Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

SISS looked as real as he remembered. The Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies had its organisational centre in a wheel-shaped structure dating from the Amerikano days, although there was not a single cubic nanometre which had not been reprocessed many times over the intervening centuries. The wheel’s hub sprouted two grey, mushroom-shaped hemispheres, pocked with docking interfaces and the modest defence systems permitted by Demarchist ethics. The wheel’s edge was a hectic accretion of living modules, labs and offices, embedded in a matrix of bulk chitin polymer, linked by a tangle of access tunnels and supply pipes walled in shark-collagen.

“It’s good.”

“You think so?” Pascale’s voice was distant.

“That’s how it was,” Sylveste said. “How it felt when I visited him.”

“Thanks, I… well, this was nothing—the easy part. Fully documented. We had blueprints for SISS, and there are even some people in Cuvier who knew your father, like Janequin. The hard part’s what happened afterwards—where we have so little to go on except what you told them on your return.”

“I’m sure you’ve done an excellent job of it.”

“Well, you’ll see—sooner rather than later.”

The shuttle coupled with the docking interface. Institute security servitors were waiting beyond the lock, validating his identity.

“Calvin won’t be thrilled,” said Gregori, the Institute’s housekeeper. “But I suppose it’s too late to send you home now.”

They had been through this ritual two or three times in the last few months, Gregori always washing his hands of the consequences. It was no longer necessary to have someone escort Sylveste through the shark-collagen tunnels to the place where they kept him; the thing.

“You’ve nothing to worry about, Gregori. If Father gives you any trouble, just tell him I ordered you to show me around.”

Gregori arched his eyebrows, the emotionally attuned entoptics around him registering amusement.

“Isn’t that just what you’re doing, Dan?”

“I was trying to keep things amicable.”

“Utterly futile, dear boy. We’d all be much happier if you just followed your father’s lead. You know where you are with a good totalitarian regime.”

It took twenty minutes to navigate the tunnels, moving radially outwards to the rim, passing through scientific sections where teams of thinkers—human and machine—grappled endlessly with the central enigma of the Shrouds. Although SISS had established monitoring stations around all the Shrouds so far discovered, most of the information-processing and collating took place around Yellowstone. Here elaborate theories were assembled and tested against the facts, which were scant, but unignorable. No theory had lasted more than a few years.

The place where they kept him, the thing Sylveste had come to see, was a guarded annex on the rim; a generously large allocation of volume given the lack of evidence that the thing within was actually capable of appreciating the gift. The thing’s name—his name—was Philip Lascaille.

He did not have many visitors now. There had been lots in the early days, shortly after his return. But interest had dwindled when it became clear that Lascaille could tell his inquisitors nothing, useful or otherwise. But, as Sylveste had quickly appreciated, the fact that no one paid Lascaille much attention these days could actually work to his advantage. Even Sylveste’s relatively infrequent visits—once or twice a month—had been sufficiently far from the norm to enable a kind of rapport to form between the two of them… between himself and the thing Lascaille had become.

Lascaille’s annex contained a garden, under an artificial sky glazed the deep blue of cobalt. A breeze had been created, sufficient to finger the windchimes suspended from the bower of over-arching trees which fringed the garden.

The garden had been landscaped with paths, rockeries, knolls, trellises and goldfish ponds, the effect being of a rustic maze, so that it always took a minute or so to find Lascaille. When Sylveste did find him the man was usually in the same state: naked or half-naked, filthy to some degree, his fingers smeared with the rainbow shades of crayons and chalks. Sylveste would always know he was getting warm when he saw something scrawled on the stone path; either a complex symmetrical pattern, or what looked like an attempt at mimicking Chinese or Sanskrit calligraphy, without actually knowing any real letters. At other times the things which Lascaille marked on the path looked like Boolean algebra or semaphore.

Then—it was always only a question of time—he would round a corner and Lascaille would be there, working on another marking, or carefully erasing one he had worked on previously. His face would be frozen in a rictus of total concentration, and every muscle in his body would be rigid with the exertion of the drawing, and the process would take place in complete silence, except for the stirring of the windchimes, the quiet whisper of the water or the scraping of his crayons and chalks against stone.

Sylveste would often have to wait hours for Lascaille to even register his presence, which would generally amount to nothing more than the man turning his face to him for an instant, before continuing. Yet the same thing always happened in that instant. The rictus would soften, and in its place would be—if only for a moment—a smile; one of pride or amusement or something utterly beyond Sylveste’s fathoming.

And then Lascaille would return to his chalks. And there would be nothing to suggest that this was a man—the only man—the only human being—to ever touch the surface of a Shroud and return alive.

“Anyway,” Volyova said, quenching what remained of her thirst, “I’m not expecting it to be easy, but I have no doubts that I will find a recruit sooner or later. I’ve begun to advertise, stating our planned destination. As far as the work is concerned, I say only that it requires someone with implants.”

“But you’re not going to take the first one that comes along,” Hegazi said. “Surely?”

“Of course not. Though they won’t know it, I’ll be vetting my candidates for some kind of military experience in their backgrounds. I don’t want someone who’s going to crack up at the first hint of trouble, or someone unwilling to submit to discipline.” She was beginning to relax now, after all her difficulties with Nagorny. A girl was playing on stage, working a gold teeconax through endlessly spiralling ragas. Volyova did not greatly care for music; never had done. But there was something mathematically beguiling about the music which for a moment worked against her prejudices. She said: “I’m confident of success. We need only concern ourselves with Sajaki.”

At that moment Hegazi nodded towards the door, where bright daylight forced Volyova to squint. A figure stood there, majestically silhouetted in the glare. The man was garbed in a black anklelength cloak and a vaguely defined helmet, the light making it resemble a halo cast around his head. His profile was split diagonally by a long smooth stick which he gripped two-handedly.

The Komuso stepped into the darkness. What looked like a kendo stick was only his bamboo shakuhachi; a traditional musical instrument. With well-rehearsed rapidity he slid the thing into a sheath concealed behind the folds of his cloak. Then, with imperial slowness, he removed the wicker helmet. The Komuso’s face was difficult to make out. His hair was brilliantined, slickly tied back in a scythe-shaped tail. His eyes were lost behind sleek assassin’s goggles, infrared sensitive facets dully catching the room’s tinted light.

The music had come to an abrupt stop, the girl with the teeconax vanishing magically from the stage.