Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

She looked towards the ceiling.

“Taraschi?” she called. “Can you hear me yet? I’m coming.”

She wondered, briefly, why the television people had not yet arrived. It was strange to be this close to the termination of the kill and not have them baying for blood around her, along with the usual impromptu crowd which they invariably drew.

He had not answered her. But she knew he was above the ceiling, somewhere. She walked across the atrium, towards the spiral staircase that led higher. She climbed quickly, then cast around for large objects she could budge, to obstruct Taraschi’s escape route. There were plenty of ruined exhibits and pieces of furniture. She began to assemble an obstructing pile atop the staircase. It would hinder Taraschi more than block his exit completely, but that was all she needed.

By the time it was half done she was sweating and her back was stiff. She took a moment to collect herself and take in her surroundings; the constant arpeggiating note in her head confirming that Taraschi was still nearby.

The upper part of the pyramid had been dedicated to individual shrines to the Eighty. These little memorials were set in recesses within the impressive black marble walls which rose partway to the dizzyingly high ceilings, framed by pillars adorned with suggestively posed caryatids. The walls, pierced by corniced archways, blocked her view for a few tens of metres in any direction. The three triangular sides of the ceiling had been punctured in places; sepia shafts of light entering the chamber. Rain fell in steady streamers from the larger rents. Khouri saw that many of the recesses were empty; evidently, those shrines had either been looted or the families of those members of the Eighty had decided to remove their memorials to some safer place. Perhaps half remained. Of those, roughly two-thirds had been arranged in a similar manner—images, biographies and keepsakes of the dead, placed in a standard fashion. Other exhibits were more elaborate. There were holograms or statues, even, in one or two grisly cases, the embalmed corpses of the actual people being celebrated, doubtless subjected to some skilled taxidermy to offset the worst damage wrought by the procedure which had killed them.

She left the well-tended shrines alone, plundering only those that were obviously derelict, even then uncomfortable with the act of vandalism. The busts were useful—just large enough to move if she got both fingers under the base. Rather than placing them in an ordered pile at the top of the stairs, she just let them drop. Most of them had had their jewelled eyes gouged out already. The full-size statues were much harder to move, and she managed to shift only one of them.

Soon her barricade was done. For the most part it was a rubble-like pile of toppled heads, dignified faces unembarrassed by what she had done to them. The pile was surrounded by smaller, foot-tangling bric-a-brac: vases, Bibles and loyal servitors. Even if Taraschi began to dismantle the pile to reach the stairs, she was sure she would hear him doing it and be able to reach the site long before he was finished. It might even be good to kill him on that pile of heads, since it did slightly resemble Golgotha.

All this time she had been listening to his ponderous footsteps somewhere behind the black dividing walls.

“Taraschi,” she called. “Make this easy for yourself. There’s no escape from here.”

His reply sounded remarkably strong and confident. “You’re so wrong, Ana. The escape’s why we’re here.”

Shit. He was not supposed to know her name.

“Escape is death, right?”

He sounded amused. “Something like that.”

It was not the first time she had heard such eleventh-hour bravado. She rather admired them for it. “You want me to come find you, is that it?”

“Now that we’ve come this far, why not?”

“I understand. You want your money’s worth. A contract with as many clauses in it as this one couldn’t have come cheap.”

“Clauses?”—the pulse in her head shifting minutely, rhapsodically.

“This weapon. The fact that we’re alone.”

“Ah,” Taraschi said. “Yes. That did cost. But I wanted this to be a personal matter. When it came to finalities.”

Khouri was getting edgy. She had never had an actual conversation with one of her targets. Usually it would have been impossible, in the roaring bloodlust of the crowd she generally attracted. Readying the toxin gun, she began to walk slowly down the aisle. “Why the privacy clause?” she asked, unable to sever the contact.

“Dignity. I may have played this game, but I didn’t have to dishonour myself in the process.”

“You’re very close,” Khouri said.

“Yes, very close.”

“And you’re not frightened?”

“Naturally. But of living, not dying. It’s taken me months to reach this state.” His footsteps stopped. “What do you think of this place, Ana?”

“I think it needs a bit of attention.”

“It was well chosen, you must admit.”

She turned the aisle. Her target was standing next to one of the shrines, looking preternaturally calm, almost calmer than one of the statues which watched the encounter. The interior rain had darkened the burgundy fabric of his Canopy finery, his hair was plastered unglamorously to his forehead. In person he looked younger than any of her previous kills, which meant he was either genuinely younger or rich enough to afford the best longevity therapies. Somehow she knew it was the former.

“You do remember why we’re here?” he asked.

“I do, but I’m not sure I like it.”

“Do it anyway.”

One of the shafts of light falling from the ceiling shifted magically onto him. It was only an instant, but long enough for her to raise the toxin gun.

She fired.

“You did well,” Taraschi said, no pain showing in his voice. He reached out with one hand to steady himself against the wall. The other touched the swordfish protruding from his chest and prised it free, as if picking a thistle from his clothes. The pointed husk dropped to the floor, serum glistening from the end. Khouri raised the toxin gun again, but Taraschi warded her off with a blood-smeared palm. “Don’t overdo it,” he said. “One should be sufficient.”

Khouri felt nauseous.

“Shouldn’t you be dead?”

“Not for a little while. Months, to be precise. The toxin is very slow-acting. Plenty of time to think it over.”

“Think what over?”

Taraschi raked his wet hair and wiped dust and blood from his hands onto the shins of his trousers.

“Whether I follow her.”

The pulsing stopped and the sudden absence of it was enough to make Khouri dizzy. She fell in a half-faint to the floor. The contract was over, she grasped. She had won—again. But Taraschi was still alive.

“This was my mother,” Taraschi said, gesturing at the nearest shrine. It was one of the few that were well-tended. There was no dust at all on the woman’s alabaster bust, as if Taraschi had cleaned it himself just before their meeting. Her skin was uncorrupted and her jewelled eyes were still present, aristocratic features unmarred by dent or blemish. “Nadine Weng-da Silva Taraschi.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died, of course, in the process of being scanned. The destructive mapping was so swift that half her brain was still functioning normally while the other half was tom apart.”

“I’m sorry—even though I know she volunteered for it.”

“Don’t be. She was actually one of the lucky ones. Do you know the story, Ana?”

“I’m not from around here.”

“No; that was what I heard—that you were a soldier once, and that something terrible happened to you. Well, let me tell you this much. The scannings were all successful. The problem lay in the software which was supposed to execute the scanned information; to allow the alphas to evolve forward in time and experience awareness, emotion, memory—everything that makes us human. It worked well enough until the last of the Eighty had been scanned, a year after the first. But then strange pathologies began to emerge amongst the early volunteers. They crashed irrecoverably, or locked themselves in infinite loops.”