‘Come on then, svinoi. Finish me off. I’ve had enough. I don’t want to see any more. Get it over with.’
A hatch opened somewhere down the ship’s conic flank, briefly aglow with orange interior lighting. She half expected some nasty and dimly remembered weapon to cruise out; perhaps something she had knocked together in a spasm of drunken creativity.
Instead a shuttle emerged, and powered slowly towards her.
The way Pascale told it to Khouri, the neutron star was in fact nothing of the sort. Or at least it had been once, or would have been — had it not been for interference by some third party Pascale declined to talk about in any great detail. But the gist was simple. They had converted the neutron star into a giant, blindingly fast computer — one that, in some bizarre manner, was able to communicate with its own past and future selves.
‘What am I doing here?’ Khouri asked, as they descended the stairway. ‘No, better question: what are we doing here? And how do you know so much more than me all of a sudden?’
‘I told you; I was in the matrix for longer.’ Pascale paused on one of the steps. ‘Listen, Khouri — you might not like what I’m about to tell you. Namely, that you’re dead — for now, at least.’
Khouri was less surprised by this than she had expected. It seemed almost predictable.
‘We died in the gravitational tides,’ Pascale said matter-of-factly. ‘We got too close to Hades, and the tides pulled us apart. It wasn’t very pleasant, either — but most of your memories of it were never captured, so you don’t recall them now.’
‘Captured?’
‘According to all the normal laws, we should have been crushed to atoms. And in a sense we were. But the information which described us was preserved in the flow of gravitons between what remained of us and Hades. The force that killed us also recorded us, transmitted that information to the crust…’
‘Right,’ Khouri said slowly, prepared to take this as given for the time being. ‘And once we were transmitted into the crust?’
‘We were — um — simulated back to life. Of course, computation in the crust happens much faster than realtime — which is why I’ve spent several decades of subjective time in it.’
She sounded almost apologetic.
‘I don’t remember spending several decades anywhere.’
‘That’s because you didn’t. You were brought to life, but you didn’t want to stay here. You don’t remember any of that; you chose not to, in fact. There was nothing to keep you here.’
‘Implying there was something to keep you here?’
‘Oh yes,’ Pascale said, with wonder. ‘Oh yes. We’ll come to that.’
The stairwell reached its foot now, leading into a lanterned corridor, bright with randomly strewn fairytale lights. The walls, when she looked at them, were alive with the same computational shimmer she had seen on the surface. An impression of intense busyness; of unguessably complex machine algebra constantly churning just beyond her reach.
‘What am I?’ Khouri said. ‘What are you? You said I was dead. I don’t feel it. And I don’t feel like I’m being simulated in any matrix. I was out on the surface, wasn’t I?’
‘You’re flesh and blood,’ Pascale said. ‘You died, and you were recreated. Your body was reconstructed from the chemical elements already present in the matrix’s outer crust, and then you were reanimated, and quickened to consciousness. The suit you’re wearing — that came from the matrix as well.’
‘You mean someone wearing a suit got close enough to be killed by the tides?’
‘No…’ Pascale said carefully. ‘No; there’s another way into the matrix. A much easier way — or at least it once was.’
‘I should still be dead. Nothing can live on a neutron star. Or in it, for that matter.’
‘I told you; it isn’t one.’ And then she explained how it was possible; how the matrix itself was generating a pocket of tolerable gravity in which she could live; how it was achieved by the circulation deeper in the crust of awesome quantities of degenerate matter; perhaps as a computational by-product; perhaps not. But like a diverging lens, the flow focused gravity away from her, while equally ferocious forces kept the walls from crushing in at only fractionally less than the speed of light.
‘What about you?’
‘I’m not like you,’ Pascale said. ‘This body I’m wearing — that’s all it is, something to puppet; something in which to meet you. It’s formed from the same nuclear material as the crust. The neutrons are bound together by strange quarks, so I don’t fly apart under my own quantum pressure.’ She touched her forehead. ‘But I’m not doing any thinking. That’s going on all around you, in the matrix itself. You’ll excuse me — and this is going to sound terribly rude — but I’d find it mind-numbingly boring if I was forced into doing nothing except talk to you. As I said, our computational rates are highly divergent. You’re not offended, are you? I mean, it’s nothing personal, I hope you understand.’
‘Forget it,’ Khouri said. ‘I’m sure I’d feel the same.’
The corridor widened out now, into what seemed to be a well-appointed scientific study, from any time in the last five or six centuries. The room’s predominant colour was brown, the brown of age: on the wooden shelves which ran along its walls, on the browning spines of the ancient paper books arrayed along those shelves, the lustrous brown of the mahogany desk, and the golden-brown metal of the antique scientific tools placed around the desk’s periphery for effect. Wooden cabinets buttressed the walls which did not carry shelves, and in them hung yellowing bones; alien bones which at first glance might be mistaken for the fossils of dinosaurs or large, extinct flightless birds, provided one did not pay undue attention to the capaciousness of the alien skull, the roominess of the mind it had surely once entrapped.
There were examples of modern apparatus too: scanning devices, advanced cutting instruments, racks of eidetics and holographic storage wafers. A servitor of intermediate modernity waited inertly in one corner, head slightly bowed, like a trusty retainer taking a well-earned snooze while still on his feet.
In one wall, slatted windows overlooked an arid, windswept terrain of mesas and precarious rock formations, bathed in the reddish light of a setting sun, already disappearing behind the chaotic horizon.
And at the desk — rising from it as they entered the room, as if disturbed from concentration — was Sylveste.
She looked into his eyes — human eyes — for the first time, in what passed for the flesh.
For a moment he looked annoyed by their intrusion, but his expression softened until half a smile played across his features. ‘I’m glad you took the time to visit us,’ he said. ‘And I hope Pascale has explained all that you asked of her.’
‘Most of it,’ Khouri said, stepping further into the study, marvelling at the fastidiousness of its recreation. It was as good as any simulation she had ever experienced. Yet — and the thought was as impressive as it was frightening — every single object in this room was moulded from nuclear matter, at densities so large that, ordinarily, the smallest paperweight on his desk would have exerted a fatal gravitational pull, even from halfway across the room. ‘But not all of it. How did you get here?’
‘Pascale probably mentioned that there was another way into the matrix.’ He offered her the palms of his hands. ‘I found it, that’s all. Passed through it.’
‘And what happened to your…’
‘My real self?’ The smile had a quality of self-amusement now, as if he were enjoying some private joke too subtle to share. ‘I doubt that he survived. And frankly, it doesn’t really concern me. I’m the real me now. I’m all that I ever was.’
‘What happened in Cerberus?’
‘That’s a very long story, Khouri.’
But he told her anyway. How he had travelled into the world; how Sajaki’s suit had turned out to be an empty shell; how that realisation had done nothing but strengthen his resolve to push on further, and what, finally, he had fo
und, in the final chamber. How he had passed into the matrix — at which point, his memories diverged from his other self. But when he told her he was sure that his other self was dead, he did so with such conviction that Khouri wondered if there was not another way of knowing; if some other, less tangible bond had linked them, right until the end.
There were things even Sylveste did not really understand; that much she sensed. He had not achieved godhead — or at least, not for more than an instant, when he bathed in the portal. Had that been a choice he had made subsequently? she wondered. If the matrix was simulating him; and if the matrix was essentially infinite in its computational capacity… what limits had been imposed on him, other than those he had consciously selected?
What she learnt was this: Carine Lefevre had been kept alive by part of the Shroud, but there had been nothing accidental about it.
‘It’s as if there were two factions,’ Sylveste said, toying with one of the brass microscopes on his desk, angling its little mirror this way and that, as if trying to catch the last rays of the setting sun. ‘One that wanted to use me to find out if the Inhibitors were still around, still capable of posing a threat to the Shrouders. And the other faction, which I don’t think cared for humanity any more than the first. But they were more cautious. They thought there had to be a better way, other than goading the Inhibitor device to see if it still generated a response.’
‘But what happens to us now? Who actually won? Was it Sun Stealer or the Mademoiselle?’
‘Neither,’ Sylveste said, placing the microscope back down again, its velvet base softly bumping against the desk. ‘At least, that’s my instinctual feeling. I think we — I — came close to triggering the device, close to giving it the stimulus it needed to alert the remaining devices and begin the war against humanity.’ He laughed. ‘Calling it a war implied it might have been a two-sided thing. But I don’t think it would have been like that at all.’
‘But you don’t think it got that far?’
‘I hope and I pray, that’s all.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course, I could be wrong. I used to say I was never wrong about anything, but that’s one lesson I have learnt.’
‘And what about the Amarantin, the Shrouders?’
‘Only time will tell.’
‘That’s all?’
‘I don’t have all the answers, Khouri.’ He looked around the room, as if appraising the volumes on the shelves, reassuring himself that they were still present. ‘Not even here.’
‘It’s time to go,’ Pascale said, suddenly. She had appeared at her husband’s side with a glass of something clear; vodka, maybe. She placed it on the desk, next to a polished skull the colour of parchment.
‘Where?’
‘Back into space, Khouri. Isn’t that what you want? You surely don’t want to spend the rest of eternity here.’
‘There’s nowhere to go,’ Khouri said. ‘You should know that, Pascale. The ship was against us; the spider-room destroyed; Ilia killed —’
‘She made it, Khouri. She wasn’t killed when the shuttle was destroyed.’
So she had managed to get into a suit — but what good did that do her? Khouri was about to question Pascale further, when she realised that whatever the woman told her was very likely to be true, no matter how unbelievable it seemed — and no matter how useless the truth, no matter how little difference it could possibly make.
‘What are you two going to do?’
Sylveste reached for the vodka glass and took a discreet sip. ‘Haven’t you guessed yet? This room isn’t just for your benefit. We inhabit it as well, except that we inhabit a simulated version in the matrix. And not just this room, but the rest of the base; just as it always was — except now we have it all to ourselves.’
‘Is that all?’
‘No… not quite.’
And then Pascale moved to his side and he put an arm around her waist and the two of them turned towards the slatted window; towards the red-drenched alien sunset, the arid landscape of Resurgam stretching away, lifeless.
And then it changed.
It began at the horizon; a sweeping wave of transformation which raced towards them with the speed of an oncoming day. Clouds burst into the sky, vast as empires; now the sky was bluer, even though the sun was still sinking towards dusk. And the landscape was no longer arid, but erupting into tumultuous greenery, a verdant tidal wave. She could see lakes, and trees, alien trees, and now roads, winding between egglike houses, clustered into hamlets and, on the horizon, a larger community, rising towards a single slender spire. She stared into the distance, and stared, struck dumb by the immensity of what she was seeing, which was an entire world returned to life, and — perhaps it was a trick of the eye; she would never know — she thought she saw them moving between the houses, moving with the speed of birds, but never leaving the ground; never reaching the air.
‘Everything that they ever were,’ Pascale said, ‘or most of it, at any rate, is stored in the matrix. This isn’t some archaeological reconstruction, Khouri. This is Resurgam, as they inhabit it now. Brought into being by sheer force of will, by those who survived. It’s a whole world, down to the smallest detail.’
Khouri looked around the room, and now she understood. ‘And you’re going to study it, aren’t you?’
‘Not just study it,’ Sylveste said, draining a little more of his vodka. ‘But live in it. Until it bores us, which — I suspect — won’t be any time now.’
And then she left them, in their study, to resume whatever deep and meaningful conversation they had put in abeyance while they entertained her.
She finished climbing the stairwell, stepping once more onto the surface of Hades. The crust was still aglow with red fire, still alive with computation. Now that she had been here for long enough to attune her senses, she realised that, all along, the crust had been drumming beneath her feet, as if a titanic engine were roaring in a basement. That, she supposed, was not far from the truth. It was an engine of simulation.
She thought of Sylveste and Pascale, commencing another day’s exploration of their fabulous new world. In the time since she had left them, years might have passed for them. That seemed to matter very little. She had the suspicion that they would only choose death when all else had ceased to hold their fascination. Which, as Sylveste had said, was not going to happen any time soon.
She turned on the suit communicator.
‘Ilia… can you hear me? Shit; this is stupid, but they said you might still be alive.’
There was nothing but static. Hopes crushed, she looked around at the searing plain and wondered what she was meant to do next.
Then: ‘Khouri, is that you? What business have you got still being alive?’
There was something very odd about her voice. It kept speeding up and slowing down, like she was drunk, but too ominously regular for that.
‘I could ask you the same thing. Last thing I remember is the shuttle going belly-up. You telling me you’re still out there, drifting?’
‘Better than that,’ Volyova said, voice whooshing up and down the spectrum. ‘I’m aboard a shuttle; do you hear that? I’m aboard a shuttle.’
‘How the —’
‘The ship sent it. The Infinity.’ For once, Volyova sounded breathless with excitement; as if this was something she had been desperately anxious to tell someone. ‘I thought it was going to kill me. That’s all I was waiting for; that final attack. But it didn’t come. Instead, the ship sent out a shuttle for me.’
‘This doesn’t make any sense. Sun Stealer should still be running it; should still be trying to finish us off…’
‘No,’ Volyova said, still with the same tone of childish delight, ‘no; it makes perfect sense — provided what I did worked, which I think it must have —’
‘What did you do, Ilia?’
‘I — um — let the Captain warm.’
‘You did what?’
‘Yes; it was rather a terminal approach to the problem. But I thought if
one parasite was trying to gain control of the ship, the surest way to fight it was by unleashing an even more potent one.’ Volyova paused, as if awaiting Khouri’s confirmation that this had indeed been a sensible thing to do. When none came, she continued, ‘This was barely a day ago — do you know what that means? The plague must have transformed a substantial mass of the ship in only a few hours! The speed of the transformation must have been incredible; centimetres a second!’
‘Are you sure it was wise?’
‘Khouri, it’s probably the least wise thing I’ve ever done in my life. But it does seem to have worked. At the very least, we’ve swapped one megalomaniac for another — but this one doesn’t seem quite so dedicated to our destruction.’
‘I guess that’s a step in the right direction. Where are you now? Have you been back aboard yet?’
‘Hardly. No, I’ve spent the last few hours searching for you. Where the hell are you, Khouri? I can’t seem to get a meaningful fix on your location.’
‘You don’t really want to know.’
‘Well, we’ll see. But I want you aboard this ship as soon as possible. I’m not going back into the lighthugger alone, in case you had any doubts. I don’t think it’s going to look quite the way we remembered it. You — uh — can reach me, can’t you?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
Khouri did what she had been told she should do, when she wanted to leave the surface of Hades. It made very little sense, but Pascale had been quite insistent — she had said it was a message that the matrix would understand; one that would cause it to project its bubble of lowfield gravity into space; a bottle in which she could ride to safety.
She spread arms wide, as if she had wings; as if she could fly.
The red ground — fluctuating, shimmering as ever — dropped smoothly away.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Alastair Preston Reynolds (born in 1966 in Barry, Wales) is a British science fiction author. He specialises in dark hard science fiction and space opera. He spent his early years in Cornwall, moved back to Wales before going to Newcastle, where he read physics and astronomy. Afterwards, he earned a PhD from St. Andrews, Scotland. In 1991, he moved to Noordwijk in the Netherlands where he met his wife Josette (who is from France). There, he worked for the European Space Research and Technology Centre, part of the European Space Agency, until 2004 when he left to pursue writing full time. He returned to Wales in 2008 and lives near Cardiff.