Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

There were examples of modern apparatus too: scanning devices, advanced cutting instruments, racks of eidetics and holographic storage wafers. A servitor of intermediate modernity waited inertly in one corner, head slightly bowed, like a trusty retainer taking a well-earned snooze while still on his feet.

In one wall, slatted windows overlooked an arid, windswept terrain of mesas and precarious rock formations, bathed in the reddish light of a setting sun, already disappearing behind the chaotic horizon.

And at the desk—rising from it as they entered the room, as if disturbed from concentration—was Sylveste.

She looked into his eyes—human eyes—for the first time, in what passed for the flesh.

For a moment he looked annoyed by their intrusion, but his expression softened until half a smile played across his features. “I’m glad you took the time to visit us,” he said. “And I hope Pascale has explained all that you asked of her.”

“Most of it,” Khouri said, stepping further into the study, marvelling at the fastidiousness of its recreation. It was as good as any simulation she had ever experienced. Yet—and the thought was as impressive as it was frightening—every single object in this room was moulded from nuclear matter, at densities so large that, ordinarily, the smallest paperweight on his desk would have exerted a fatal gravitational pull, even from halfway across the room. “But not all of it. How did you get here?”

“Pascale probably mentioned that there was another way into the matrix.” He offered her the palms of his hands. “I found it, that’s all. Passed through it.”

“And what happened to your…”

“My real self?” The smile had a quality of self-amusement now, as if he were enjoying some private joke too subtle to share. “I doubt that he survived. And frankly, it doesn’t really concern me. I’m the real me now. I’m all that I ever was.”

“What happened in Cerberus?”

“That’s a very long story, Khouri.”

But he told her anyway. How he had travelled into the world; how Sajaki’s suit had turned out to be an empty shell; how that realisation had done nothing but strengthen his resolve to push on further, and what, finally, he had found, in the final chamber. How he had passed into the matrix—at which point, his memories diverged from his other self. But when he told her he was sure that his other self was dead, he did so with such conviction that Khouri wondered if there was not another way of knowing; if some other, less tangible bond had linked them, right until the end.

There were things even Sylveste did not really understand; that much she sensed. He had not achieved godhead—or at least, not for more than an instant, when he bathed in the portal. Had that been a choice he had made subsequently? she wondered. If the matrix was simulating him; and if the matrix was essentially infinite in its computational capacity… what limits had been imposed on him, other than those he had consciously selected?

What she learnt was this: Carine Lefevre had been kept alive by part of the Shroud, but there had been nothing accidental about it.

“It’s as if there were two factions,” Sylveste said, toying with one of the brass microscopes on his desk, angling its little mirror this way and that, as if trying to catch the last rays of the setting sun. “One that wanted to use me to find out if the Inhibitors were still around, still capable of posing a threat to the Shrouders. And the other faction, which I don’t think cared for humanity any more than the first. But they were more cautious. They thought there had to be a better way, other than goading the Inhibitor device to see if it still generated a response.”

“But what happens to us now? Who actually won? Was it Sun Stealer or the Mademoiselle?”

“Neither,” Sylveste said, placing the microscope back down again, its velvet base softly bumping against the desk. “At least, that’s my instinctual feeling. I think we—I—came close to triggering the device, close to giving it the stimulus it needed to alert the remaining devices and begin the war against humanity.” He laughed. “Calling it a war implied it might have been a two-sided thing. But I don’t think it would have been like that at all.”

“But you don’t think it got that far?”

“I hope and I pray, that’s all.” He shrugged. “Of course, I could be wrong. I used to say I was never wrong about anything, but that’s one lesson I have learnt.”

“And what about the Amarantin, the Shrouders?”

“Only time will tell.”

“That’s all?”

“I don’t have all the answers, Khouri.” He looked around the room, as if appraising the volumes on the shelves, reassuring himself that they were still present. “Not even here.”

“It’s time to go,” Pascale said, suddenly. She had appeared at her husband’s side with a glass of something clear; vodka, maybe. She placed it on the desk, next to a polished skull the colour of parchment.

“Where?”

“Back into space, Khouri. Isn’t that what you want? You surely don’t want to spend the rest of eternity here.”

“There’s nowhere to go,” Khouri said. “You should know that, Pascale. The ship was against us; the spider-room destroyed; Ilia killed—”

“She made it, Khouri. She wasn’t killed when the shuttle was destroyed.”

So she had managed to get into a suit—but what good did that do her? Khouri was about to question Pascale further, when she realised that whatever the woman told her was very likely to be true, no matter how unbelievable it seemed—and no matter how useless the truth, no matter how little difference it could possibly make.

“What are you two going to do?”

Sylveste reached for the vodka glass and took a discreet sip. “Haven’t you guessed yet? This room isn’t just for your benefit. We inhabit it as well, except that we inhabit a simulated version in the matrix. And not just this room, but the rest of the base; just as it always was—except now we have it all to ourselves.”

“Is that all?”

“No… not quite.”

And then Pascale moved to his side and he put an arm around her waist and the two of them turned towards the slatted window; towards the red-drenched alien sunset, the arid landscape of Resurgam stretching away, lifeless.

And then it changed.

It began at the horizon; a sweeping wave of transformation which raced towards them with the speed of an oncoming day. Clouds burst into the sky, vast as empires; now the sky was bluer, even though the sun was still sinking towards dusk. And the landscape was no longer arid, but erupting into tumultuous greenery, a verdant tidal wave. She could see lakes, and trees, alien trees, and now roads, winding between egglike houses, clustered into hamlets and, on the horizon, a larger community, rising towards a single slender spire. She stared into the distance, and stared, struck dumb by the immensity of what she was seeing, which was an entire world returned to life, and—perhaps it was a trick of the eye; she would never know—she thought she saw them moving between the houses, moving with the speed of birds, but never leaving the ground; never reaching the air.

“Everything that they ever were,” Pascale said, “or most of it, at any rate, is stored in the matrix. This isn’t some archaeological reconstruction, Khouri. This is Resurgam, as they inhabit it now. Brought into being by sheer force of will, by those who survived. It’s a whole world, down to the smallest detail.”

Khouri looked around the room, and now she understood. “And you’re going to study it, aren’t you?”

“Not just study it,” Sylveste said, draining a little more of his vodka. “But live in it. Until it bores us, which—I suspect—won’t be any time now.”