Alastair Reynolds - Beyond the Aquila Rift - The Best of Alastair Reynolds

Lenka’s own breathing was now as heavy as my own. I caught another glimpse of her face, eyes wide with apprehension. “I know he means a lot to you, Captain…”

“Is there something wrong with your suits?” I asked.

“Yes,” Lenka said. “Mine, anyway. Losing locomotive assist. Same as happened to you.”

“I’m not sure it’s the same thing. I fell in the pool, you didn’t. Can you still move?”

Lenka lifted up an arm, clenched and unclenched her hand. “For the time being. If it gets too bad, I can always go full manual.” Then she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and reopened them. “All right, Captain .” This with a particular sarcastic emphasis. “I’ll check out the middle tunnel, if it’ll help. I’ll go thirty metres, no more, and turn around. You can check out the one on your right, if you think Kanto’s gone that way. Nidra can wait here, just in case Kanto’s gone ahead of us and turns back.”

I did not like the idea of spending ten more seconds in this place, let alone the time it would take to inspect the tunnels. But Lenka’s suggestion made the best of a bad situation. It would appease the Captain and not delay us more than a few minutes.

“All right,” I agreed. “I’ll wait here. But don’t count on me catching Kanto if he comes back.”

“Stay where you are, my dear,” Rasht said, addressing the monkey wherever it might be. “We are coming.”

Lenka and Rasht disappeared into their respective tunnels, their suits moving with visible sluggishness. Lenka, whose suit was more lightly armoured, would find it easier to cope than Rasht. I speculated to myself that the silver contamination was indeed having some effect, but that my exposure to the pond’s microorganisms had provided a barriering layer, a kind of inocculation. It was not much of a theory, but I had nothing better to offer.

I counted a minute, then two.

Then heard: “Nidra.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I hear you, Lenka. Have you found the monkey?”

There was a silence that ate centuries. My own fear was now as sharp and clean and precise as a surgical instrument. I could feel every cruel edge of it, cutting me open from inside.

“Help me.”

YOU CAME BACK then. You’d found your stupid fucking monkey. You were cradling it, holding it to you like it was the most precious thing in your universe .

Actually I do the monkey a disservice .

As stupid as he was, Kanto was innocent in all this. I thought he was dead to begin with, but then I realised that it was trembling, caught in a state of infant terror, clinging to the fixed certainty of you while he shivered in its armour .

I made out his close-set yellow eyes, wide and uncomprehending .

I loathed your fucking monkey. But there was nothing that deserved that sort of terror .

Do you remember how our conversation played out? I told you that Lenka was in trouble. Your loyal crewmember, good, dependable Lenka. Always there for you. Always there for the Lachrimosa. No matter what had happened until that point, there was now only one imperative. We had to save her. This is what Ultras do. When one of us falls, we reach. We’re better than people think .

But not you .

The fear had finally worked its way into you. I was wrong about greed being stronger. Or rather, there are degrees. Greed trumps fear, but then a deeper fear trumps greed all over again .

I pleaded with you .

But you would not answer her call. You left with Kanto, hobbling your way back to safety .

You left me to find Lenka .

I DID NOT have to go much further down the tunnel and reached the thing blocking further progress. It had trapped Lenka, but she was not yet fully part of it. Teterev had come earlier—many years ago—so her degree of intregration was much more pronounced. I could judge this in a glance, even before I had any deeper understanding of what I had found. I knew that Lenka would succumb to Teterev’s fate, and that if I remained in this place I would eventually join them.

“Come closer, Nidra,” a voice said.

I stepped nearer, hardly daring to bring the full blaze of my helmet light to bear on the half-sensed obstruction ahead of me.

“I’ve come for Lenka. Whatever you are, whatever’s happened to you, let her go.”

“We’ll speak of Lenka.” The voice was loud, booming across the air between us. “But do come closer.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Because you are frightened?”

“Yes.”

“Then I am very glad to hear it. Fear is the point of this place. Fear is the last and best thing that we have.”

“We?”

“My predecessors and I. Those who came before me, the wayfarers and the lost. We’ve been coming for a very long time. Century after century, across hundreds of thousands of years. Unthinkable ages of galactic time. Drawn to this one place, and repelled by it—as you nearly were.”

“I wish we had been.”

“And usually the fear is sufficient. They turn back before they get this deep, as you nearly did. As you should have done. But you were braver than most. I’m sorry that your courage carried you as far as it did.”

“It wasn’t courage.” But then I added: “How do you know my name?”

“I listened to your language, from the moment you entered me. You are very noisy! You gibber and shriek and make no sense whatsoever.”

“Are you Teterev?”

“That is not easily answered. I remember Teterev, and I feel her distinctiveness quite strongly. Sometimes I speak through her, sometimes she speaks through us. We have all enjoyed what Teterev has brought to us.”

I had never met Teterev, never seen an image of her, but there were only two human figures before me and one of them was Lenka, jammed into immobility, strands of silver beginning to wrap and bind her suit as if in the early stages of mummification. The strands extended back to the larger form of which Teterev was only an embellishment.

She must still have been wearing her suit when she was trapped and bound. Traces of the suit remained, but much of it had been picked off her, detached or dissolved or remade into the larger mass. Her helmet, similar in design to the one we had seen in the wreck, had fissured in two, with its halves framing her head.

I thought of flytrap mouthparts, Teterev’s head an insect. Her face was stony and unmoving, her eyes blank surfaces, but there was no hint of ageing or decay. Her skin had the pearly shimmer of the figures we had seen in the second chamber. She had become—or was becoming—something other than flesh.

But apart from Teterev—and Lenka, if you included her—none of the other forms were human. The blockage was an assemblage of fused shapes, creature after creature absorbed into a sort of interlocking stone puzzle, a jigsaw of jumbled anatomies and half-implied life-support technologies. Two or three of the creatures were loosely humanoid, in so far as their forms could be discerned. But it was hard to gauge where their suits and life-support mechanisms ended and their alien anatomies commenced. Vines and tendrils of silver smothered them from head to foot, binding them into the older layers of the mass. Beyond these recognisable forms lay the evidence of many stranger anatomies and technologies.

“I’ve heard of a plague,” I said, making my way to Lenka. “They say it’s all just rumour, but I don’t know. Is this what happened to you?”

“There are a million plagues, some worse than others. Some much worse.” There was an edge of playfulness in the voice, taking droll amusement in my ignorance. “No: what you see here is deliberate, done for our mutual benefit. Haphazard, yes, but organised for a purpose. Think of it as a form of defense.”