than you do. One other thing, Scorpio.’

‘Yes?’

Valensin handed him a curved white shard, like a flake of ice. ‘You were holding this when you went under. I presumed it had some significance.’

Scorpio took the piece of conch material from the doctor.

* * *

There was something wrong, something that no one was telling him. Scorpio looked at the faces around the conference table, trying to see it for himself. Everyone that he would have expected to be there was present: Cruz, Urton, Vasko, as well as a good number of seniors he did not know so well. Khouri was also there. But now that he saw her he realised the obvious, screaming absence. There was no sign of Aura.

‘Where is she?’ he asked.

‘She’s all right, Scorp,’ Vasko said. ‘She’s safe and well. I know because I’ve just seen her.’

‘Someone tell him,’ Khouri said. She looked older than last time, Scorpio thought. There were more lines on her face, more grey in her hair. She wore it short now, combed across her brow. He could see the shape of her skull shining through the skin.

‘Tell me what?’ he asked.

‘How much did Valensin explain?’ Vasko asked him.

‘He told me the date. That was about it.’

‘We had to take some difficult decisions, Scorp. In your absence, we did the best we could.’

In my absence, Scorpio thought: as if he had walked out on them, leaving them in the lurch when they most needed him; making him feel as if he was the one at fault, the one who had shirked his responsibilities.

‘I’m sure you managed,’ he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. He had woken up with a headache. It was still there.

‘We arrived here in 2717,’ Vasko said, ‘after a nineteen-year flight from the Yellowstone system.’

The back of Scorpio’s neck prickled. ‘That’s not the date Valensin just gave me.’

‘Valensin didn’t lie,’ Urton said. ‘The local system date is 2727. We arrived around Hela nearly ten years ago. We’d have woken you then, but the time wasn’t right. Valensin told us we’d only get one shot. If we woke you then, you’d either be dead now or frozen again with only a small chance of revival.’

‘This is the way it had to happen, Scorp,’ Vasko said. ‘You were a resource we couldn’t afford to squander.’

‘You’ve no idea how good that makes me feel.’

‘What I mean is, we had to think seriously about when would be the best time to wake you. You always told us to wait until we’d arrived around Hela.’

‘I did, didn’t I?’

‘Well, think of this as our proper arrival. As far as the system authorities are concerned — the Adventists — we’ve only shown up in the last few weeks. We left and came back again, making a loop through local interstellar space.’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Because of what had to happen,’ Vasko said. ‘When we got here ten years ago, we realised that the situation in this system was vastly more complex than we’d anticipated. The Adventists controlled access to Haldora, the planet that keeps vanishing. You had to deal with the church to get near Hela, and even then you weren’t allowed to send any probes anywhere near the gas giant.’

‘You could have shot your way in, taken what you wanted by force.’

‘And risked a bloodbath? There are a million innocent civilians on Hela, not to mention all the tens of thousands of sleepers in the ships parked in this system. And it’s not as if we knew exactly what we were looking for. If we’d come in with guns blazing, we might have destroyed the very thing we needed, or at the very least made sure that we’d never get our hands on it. But if we could get close to Quaiche, then we could get at the problem from the inside.’

‘Quaiche is still alive?’ Scorpio asked.

‘We know that for sure now — Khouri and I met him today,’ Vasko said. ‘But he’s a recluse, kept alive with faltering longevity therapies. He never leaves the Lady Morwenna, his cathedral. He doesn’t sleep. He’s had his brain altered so that he doesn’t need to. He doesn’t even blink. He spends every waking instant of his life staring at Haldora, waiting for it to blink instead.’

‘He’s insane, then.’

‘In his situation, wouldn’t you be? Something awful happened to him down there. It pushed him over the edge.’

‘He has an indoctrinal virus,’ Cruz said. ‘It’s always been in his blood, since before he came to Hela. Now there’s a whole industry down there, fractioning it off, splicing it into different grades, mixing it with other viruses brought in by the evacuees. They say he has moments of doubt, when he realises that everything he’s created here is a sham. That deep down inside he knows the vanishings are a rational phenomenon, not a miracle. That’s when he has a new strain of the indoctrinal virus pumped back into his blood.’

‘Difficult man to get to know, sounds like,’ Scorpio observed.

‘More difficult than we anticipated,’ Vasko said. ‘But Aura saw the way. It was her plan, Scorp, not ours.’

‘And the plan was?’

‘She went down there nine years ago,’ Khouri said, looking straight at him, as if the two of them were alone in the room. ‘She was eight years old, Scorp. I couldn’t stop her. She knew what she’d been sent out into the world to do, and it was to find Quaiche.’

He shook his head. ‘You didn’t send an eight-year-old girl down there alone. Tell me you didn’t do it.’

‘We had no choice,’ Khouri said. ‘Trust me. I’m her mother. Trying to stop her from going down there was like trying to stop a salmon swimming upriver. It was going to happen whether we liked it or not.’