Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

Ultras, of course, were not the only spacegoing faction spawned by humanity. Skyjacks—at least here—made up a significant portion of the others she saw. They were spacedwellers to be sure, but they did not crew interstellar ships and so their outlook was very different to the wraithlike Ultras, with their dreadlocks and old-fashioned expressions. There were others still. Icecombers were a Skyjack offshoot; psychomodified for the extreme solitude which came from working the Kuiper belt zones, and they kept themselves to themselves with ferocious dedication. Gillies were aquatically modified humans who breathed liquid air; capable of crewing short-range, high-gee ships: they constituted a sizeable fraction of the system’s police force. Some gillies were so incapable of normal respiration and locomotion that they had to move around in huge robotic fishtanks when not on duty.

And then there were Conjoiners: descendants of an experimental clique on Mars who had systematically upgraded their minds, swapping cells for machines, until something sudden and drastic had happened. In one moment, they had escalated to a new mode of consciousness—what they called the Transenlightenment—precipitating a brief but nasty war in the process. Conjoiners were easy to pick out in crowds: recently they had bio-engineered huge and beautiful cranial crests for themselves, veined to dissipate the excess heat produced by the furious machines in their heads. There were fewer of them these days, so they tended to draw attention. Other human factions—like the Demarchists, who had long allied themselves with the Conjoiners—were acutely aware that only Conjoiners knew how to build the engines which powered lighthuggers.

“Stop here,” Hegazi said. The rickshaw darted to the streetside, where wizened old men sat at folding tables playing card games and mah-jong. Hegazi slapped payment into the driver’s fleshy palm and then followed Volyova onto the streetside. They had arrived at a bar.

“The Juggler and the Shrouder,” Volyova said, reading the holographic sign above the door. It showed a naked man emerging from the sea, backdropped by strange, phantasmagoric shapes among the surf. Above him, a black sphere hung in the sky. “This doesn’t look right.”

“It’s where all the Ultras hang out. You’d better get used to it.”

“All right, point made. I suppose I wouldn’t feel at home in any Ultra bar, come to think of it.”

“You wouldn’t feel at home in anything that didn’t have a navigational system and a lot of nasty firepower, Ilia.”

“Sounds like a reasonable definition of common sense to me.”

Youths barged out into the street, plastered in sweat and what Volyova hoped was spilt beer. They had been arm wrestling: one of their number was nursing a prosthetic which had ripped off at the shoulder, another was riffling a wad of notes he must have won inside. They had the regulation sleep-stretch locks and the standard-issue star-effect tattoos, making Volyova feel simultaneously ancient and envious. She doubted that their anxieties extended much beyond the troubling question of where their next drink or bed was coming from. Hegazi gave them a look—he must have seemed intimidating to them, even given their chimeric aspirations, since it was difficult to tell which parts of Hegazi were not mechanical.

“Come on,” he said, pushing through the disturbance. “Grin and bear it, Ilia.”

It was dark and smoky inside, and with the combined synergistic effects of the noise from the music—pulsing Burundi rhythms overlaid with something that might have been human singing—and the perfumed, mild hallucinogens in the smoke, it took Volyova a few moments to get her bearings. Then Hegazi pointed to a miraculously spare table in the comer and she followed him to it with the minimum of enthusiasm.

“You’re going to sit down, aren’t you?”

“I don’t suppose I have much choice. We have to look as if we at least tolerate each other’s company or people will get suspicious.”

Hegazi shook his head, grinning. “I must like something about you, Ilia, otherwise I’d have killed you ages ago.”

She sat down.

“Don’t let Sajaki hear you talking like that. He doesn’t take kindly to threats being made against Triumvir members.”

“I’m not the one who has a problem with Sajaki, in case you forgot. Now, what are you drinking?”

“Something my digestive system can process.”

Hegazi ordered some drinks—his physiology allowed that—waiting until the overhead delivery system brought them.

“You’re still annoyed by that business with Sudjic, aren’t you?”

“Don’t worry,” Volyova said, crossing her arms. “Sudjic isn’t anything I can’t handle. Besides, I’d be lucky to lay a finger on her before Sajaki finished her off.”

“He might let you have second pickings.” The drinks arrived in a little perspex cloud with a flip-top, the cloud suspended from a trolley which ran along rails mounted on the ceiling. “You think he’d actually kill her?”

Volyova attacked her drink, glad of something to wash away the dust of the rickshaw ride. “I wouldn’t trust Sajaki not to kill any of us, if it came to that.”

“You used to trust him. What made you change your mind?”

“Sajaki hasn’t been the same since the Captain fell ill again.” She looked around nervously, well aware that Sajaki might not be very far from earshot. “Before that happened, they both visited the Jugglers, did you know that?”

“You’re saying the Jugglers did something to Sajaki’s mind?”

She thought back to the naked man stepping from the Juggler ocean. “That’s what they do, Hegazi.”

“Yes, voluntarily. Are you saying Sajaki chose to become crueller?”

“Not just cruel. Single-minded. This business with the Captain…” She shook her head. “It’s emblematic.”

“Have you spoken to him recently?”

She read his question. “No; I don’t think he’s found who he’s looking for, though doubtless we’ll find out shortly.”

“And your own quest?”

“I’m not looking for a specific individual. My only constraint is that whoever I find should be saner than Boris Nagorny. That ought not to pose any great difficulties.” She let her gaze drift around the drinkers in the bar. Although none of the people looked definitely psychotic, neither was there anyone who exactly looked stable and well-adjusted. “At least I hope not.”

Hegazi lit a cigarette and offered Volyova a second. She took it gratefully and smoked it solidly for five minutes, until it resembled a glowing speck of fissile material wrapped in glowing embers. She made a mental note to replenish her supply of cigarettes during this stopover. “But my search is only just beginning,” she said. “And I have to handle it delicately.”

“You mean,” Hegazi said with a knowing smile, “that you’re not actually going to tell people what the job is before you recruit them.”

Volyova smirked. “Of course not.”

The sapphire-hulled shuttle he was riding had not come far: only a short inter-orbital hop from the Sylvestes’ familial habitat. Even so, it had been difficult to arrange. Calvin strongly disapproved of his son having any contact with the thing which now resided in the Institute, as if the thing’s state of mind might infect Sylveste by some mysterious process of sympathetic resonance. Yet Sylveste was twenty-one. He chose his own associations now. Calvin could go hang, or bum his neurons to ash in the madness he was about to inflict on himself and his seventy-nine disciples… but he was not going to dictate who Sylveste could see.

He saw SISS looming ahead, and thought, none of this is real; just a narrative strand from his biography. Pascale had given him the rough-cut and asked for his comments. Now he was experiencing it, still walled in his prison in Cuvier, but moving like a ghost through his own past, haunting his younger self. Memories, long buried, were welling up unbidden. The biography, still far from complete, would be capable of being accessed in many ways, from many viewpoints, and with varying degrees of interactivity. It would be an intricately faceted thing, detailed enough that one could easily spend more than a lifetime exploring only a segment of his past.