Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

Janequin’s full-body projection was slightly less sharp than Calvin’s, for Janequin’s image was coming over the satellite network—patchy at best—from Mantell. And the cameras imaging him had probably seen better days, Sylveste thought—like much else on Resurgam.

“There you are,” Janequin said, noticing only Sylveste at first. “I’ve been trying to reach you for the last hour. Don’t you have a way of being alerted to incoming calls when you’re down in the pit?”

“I do,” Sylveste said. “But I turned it off. It was too distracting.”

“Oh,” Janequin said, with only the tiniest hint of annoyance. “Very shrewd indeed. Especially for a man in your position. You realise what I’m talking about, of course. There’s trouble afoot, Dan, perhaps more than you…” Then Janequin must have noticed Cal for the first time. He studied the figure in the chair for a moment before speaking. “My word. It is you, isn’t it?”

Cal nodded without saying a word.

“This is his beta-level simulation,” Sylveste said. It was important to clear that up before the conversation proceeded any further; alphas and betas were fundamentally different things and Stoner etiquette was very punctilious indeed about distinguishing between the two. Sylveste would have been guilty of an extreme social gaffe had he allowed Janequin to think that this was the long-lost alpha-level recording.

“I was consulting with him… with it,” Sylveste said.

Calvin pulled a face.

“About what?” Janequin said. He was an old man—the oldest person on Resurgam, in fact—and with each passing year his appearance seemed to approach fractionally closer to some simian ideal. His white hair, moustache and beard framed a small pink face in the manner of some rare marmoset. On Yellowstone, there had been no more talented expert in genetics outside of the Mixmasters, and there were some who rated Janequin a good deal cleverer than any in that sect, for all that his genius was of the undemonstrative sort, accumulating not in any flash of brilliance, but through years and years of quietly excellent work. He was well into his fourth century now, and layer upon layer of longevity treatment was beginning to crumble visibly. Sylveste supposed that before very long Janequin would be the first person on Resurgam to die of old age. The thought filled him with sadness. Though there was much upon which Janequin and he disagreed, they had always seen eye to eye on all the important things.

“He’s found something,” Cal said.

Janequin’s eyes brightened, years lifting off him in the joy of scientific discovery. “Really?”

“Yes, I…” Then something else odd happened. The room was gone now. The three of them were standing on a balcony, high above what Sylveste instantly recognised as Chasm City. Calvin’s doing again. The escritoire had followed them like an obedient dog. If Cal could access its private-level functions, Sylveste thought, he could also do this kind of trick, running one of the escritoire’s standard environments. It was a good simulation, too: down to the slap of wind against Sylveste’s cheek and the city’s almost intangible smell, never easy to define but always obvious by its absence in more cheaply done environments.

It was the city from his childhood: the high Belle Epoque. Awesome gold structures marched into the distance like sculpted clouds, buzzing with aerial traffic. Below, tiered parks and gardens stepped down in a series of dizzying vistas towards a verdant haze of greenery and light, kilometres beneath their feet.

“Isn’t it great to see the old place?” Cal said. “And to think that it was almost ours for the taking; so much within reach of our clan… who knows how we might have changed things, if we’d held the city’s reins?”

Janequin steadied himself on the railing. “Very nice, but I didn’t come to sight-see, Calvin. Dan, what were you about to tell me before we were so…”

“Rudely interrupted?” Sylveste said. “I was going to tell Cal to pull the gravitometer data from the escritoire, as he obviously has the means to read my private files.”

“There’s really nothing to it for a man in my position,” Cal said. There was a moment while he accessed the smoky imagery of the buried thing, the obelisk hanging in front of them beyond the railing, apparently life-size.

“Oh, very interesting,” Janequin said. “Very interesting indeed!”

“Not bad,” Cal said.

“Not bad?” Sylveste said. “It’s bigger and better preserved than anything we’ve found to date by an order of magnitude. It’s clear evidence of a more advanced phase of Amarantin technology… perhaps even a precursor phase to a full industrial revolution.”

“I suppose it could be quite a significant find,” Cal said, grudgingly. “You—um—are planning to unearth it, I assume?”

“Until a moment ago, yes.” Sylveste paused. “But something’s just come up. I’ve just been… I’ve just found out for myself that Girardieau may be planning to move against me a lot sooner than I had feared.”

“He can’t touch you without a majority in the expeditionary council,” Cal said.

“No, he couldn’t,” Janequin said. “If that was how he was going to do it. But Dan’s information is right. It looks as if Girardieau may be planning on more direct action.”

“That would be tantamount to some kind of… coup, I suppose.”

“I think that would be the technical term,” Janequin said.

“Are you sure?” Then Calvin did the concentration thing again, dark lines etching his brow. “Yes… you could be right. A lot of media speculation in the last day concerning Girardieau’s next move, and the fact that Dan’s off on some dig while the colony stumbles through a crisis of leadership… and a definite increase in encrypted comms among Girardieau’s known sympathisers. I can’t break those encryptions, of course, but I can certainly speculate on the reason for the increase in traffic.”

“Something’s being planned, isn’t it?” Sluka was right, he thought to himself. In which case she had done him a favour, even as she had threatened to abandon the dig. Without her warning he would never have invoked Cal.

“It does look that way,” Janequin said. “That’s why I was trying to reach you. My fears have only been confirmed by what Cal says about Girardieau’s sympathisers.” His grip tightened on the railing. The cuff of his jacket—hanging thinly over his skeletal frame—was patterned with peacocks’ eyes. “I don’t suppose there’s any point my staying here, Dan. I’ve tried to keep my contact with you below suspicious levels, but there’s every reason to think this conversation is being tapped. I shouldn’t really say any more.” He turned away from the cityscape and the hanging obelisk, then addressed the seated man. “Calvin… it’s been a pleasure to meet you again, after such a long time.”

“Look after yourself,” Cal said, elevating a hand in Janequin’s direction. “And good luck with the peacocks.”

Janequin’s surprise was evident. “You know about my little project?”

Calvin smiled without answering; Janequin’s question had been superfluous after all, Sylveste thought.

The old man shook his hand—the environment ran to full tactile interaction—and then stepped out of range of his imaging suite.

The two of them were left alone on the balcony.

“Well?” Cal asked.

“I can’t afford to lose control of the colony.” Sylveste had still been in nominal command of the entire Resurgam expedition, even after Alicia’s defection. Technically, those who had chosen to stay behind on the planet rather than return home with her should have been his allies, meaning that his position should have been strengthened. But it had not worked like that. Not everyone who was sympathetic to Alicia’s side of the argument had managed to get aboard the Lorean before it left orbit. And amongst those who had stayed behind, many previously sympathetic to Sylveste felt he had handled the crisis badly, or even criminally. His enemies said that the things the Pattern Jugglers had done to his head before he met the Shrouders were only now emerging into the light; pathologies that bordered on madness. Research into the Amarantin had carried on, but with slowly lessening momentum, while political differences and enmities widened beyond repair. Those with residual loyalty to Alicia—chief among them Girardieau—had amalgamated into the Inundationists. Sylveste’s archaeologists had become steadily embittered, a siege-mentality setting in. There had been deaths on both sides which were not easily explained as accidents. Now things had reached a head, and Sylveste was in nowhere like the right place to resolve the crisis. “But I can’t let go of that, either,” he said, indicating the obelisk. “I need your advice, Cal. I’ll get it because you depend on me absolutely. You’re fragile; remember that.”