Reynolds, Alastair: Redemption Ark

“I suppose we’d better make a start,” Clavain said.

They followed Antoinette into the huddle of tents. People were at work outside, putting up new tents and plumbing-in snakelike power cables from turtle-shaped generators. She led them into one enclosure, sealing the flap behind them. It was warmer inside, and drier, but this served only to make Clavain feel more damp and cold than he had a moment before.

Twenty years in a place like this, he thought. They’d be busy staying alive, yes, but what kind of a life was one of pure struggle for existence? The Jugglers might prove endlessly fascinating, awash with eternally old mysteries of cosmic provenance, or they might not wish to communicate with the humans at all. Although lines of rapport had been established between humans and Pattern Jugglers on the other Juggler worlds, it had sometimes taken decades of study before the key was found to unlock the aliens. Until then, they were little more than sluggish vegetative masses, evidencing the work of intelligence without in any way revealing it themselves. What if this turned out to be the first group of Jugglers that did not wish to drink human neural patterns? It would be a lonely and bleak place to stay, shunned by the very things one had imagined might make it tolerable. Staying with Remontoire, Khouri and Thorn, plunging into the intricate structure of the living neutron star, might begin to seem like the more attractive option.

Well, in twenty years they’d find out whether that had been the case.

Antoinette pushed a mug of green-coloured tea in front of him. “Drink up, Clavain.”

He sipped at it, wrinkling his nose against the miasma of pungent, briny fumes that hovered above the drink. “What if I’m drinking a Pattern Juggler?”

“Felka says you won’t be. She should know, I think—I gather she’s been itching to meet these bastards for quite a while, so she knows a thing or two about them.”

Clavain gave the tea another go. “Yes, that’s true, isn’t . . .”

But Felka had gone. She had been in the tent a moment ago, but now she wasn’t.

“Why does she want to meet them so badly?” Antoinette asked.

“Because of what she hopes they’ll give her,” Clavain said. “Once, when she lived on Mars, she was at the core of something very complex—a vast, living machine she had to keep alive with her own willpower and intellect. It was what gave her a reason to live. Then people—my people, as a matter of fact—took the machine away from her. She nearly died then, if she had ever truly been alive. And yet she didn’t. She made it back to something like normal life. But everything that has followed, everything that she has done since, has been a way to find something else that she can use and that will use her in the same way; something so intricate that she can’t understand all its secrets in a single intuitive flash, and something that, in its own way, might be able to exploit her as well.”

“The Jugglers.”

Still clasping the tea—and it wasn’t so bad, really, he noted—he said, “Yes, the Jugglers. Well, I hope she finds what she’s looking for, that’s all.”

Antoinette reached beneath the table and hefted something up from the floor. She placed it between them: a corroded metal cylinder covered in a lacy froth of calcified micro-organisms.

“This is the beacon. They found it yesterday, a mile down. There must have been a tsunami which washed it into the sea.”

He leaned over and examined the hunk of metal. It was squashed and dented, like an old rations tin that had been stepped on. “It could be Conjoiner,” he said. “But I’m not sure. There aren’t any markings which have survived.”

“I thought the code was Conjoiner?”

“It was: it’s a simple in-system transponder beacon. It’s not meant to be detected over much more than a few hundred million kilometres. But that doesn’t mean it was put here by Conjoiners. Ultras could have stolen it from one of our ships, perhaps. We’ll know a little more when we dismantle it, but that has to be done carefully.” He rapped the rough metal husk with his knuckles. “There is anti-matter in here, or it wouldn’t be transmitting. Not much, maybe, but enough to make a dent in this island if we don’t open it properly.”

“Rather you than me.”

“Clavain . . .”

He looked around; Felka had returned. She looked even wetter than when they had arrived. Her hair was glued to her face in lank ribbons, and the black fabric of her dress was tight against one side of her body. She should have been pale and shivering, by Clavain’s estimation. But she was flushed red, and she looked excited.

“Clavain,” she repeated.

He put down the tea. “What is it?”

“You have to come outside and see this.”

He stepped out of the tent. He had warmed up just enough to feel a sudden spike of cold as he did so, but something in Felka’s manner made him ignore it, just as he had long ago learned to selectively suppress pain or discomfort in the heat of battle. It did not matter for now; it could, like most things in life, be dealt with later, or not at all.

Felka was looking out to sea.

“What is it?” he asked again.

“Look. Do you see?” She stood by him and directed his gaze. “Look. Look hard, where the mist thins out.”

“I’m not sure if—”

“Now.”

And he did see it, if only fleetingly. The local wind direction must have changed since they had arrived in the tent, enough to push the fog around into a different configuration and allow brief openings that reached far out to sea. He saw the mosaic of sharp-edged rockpools, and beyond that the boat they had come in on, and beyond that a horizontal stroke of slate-grey water which turned fainter as his eye skidded toward the horizon, becoming the pale milky grey of the sky itself. And there, for an instant, was the upright spire of Nostalgia for Infinity, a tapering finger of slightly darker grey rising from just below the horizon line itself.

“It’s the ship,” Clavain said mildly, determined not to disappoint Felka.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s the ship. But you don’t understand. It’s more than that. It’s much, much more.”

Now he was beginning to feel slightly worried. “It is?”

“Yes. Because I’ve seen it before.”

“Before?”

“Long before we ever came here, I saw it.” She turned to him, peeling hair from her eyes, squinting against the sting of the spray. “It was the Wolf, Clavain. It showed me this view when Skade coupled us together. At the time I didn’t know what to make of it. But now I understand. It wasn’t really the Wolf at all. It was Galiana, getting through to me even though the Wolf thought it was in control.”

Clavain knew what had happened aboard Skade’s ship while Felka was her hostage. He had been told about the experiments, and the times when Felka had glimpsed the Wolf’s mind. But she had never mentioned this before.

“It must be a coincidence,” he said. “Even if you did get a message from Galiana, how could she have known what was going to happen here?”

“I don’t know, but there must have been a way. Information has already reached the past, or none of this would have happened. All we know now is that somehow, our memories of this place—whether they’re yours or mine— will reach the past . More than that, they will reach Galiana.” Felka leaned down and touched the rock beneath her. “Somehow this is the crux, Clavain. We haven’t just stumbled on this place. We’ve been led here by Galiana because she knows that it matters that we find it.”

Clavain thought back to the beacon he had just been shown. “If she had been here . . .”