Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

Pascale, as always, was accompanied by a human bodyguard and a couple of armed servitors, but they did not follow her into the room. What did was a tiny buzzing blur like a clockwork wasp. It looked harmless, but he knew that if he so much as broke wind in the biographer’s direction, what he would have to show for it would be an additional orifice in the centre of his forehead.

“Good morning,” she said.

“I’d say it’s anything but,” Sylveste said, nodding towards the window. “Actually, I’m surprised you made it here at all.”

She sat down on a velvet-cushioned footstool. “I have connections in security. It wasn’t difficult, despite the curfew.”

“It’s come to a curfew, now?”

Pascale wore a pillbox hat in Inundationist purple, the geometric line of her blunt black fringe beneath emphasising the pale expressionless cast of her face. Her outfit was tight-fitting, striped purple and black jacket and trousers. Her entoptics were dewdrops, seahorses and flying fish, trailing pink and lilac glitter. She sat with her feet angled together, touching at the toes, her upper body leaning slightly towards him, as his did towards hers.

“Times have changed, Doctor. You of all people should appreciate that.”

He did. He had been in prison, in the heart of Cuvier, for ten years now. The new regime which had succeeded his after the coup had become as fragmentary as the old, in the time-honoured way of all revolutions. Yet while the political landscape was as divided as ever, the underlying topology was quite different. In his time, the schism had been between those who wanted to study the Amarantin and those who wanted to terraform Resurgam, thereby establishing the world as a viable human colony rather than a temporary research outpost. Even the Inundationist terraformers had been prepared to admit that the Amarantin might once have been worthy of study. These days, however, the extant political factions differed only in the rates of terraforming they advocated, ranging from slow schemes spread across centuries to atmospheric alchemies so brutal that humans might have to evacuate the planet’s surface while they were being wrought. One thing was clear enough: even the most modest proposals would destroy many Amarantin secrets for eternity. But few people seemed particularly bothered by that—and for the most part those who did care were too scared to raise their voices. Apart from a skeleton staff of bitter, underfunded researchers, hardly anyone admitted to an interest in the Amarantin at all now. In ten years, study of the dead aliens had been relegated to an intellectual backwater.

And things would only get worse.

Five years earlier, a trade ship had passed through the system. The lighthugger had furled its ramscoop fields and moved into orbit around Resurgam; a bright and temporary new star in the heavens. Its commander, Remilliod, had offered a wealth of technological marvels to the colony: new products from other systems, and things which had not been seen since before the mutiny. But the colony could not afford everything Remilliod had to sell. There had been bloody arguments in favour of buying this over that; machines rather than medicine; aircraft rather than terraforming tools. Rumours, too, of underhand deals; trade in weapons and illegal technologies, and while the general standard of living on the colony was higher than in Sylveste’s time—witness the servitors, and the implants Pascale now took for granted—unhealable divisions had opened amongst the Inundationists.

“Girardieau must be frightened,” Sylveste said.

“I wouldn’t know,” she said, a touch too hastily. “All that matters to me is that we have a deadline.”

“What is it you want to talk about today?”

Pascale glanced down at the compad she balanced on her knees. In six centuries computers had assumed every shape and architecture imaginable, but something like a simple drawing slate—flat, with a handwritten entry-mode—had seldom been out of fashion for long. “I’d like to talk about what happened to your father,” Pascale said.

“You mean the Eighty? Isn’t the whole thing already sufficiently well-documented for your needs?”

“Almost.” Pascale touched the tip of her stylus against her cochineal-dark lips. “I’ve examined all the standard accounts, of course. For the most part they’ve answered my questions. There’s just one small matter I haven’t been able to resolve to my total satisfaction.”

“Which is?”

He had to hand it to Pascale. The way she answered, without the slightest trace of real interest in her voice, it really was just as if this were a loose end that needed clearing up. It was a skill; one that almost lulled him into carelessness. “It’s about your father’s alpha-level recording,” Pascale said.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to know what really happened to it afterwards.” In the soft interior rain, the man with the trick gun directed Khouri to a waiting cable-car. It was as unmarked and inconspicuous as the palanquin he had abandoned in the Monument.

“Get in.”

“Just a moment—” But as soon as Khouri opened her mouth, he pushed the end of the gun into the small of her back. Not painfully—it was done firmly, not to hurt—but to remind her that it was there. Something in that gentleness told her the man was a professional, and that he was far more likely to use the gun than someone who would have prodded her aggressively. “All right; I’m moving. Who is this Mademoiselle anyway? Someone behind a rival Shadowplay house?”

“No; I’ve already told you; stop thinking so parochially.”

He was not going to tell her anything useful; she could see that. Certain it would not get her far, she said: “Who are you, then?”

“Carlos Manoukhian.”

That worried her more than the way he handled the gun. He said it too truthfully. It was not a cover-name. And now that she knew it—and guessed that this man was at best some kind of criminal, laughable as that category seemed in Chasm City’s lawlessness—it meant he planned to kill her later.

The cable-car’s door clammed shut. Manoukhian pressed a button on the console which purged the Chasm City air, blasting out in steam jets below the car as it lofted itself via a nearby cable.

“Who are you, Manoukhian?”

“I help the Mademoiselle.” As if that was not blindingly obvious. “We have a special relationship. We go back a long way.”

“And what does she want with me?”

“I would have thought it was obvious by now,” Manoukhian said. He was still keeping the gun on her, even as he kept one eye on the car’s navigation console. “There’s someone she wants you to assassinate.”

“That’s what I do for a living.”

“Yeah.” He smiled. “Difference is, this guy hasn’t paid for it.”

The biography, needless to say, had not been Sylveste’s idea. Instead, the initiative had come from the one man Sylveste would have least suspected. It had been six months earlier; during one of the very few occasions when he had spoken face to face with his captor. Nils Girardieau had brought up the subject almost casually, mentioning that he was surprised no one had taken on the task. After all, the fifty years on Resurgam virtually amounted to another life, and even though that life was now capped by an ignominious epilogue, it did at least put his earlier life into a perspective it had lacked during the Yellowstone years. “The problem was,” Girardieau said, “your previous biographers were too close to the events—too much part of the societal milieu they were attempting to analyse. Everyone was in thrall to either Cal or yourself, and the colony was so claustrophobic there was no room to step back and see the wider perspective.”