Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space

“I know. That’s precisely what bothers me.”

“Then what does the writing say?”

Sylveste sighed and looked back at it again. He had hoped that the distraction would allow his subconscious to work at the piece, and that now the meaning of the inscription would snap into clarity, like the answer to one of the psychological problems they had been posed before the Shrouder mission. But the moment of revelation stubbornly refused to come; the graphicforms were still not yielding meaning. Or perhaps, he thought, it was his expectations that were at fault. He had been hoping for something momentous; something that would confirm his ideas, terrifying as they were.

But instead, the writing seemed only to commemorate something that had happened here—something that might have been of great importance in Amarantin history, but which—set against his expectations—was bound to be parochial in the extreme. It would take a full computer analysis to be sure, and he had only been able to read the top metre or so of the text—but already he could feel the crush of disappointment. Whatever this obelisk represented, it was no longer of interest to him.

“Something happened here,” Sylveste said. “Maybe a battle, or the appearance of a god. That’s all it is—a marker stone. We’ll know more when we unearth it and date the context layer. We can run a TE measurement on the artefact itself, too.”

“It’s not what you were looking for, is it?”

“I thought it might be, for a while.” Then Sylveste looked down, towards the lowest exposed part of the obelisk. The text ended a few inches above the highest layer of cladding, and something else began, extending downwards out of sight. It was a diagram, of some sort—he could see the topmost arcs of several concentric circles, and that was all. What was it?

Sylveste could not—would not—begin to guess. The storm was growing stronger. No stars at all were visible now, only a single occluding sheet of dust, roaring overhead like a great bat’s wing. It would be a kind of hell when they left the pit.

“Give me something to dig with,” he said. And then started scraping away at the permafrost around the topmost layer of the sarcophagus, like a prisoner who had until dawn to tunnel from his cell. Only a few moments passed before Pascale and the student joined him in the work, while the storm howled above. “I don’t remember much,” the Captain said. “Are we still around Bloater?”

“No,” Volyova said, trying not to make it seem as if she had already explained this to him a dozen times, each time she had warmed his mind. “We left Kruger 6OA some years ago, once Hegazi negotiated us the shield ice we needed.”

“Oh. Then where are we?”

“Heading towards Yellowstone.”

“Why?” The Captain’s basso voice rumbled out of speakers arranged some distance from his corpse. Complex algorithms scanned his brain patterns and translated the results into speech, fleshing out the responses when required. He had no real right to be conscious at all, really—all neural activity should have ended when his core temperature had dropped below freezing. But his brain was webbed by tiny machines, and in a way it was the machines which were thinking now, even though they were doing so at less than half a kelvin above absolute zero.

“That’s a good question,” she said. Something was bothering her now and it was more than just this conversation. “The reason we’re going to Yellowstone is…”

“Yes?”

“Sajaki thinks there’s a man there who can help you.”

The Captain pondered this. On her bracelet she had a map of his brain: she could see colours squirming across it like armies merging on a battlefield. “That man must be Calvin Sylveste,” the Captain said.

“Calvin Sylveste is dead.”

“The other one, then. Dan Sylveste. Is that the man Sajaki seeks?”

“I can’t imagine it’s anyone else.”

“He won’t come willingly. He didn’t last time.” There was a moment of silence; quantum temperature fluctuations pushing the Captain back below consciousness. “Sajaki must be aware of that,” he said, returning.

“I’m sure Sajaki has considered all the possibilities,” Volyova said, in a manner which made it clear she was sure of anything but that. But she would be careful of speaking against the other Triumvir. Sajaki had always been the Captain’s closest adjutant—the two of them went back a long way; times long before Volyova had joined the crew. To the best of her knowledge, no one else—including Sajaki—ever spoke to the Captain, or even knew that there was a way to do so. But there was no point taking stupid risks—even given the Captain’s erratic memory.

“Something’s troubling you, Ilia. You’ve always been able to confide in me. Is it Sylveste?”

“It’s more local than that.”

“Something aboard the ship, then?”

It was not something to which she was ever going to become totally accustomed, Volyova knew, but in recent weeks visiting the Captain had begun to take on definite tones of normality. As if visiting a cryogenically cooled corpse infected with a retarded but potentially all-consuming plague was merely one of life’s unpleasant but necessary elements; something that, now and again, everyone had to do. Now, though, she was taking their relationship a step further—about to ignore the same risk which had stopped her expressing her misgivings about Sajaki.

“It’s about the gunnery,” she said. “You remember that, don’t you? The room from which the cache-weapons can be controlled?”

“I think so, yes. What about it?”

“I’ve been training a recruit to become Gunnery Officer; to assume the gunnery seat and interface with the cache-weapons through neural implants.”

“Who was this recruit?”

“Someone called Boris Nagorny. No; you never met him—he came aboard only recently, and I tended to keep him away from the others when I could help it. I would never have brought him down here, for obvious reasons.” Namely that the Captain’s contagion might have reached Nagorny’s implants if she had allowed the two of them to get too close. Volyova sighed. She was getting to the crux of her confession now. “Nagorny was always slightly unstable, Captain. In many ways, a borderline psychopath was more useful to me than someone wholly sane—at least, I thought so at the time. But I underestimated the degree of Nagorny’s psychosis.”

“He got worse?”

“It started not long after I put the implants in and allowed him to tap into the gunnery. He began to complain of nightmares. Very bad ones.”

“How unfortunate for the poor fellow.”

Volyova understood. What the Captain had undergone—what the Captain was still in the process of undergoing—would make most people’s nightmares seem very tame phantasms indeed. Whether or not he experienced pain was a debatable point, but what was pain anyway, compared to the knowledge that one was being eaten alive—and transformed at the same time—by something inexpressibly alien?

“I can’t guess what those nightmares were really like,” Volyova said. “All I know is that for Nagorny—a man who already had enough horrors loose in his head for most of us—they were too much.”

“So what did you do?”

“I changed everything—the whole gunnery interface system, even the implants in his head. None of it worked. The nightmares continued.”

“You’re certain they had something to do with the gunnery?”

“I wanted to deny it at first, but there was a clear correlation with the sessions when I had him in the seat.” She lit herself another cigarette, the orange tip the only remotely warm thing anywhere near the Captain. Finding a fresh packet of cigarettes had been one of the few joyful moments of recent weeks. “So I changed the system again, and still it didn’t work. If anything, he just got worse.” She paused. “That was when I told Sajaki of my problems.”