XHTML 1.0 Strict @This document has been validated Ace Books by "Alastair Reynolds  REVELATION SPACE CHASM CITY REDEMPTION ARK ABSOLUTION GAP 8DIAMOND DOGS, TURQUOISE DAYS CENTURY RAIN ABSOLUTION GAP "Alastair Reynolds       8THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP Scopio examined one of the conch pieces, fingering the sharp edge where it had been cut from some larger whole. "Looks like he's been doing some beachcombing." Vasko pointed to the already open outer door. "All the same, doesn't look as if there's anyone home at the moment." .Scorpio opened the inner door. Inside he found a bunk bed and a neatly folded pile of bedclothes. A small collapsible desk, a stove and food synthesiser. A flagon of purified water and a box of rations. An air pump that was still running and some small conch pieces on the table. "There's no telling how long it's been since he was last here," Vasko said. Scorpio shook his head. "He hasn't been away for very long, probably not more than an hour or two." Vasko looked around, searching for whatever piece of evidence Scorpio had already spotted. He wasn't going to find it: pigs had long ago learned that the acute sense of smell they had inherited from their ancestors was not something shared by baseline humans. They had also learned-painfully-that humans did not care to be reminded of this. They stepped outside again, sealing the inner door as they had found it. 0"What now?" Vasko asked. Scorpio snapped a spare communications bracelet from one wrist and handed it to Vasko. It had already been assigned a secure frequency, so there was no danger of anyone on the other islands listening in. "You know how to use one of these things?" "I'll manage. Anything in particular you want me to do with it?" "Yes. You're going to wait here until I get back. I expect to have Clavain with me when I return. But in the event he finds you first, you're to tell him who you are and who sent you. Then you call me and ask Clavain if he'd like to talk to me. Got that?" :"And if you don't come back?" 4"You'd better call Blood." Vasko fingered the bracelet. "You sound a bit worried about his state of mind, sir. Do you think he might be dangerous?" "I hope so," Scorpio said, "because if he isn't, he's not a lot of use to us." He patted the young man on the shoulder. "Now wait here while I circle the island. It won't take me more than an hour, and my guess is I'll find him somewhere near the sea."  PScorpio made his way across the flat rocky fringes of the island, spreading his stubby arms for balance, not caring in the slightest how awkward or comical he appeared. He slowed, thinking that in the distance he could see a figure shifting in and out of the darkening haze of late-afternoon sea mist. He squinted, trying to compensate for eyes that no longer worked as well as they had in Chasm City, when he had been younger. On one level he hoped that the mirage would turn out to be Clavain. On another he hoped that it would turn out to be a figment of his imagination, some conjunction of rock, light and shade tricking the eye. \As little as he cared to admit it, he was anxious. It was six months since he had last seen Clavain. Not that long a time, really, most certainly not when measured against the span of the man's life. Yet Scorpio could not rid himself of the sense that he was about to encounter an acquaintance he had not met in decades; someone who might have been warped beyond all recognition by life and experience. He wondered how he would respond if it turned out that Clavain had indeed lost his mind. Would he even recognise it if that was true? Scorpio had spent enough time around baseline humans to feel confident about reading their intentions, moods and general states of sanity. It was said that human and pigs minds were not so very different. But with Clavain, Scorpio always made a mental note to ignore his expectations. Clavain was not like other humans. History had shaped him, leaving behind something unique and quite possibly monstrous. >Scorpio was fifty. He had known Clavain for half his life, ever since he had been captured by Clavain's former faction in the Yellowstone system. Shortly after that, Clavain had defected from the Conjoiners, and after some mutual misgivings he and Scorpio had ended up fighting together. They had gathered a loose band of soldiers and assorted hangers-on from the vicinity of Yellowstone and had stolen a ship to make the journey to Resurgam's system. Along the way they had been hectored and harried by Clavain's former Conjoiner comrades. From Resurgam space-riding another ship entirely-they had arrived here, on the blue-green waterlogged marble of Ararat. Little fighting had been required since Resurgam, but the two had continued to work together in the establishment of the temporary colony. JThey had schemed and plotted whole communities into existence. Often they had argued, but only ever over matters of the gravest importance. When one or the other leant towards too harsh or too soft a policy, the other was there to balance matters. It was in those years that Scorpio had found the strength of character to stop hating human beings every waking moment of his life. If nothing else, he owed that to Clavain. RBut nothing was ever that simple, was it? The problem was that Clavain had been born five hundred years ago and had lived through many of those years. What if the Clavain that Scorpio knew-the Clavain that most of the colonists knew, for that matter-was only a passing phase, like a deceitful glimpse of sunshine on an otherwise stormy day? In the early days of their acquaintance, Scorpio had kept at least half an eye on him, alert for any reversion to his indiscriminate butcher tendencies. He had seen nothing to arouse his suspicions, and more than enough to reassure him that Clavain was not the ghoul that history said he was. But in the last two years, his certainties had crumbled. It was not that Clavain had become more cruel, argumentative or violent than before, but something in him had changed. It was as if the quality of light on a landscape had shifted from one moment to another. The fact that Scorpio knew that others harboured similar doubts about his own stability was of scant comfort. He knew his own state of mind and hoped he would never hurt another human the way he had done in the past. But he could only speculate about what was going on inside his friend's head. What he could be certain about was that the Clavain he knew, the Clavain alongside whom he had fought, had withdrawn to some intensely private personal space. Even before he had retreated to this island, Scorpio had reached the point where he could hardly read the man at all. But he did not blame Clavain for that. No one would. He continued his progress until he was certain that the figure was real, and then advanced further until he was able to discern detail. The figure was crouched down by the shore of sea, motionless, as if caught in some reverie that had interrupted an otherwise innocent examination of the tide pools and their fauna. Scorpio recognised him as Clavain; he would have been as certain even if he had thought the island uninhabited. ,The pig felt a momentary surge of relief. At least Clavain was still alive. No matter what else transpired today, that much had to count as a victory. When he was within shouting distance of the man, Clavain sensed his presence and looked around. There was a breeze now, one that had not been there when Scorpio landed. It pulled wild white hair across Clavain's pink-red features. His beard, normally neatly trimmed, had also grown long and unkempt since his departure. His thin figure was clad in black, with a dark shawl or cloak pulled across his shoulders. He maintained an awkward posture between kneeling and standing, poised on his haunches like a man who had only stopped there for a moment. zScorpio was certain he had been staring out to sea for hours. ,"Nevil," Scorpio said. He said something back, his lips moving, but his words were masked by the hiss of the surf. XScorpio called out again. "It's me-Scorpio." Clavain's mouth moved a second time. His voice was a croak that barely made it above a whisper. "I said, I told you not to come here." "I know." Scorpio had approached closer now. Clavain's white hair flicked in and out of his deeply recessed old-man's eyes. They appeared to be focused on something very distant and bleak. "I know, and for six months we honoured that request, didn't we?" "Six months?" Clavain almost smiled. "Is that how long it's been?" x"Six months and a week, if you want to be finicky about it." "It doesn't feel like it. It feels like no time at all." Clavain looked back out to sea again, the back of his head turned towards Scorpio. Between thin strands of white hair his scalp had the same raw pink colour as Scorpio's skin. n"Sometimes it feels like a lot longer, as well," Clavain continued, "as if all I've ever done was spend each day here. Sometimes I feel as if there isn't another soul on this planet." "We're all still here," Scorpio said, "all one hundred and seventy thousand of us. We still need you." P"I expressly asked not to be disturbed." " Unlessv it was important. That was always the arrangement, Nevil." Clavain stood up with painful slowness. He had always been taller than Scorpio, but now his thinness gave him the appearance of something sketched in a hurry. His limbs were quick cursive scratches against the sky. Scorpio looked at Clavain's hands. They were the fine-boned hands of a surgeon. Or, perhaps, an interrogator. The rasp of his long fingernails against the damp black fabric of his trousers made Scorpio wince. "Well?" N"We've found something," Scorpio said. "We don't know exactly what it is, or who sent it, but we think it came from space. We also think there might be someone in it."     TWO Lighthugger "Gnostic Ascension4, Interstellar Space, 2615 Surgeon-General Grelier strode through the circular green-lit corridors of the body factory. He hummed and whistled, happy in his element, happy to be surrounded by humming machines and half-formed people. With a shiver of anticipation he thought about the solar system that lay ahead of them and the great many things that depended on it. Not necessarily for him, it was true, but certainly for his rival in the matter of the queen's affection. Grelier wondered how she would take another of Quaiche's failures. Knowing Queen Jasmina, he did not think she would take it awfully well. Grelier smiled at that. The odd thing was that for a system on which so much hung, the place was still nameless; no one had ever bothered with the remote star and its uninteresting clutch of planets. There had never been any reason to. There would be an obscure catalogue entry for the system in the as-trogation database of the "Gnostic Ascension, and indeed of almost every other starship, along with brief notes on the major characteristics of its sun and worlds, likely hazards and so forth. But these databases had never been intended for human eyes; they existed only to be interrogated and updated by other machines as they went about their silent, swift business executing those shipboard tasks considered too dull or too difficult for humans. The entry was just a string of binary digits, a few thousand ones and zeroes. It was a measure of the system's unimportance that the entry had only been queried three times in the entire operational lifetime of the "Gnostic Ascension6. It had been updated once. ^Grelier knew: he had checked, out of curiosity. Yet now, perhaps for the first time in history, the system was of more than passing interest. It still had no name, but now at least the absence of one had become vaguely troubling, to the point where Queen Jasmina sounded a trifle more irritated every time she was forced to refer to the place as "the system ahead" or "the system we are approaching." But Grelier knew that she would not deign to give the place a name until it had proved valuable. And the system's value was entirely in the hands of the queen's fading favourite, Quaiche. Grelier paused a while near one of the bodies. It was suspended in translucent support gel behind the green glass of its vivification tank. Around the base of the tank were rows of nutrient controls like so many organ stops, some pushed in and some pulled out. The stops controlled the delicate biochemical environment of the nutrient matrix. Bronze valve wheels set into the side of the tank adjusted the delivery of bulk chemicals like water or saline. Appended to the tank was a log showing the body's clonal history. Grelier flicked through the plastic-laminated pages of the log, satisfying himself that all was well. Although most of the bodies in the factory had never been decanted, this specimen-an adult female-had been warmed and used once before. The evidence of the injuries inflicted on it was fading under the regenerative procedures, abdominal scars healing invisibly, the new leg now only slightly smaller than its undamaged counterpart. Jasmina did not approve of these patch-up jobs, but her demand for bodies had outstripped the production capacity of the factory. ~Grelier patted the glass affectionately. "Coming along nicely." He walked on, making random checks on the other bodies. Sometimes a glance was sufficient, though more often than not Grelier would thumb through the log and pause to make some small adjustment to the settings. He took a great deal of pride in the quiet competence of his work. He never boasted of his abilities or promised anything he was not absolutely certain of being able to deliver-utterly unlike Quaiche, who had been full of exaggerated promises from the moment he stepped aboard the "Gnostic Ascension. For a while it had worked, too. Grelier, long the queen's closest confidant, had found himself temporarily usurped by the flashy newcomer. All he heard while he was working on her was how Quaiche was going to change all their fortunes: Quaiche this, Quaiche that. The queen had even started complaining about Grelier's duties, moaning that the factory was too slow in delivering bodies and that the attention-deficit therapies were losing their effectiveness. Grelier had been briefly tempted to try something seriously attention-grabbing, something that would catapult him back into her good graces. 2Now he was profoundly glad that he had done no such thing; he had needed only to bide his time. It was simply a question of letting Quaiche dig his own grave by setting up expectations that he could not possibly meet. Sadly-for Quaiche, if not for Grelier-Jasmina had taken him exactly at his word. If Grelier judged the queen's mood, poor old Quaiche was about this close to getting the figurehead treatment. Grelier stopped at an adult male that had begun to show developmental anomalies during his last examination. He had adjusted the tank settings, but his tinkering had apparently been to no avail. To the untrained eye the body looked normal enough, but it lacked the unmarred symmetry that Jasmina craved. Grelier shook his head and placed a hand on one of the polished brass valve wheels. Always a difficult call, this. The body wasn't up to scratch by the usual standards of the factory, but then again neither were the patch-up jobs. Was it time to make Jasmina accept a lowering of quality? It was she who was pushing the factory to its limit, after all. No, Grelier decided. If he had learned one lesson from this whole sordid Quaiche business, it was to maintain his own standards. Jasmina would scold him for aborting a body, but in the long run she would respect his judgement, his stolid devotion to excellence. He twisted the brass wheel shut, blocking saline. He knelt down and pushed in most of the nutrient valves. "Sorry," Grelier said, addressing the smooth, expressionless face behind the glass, "but I'm afraid you just didn't cut it." He gave the body one last glance. In a few hours the processes of cellular deconstruction would be grotesquely obvious. The body would be dismantled, its constituent chemicals recycled for use elsewhere in the factory. A voice buzzed in his earpiece. He touched a finger to the device. N"Grelier... I was expecting you already." ."I'm on my way, ma'am." A red light started flashing on top of the vivification tank, synchronised to an alarm. Grelier cuffed the override, silencing the alarm and blanking the emergency signal Calm returned to the body factory, a silence broken only by the occasional gurgle of nutrient flows or the muffled click of some distant valve regulator. Grelier nodded, satisfied that all was in hand, and resumed his unhurried progress.  At the same instant that Grelier pushed in the last of the nutrient valves, an anomaly occurred in the sensor apparatus of the "Gnostic Ascension. The anomaly was brief, lasting only a fraction over half a second, but it was sufficiently unusual that a flag was raised in the data stream: an exceptional event marker indicating that something merited attention. pAs far as the sensor software was concerned that was the end of it: the anomaly had not continued, and all systems were now performing normally. The flag was a mere formality; whether it was to be acted on was the responsibility of an entirely separate and slightly more intelligent layer of monitoring software. The second layer-dedicated to health-monitoring all ship-wide sensor subsystems-detected the flag, along with several million others raised in the same cycle, and assigned it a schedule in its task profile. Less than two hundred thousandths of a second had lapsed since the end of the anomaly: an eternity in computational terms, but an inevitable consequence of the vast size of a lighthugger's cybernetic nervous system. Communications between one end of the "Gnostic Ascension and the other required three to four kilometres of main trunk cabling, six to seven for a round-trip signal. Nothing happened quickly on a ship that large, but it made little practical difference. The ship's huge mass meant that it responded sluggishly to external events: it had precisely the same need for lightning-fast reflexes as a brontosaurus. rThe health-monitoring layer worked its way down the pile. Most of the several million events it looked at were quite innocuous. Based on its grasp of the statistical expectation pattern of error events, it was able to de-assign most of the flags without hesitation. They were transient errors, not indicative of any deeper malaise in the ship's hardware. Only a hundred thousand looked even remotely suspicious. The second layer did what it always did at this point: it compiled the hundred thousand anomalous events into a single packet, appended its own comments and preliminary findings and offered the packet to the third layer of monitoring software. nThe third layer spent most of its time doing nothing: it existed solely to examine those anomalies forwarded to it by duller layers. Quickened to alertness, it examined the dossier with as much actual interest as its borderline sentience allowed. By machine standards it was still somewhere below gamma-level intelligence, but it had been doing its job for such a long time that it had built up a huge hoard of heuristic expertise. It was insultingly> clear to the third layer that more than half of the forwarded events in no way merited its attention, but the remaining cases were more interesting, and it took its time going through them. Two-thirds of those anomalies were repeat offenders: evidence of systems with some real but transient fault. None, however, were in critical areas of ship function, so they could be left alone until they became more serious. One-third of the interesting cases were new. Of these, perhaps ninety per cent were the kind of failures that could be expected once in a while, based on the layer's knowledge of the various hardware components and software elements involved. Only a handful were in possibly critical areas, and thankfully these faults could all be dealt with by routine repair methods. Almost without blinking, the layer dispatched instructions to those parts of the ship dedicated to the upkeep of its infrastructure. At various points around the ship, servitors that were already engaged in other repair and overhaul jobs received new entries in their task buffers. It might take them weeks to get around to those chores, but eventually they would be performed. That left a tiny core of errors that might potentially be of some concern. They were more difficult to explain, and it was not immediately clear how the servitors should be ordered to deal with them. The layer was not unduly worried, in so far as it was capable of worrying about anything: past experience had taught it that these gremlins generally turned out to be benign. But for now it had no choice but to forward the puzzling exceptions to an even higher stratum of shipboard automation. The anomaly moved up like this, through another three layers of steadily increasing intelligence. FBy the time the final layer was invoked, only one outstanding event remained in the packet: the original transient sensor anomaly, the one that had lasted just over half a second. None of the underlying layers could account for the error via the usual statistical patterns and look-up rules. An event only filtered this high in the system once or twice a minute. Now, for the first time, something with real intelligence was invoked. The gamma-level subpersona in charge of overseeing layer-six exceptions was part of the last line of defence between the cybernetics and the ship's flesh crew. It was the sub-persona that had the difficult role of deciding whether a given error merited the attention of its human stewards. Over the years it had learned not to cry wolf too often: if it did, its owners might decide that it needed upgrading. As a consequence, the subpersona agonised for many seconds before deciding what to do. The anomaly was, it decided, one of the strangest it had ever encountered. A thorough examination of every logical path in the sensor system failed to explain how something so utterly, profoundly unusual could ever have happened. fIn order to do its job effectively, the subpersona had to have an abstract understanding of the real world. Nothing too sophisticated, but enough that it could make sensible judgements about which kinds of external phenomena were likely to be encountered by the sensors, and which were so massively unlikely that they could only be interpreted as hallucinations introduced at a later stage of data processing. It had to grasp that the "Gnostic Ascension was a physical object embedded in space. It also had to grasp that the events recorded by the ship's web of sensors were caused by objects and quanta permeating that space: dust grains, magnetic fields, radar echoes from nearby bodies; and by the radiation from more distant phenomena: worlds, stars, galaxies, quasars, the cosmic background signal. In order to do this it had to be able to make accurate guesses about how the data returns from all these objects were supposed to behave. No one had ever given it these rules; it had formulated them for itself, over time, making corrections as it accumulated more information. It was a never-ending task, but at this late stage in the game it considered itself rather splendid at it. It knew, for instance, that planets-or rather the abstract objects in its model that corresponded to planets-were definitely not supposed to do that. The error was completely inexplicable as an outside-world event. Something must have gone badly wrong at the data-capture stage. It pondered this a little more. Even allowing for that conclusion, the anomaly was still difficult to explain. It was so peculiarly selective, affecting only the planet itself. Nothing else, not even the planet's moons, had done anything in the least bit odd. The subpersona changed its mind: the anomaly had to be external, in which case the subpersona's model of the real world was shockingly flawed. It didn't like that conclusion either. It was a long time since it had been forced to update its model so drastically, and it viewed the prospect with a stinging sense of affront. VWorse, the observation might mean that the "Gnostic Ascension itself was... well, not exactly in immediate ganger-the planet in question was still dozens of light-hours away-but conceivably headed for something that might, at some point in the future, pose a non-negligible risk to the ship. That was it, then. The subpersona made its decision: it had no choice but to alert the crew on this one. That meant only one thing: a priority interrupt to Queen Jasmina. The subpersona established that the queen was currently accessing status summaries through her preferred visual read-out medium. As it was authorised to do, it seized control of the data channel and cleared both screens of the device ready for an emergency bulletin. It prepared a simple text message: SENSOR ANOMALY: REQUEST ADVICE. @For an instant-significantly less than the half-second that the original event had consumed-the message hovered on the queen's read-out, inviting her attention. `Then the subpersona had a hasty change of heart. Perhaps it was making a mistake. The anomaly, bizarre as it had been, had cleared itself. No further reports of strangeness had emanated from any of the underlying layers. The planet was behaving in the way the subpersona had always assumed planets were supposed to. With the benefit of a little more time, the layer decided, the event could surely be explained as a perceptual malfunction. It was just a question of going over things again, looking at all the components from the right perspective, thinking outside the box. As a subpersona, that was exactly what it was meant to do. If all it ever did was blindly forward every anomaly that it couldn't immediately explain, then the crew might as well replace it with another dumb layer. Or, worse, upgrade it to something cleverer. It cleared the text message from the queen's device and immediately replaced it with the data she had been viewing just before. It continued to gnaw away at the problem until, a minute or so later, another anomaly bumped into its in-box. This time it was a thrust imbalance, a niggling one-per-cent jitter in the starboard Conjoiner drive. Faced with a bright new urgency, it chose to put the matter of the planet on the back-burner. Even by the slow standards of shipboard communications, a minute was a long time. With every further minute that passed without the planet misbehaving, the whole vexing event would inevitably drop to a diminished level of priority. NThe subpersona would not forget about it-it was incapable of forgetting about anything-but within an hour it would have a great many other things to deal with instead. Good. It was decided, then. The way to handle it was to pretend it had never happened in the first place. DThus it was that Queen Jasmina was informed of the sensor event anomaly for only a fraction of a second. And thus it was that no human members of the crew of the "Gnostic Ascension-not Jasmina, not Grelier, not Quaiche, nor any of the other Ultras-were ever aware that, for more than half a second, the largest gas giant in the system they were approaching, the system unimaginatively called 107 Piscium, had simply ceased to exist.  Queen Jasmina heard the surgeon-general's footsteps echoing towards her, approaching along the metal-lined companionway that connected her command chamber to the rest of the ship. As always, Grelier managed not to sound in any particular hurry. Had she tested his loyalty by fawning over Quaiche? she wondered. Perhaps. In which case it was probably time to make Grelier feel valued again. `A flicker on the read-out screens of the skull caught her attention. For a moment a line of text replaced the summaries she was paging through-something about a sensor anomaly. hQueen Jasmina shook the skull. She had always been convinced that the horrid thing was possessed, but increasingly it appeared to be going senile, too. Had she been less superstitious, she would have thrown it away, but dreadful things were rumoured to have happened to those who ignored the skull's counsel. FA polite knock sounded at the door. ""Enter, Grelier." The armoured door eased itself open. Grelier emerged into the chamber, his eyes wide and showing a lot of white as they adjusted to the chamber's gloom. Grelier was a slim, neatly dressed little man with a flat-topped shock of brilliant white hair. He had the flattened, minimalist features of a boxer. He wore a clean white medical smock and apron; his hands were always gloved. His expression never failed to amuse Jasmina: it always appeared that he was on the point of breaking into tears or laughter. It was an illusion: the surgeon-general had little familiarity with either emotional extreme. H"Busy in the body factory, Grelier?" &"A wee bit, ma'am." "I'm anticipating a period of high demand ahead. Production mustn't slacken." >"Little danger of that, ma'am." "Just as long as you're aware of it." She sighed. "Well, niceties over with. To business." hGrelier nodded. "I see you've already made a start." While awaiting his arrival, she had strapped her body into the throne, leather cuffs around her ankles and thighs, a thick band around her belly, her right arm fixed to the chair rest, with only her left arm free to move. She held the skull in her left hand, its face turned towards her so that she could view the read-out screens bulging from its eye sockets. Prior to picking up the skull she had inserted her right arm into a skeletal machine bracketed to the side of the chair. The machine-the alleviator-was a cage of rough black ironwork equipped with screw-driven pressure pads. They were already pressing uncomfortably against her skin. <"Hurt me," Queen Jasmina said. Grelier's expression veered momentarily towards a smile. He approached the throne and examined the arrangement of the alleviator. Then he commenced tightening the screws on the device, adjusting each in sequence by a precise quarter turn at a time. The pressure pads bore down on the skin of the queen's forearm, which was supported in turn by an underlying arrangement of fixed pads. The care with which Grelier turned the screws made the queen think of someone tuning some ghastly stringed instrument. NIt wasn't pleasant. That was the point. After a minute or so, Grelier stopped and moved behind the throne. She watched him tug a spool of tubing from the little medical kit he always kept there. He plugged one end of the tubing into an oversized bottle full of something straw-yellow and connected the other to a hypodermic. He hummed and whistled as he worked. He lifted up the bottle and attached it to a rig on the back of the throne, then pushed the hypodermic line into the queen's upper right arm, fiddling around a little until he found the vein. Then she watched him return to the front of the throne, back into view of the body. It was a female one this time, but there was no reason that it had to be. Although all the bodies were cultured from Jasmina's own genetic material, Grelier was able to intervene at an early stage of development and force the body down various sexual pathways. Usually it was boys and girls. Now and then, for a treat, he made weird neuters and intersex variants. They were all sterile, but that was only because it would have been a waste of time to equip them with functioning reproductive systems. It was enough bother installing the neural coupling implants so that she could drive the bodies in the first place. Suddenly she felt the agony lose its focus. "I don't want anaesthetic, Grelier." :"Pain without intermittent relief is like music without silence," he said. "You must trust my judgement in this matter, as you have always done in the past." `"I do trust you, Grelier," she said, grudgingly. &"Sincerely, ma'am?" "Yes. Sincerely. You've always been my favourite. You do appreciate that, don't you?" "I have a job to do, ma'am. I simply do it to the limit of my abilities." The queen put the skull down in her lap. With her free hand she ruffled the white brush of his hair. h"I'd be lost without you, you know. Especially now." "Nonsense, ma'am. Your expertise threatens any day to eclipse my own." It was more than automatic flattery: though Grelier had made the study of pain his life's work, Jasmina was catching up quickly. She knew volumes about the physiology of pain. She knew about nociception; she knew the difference between epi-critic and protopathic pain; she knew about presynaptic blocking and the neospinal pathway. She knew her prostaglandin promoters from her GABA agonists. \But the queen also knew pain from an angle Grelier never would. His tastes lay entirely in its infliction. He did not know it from the inside, from the privileged point of view of the recipient. No matter how acute his theoretical understanding of the subject, she would always have that edge over him. Like most people of his era, Grelier could only imagine agony, extrapolating it a thousandfold from the minor discomfort of a torn hangnail. He had no idea. "I may have learned a great deal," she said, "but you will always be a master of the clonal arts. I was serious about what I said before, Grelier: I anticipate increased demand on the factory. Can you satisfy me?" "You said production mustn't slacken. That isn't quite the same thing." "But surely you aren't working at full capacity at this moment." Grelier adjusted the screws. "I'll be frank with you: we're not far off it. At the moment I'm prepared to discard units that don't meet our usual exacting standards. But if the factory is expected to increase production, the standards will have to be relaxed." L"You discarded one today, didn't you?" &"How did you know?" "I suspected you'd make a point of your commitment to excellence." She raised a finger. "And that's all right. It's why you work for me. I'm disappointed, of course-I know exactly which body you terminated-but standards are standards." D"That's always been my watchword." v"It's a pity that can't be said for everyone on this ship." BHe hummed and whistled to himself for a little while, then asked, with studied casualness, "I always got the impression that you have a superlative crew, ma'am." J"My regular crew is not the problem." "Ah. Then you would be referring to one of the irregulars? Not myself, I trust?" "You are well aware of whom I speak, so don't pretend otherwise." ,"Quaiche? Surely not." l"Oh, don't play games, Grelier. I know exactly how you feel about your rival. Do you want to know the truly ironic thing? The two of you are more similar than you realise. Both baseline humans, both ostracised from your own cultures. I had great hopes for the two of you, but now I may have to let Quaiche go." "Surely you'd give him one last chance, ma'am. We are approaching a new system, after all." "You'd like that, wouldn't you? You'd like to see him fail one final time, just so that my punishment would be all the more severe?" b"I was thinking only of the welfare of the ship." `"Of course you were, Grelier." She smiled, amused by his lies. "Well, the fact of the matter is I haven't made up my mind what to do with Quaiche. But I do think he and I need a little chat. Some interesting new information concerning him has fallen into my possession, courtesy of our trading partners." 6"Fancy that," Grelier said. "It seems he wasn't completely honest about his prior experience when I hired him. It's my fault: I should have checked his background more thoroughly. But that doesn't excuse the fact that he exaggerated his earlier successes. I thought we were hiring an expert negotiator, as well as a man with an instinctive understanding of planetary environments. A man comfortable among both baseline humans and Ultras, someone' who could talk up a deal to our advantage and find treasure where we'd miss it completely." 6"That sounds like Quaiche." Z"No, Grelier, what it sounds like is the character Quaiche wished to present to us. The fiction he wove. In truth, his record is a lot less impressive. The occasional score here and there, but just as many failures. He's a chancer: a braggart, an opportunist and a liar. And an infected one, as well." LGrelier raised an eyebrow. "Infected?" "He has an indoctrinal virus. We scanned for the usuals but missed this one because it wasn't in our database. Fortunately, it isn't strongly infectious-not that it would stand much of a chance infecting one of us* in the first place." v"What type of indoctrinal virus are we talking about here?" "It's a crude mishmash: a half-baked concoction of three thousand years' worth of religious imagery jumbled together without any overarching theistic consistency. It doesn't make him believe anything coherent; it just makes him feel^ religious. Obviously he can keep it under control for much of the time. But it worries me, Grelier. What if it gets worse? I don't like a man whose impulses I can't predict." B"You'll be letting him go, then." "Not just yet. Not until we've passed beyond 107 Piscium. Not until he's had one last chance to redeem himself." ^"What makes you think he'll find anything now?" "I have no expectation that he will, but I do believe he's more likely to find something if I provide him with the right incentive." ."He might do a runner." "I've thought of that as well. In fact, I think I've got all bases covered where Quaiche is concerned. All I need now is the man himself, in some state of animation. Can you arrange that for me?" "Now, ma'am?" h"Why not? Strike while the iron's hot, as they say." "The trouble is," Grelier said, "he's frozen. It'll take six hours to wake him, assuming that we follow the recommended procedures." "And if we don't?" She wondered how much mileage was left in her new body. "Realistically, how many hours could we shave off?" "Two at the most, if you don't want to run the risk of killing him. Even then it'll be a wee bit unpleasant." Jasmina smiled at the surgeon-general. "I'm sure he'll get over it. Oh, and Grelier? One other thing." "Ma'am?" <"Bring me the scrimshaw suit."     THREE Lighthugger "Gnostic Ascension4, Interstellar Space, 2615 His lover helped him out of the casket. Quaiche lay shivering on the revival couch, racked with nausea, while Morwenna attended to the many jacks and lines that plunged into his bruised baseline flesh. ,"Lie still," she said. 2"I don't feel very well." "Of course you don't. What do you expect when the bastards thaw you so quickly?" DIt was like being kicked in the groin, except that his groin encompassed his entire body. He wanted to curl up inside a space smaller than himself, to fold himself into a tiny knot like some bravura trick of origami. He considered throwing up, but the effort involved was much too daunting. :"They shouldn't have taken the risk," he said. "She knows I'm too valuable for that." He retched: a horrible sound like a dog that had been barking too long. "I think her patience might be a bit strained," Morwenna said, as she dabbed at him with stinging medicinal salves. 2"She knows she needs me." "She managed without you before. Maybe it's dawning on her that she can manage without you again." bQuaiche brightened. "Maybe there's an emergency." &"For you, perhaps." X"Christ, that's all I need-sympathy." He winced as a bolt of pain hit his skull, something far more precise and targeted than the dull unpleasantness of the revival trauma. "You shouldn't use the Lord's name in vain," Morwenna said, her tone scolding. "You know it only hurts you." He looked into her face, forcing his eyes open against the cruel glare of the revival area. "Are you on my side or not?" "I'm trying to help you. Hold still, I've nearly got the last of these lines out." There was a final little stab of pain in his thigh as the shunt popped out, leaving a neat eyelike wound. "There, all done." b"Until next time," Quaiche said. "Assuming there is a next time." Morwenna fell still, as if something had struck her for the first time. "You're really frightened, aren't you?" >"In my shoes, wouldn't you be?" "The queen's insane. Everyone knows that. But she's also pragmatic enough to know a valuable resource when she sees one." Morwenna spoke openly because she knew that the queen had no working listening devices in the revival chamber. "Look at Grelier, for pity's sake. Do you think she'd tolerate that freak for one minute if he wasn't useful to her?" "That's precisely my point," Quaiche said, sinking into an even deeper pit of dejection and hopelessness. "The moment either of us stops being useful..." Had he felt like moving, he would have mimed drawing a knife across his throat. Instead he just made a choking sound. "You've an advantage over Grelier," Morwenna said. "You have me, an ally amongst the crew. Who does he have?" "You're right," Quaiche said, "as ever." With a tremendous effort he reached out and closed one hand around Morwenna's steel gauntlet. He didn't have the heart to remind her that she was very nearly as isolated aboard the ship as he was. The one thing guaranteed to get an Ultra ostracised was having any kind of interpersonal relationship with a baseline human. Morwenna put a brave face on it, but, Quaiche knew, if he had to rely on her for help when the queen and the rest of the crew turned against him, he was already crucified. @"Can you sit up now?" she asked. "I'll try." The discomfort was abating slightly, as he had known it must do, and at last he was able to move major muscle groups without crying. He sat on the couch, his knees tucked against the hairless skin of his chest, while Morwenna gently removed the urinary catheter from his penis. He looked into her face while she worked, hearing only the whisk of metal sliding over metal. He remembered how fearful he had been when she first touched him there, her hands gleaming like shears. Making love to her was like making love to a threshing machine. Yet Morwenna had never hurt him, even when she inadvertently cut her own living parts. ."All right?" she asked. "I'll make it. Takes more than a quick revival to put a dent in Horris Quaiche's day." "That's the spirit," she said, sounding less than fully convinced. She leant over and kissed him. She smelt of perfume and ozone. N"I'm glad you're around," Quaiche said. Z"Wait here. I'll get you something to drink." JMorwenna moved off the revival couch, telescoping to her full height. Still unable to focus properly, he watched her slink across the room towards the hatch where various recuperative broths were dispensed. Her iron-grey dreadlocks swayed with the motion of her high-hipped piston-driven legs. Morwenna was on her way back with a snifter of recuperative broth-chocolate laced with medichines-when the door to the chamber slid open. Two more Ultras strode into the room: a man and a woman. After them, hands tucked demurely behind his back, loomed the smaller, unaugmented figure of the surgeon-general. He wore a soiled white medical smock. 6"Is he fit?" the man asked. ^"You're lucky he's not dead," Morwenna snapped. "Don't be so melodramatic," the woman said. "He was never going to die just because we thawed him a bit faster than usual." n"Are you going to tell us what Jasmina wants with him?" `"That's between him and the queen," she replied. dThe man threw a quilted silver gown in Quaiche's general direction. Morwenna's arm whipped out in a blur of motion and caught it. She walked over to Quaiche and handed it to him. b"I'd like to know what's going on," Quaiche said. n"Get dressed," the woman said. "You're coming with us." 8He pivoted around on the couch and lowered his feet to the coldness of the floor. Now that the discomfort was wearing off he was starting to feel scared instead. His cock had shrivelled in on itself, retreating into his belly as if already making its own furtive escape plans. Quaiche put on the gown, cinching it around his waist. To the surgeon-general he said, "You had something to do with this, didn't you?" Grelier blinked. "My dear fellow, it was all I could do to stop them warming you even more rapidly." j"Your time will come," Quaiche said. "Mark my words." ""I don't know why you insist on that tone. You and I have a great deal in common, Horris. Two human men, alone aboard an Ultra ship? We shouldn't be bickering, competing for prestige and status. We should be supporting each other, cementing a friendship." Grelier wiped the back of his glove on his tunic, leaving a nasty ochre smear. "We should be allies, you and I. We could go a long way together." T"When hell freezes over," Quaiche replied.  The queen stroked the mottled cranium of the human skull resting on her lap. She had very long finger and toenails, painted jet-black. She wore a leather jerkin, laced across her cleavage, and a short skirt of the same dark fabric. Her black hair was combed back from her brow, save for a single neatly formed cowlick. Standing before her, Quaiche initially thought she was wearing makeup, vertical streaks of rouge as thick as candlewax running from her eyes to the curve of her upper lip. Then, joltingly, he realised that she had gouged out her eyes. ~Despite this, her face still possessed a certain severe beauty. It was the first time he had seen her in the flesh, in any of her manifestations. Until this meeting, all his dealings with her had been at a certain remove, either via alpha-compliant proxies or living intermediaries like Grelier. JHe had hoped to keep things that way. Quaiche waited several seconds, listening to his own breathing. Finally he managed, "Have I let you down, ma'am?" "What kind of ship do you think I run, Quaiche? One where I can afford to carry baggage?" <"I can feel my luck changing." d"A bit late for that. How many stopovers have we made since you joined the crew, Quaiche? Five, isn't it? And what have we got to show for ourselves, after those five stopovers?" <He opened his mouth to answer her when he saw the scrimshaw suit lurking, almost lost, in the shadows behind her throne. Its presence could not be accidental. It resembled a mummy, worked from wrought iron or some other industrialage metal. There were various heavy-duty input plugs and attachment points, and a dark grilled-over rectangle where the visor should have been. There were scabs and fillets of solder where parts had been rewelded or braised. There was the occasional smooth patch of obviously new metal. Covering every other part of the suit, however, was an intricate, crawling complexity of carvings. Every available square centimetre had been crammed with obsessive, eye-wrenching detail. There was far too much to take in at one glance, but as the suit gyrated above him Quaiche made out fanciful serpent-necked space monsters, outrageously phallic spacecraft, screaming faces and demons, depictions of graphic sex and violence. There were spiralling narratives, cautionary tales, boastful trade episodes writ large/There were clock faces and psalms. Lines of text in languages he didn't recognise, musical stanzas, even swathes of lovingly carved numerals. Sequences of digital code or DNA base pairs. Angels and cherubim. Snakes. A lot of snakes. RIt made his head hurt just to look at it. dIt was pocked and gouged by the impact spots of microme-teorites and cosmic rays, its iron-grey tainted here and there with emerald-green or bronze discoloration. There were scratchlike striations where ultra-heavy particles had gouged out their own impact furrows as they sliced by at oblique angles. And there was a fine dark seam around the whole thing where the two armoured halves could be popped open and then welded shut again. The suit was a punishment device, its existence no more than a cruel rumour. Until this moment. The queen put people in the suit. It kept them alive and fed them sensory information. It protected them from the sleeting radiation of interstellar flight when they were entombed, for years at a time, in the ice of the ship's ablative shield. ~The lucky ones were dead when they pulled them out of the suit. Quaiche tried to stop the tremble in his voice. "If you look at things one way, we didn't really... we didn't really do too badly... all things considered. There was no material damage to the ship. No crew fatalities or major injuries. No contamination incidents. No unforeseen expenditures..." He fell silent, looking hopefully at Jasmina. Z"That's the best you can come up with? You were supposed to make us rich, Quaiche. You were supposed to turn our fortunes around in these difficult times, greasing the wheels of trade with your innate charm and grasp of planetary psychologies and landscapes. You were supposed to be our golden goose." (He shifted uneasily. Z"Yet in five systems all you found was junk." "You chose the systems, not me. It isn't my fault if there wasn't anything worth finding." Slowly and worryingly the queen shook her head. "No, Quaiche. Not that easy, I'm afraid. You see, a month ago we intercepted something. It was a transmission, a two-way trade dialogue between a human colony on Chaloupek and the lighthugger .Faint Memory of Hokusai$. Ring any bells?" "Not really..." But it did. "The Hokusai was entering Gliese 664 just as we departed that system. It was the second system you swept for us. Your report was..." The queen hoisted the skull to the side of her head, listening to its chattering jaw. "Let's see... 'nothing of value found on Opincus or the other three terrestrial worlds; only minor items of discarded technology recovered on moons five to eight of the Haurient giant... nothing in the inner asteroid fields, D-type swarms, Trojan points or major K-belt concentrations.'" fQuaiche could see where this was heading. "And the .Faint Memory of Hokusai?" "The trade dialogue was absolutely fascinating. By all accounts, the Hokusai located a cache of buried trade items around one century old. Pre-war, pre-plague. Very valuable stuff: not merely technological artefacts, but also art and culture, much of it unique. I hear they made enough on that to buy themselves an entirely new layer of ablative hull cladding." She looked at him expectantly. "Any comments, thoughts, on that?" &"My report was honest," Quaiche said. "They must have got lucky, that's all. Look, just give me another chance. Are we approaching another system?" The queen smiled. "We're always approaching another system. This time it's a place called 107 Piscium, but frankly from this distance it doesn't look much more promising than the last five. What's to say you're going to be any use this time?" ""Let me take the Dominatrix," he said, knitting his hands together involuntarily. "Let me take her down into that system." The queen was silent for many seconds. Quaiche heard only his own breathing, punctuated now and then by the abrupt, attenuated sizzle of a dying insect or rat. Something moved languidly beyond the green glass of a hemispherical dome set into one of the chamber's twelve walls. He sensed that he was being observed by something other than the eyeless figure in the chair. Without having been told, he understood then that the thing beyond the glass was the real queen, and that the ruined body in the seat was only a puppet that she currently inhabited. They were all true, then, all the rumours he had ever heard: the queen's solipsism; her addiction to extreme pain as a reality-anchoring device; the vast reserve of cloned bodies she was said to keep for just that purpose. l"Have you finished, Quaiche? Have you made your case?"