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

“Good. I’m truly sorry for Teterev. But you don’t need Lenka. Give her back control of her suit, and we’ll leave you alone.”

“You could make that promise to me. But you did not come here alone.”

“The Captain…we’ll take care of him.”

SEE? THINKING OF you even then .

Always in our hearts and minds .

“I LISTENED TO your babble. The theories of your Captain. He craves his fortune. He will think he can turn the fact of me to profit. He will try to sell the knowledge of my location.”

“He doesn’t even know what you are!”

“But he will find out. He will ask what became of you, what became of Lenka. Your silence will count for nothing. He will return. He will send machines into me. And soon more will come, in other ships, and I am bound to fail. When the machines touch your civilisation, they will scorch you into history. They have done it a thousand times, with a thousand cultures. They will leave dust and ruins and silence, and you will not be the last.”

“Lev,” I said quietly.

There was a silence. I wondered if the thing before me would speak again. Perhaps I had shut the door of communication between us with that one invocation.

But the voice asked: “What do you know of Lev?”

“Your son,” I answered. “The son of part of you, the son of Teterev. You had to leave him on the orbiting ship. You didn’t mean to, but it must have been the only way. You loved him. You wanted very badly to get a message to him, to have him help you. That’s why you came as far as you did. But you failed.”

“And Lev is gone.”

I nodded. “But not in the way you think. Someone got to that ship before us—cleaned it out. Stripped it of engines, weps, crew. The frozen.

But they’d have been valuable to someone. If Lev was on that ship, he’d have made it back to one of the settled worlds by now. And we can find him. The Mendicants trade in the frozen, and we have traded with the Mendicants, in many systems. There are channels, lines of enquiry. The name of your ship…”

“What would it be to you?

“Give us that name. Let us find Lev. I’ll return. I promise you that much.”

“No one ever promises to return , Nidra. They promise to stay away.”

“The name of the ship,” I said again.

She told me.

SO MANY NAMES, so many ships. Numberless. Names too strange to put into language, at least no language that would fit into our heads. Names like clouds. Names like forests. Names like ever-unfolding mathematical structures—names that begat themselves, in dreams of recursion. Names that split the world in two. Names that would drive a nail through your sanity .

But she told me some of them, as best as she could .

Lovely names. Names of such beauty and terror they made me weep. The hopes and fears of the brave and the lost. The best and the worst of all of us. All wayfarers, all travellers .

I asked her to try and remember the last of them .

She did .

Tell you?

Not a chance, Captain. You don’t get to know everything .

I STEPPED BACK from his suited-but-immobile form, admiring my handiwork. He really did look sculptural, frozen into that oddly dignified posture, with his arms coming together across his chest, one hand touching the cuff of the other.

“I suppose you could say that we came to an understanding, Teterev and I,” I said. “Or what Teterev had become. Partly it was fear, I think, that I’d use the hot-dust. Did I come close? Yes, definitely. Not much to lose at that point. I might have been able to work the ship without you, but certainly not without Lenka. If she didn’t survive, there wasn’t much point in me surviving either. But Lenka was allowed to leave, and so was I. It was hard work, getting Lenka back here. But she’s begun to regain some suit function now, and I don’t think either of us will have any trouble returning to the lander.”

The Captain tried to speak. It was hard, with the noose tight around his throat. He could breathe, but anything more was an effort.

He rasped out three words that might have been “fuck you, Nidra”. But I could not be sure.

“I made a commitment to Teterev,” I carried on. “Firstly, that we’d make sure you were not a problem. Secondly, that I’d do what I could to find Lev. If that’s decades, longer, so be it. It’s something to live for, anyway. A purpose. We all need a purpose, don’t we?”

He attempted another set of syllables.

“Here’s yours,” I said. “Your purpose is to die here. It will happen. How fast it happens, is in your hands. Quite literally. Those pieces of debris I set around you are curved mirrors. Now, it’s not an exact science. But when the sun climbs, some of them will concentrate the sun’s light on the snow and ice on which you are standing. It will begin to melt. The tension on your noose will increase.” I paused, allowing that part to sink in, if he had not already deduced matters for himself. “In any case, the ice will melt eventually, with the change of seasons. It’s only permafrost deeper in the cave mouth. But you’ll be dead by then. It’ll be a nasty, slow death, though. Hypothermia, frostbite, slow choking—take your pick. But you can speed it up, if you like. Turn up your suit’s heat, and you can stay as warm as you like. The downside is that the heat will spill away from your suit and melt the ice even quicker. You’ll be hanging by your neck within hours, with the entire weight of your suit trying to rip your skull from your spine. At that point, overwhelmed by terror and pain, you might try and turn down the thermal regulation again. But by then you might not be able to move your fingers. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. There are many paths to the one goal. All the scenarios end with your corpse hanging from the mouth of the cave. Swinging there until the ice returns. You’ll make an effective deterrent, wouldn’t you say? A tolerable invitation to keep away?”

Rasht tried to say something. But Lenka, who had hobbled closer, placed a finger on his lips.

“Enough,” she whispered. “Save your breath.”

“Where is the monkey?” I asked.

“Tethered where we left it, over by the wreck. Shall we leave it here?”

“No. We’ll bring it with us, and we’ll take good care of it. I promised him that much. I try not to break my promises. Any of them.”

“Then we’re done here,” Lenka said.

“I think we are.”

We turned our backs on our former Captain and commenced the slow walk back to the lander. We would stop at the wreck on our way, collect the monkey, and what we could of Teterev’s belongings. Then we would be off Holda, out of this system, and that was a good thought.

Even if I knew I had to return.

“When we we get back to the ship, I want to give it a new name.”

I thought about that for a moment. “That’s a good idea. A clean break. I have some suggestions.”

“I’d be glad to hear them,” Lenka said.

THE BOY wants my eye again. He’s seen me using it, setting it down on the mattress where I squat. I am not sure why he covets it so badly.

“Sorry,” I say. “I need this. Without it I can’t work, and if I can’t work, my daughter and I go hungry.”

He is too small to understand my words, but the message gets through anyway. I smile as he sprints away, pausing only to glance over his shoulder. Nothing would prevent the boy creeping into the shipping container and taking the eye while I am working. But he has not done that yet. Something in his face makes me think he can be trusted.