Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

He dropped out of the shaft into emptiness as, much earlier, he had passed out of the bridgehead. As then, he found himself falling through a tremendous unoccupied volume, but this chamber seemed very much larger than the one immediately below the crust. No gnarled tree-trunks rose up from a crystal floor to support the ceiling over his head, and he doubted that any lay beyond the immediate curvature of the horizon. Yet there was a floor below him, and it must have been that the ceiling was unsupported, thrown around the entire volume of the world-within-a-world below, suspended only by the preposterous counter-balancing of its own gravitational infall, or something beyond Sylveste’s imagination. Whatever; he was dropping now towards the starred floor tens of kilometres below.

It was not difficult, finding Sajaki’s suit; not once Sylveste had begun that lonely descent. His own still-functioning suit did all that was required, locking onto the signature of its fallen companion (something of which must therefore have survived) and then directing Sylveste’s fall towards it, bringing him down only tens of metres from the spot where Sajaki had fallen. The Triumvir had hit fast; that much was obvious. But then there were few other options if one had to accept an uncontrolled fall from two hundred kilometres up. He appeared to have partially buried himself in the metallic floor, before undergoing a bounce which had resulted in his final resting position being face down.

Sylveste had not been expecting to find Sajaki alive, but the mangled contours of his suit were still shocking; rather as if it were a china doll which had been subjected to some terrible temper tantrum by a malevolent child. The suit was gashed and scarred and discoloured, damage which had probably happened during the battle and Sajaki’s subsequent grazing fall, as the Coriolis force knocked him repeatedly against the shaft walls.

Sylveste moved him onto his back, using his own suit’s amplification to ease the process. He knew that what he would be confronted with would not be pleasant, but that it was nonetheless something he had to endure so he could press on; the closing of a mental chapter. He had seldom felt anything but antipathy towards Sajaki, alleviated by a forced respect for the man’s cleverness and the sheer bloody-minded stubbornness with which he had sought Sylveste across all the decades. It was nothing remotely resembling friendship; merely the craftsmanlike appreciation for a piece of equipment which did its job exceptionally well. That was Sajaki, Sylveste thought: a well-honed tool; shaped admirably towards one end and one end only.

The suit’s faceplate was riven by a thumb-wide crack. Something drew Sylveste forward, kneeling until his own head was next to that of the dead Triumvir.

“I’m sorry it had to end like this,” he said. “I can’t say we were ever friends, Yuuji—but I suppose in the end I wanted you to see what lay ahead as much as I did. I think you’d have appreciated it.”

And then he saw that the suit was empty; that all it had ever been was a shell.

This was what Khouri knew.

The Banished had reached the edge of the solar system, thousands of years after their exile from mainstream Amarantin culture. It was in the nature of things that they progressed slowly, since it was not simply technological limits against which they were pushing. They were also ramming against the constraints of their own psychology, barriers no less impervious.

The Banished, at first, still retained the flock instincts of their brethren. They had evolved into a society highly dependent on visual modes of communication; highly organised into large collectives, where the individual was of less importance than the whole. Displaced from its position in a flock, a single Amarantin underwent a kind of psychosis; the equivalent of massive sensory deprivation. Even small groupings were not enough to assuage that terror, which meant that Amarantin culture was extremely stable; extremely resilient against internal plots and treason. But it also meant that the Banished were, by their very isolation, consigned to a kind of insanity.

So they accepted this, and worked with it. They changed themselves; cultured sociopathy. In only a few hundred generations the Banished had stopped being a flock at all, but had fragmented into dozens of specialised clades, each tuned to a particular strain of madness. Or what would have been seen as madness by those who had stayed at home…

The ability to function in smaller groups enabled the Banished to probe further from Resurgam, out of the immediate volume of light-limited communication. The more psychotic individuals reached even further from the sun, until they found Hades and the odd, troubling planet which orbited it. By this time the Banished had gone through the same philosophical hoops which Volyova and Pascale had just summarised for Khouri’s benefit. How the galaxy should have been a busier place than it really was, if their ideas were correct—which, as a consequence, was probably not the case. They had listened in the radio, optical, gravitational and neutrino bands for the voices of other cultures, others like them, but had heard nothing. Some of the more adventurous among them—or the more deranged, depending on one’s point of view—had even left the system entirely, and had found nothing of great consequence to report back to home: a few ruins here and there (enigmatic) and a puzzling sludge-like organism which hinted at organisational sophistication, encountered on a handful of aquatic planets, as if it had been placed there.

But all of this became incidental when they found the thing around Hades.

It was, beyond any possible doubt, artefactual. It had been placed there by another civilisation, uncountable millions of years in the past. It seemed to actively invite them to enter its mysteries. So they began to explore it.

And that was when their problems began.

“It was an Inhibitor device,” Pascale said. “That was what they found, wasn’t it?”

“It had been waiting there for millions of years,” Khouri said. “All the time they were evolving from what we’d think of as dinosaurs, or birds. All the time they spent reaching towards intelligence; learning to use tools; discovering fire…”

“Just waiting,” Volyova echoed. Behind her, the tactical display had been pulsing red for many minutes now, indicating that the shuttle had now fallen within the theoretical maximum range of the lighthugger’s beam weapons. A kill at this distance would be difficult but not impossible, and neither would it be swift. She continued, “Waiting for something recognisably intelligent to enter its vicinity—at which point it doesn’t strike out mindlessly; doesn’t destroy them. Because that would defeat the point. What it does is encourage them in, so it can learn as much about them as possible. Where they come from. What kind of technology they have, how they think, how they co-operate and communicate.”

“Gathering intelligence.”

“Yes.” Volyova’s voice was as dolorous as a church bell. “It’s patient, you see. But sooner or later there comes a point when it decides that it has all the intelligence it needs. And then—only then—it acts.”

Now the three of them were on common ground. “Which is why the Amarantin died out,” Pascale said, wonderingly. “It did something to their sun; tampered with it, triggered something like a vast coronal mass ejection; just enough to scour Resurgam clean of life, and cause a phase of cometary-infall for a few hundred thousand years.”

“Ordinarily the Inhibitors wouldn’t go to such drastic lengths,” Volyova said. “But in this case they’d left it far too late for anything less. And even that wasn’t sufficient, of course; the Banished were already spaceborn. They had to be hunted down; across tens of lightyears, if necessary.”