Alastiar Reynolds

It was the matter of Clavain. He brought everyone out of retirement.
Remontoire felt the sudden presence of Skade as she entered the privy chamber. She had emerged on a ring-shaped balcony halfway up the side of the spherical room. The chamber was opaque to all neural transmissions; those within it could communicate freely, but they were totally isolated from the other minds in the Mother Nest. It enabled the Closed Council to meet in session and communicate more freely than through the usual restricted neural channels.
Remontoire shaped a thought and assigned it high priority, so that it immediately cut across the general wash of gossip and gained everyone’s attention. Does Clavain know about this meeting

?Skade snapped around to address him. note 75
Remontoire shrugged. Isn’t it him we’ve come to talk about, behind his back ?
Skade smiled sweetly. note 76
Remontoire stood up, now that everyone was looking at him or directing some sort of sensory apparatus in his direction. Who said anything about a problem, Skade? What I’m objecting to is the hidden agenda behind this meeting .
note 77
Remontoire looked around. There was no sign of Felka, which did not surprise him in the slightest. She had every right to be present, but he doubted that she would have been on Skade’s list of invitees.
I am his friend, I admit that. He’s saved my life enough times, but even if he hadn’t… well, Clavain and I have been through more than enough together. If that means I don’t have an objective view on the matter, so be it. But I’ll tell you something. Remontoire glanced around the room, nodding as he made eye or sensor contact. All of you — or those of you who need reminding — no matter what Skade would like to make you think, Clavain owes us nothing. Without him, none of us would be here. He’s been as important to us as Galiana, and I don’t say that lightly. I knew her before anyone in this room .Skade nodded. note 78
More than what, Skade?
note 79
Remontoire realised that, like it or not, he had become Clavain’s advocate. He felt a mild contempt for the other Council members. He knew that many of them owed their lives to Clavain, and would have admitted it under other circumstances. But Skade had them cowed.
It was down to him to speak up for his friend. Someone has to patrol the border .
note 80
Disloyalty? No one’s shown more loyalty to the Conjoined faction than Nevil Clavain. Maybe some of you need to brush up on your history.
One of the detached heads spidered on to a seat-back. note 81
Across the auditorium a brain lit up, its lights pulsing in synchronisation with its voice patterns. note 82
The brain paused while fluid pumps throbbed and gurgled. The knotted mass of neural tissue swelled and contracted for several lethargic cycles, like some horrible lump of dough. note 83
Oh, shut up , Remontoire interjected. If you’re anything to go by, I’m not surprised Clavain has second thoughts …note 84 the brain spluttered.
But Remontoire detected a suppressed wave of amusement at his barb. The swollen brain was clearly not as universally respected as it liked to imagine. Sensing his moment, Remontoire leant forward, hands clasped tight around the railings of the balcony. What is this about, Skade? Why now, after all the years when the Closed Council has managed without him ?
note 85
I mean, what exactly has precipitated this move? Something’s afoot, isn’t it?
Skade’s crest blushed maroon. Her jaw was clenched rigid. She stepped back and arched her spine like a cornered cat.
Remontoire pressed on. First we have a renewal of the starship-building programme, a century after we stopped building them for reasons so secret even the Closed Council isn’t allowed to know them. Then we have a prototype crammed with hidden machinery of unknown origin and function, the nature of which again can’t be revealed to the Closed Council. Then there’s a fleet of similar ships being put together in a comet not far from here — but again, that’s as much as we’re allowed to know. Of course, I’m sure the Inner Sanctum might have something to say on the matter …note 86
Why — because I might be in danger of harmless speculation?
Another Conjoiner, a man with a crest a little like Skade’s, stood up tentatively. Remontoire knew the man well, and was certain that he was not a member of the Inner Sanctum.
note 87
The man looked intently at Skade before continuing. note 88
Remontoire might have been imagining it, but he thought he saw a visible change of colour sweep through Skade’s crest at the mere mention of the word. What about Exordium ? he asked.
The man turned to Remontoire. note 89
The codeword meant something to Remontoire; he had definitely heard it before. But if it referred to experiments Galiana had performed on Mars, it was something that had happened more than four hundred years earlier. It would require delicate mnemonic archaeology to dig through the strata of overlying memories, especially if the subject itself was shrouded in secrecy.
It seemed simpler to ask. What was Exordium ?
I’ll tell you what it was, Remontoire.‘
The sound of a real human voice cutting through the chamber’s silence was as shocking as a scream.
Remontoire followed the sound until he saw the speaker, sitting on her own near one of the entry points. It was Felka; she must have arrived since the session had commenced.
Skade slammed a furious thought into his head. note 90
‘I did,’ Remontoire said mildly, speaking aloud for Felka’s benefit, ‘on the assumption that you didn’t seem very likely to, and since the matter under discussion happened to be Clavain… it seemed the right thing to do.’
‘It was,’ Felka said. Remontoire saw something move in her hand and realised that she had brought a mouse into the privy chamber. ‘Wasn’t it, Skade?’
Skade sneered. note 91
‘But if you were to hear my thoughts, you’d probably all go mad,’ Felka said. The way she smiled was all the more chilling, Remontoire thought, because what she said was probably true. ‘So rather than risk that…’ She looked down, the mouse chasing its tail around her hand.
note 92
‘But I do, Skade. If I wasn’t recognised as a Closed Council member, the privy chamber wouldn’t have admitted me. And if I wasn’t a Closed Council member, I’d hardly be in a position to talk about Exordium, would I?’
The man who had first mentioned the codeword spoke aloud, his voice high and trembling. ‘So my guess was correct, was it, Skade?’
note 93
‘Then I can say what I like, can’t I, and none of it will matter. Exordium was an experiment, Remontoire, an attempt to achieve unification between consciousness and quantum superposition. It happened on Mars; you can verify that much for yourself. But Galiana got far more than she bargained for. She curtailed the experiments, frightened at what she had invoked. And that should have been the end of it.’ Felka looked directly at Skade, tauntingly. ‘But it wasn’t, was it? The experiments were begun again, about a century ago. It was an Exordium message that made us stop making ships.’
‘A message?’ Remontoire said, perplexed.
‘From the future,’ Felka said, as if this should have been obvious from the start.
‘You’re not serious.’
‘I’m perfectly serious, Remontoire. I should know — I took part in one of the experiments.’
Skade’s thoughts scythed across the room. note 94
Felka continued to speak calmly. She was, Remontoire thought, the only one in the room who was unfazed by Skade, including himself. Felka’s head already held worse horrors than Skade could imagine. ‘But we can’t discuss one without discussing the other, Skade. The experiments have continued, haven’t they? And they have something to do with what’s happening now. The Inner Sanctum’s learned something, and they’d rather the rest of us didn’t know anything about it.’
Skade clenched her jaw again. note 95
‘What kind of crisis?’ asked Felka.
note 96
Felka nodded sagely and pushed a strand of lank black hair from her eyes. ‘And Clavain’s role in all this — where does he come in?’
Skade’s pain was almost tangible. Her thoughts arrived in clipped packets, as if, between her utterances, she was waiting for a silent speaker to offer her guidance. note 97
‘What kind of assistance did you have in mind, exactly?’ Felka persisted.
A tiny vein twitched in Skade’s brow. Jarring colour waves chased each other along her crest, like the patterns in a dragonfly’s wing. note 98
‘And these “objects”,’ Felka said. ‘They wouldn’t by any chance be weapons, would they?’

The Inquisitor said farewell to the driver who had brought her to Solnhofen. She had slept for five or six hours clean through on the drive, offering the driver ample opportunity to rifle her belongings or strand her in the middle of nowhere. But everything was intact, including her gun. The driver had even left her with the newspaper clipping, the one about Thorn.

Solnhofen itself was every bit as miserable and squalid as she had suspected it would be. She only had to wander around the centre for a few minutes before she found what passed for the settlement’s heart: an apron of ground surrounded by two slovenly-looking hostels, a couple of drab administrative structures and a motley assortment of drinking establishments. Looming beyond the centre were the hulking repair sheds that were Solnhofen’s reason for existence. Far to the north, vast terraforming machines worked to speed the conversion of Resurgam’s atmosphere into a fully human-breathable form. These atmospheric refineries had functioned perfectly for a few decades, but now they were becoming old and unreliable. Keeping them working was a major drain on the planet’s centrally managed economy. Communities like Solnhofen made a precarious living from servicing and crewing the terraforming rigs, but the work was hard and unforgiving, and required — demanded — a certain breed of worker.
The Inquisitor remembered that as she stepped into the hostel. She had expected it to be quiet at this time of day, but when she shoved open the door it was like stepping into a party that had only just passed its peak. There was music and shouting and laughter, hard, boisterous laughter that reminded her of barracks rooms on Sky’s Edge. A few drinkers had already passed out, huddled over their mugs like pupils guarding homework. The air was clotted with chemicals that made her eyes sting. She clenched her teeth against the noise and swore softly. Trust Four to pick a dump like this. She remembered the first time they had met. It had been in a bar in a carousel orbiting Yellowstone, probably the worst dive she had ever been in. Four had many talents, but selecting salubrious meeting places was not one of them.
Fortunately no one had noticed the Inquisitor’s arrival. She pushed past some semi-comatose bodies to what passed for the bar: a hole punched through one wall, ragged brickwork at the edges. A surly woman pushed drinks through like prison rations, snatching back money and spent glasses with almost indecent haste.
‘Give me a coffee,’ the Inquisitor said.
‘There isn’t any coffee.’
‘Then give me the nearest fucking equivalent.’
‘You shouldn’t speak like that.’
‘I’ll speak any fucking way I want to. Especially until I get a coffee.’ She leant on the plastic lip of the serving hatch. ‘You can get me one, can’t you? I mean, it’s not like I’m asking for the world.’
‘You government?’
‘No, just thirsty. And a tiny bit irritable. It’s morning, you see, and I really don’t do mornings.’
A hand landed on her shoulder. She twisted around sharply, her own hand instinctively reaching for the haft of the boser-pistol.
‘Causing trouble again, Ana?’ said the woman behind her.
The Inquisitor blinked. She had rehearsed this moment many times since she had left Cuvier, but still it felt unreal and melodramatic. Then Triumvir Ilia Volyova nodded at the woman behind the hatch.
‘This is my friend. She wants a coffee. I suggest you give her one.’
The serving woman squinted at her, then grunted something and vanished from view. She reappeared a few moments later with a cup of something that looked as if it had just been drained from the main axle bearing of an overland cargo hauler.
‘Take it, Ana,’ Volyova said. ‘It’s about as good as it gets.’
The Inquisitor took the coffee, her hand trembling faintly. ‘You shouldn’t call me that,’ she whispered.
Volyova steered her towards a table. ‘Call you what?’
‘Ana.’
‘But it’s your name.’
‘Not any more, it isn’t. Not here. Not now.’
The table that Volyova had found was tucked into a corner, half-hidden by several stacked beer crates. Volyova swept her sleeve across the surface, brushing detritus on to the floor. Then she sat, placing both elbows on the table’s edge and locking her fingers under her chin. ‘I don’t think we need worry about anyone recognising you, Ana. No one’s given me more than a second glance and, with the possible exception of Thorn, I’m the most wanted person on the planet.’
The Inquisitor, who had once called herself Ana Khouri, sipped experimentally at the treaclelike concoction that passed for coffee. ‘You’ve had the benefit of some expert misdirection, Ilia…’ She paused and looked around, realising as she did so how suspicious and theatrical she must look. ‘Can I call you Ilia?’
‘That’s what I call myself. Best leave off the Volyova part for the time being, though. No sense in pushing our luck.’
‘None at all. I suppose I should say…’ Again, she looked around. She could not help herself. ‘It’s good to see you again, Ilia. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.’
‘I’ve missed your company, too. Odd to think we once started out almost killing each other. All water under the bridge now, of course.’
‘I began to worry. You hadn’t been in touch for so long…’
‘I had good reasons to keep a low profile, didn’t I?’
‘I suppose so.’
For several minutes neither of them said anything. Khouri, for that was how she was daring to think of herself again, found herself recalling the origin of the audacious game the two of them were playing. They had devised it themselves, amazing each other with their nerve and ingenuity. Together, they made a very resourceful pair indeed. But for maximum usefulness they found that they had to work alone.
Khouri broke the silence, unable to wait any longer. ‘What is it, Ilia? Good news or bad?’
‘Knowing my track record, what do you think?’
‘A wild stab in the dark? Bad news. Very bad news indeed.’
‘Got it in one.’
‘It’s the Inhibitors, isn’t it?’
‘Sorry to be so predictable, but there you are.’
‘They’re here?’
‘I think so.’ Volyova’s voice had dropped low now. ‘Something is happening, anyway. I’ve seen it myself.’
‘Tell me about it.’
Volyova’s voice, if anything, became quieter still. Khouri had to strain to hear it. ‘Machines, Ana, huge black machines. They’ve entered the system. I never saw them actually arrive. They were just… here.’
Khouri had tasted the minds of those machines briefly, feeling the furious predatory chill of ancient recordings. They were like the minds of pack animals, ancient and patient and drawn to the dark. Their minds were mazes of instinct and hungry intelligence, utterly unencumbered by sympathy or emotion. They howled across the silent steppes of the galaxy to each other, summoning themselves in great numbers when the bloody stench of life again troubled their wintry sleep.
‘Dear God.’
‘We can’t say we weren’t expecting them, Ana. From the moment Sylveste started fiddling around with things he didn’t understand, it was only a matter of when and where.’
Khouri stared at her friend, wondering why the temperature in the room appeared to have dropped ten or fifteen degrees. The feared and hated Triumvir looked small and faintly grubby, like a bag lady. Volyova’s hair was a close-cropped greying thatch above a round, hard-eyed face which betrayed remote Mongol ancestry. She did not look like a very convincing herald of doom.
‘I’m scared, Ilia.’
‘I think you have excellent reason to be scared. But try not to show it, will you? We don’t want to terrify the locals just yet.’
‘What can we do?’
‘Against the Inhibitors?’ Volyova squinted through her glass, frowning slightly, as if this was the first time she had given the subject any serious consideration. ‘I don’t know. The Amarantin didn’t have a lot of success in that department.’
‘We’re not flightless birds.’
‘No, we’re humans — the scourge of the galaxy… or something like that. I don’t know, Ana. I really don’t. If it was just you and I, and if we could persuade the ship, the Captain, to come out of his shell, we could at least consider running away. We could even contemplate using the weapons, if that would help matters.’
Khouri shuddered. ‘But even if it did, and even if we could make a getaway, it wouldn’t help Resurgam much, would it?’
‘No. And I don’t know about you, Ana, but my conscience isn’t exactly whiter-than-white as it is.’
‘How long do we have?’
‘That’s the odd thing. The Inhibitors could have destroyed Resurgam already, if that was all they intended to do — it’s within even our technology to do that much, so I very much doubt that it would trouble them particularly.’
‘So maybe they haven’t come to kill us after all.’
Volyova tipped back her drink. ‘Or maybe… just maybe… they have.’