The Revelation Space Collection

It was only when he had finished speaking with Trajanova that Dreyfus paused to examine his state of mind. What he found was both unexpected and shocking. Only a few days ago, he would have regarded the loss of a beta-level witness as akin to the destruction of some potentially incriminating forensic evidence. He would have been irritated, even angered, but his feelings would have arisen solely because an investigation had been hampered. He would have felt no emotional sentimentality concerning the loss of the artefact itself, because an artefact was all that it was.

That wasn’t how he felt now. He kept seeing Delphine’s face in those final moments, when she had still retained enough sentience to recognise the inevitability of her own death.

But if beta-levels were never alive, how could they ever die?

Gaffney’s first thought was that Clepsydra was dead, or at least comatose. He experienced a moment of relief, thinking that he would be spared the burden of another death, before the truth revealed itself. The Conjoiner woman was still breathing; her deathlike composure was merely her natural state of repose when no one was in attendance. Her sharp-boned face was already turning towards him, moving with the smoothness of a missile launcher locking on to a target, her eyes widening from drowsy slits.

‘I was not expecting you to come back so quickly,’ she said, ‘but perhaps the timing is fortuitous. I’ve been thinking about our previous conversation—’

‘Good,’ Gaffney said.

There was a measurable pause before she spoke again. ‘I was expecting Dreyfus.’

‘Dreyfus couldn’t make it. Otherwise detained.’ Gaffney came to rest in the bubble, having judged his momentum with expert precision. ‘That’s not a problem, is it?’

He felt Clepsydra’s attention pierce the skin of his face, mapping the bones under the skin. His skull itched. He had never felt so intensely looked at in all his life.

‘I can guess why you are here,’ she said. ‘Before you kill me, though, you should be aware that I know who you are.’

The statement unnerved him. Perhaps it was bluff, perhaps not. If she had truly looked into Panoply’s archives, then she might have seen employee records. It didn’t matter. She could scream out his name and the world wouldn’t hear her.

‘Who said anything about killing?’ he asked mildly.

‘Dreyfus came unarmed.’

‘More fool him. I wouldn’t enter a room with a Conjoiner inside unless I was carrying a weapon. Or would you have me believe that you couldn’t kill me in an eyeblink?’

‘I had no intention of killing you, Prefect. Until now.’

Gaffney spread his arms. ‘Go ahead, then. Or rather, tell me what you were going to tell Dreyfus. Then kill me.’

‘Why do I need to tell you? You know everything.’

‘Well, maybe not everything.’ Gaffney unclipped his whiphound and thumbed it to readiness. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to let you leave this place alive and be reunited with your people. Voi knows you deserve it. Voi knows you’ve earned the right to some reward for the service you’ve provided. But it just can’t happen. Because if I let you out of here, you’d endanger the state of affairs that must now come into being. And if you did that, you’d be indirectly responsible for the terrible things your people dreamed were coming, the terrible things I’m striving to avert.’ He thumbed another stud, causing the whiphound to spool out its filament and move to full attack posture. In the weightless sphere of the bubble, the filament swayed back and forth like a tendril stirred by languid sea currents.

‘You have no idea what we saw in Exordium,’ Clepsydra said.

‘I don’t need to. That’s Aurora’s business.’

‘Do you know what Aurora is, Gaffney?’

He hoped that she did not catch the subliminal hesitation in his response. More than likely she did. Very little was subliminal to Conjoiners. ‘I know everything I need to know.’

‘Aurora is not a human being.’

‘She looked pretty human to me when we met.’

‘In person?’

‘Not exactly,’ he admitted.

‘Aurora was a person once upon a time. But that was a long time ago. Now Aurora is something else. She is a life form that has never truly existed before, except fleetingly. Being human is something she remembers the same way you remember sucking your thumb. It’s a part of her, a necessary phase in her development, but one now so remote that she can barely comprehend that she was ever that small, that vulnerable, that ineffective. She is the closest thing to a goddess that has ever existed, and she will only get stronger.’ Clepsydra flashed him a smile that did not quite belong on her face. ‘And you feel comfortable entrusting the future fate of the Glitter Band to this creature?’

‘Aurora’s plan is about the continued existence of the human species around Yellowstone,’ Gaffney said dogmatically. ‘Taking the long view, she sees that our little cultural hub is critical to the wider human diaspora. If the hub fails, the wheel will splinter itself apart. Take out Yellowstone and the Ultras lose their most lucrative stopover. Interstellar trade will wither. The other Demarchist colonies will fall like dominoes. It might take decades, centuries, even, but it will happen. That’s why we need to think about survival now.’

Clepsydra formed a convincing sneer. ‘Her plan is about her survival, not yours. At the moment she is letting you tag along for the ride. When you are no longer useful — and that will come to pass — I would make sure you have a very good escape plan.’

‘Thank you for the advice.’ His hand tightened on the whiphound. ‘I’m puzzled, Clepsydra. You know that I can kill you with this thing. I also know that you can influence it, to a degree.’

‘You’re wondering why I haven’t turned it against you.’

‘Crossed my mind.’

‘Because I know that the gesture would be futile.’ She nodded at his wrist. ‘Your hand is gloved, for instance. It could be that you wish to avoid forensic contamination of the weapon, but I think there must be more to it than that. The glove extends into your sleeve. I presume it merges with some kind of lightweight armour under your uniform.’

‘Good guess. It’s training armour, the kind recruits wear when they’re learning to use whiphounds. Hyperdiamond cross-weave, edged on the microscopic scale to blunt and clog the cutting mechanisms on the sharp side of the filament. Even if you could bend the tail around towards me, it wouldn’t be able to slice through my arm. Still, I’m surprised you didn’t try it anyway.’

‘I was resigned to death the moment I saw that you were not Prefect Dreyfus.’

‘Here’s the deal,’ he said. ‘I know that Conjoiners can shut off pain when they need to. But I’m willing to bet you’d still choose a quick death over a slow one. Especially here. Especially when you’re all alone, far from your friends.’

‘Death is death. And I can die precisely as quickly as I choose, not you.’

‘All the same, I’ll make you a proposition. I know you looked deep into our files. Minor confession: I was prepared to let that happen because I knew I was going to have to kill you anyway. I thought you might turn something up that I could use.’

‘I did.’

‘I’m not talking about Aurora. I mean the Clockmaker.’

‘I have no idea what you mean.’

He guessed that she was lying. Even if she’d had no knowledge of the Clockmaker prior to her arrival in Panoply — and the Exordium dreamers hadn’t been totally isolated from information concerning events in the outside world — she would surely have found out about it during her uninvited rummage through Panoply’s records.

He rolled the whiphound handle in his palm. ‘I’ll let you in on a little secret. Officially, it was nuked out of existence when Panoply destroyed the Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation.’ He lowered his voice, even though he knew there could be no eaves-droppers. ‘But that’s not what really happened. SIAM was only nuked after Panoply had already gone inside to extract intelligence and hardware. They believed that they’d destroyed the