The Revelation Space Collection

worry about. ‘You know what? Now that we’re done, maybe I will take a walk in some of the gardens after all.’

‘Abstraction is down,’ Caillebot said quietly.

Thalia felt the first itch of wrongness. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘We have no abstraction. You said it would be off-line for a few microseconds, too short to notice. But it’s still down.’ His voice became firmer and louder. ‘Abstraction is down, Prefect. Abstraction is down.’

Thalia shook her head. ‘You’re mistaken. It can’t be down.’

‘There is no abstraction,’ Paula Thory said, standing up from her own chair. ‘We’re out of contact, Prefect. Something appears to have gone wrong.’

‘The system ran an audit on itself. It confirmed that abstraction had only been interrupted for an instant. The system doesn’t make mistakes.’

‘Then why were you here in the first place, if it wasn’t to correct a failing in the apparatus?’ asked Caillebot.

‘Maybe it’s just us,’ said Broderick Cuthbertson. His mechanical owl twitched its head in all directions, as if following the flight of an invisible wasp.

‘Your bird’s confused,’ Cyrus Parnasse said. ‘I’m guessing it depends on abstraction to orient itself.’

Cuthbertson comforted his creation with a finger-stroke. ‘Easy, boy.’

‘Then it’s at least everyone — everything — in this building,’ Thory said, colour draining from her cheeks. ‘What if it’s not just the building? What if we’re looking at a major outage across the whole campus?’

‘Let’s look out of the windows,’ said Meriel Redon. ‘We can see half of Aubusson from here.’

They were paying no attention to Thalia. She was just a detail in the room. For now. She walked behind them as they stood from their chairs and sofas and stools — those who weren’t already standing — and dashed to the row of portholes, two or three of them crowding behind each circular pane.

‘I can see people down in the park,’ said a clean-shaven young man whose name Thalia didn’t remember. He wore an electric-blue suit with frilled black cuffs. ‘They’re behaving oddly. Clumping together all of a sudden, as if they want to talk. Some of them are starting to run for the exits. They’re looking up, at us.’

‘They know there’s a problem,’ Thory said. ‘It’s no wonder they’re looking up at the polling core. They’re wondering what the hell’s happening.’

‘There’s a train stopped on the line,’ said a woman in a flame-red dress, standing at another porthole. ‘It’s the other side of the nearest window band. Whatever this is, it isn’t local. It isn’t just happening to us, or to the museum.’

‘There’s a volantor,’ someone else said. ‘It’s making an emergency landing on the roof of the Bailter Ziggurat. That’s two whole bands towards the leading cap. Nearly ten kilometres!’

‘It’s the whole habitat,’ Thory said, as if she’d just seen a fearful omen. ‘The whole of House Aubusson, all sixty kilometres of it. Eight hundred thousand people have just lost abstraction for the first time in their lives.’

‘This can’t be happening,’ Thalia whispered.

The knife was still hard against Dreyfus’s throat. He cursed himself for not donning the helmet when he’d had the chance. He tried to reason that the woman would have killed him by now if that was her intention, but he could think of a multitude of reasons why she might want to keep him talking now and kill him later.

‘What year is it?’ she asked, as if the question had just popped into her head.

‘What year?’

The pressure of the knife increased. ‘Is there a problem with my diction?’

‘No,’ Dreyfus said hastily. ‘Not at all. The year is two thousand, four hundred and twenty-seven. Why do you ask?’

‘Because I’ve been inside this place a very long time.’

‘Long enough to lose track of the year?’

‘Long enough to lose track of everything. I had my suspicions, though.’ He caught a note of proud defiance in her voice. ‘I wasn’t so very far off the mark.’

He’d still not seen her face, or any part of her save the gauntleted hand holding the knife. ‘Are you a member of the Nerval-Lermontov family?’ he asked.

‘Is that who you are looking for?’

‘I’m not looking for anyone in particular. I’m a policeman. I’m investigating a crime. My inquiries brought me to this asteroid.’

‘Alone?’

‘I came in a ship, with my deputy. We were attacked during our approach and the ship was damaged. We could have limped back to Panoply, but we decided to see if we could use the rock to get a message to them quicker. That’s what my deputy’s doing now. I also wanted to see what was worth attacking us to protect.’

The knife scratched against his skin. It felt cold. He wondered if it had drawn blood yet.

‘You’ve seen it now,’ the woman said, obviously meaning the ship in which they were floating. ‘Tell me what you make of it.’

‘It’s a Conjoiner spacecraft. That’s as much as I was able to tell from outside. I came aboard and I’ve seen this.’ He meant the room full of dismembered sleepers, the ones that the woman said she had been eating. ‘That’s all. Now are you going to tell me what this means?’

‘Try moving,’ she said. ‘Move an arm or a leg. I won’t stop you.’

Dreyfus tried, but although he could move his limbs, they encountered stiff resistance against the interior of his suit. He was effectively paralysed.

‘I can’t.’

‘I’ve reached into your suit and disabled its motor and communication functions. I can turn them on and off as easily as I can blink. With the suit immobilised like that, you won’t be able to move or remove it. You’ll starve here and die. It would take a long time and it would not be pleasant.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘So that you understand, Prefect. So that you grasp that I have complete control over you.’ The pressure from the knife eased. ‘So that you understand that I don’t need this to kill you.’

Her hand pulled away.

‘You must be a Conjoiner,’ he said. ‘No one else could perform a trick like that.’ When she offered neither confirmation nor denial, he said, ‘You must be from this ship. Am I right?’

‘So you are not completely incapable of deductive reasoning. For one of the retarded, you must be quite bright.’

‘I’m just a prefect trying to do my job. Are you being held captive here?’

‘What do you think?’ she asked, with acid sarcasm.

‘Let’s establish some ground rules. I’m not your enemy. If someone is keeping you here against your will, I want to find out who they are and why they’re doing it. We’re on the same side. We should be able to trust each other.’

‘Shall I tell you why I have difficulty trusting you, Prefect? A man like you came here already. He saw what was being done to us and did nothing.’

‘What do you mean, a man like me?’

‘He wore the same kind of suit.’

‘That doesn’t mean anything.’

‘I mean exactly the same kind. If a prefect is what you are, then this man was a prefect as well.’

‘That’s not possible,’ Dreyfus said. But even as he spoke he recalled the link that Sparver had found connecting this rock to Panoply. Could someone else have come here, making independent inquiries? Perhaps. But if so, how could Jane Aumonier not have known about it?

‘I saw him myself. There was no mistake. I could not see into his head, and I can’t see into yours. Your kind never carry neural implants, do they?’

His own voice sounded distant and strangulated. ‘This man… does he come on his own, or are there others?’