Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

It was several days after her first meeting with the crew. They were standing outside the dead man’s quarters, on level 821, preparing to enter his rooms. They had remained sealed since his death—longer, as far as the others were concerned. Even Volyova had not entered them, wary of disturbing something which might place her there.

She spoke into her bracelet. “Disable security interdict, personal quarters Gunnery Officer Boris Nagorny, authorisation Volyova.”

The door opened before them, emitting a palpable draught of highly chilled air.

“Send them in,” Sajaki said.

The armed servitors took only a few minutes to sweep the interior, certifying that there were no obvious hazards. It would have been unlikely, of course, since Nagorny had probably not planned to die quite when Volyova had arranged it. But with characters like him, one could never be sure.

They stepped in, the servitors having already activated the room lights.

Like most of the psychopaths she had encountered, Nagorny had always seemed perfectly happy with the smallest of personal spaces. His quarters were even more determinedly cramped than her own. A fastidious neatness had been at work there, like a poltergeist in reverse. Most of his belongings—there were not many—had been securely racked down, and so had not been disturbed by the ship’s manoeuvres when she killed him.

Sajaki grimaced and held a sleeve up to his nose. “That smell.”

“It’s borscht. Beetroot. I think Nagorny was partial to it.”

“Remind me not to try it.”

Sajaki closed the door behind them.

There was a residual frigidity to the air. The thermometers said that it was now room temperature, but it seemed as if the molecules in the air carried an imprint of the months of cold. The room’s overpowering spartanness did not offset this chill. Volyova’s quarters seemed opulent and luxurious by comparison. It was not simply a case of Nagorny neglecting to personalise his space. It was just that in so doing he had so miserably failed by normal standards that his efforts actually contradicted themselves and made the room seem even bleaker than had it been empty.

What failed to help matters was the coffin.

The elongated object had been the only thing in the room not lashed down when she killed Nagorny. It was still intact, but Volyova sensed that the thing had once stood upright, dominating the room with a fearful premonitory grandeur. It was huge and probably made of iron. The metal was as ebon and light-sucking as the surface of a Shrouder emboitement. All its surfaces had been carved in bas-relief, too intricately rendered to give up all their secrets in one glance. Volyova stared in silence. Are you trying to say, she thought, that Boris Nagorny was capable of this?

“Yuuji,” she said. “I don’t like this at all.”

“I don’t very much blame you.”

“What kind of madman makes his own coffin?”

“A very dedicated one, I’d say. But it’s here, and it’s probably the only glimpse into his mind we have. What do you make of the embellishments?”

“Undoubtedly a projection of his psychosis, a concretisation.” Now that Sajaki was forcing calm she was slipping into subservience. “I should study the imagery. It might give me insight.” She paused, added: “So that we don’t make the same mistake twice, I mean.”

“Prudent,” Sajaki said, kneeling down. He stroked his gloved forefinger over the intagliated rococo surface. “We were very lucky you were not forced to kill him, in the end.”

“Yes,” she said, giving him an odd look. “But what are your thoughts on the embellishments, Yuuji-san?”

“I’d like to know who or what Sun Stealer was,” he said, drawing her attention to those words, etched in Cyrillic on the coffin. “Does that mean anything to you? Within the terms of his psychosis, I mean. What did it mean to Nagorny?”

“I haven’t the faintest.”

“Let me hazard a guess, anyway. I’d say that in Nagorny’s imagination Sun Stealer represented somebody in his day-to-day experience, and I see two obvious possibilities.”

“Himself or me,” Volyova said, knowing that Sajaki was not to be easily distracted. “Yes, yes, that much is obvious… but this doesn’t in any way help us.”

“You’re quite sure he never mentioned this Sun Stealer?”

“I would remember a thing like that.”

Which was quite true. And of course she did remember: he had written those words on the wall in her quarters, in his own blood. The expression meant nothing to her, but that did not mean she was in any sense unfamiliar with it. Towards the unpleasant termination of their professional relationship, Nagorny had spoken of little else. His dreams were thick with Sun Stealer, and—like all paranoiacs—he saw evidence of Sun Stealer’s malignant work in the most humdrum of daily annoyances. When one of the ship’s lights failed unaccountably or a lift directed him to the wrong level, this was Sun Stealer’s doing. It was never a simple malfunction, but always evidence of the deliberate machinations of a behind-the-scenes entity only Nagorny could detect. Volyova had stupidly ignored the signs. She had hoped—in fact come as close to praying as was possible for her—that his phantom would return to the netherworld of his unconscious. But Sun Stealer had stayed with Nagorny; witness the coffin on the floor.

Yes… she would remember a thing like that.

“I’m sure you would,” Sajaki said, knowingly. Then he returned his attention to the engravings. “I think first we should make a copy of these marks,” he said. “They may help us, but this damned Braille effect isn’t easy to make out with the eye. What do you think these are?” He moved his palm across a kind of radial pattern. “Birds’ wings? Or rays of sunlight shining from above? They look more like birds’ wings to me. Now why would he have bird wings on his mind? And what kind of language is this meant to be?”

Volyova looked, but the crawling complexity of the coffin was too much to take in. It was not that she was uninterested—not at all. But what she wanted was the thing to herself, and Sajaki as far away from it as possible. There was too much evidence here of the canyon depths to which Nagorny’s mind had plummeted.

“I think it merits more study,” she said carefully. “You said ‘first’. What do you intend to do after we make a copy of it?”

“I would have thought that was obvious.”

“Destroy the damned thing,” she surmised.

Sajaki smiled. “Either that or give it to Sudjic. But personally I’d settle for destroying it. Coffins aren’t good things to have on a ship, you know. Especially home-made ones.”

The stairs went up for ever. After a while—already in the two hundreds—Khouri lost count. But just when her knees felt as if they were going to buckle, the staircase came to an abrupt end, presenting her with a long, long white corridor whose sides were a series of recessed arches. The effect was like standing in a portico under moonlight. She walked along the corridor’s echoey length until she arrived at the double doors which ended it. They were festooned with organic black scrollwork, inset with faintly tinted glass. A lavender light poured through them from the room beyond.

Evidently she had arrived.

It was entirely possible that this was a trap of some kind, and that to enter the room beyond would be a form of suicide. But turning back was not an option either—Manoukhian, for all his charm, had made that abundantly clear. So Khouri grasped the handle and let herself in. Something in the air made her nose tickle pleasantly, a blossomy perfume negating the sterility of the rest of the house. The smell made Khouri feel unwashed, although it was only a few hours since Ng had woken her and told her to go and kill Taraschi. In the meantime she had accumulated a month’s worth of dirt from the Chasm City rain, suffused with her own sweat and fear.