Alastair Reynolds - Minla's Flowers

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MINLA’S FLOWERS
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS
A
lastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone, and has also sold to Asimov’s
Science Fiction, Spectrum SF, and elsewhere. His first novel, Revelation Space,
was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed
by Chasm City, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, and Century Rain, all big
sprawling space operas that were big sellers as well, es-tablishing Reynolds as one
of the best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His
other books include a novella collection, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days. His most
recent book is a new novel, Pushing Ice. Coming up are two new collections,
Galactic North and Zima Blue and Other Stories. A professional scientist with a
Ph.D. in astronomy, he comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands, where he
works for the European Space Agency.
Reynolds’s work is known for its grand scope, sweep, and scale—in one
story, “Galactic North,” a spaceship sets out in pursuit of another in a stern chase
that takes thousands of years of time and hundreds of thousands of light-years to
complete; in another, “Thousandth Night,” ultrarich immor-tals embark on a plan that
will call for the physical rearrangement of all the stars in the galaxy. In the intricate
and surprising novella that follows (a sort of prequel to his story “Merlin’s Gun”), he
shows us that long-term plans can also have long-term consequences—some of
them not at all expected.
* * * *
Mission interrupted.
I still don’t know quite what happened. The ship and I were in routine Waynet
transit, all systems ticking over smoothly. I was deep in thought, a little drunk,
rubbing clues together like a caveman trying to make fire with rocks, hoping for the
spark that would point me toward the gun, the one no one ever thinks I’m going to
find, the one I know with every fiber of my existence is out there somewhere.
Then it happened: a violent lurch that sent wine and glass flying across the
cabin, a shriek from the ship’s alarms as it went into panic mode. I knew right away
that this was no ordinary Way turbulence. The ship was tumbling badly, but I fought
my way to the command deck and did what I could to bring her back under control.
Seat-of-the-pants flying, the way Gallinule and I used to do it on Plenitude, when
Plenitude still existed.
That was when I knew we were outside the Waynet, dumped back into the
crushing slowness of normal space. The stars outside were stationary, their colors
showing no suggestion of relativistic distortion.
“Damage?” I asked.
“How long have you got?” the ship snapped back.
I told it to ease off on the wisecracks and start giving me the bad news. And it
most certainly was bad news. The precious syrinx was still func-tional—I touched it
and felt the familiar tremble that indicated it was still sensing the nearby Waynet—but
that was about the only flight-critical system that hadn’t been buckled or blown or
simply wiped out of existence by the unscheduled egress.
We were going to have to land and make repairs. For a few weeks or
months—however long it took the ship to scavenge and process the raw materials it
needed to fix itself—the search for my gun would be on hold.
That didn’t mean I was counting on a long stopover.
* * * *
The ship still had a slow tumble. Merlin squinted against hard white glare as the
burning eye of a bright sun hove into view through the windows. It was white, but
not killingly so. Probably a mid-sequence star, maybe a late F or early G type. He
thought there was a hint of yellow. Had to be pretty close too.
“Tell me where we are.”
“It’s called Calliope,” Tyrant told him. “G-type. According to the last Cohort
census the system contained fifteen planet-class bodies. There were five terrestrials,
four of which were uninhabitable. The fifth—the farthest from Calliope—was
supposedly colonized by humans in the early Flourishing.”
Merlin glanced at the census data as it scrolled down the cabin wall. The
planet in question was called Lecythus. It was a typical watery terrestrial, like a
thousand others in his experience. It even had the almost-obligatory large single
moon.
“Been a while, ship. What are the chances of anyone still being down there?”
“Difficult to say. A later Cohort flyby failed to make contact with the
settlement, but that doesn’t mean no one was alive. After the emergence of the
Huskers, many planetary colonies went to great lengths to camouflage themselves
against the aliens.”
“So there could still be a welcoming committee.”
“We’ll see. With your permission, I’ll use our remaining fuel to reach
Lecythus. This will take some time. Would you like to sleep?”
Merlin looked back at the coffinlike slab of the frostwatch cabinet. He could
skip over the days or weeks that it would take to reach the planet, but that would
mean subjecting himself to the intense unpleasantness of frostwatch revival. Merlin
had never taken kindly to being woken from normal sleep, let alone the deep
hibernation of frostwatch.
“Pass on that, I think. I’ve still got plenty of reading to catch up on.”
Later—much later—Tyrant announced that they had reached orbit around
Lecythus. “Would you like to see the view?” the ship asked, with a playful note in its
voice.
Merlin scratched fatigue from his eyes. “You sound like you know some-thing
I don’t.”
Merlin was at first reassured by what he saw. There was blue ocean down
there, swatches of green and brown landmass, large islands rather than any major
continental masses, cyclonic swirls of water-vapor clouds. It didn’t necessarily mean
there were still people, but it was a lot more encouraging than finding a cratered,
radioactive corpse of a world.
Then he looked again. Many of those green and brown swatches of landmass
were surrounded by water, as his first glimpse had indicated. But some of them
appeared to be floating above the ocean completely, cast-ing shadows beneath them.
His glance flicked to the horizon, where the atmosphere was compressed into a thin
bow of pure indigo. He could see the foreshortened shapes of hovering landmasses,
turned nearly edge on. The landmasses appeared to be one or two kilometers thick,
and they all appeared to be gently curved. Perhaps half were concave in shape, so
their edges were slightly upturned. The edges were frosted white, like the peaks of
mountain ranges. Some of the concave masses even had little lakes near their
centers. The convex masses were all a scorched tawny gray in color, devoid of
water or vegetation, save for a cap of ice at their highest point. The largest shapes,
convex or concave, must have been hundreds of kilometers wide. Merlin judged that
there must have been at least ten kilometers of clear airspace under each piece. A
third of the planet’s surface was obscured by the floating shapes.
“Any idea of what we’re looking at here?” Merlin asked. “This doesn’t look
like anything in the census.”
“I think they built an armored sky around their world,” the ship said. “And
then something—very probably Husker-level ordnance—shattered that sky.”
“No one could have survived through that,” Merlin said, feeling a rising tide of
sadness. Tyrant was clever enough, but there were times—long times—when Merlin
became acutely aware of the heartless machine lurk-ing behind the personality. And
then he felt very, very alone. Those were the hours when he would have done
anything for companionship, including returning to the Cohort and the tribunal that
undoubtedly awaited him.
“Someone does appear to have survived, Merlin.”
He perked. “Really?”
“It’s unlikely to be a very advanced culture: no neutrino or gravimagnetic
signatures, beyond those originating from the mechanisms that must still be active
inside the sky pieces. But I did detect some very brief radio emissions.”
“What language were they using? Main? Tradespeak? Anything else in the
Cohort database?”
“They were using long beeps and short beeps. I’m afraid I didn’t get the
chance to determine the source of the transmission.”
“Keep listening. I want to meet them.”
“Don’t raise your hopes. If there are people down there, they’ve been out of
contact with the rest of humanity for a considerable number of mil-lennia.”
“I only want to stop for repairs. They can’t begrudge me that, can they?”
“I suppose not.”
Then something occurred to Merlin, something he realized he should have
asked much earlier. “About the accident, ship. I take it you know why we were
dumped out of the Waynet?”
“I’ve run a fault-check on the syrinx. There doesn’t appear to be any-thing
wrong with it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know.” Tyrant sounded sullen. “I still don’t have an explanation for what
went wrong. And I don’t like that any more than you do.”
* * * *
Tyrant fell into the atmosphere of Lecythus. The transmissions had resumed,
allowing the ship to pinpoint the origin to one of the larger airborne masses.
Shortly afterward, a second source began transmitting from another floating
mass, half the size of the first, located three thousand kilometers to the west. The
way the signals started and stopped suggested some kind of agonizingly slow
communication via radio pulses, one that probably had nothing to do with Merlin’s
arrival.
“Tell me that’s a code in our database,” Merlin said.
“It isn’t. And the code won’t tell us much about their spoken language, I’m
afraid.”
Up close, the broken edges of the floating mass soared as tall as a cliff. They
were a dark, streaked gray, infinitely less regular than they had ap-peared from
space. The edge showed signs of weathering and erosion. There were wide ledges,
dizzying promontories, and cathedral-sized shadowed caves. Glinting in the low light
of Calliope, ladders and walkways—impos-sibly thin and spindly scratches of
metal—reached down from the icebound upper reaches, following zigzag trajectories
that only took them a fraction of the way to the perilous lower lip, where the floating
world curved back under itself.
Merlin made out the tiny moving forms of birdlike creatures, wheeling and
orbiting in powerful thermals, some of them coming and going from roosts on the
lower ledges.
“But that isn’t a bird,” Tyrant said, highlighting a larger moving shape.
Merlin felt an immediate pang of recognition as the image zoomed. It was an
aircraft: a ludicrously fragile assemblage of canvas and wire. It had a crescent moon
painted on both wings. There’d been a machine not much more advanced than that
in the archive inside the Palace of Eternal Dusk, preserved across thirteen hundred
years of family history. Merlin had even risked taking it outside once, to see for
himself if he had the nerve to repeat his distant ancestor’s brave crossing. He still
remembered the sting of repri-mand when he’d brought it back, nearly ruined.
This aircraft was even flimsier and slower. It was driven by a single chug-ging
propellor rather than a battery of rocket-assisted turbines. It was fol-lowing the rim
of the landmass, slowly gaining altitude. Clearly it intended to make landfall. The air
on Lecythus was thicker at sea level than on Pleni-tude, but the little machine must
still have been very close to its safe op-erational ceiling. And yet it would have to
climb even higher if it was to traverse the raised rim.
“Follow it,” Merlin said. “Keep us astern by a clear two kilometers. And set
hull to stealth.”
Merlin’s ship nosed in behind the struggling aircraft. He could see the single
pilot now, goggled and helmeted within a crude-looking bubble canopy. The plane
had reached ten kilometers, but it would need to double that to clear the upturned
rim. Every hundred meters of altitude gained seemed to tax the aircraft to the limit,
so that it climbed, leveled, climbed. It trailed sooty hyphens behind it. Merlin could
imagine the sputtering protest from the little engine, the fear in the pilot’s belly that
the motor was going to stall at any moment.
That was when an airship hove around the edge of the visible cliff. Calli-ope’s
rays flared off the golden swell of its envelope. Beneath the long ribbed form was a
tiny gondola, equipped with multiple engines on skeletal out-riggers. The airship’s
nose began to turn, bringing another crescent-moon emblem into view. The aircraft
lined up with the airship, the two of them at about the same altitude. Merlin watched
as some kind of netlike apparatus unfurled in slow motion from the belly of the
gondola. The pilot gained further height, then cut the aircraft’s engine. Powerless
now, it followed a shallow glide path toward the net. Clearly, the airship was going to
catch the aircraft and carry it over the rim. That must have been the only way for
aircraft to arrive and depart from the hovering landmass.
Merlin watched with a sickened fascination. He’d occasionally had a
pre-sentiment when something was going to go wrong. Now he had that feel-ing
again.
Some gust caught the airship. It began to drift out of the aircraft’s glide path.
The pilot tried to compensate—Merlin could see the play of light shift on the wings
as they warped—but it was never going to be enough. With-out power, the aircraft
must have been cumbersome to steer. The engines on the gondola turned on their
mountings, trying to shove the airship back into position.
Beyond the airship loomed the streaked gray vastness of the great cliff.
“Why did he cut the engines...” Merlin breathed to himself. Then, an instant
later: “Can we catch up? Can we do something?”
“I’m afraid not. There simply isn’t time.”
Sickened, Merlin watched as the aircraft slid past the airship, missing the net
by a hundred meters. A sooty smear erupted from the engine. The pilot must have
been desperately trying to restart the motor. Moments later, Merlin watched as one
wingtip grazed the side of the cliff and crumpled instantly, horribly. The aircraft
dropped, dashing itself to splinters and shreds against the side of the cliff. There was
no possibility that the pilot could have survived.
For a moment Merlin was numb. He was frozen, unsure what to do next.
He’d been planning to land, but it seemed improper to arrive immediately after
witnessing such a tragedy. Perhaps the thing to do was find an unin-habited
landmass and put down there.
“There’s another aircraft,” Tyrant announced. “It’s approaching from the
west.”
Still shaken by what he’d seen, Merlin took the stealthed ship closer. Dirty
smoke billowed from the side of the aircraft. In the canopy, the pilot was obviously
engaged in a life-or-death struggle to bring his machine to safety. Even as they
watched, the engine appeared to slow and then restart.
Something slammed past Tyrant, triggering proximity alarms. “Some kind of
shell,” the ship told Merlin. “I think someone on the ground is trying to shoot down
these aircraft.”
Merlin looked down. He hadn’t paid much attention to the landmass beneath
them, but now that he did—peering through the holes in a quilt of low-lying
cloud—he made out the unmistakable flashes of artillery posi-tions, laid out along
the pale scratch of a fortified line.
He began to understand why the airship dared not stray too far from the side
of the landmass. Near the cliff, it at least had some measure of cover. It would have
been far too vulnerable to the shells in open air.
“I think it’s time to take a stand,” he said. “Maintain stealth. I’m going to
provide some lift support to that aircraft. Bring us around to her rear and then
approach from under her.”
“Merlin, you have no idea who these people are. They could be brigands,
pirates, anything.”
“They’re being shot at. That’s good enough for me.”
“I really think we should land. I’m down to vapor pressure in the tanks now.”
“So’s that brave fool of a pilot. Just do it.”
The aircraft’s engine gave out just as Tyrant reached position. Taking the
controls manually, Merlin brought his ship’s nose into contact with the un-derside of
the aircraft’s paper-thin fuselage. Contact occurred with the faintest of bumps. The
pilot glanced back down over his shoulder, but the goggled mask hid all expression.
Merlin could only imagine what the pilot made of the sleek, whale-sized machine now
supporting his little contraption.
Merlin’s hands trembled. He was acutely aware of how easily he could
damage the fragile thing with a miscalculated application of thrust. Tyrant was
armored to withstand Waynet transitions and the crush of gas giant atmospheres. It
was like using a hammer to push around a feather. For a moment, contact between
the two craft was lost, and when Tyrant came in again it hit the aircraft hard enough
to crush the metal cylinder of a spare fuel tank bracketed on under the wing. Merlin
winced in anticipation of an explosion—one that would hurt the little airplane a lot
more than it hurt Tyrant—but the tank must have been empty.
Ahead, the airship had regained some measure of stability. The capture net
was still deployed. Merlin pushed harder, giving the aircraft more alti-tude in
readiness for its approach glide. At the last moment he judged it safe to disengage.
He steered Tyrant away and left the aircraft to blunder into the net.
This time there were no gusts. The net wrapped itself around the aircraft, the
soft impact nudging down the nose of the airship. Then the net began to be winched
back toward the gondola like a haul of fish. At the same time the airship swung
around and began to climb.
“No other planes?” Merlin asked.
“That was the only one.”
They followed the airship in. It rose over the cliff, over the ice-capped rim of
the aerial landmass, then settled down toward the shielded region in the bowl, where
water and greenery had gathered. There was even a wispy layer of cloud, arranged in
a broken ring around the shore of the lake. Merlin presumed that the concave shape
of the landmass was sufficient to trap a stable microclimate.
By now Merlin had an audience. People had gathered on the gondola’s rear
observation platform. They wore goggles and gloves and heavy brown overcoats.
Merlin caught the shine of glass lenses being pointed at him. He was being studied,
sketched, perhaps even photographed.
“Do you think they look grateful?” he asked. “Or pissed off?”
Tyrant declined to answer.
Merlin kept his distance, conserving fuel as best he could as the airship
crossed tens of kilometers of arid, gently sloping land. Occasionally they overflew a
little hamlet of huts or the scratch of a minor track. Presently the ground became
soil-covered, and then fertile. They traversed swaths of bleak gray-green grass,
intermingled with boulders and assorted uplifted debris. Then there were trees and
woods. The communities became more than just hamlets. Small ponds fed rivers
that ambled down to the single lake that occupied the landmass’s lowest point.
Merlin spied waterwheels and rustic-looking bridges. There were fields with grazing
animals, and evidence of some tall-chimneyed industrial structures on the far side of
the lake. The lake itself was an easy fifty or sixty kilometers wide. Nestled around a
natu-ral harbor on its southern shore was the largest community Merlin had seen so
far. It was a haphazard jumble of several hundred mostly white, mostly single-story
buildings, arranged with the randomness of toy blocks littering a floor.
The airship skirted the edge of the town and then descended quickly. It
approached what was clearly some kind of secure compound, judging by the
guarded fence that encircled it. There was a pair of airstrips arranged in a cross
formation, and a dozen or so aircraft parked around a painted copy of the crescent
emblem. Four skeletal docking towers rose from another area of the compound,
stayed by guylines. A battle-weary pair of partially de-flated airships was already
tethered. Merlin pulled back to allow the incom-ing craft enough space to complete
its docking. The net was lowered back down from the gondola, depositing the
airplane—its wings now crumpled, its fuselage buckled—on the apron below.
Service staff rushed out of bun-kers to untangle the mess and free the pilot. Merlin
brought his ship down at a clear part of the apron and doused the engines as soon as
the landing skids touched the ground.
It wasn’t long before a wary crowd had gathered around Tyrant. Most of
them wore long leather coats, heavily belted, with the crescent emblem sewn into the
right breast. They had scarves wrapped around their lower faces, almost to the nose.
Their helmets were leather caps, with long flaps covering the sides of the face and
the back of the neck. Most of them wore goggles; a few wore some kind of
breathing apparatus. At least half the number were aiming barreled weapons at the
ship, some of which needed to be set up on tripods, while some even larger wheeled
cannons were being propelled across the apron by teams of well-drilled soldiers.
One figure was gesticulat-ing, directing the armed squads to take up specific
positions.
“Can you understand what he’s saying?” Merlin asked, knowing that Tyrant
would be picking up any external sounds.
“I’m going to need more than a few minutes to crack their language, Merlin,
even if it is related to something in my database, of which there’s no guarantee.”
“Fine. I’ll improvise. Can you spin me some flowers?”
“Where exactly are you going? What do you mean, flowers?”
Merlin paused at the airlock. He wore long boots, tight black leather trou-sers,
a billowing white shirt, and brocaded brown leather waistcoat, accented with scarlet
trim. He’d tied back his hair and made a point of trimming his beard. “Where do you
think? Outside. And I want some flowers. Flowers are good. Spin me some indigo
hyacinths, the kind they used to grow on Springhaven, before the Mentality Wars.
They always go down well.”
“You’re insane. They’ll shoot you.”
“Not if I smile and come bearing exotic alien flowers. Remember, I did just
save one of their planes.”
“You’re not even wearing armor.”
“Armor would really scare them. Trust me, ship: this is the quickest way for
them to understand I’m not a threat.”
“It’s been a pleasure having you aboard,” Tyrant said acidly. “I’ll be sure to
pass on your regards to my next owner.”
“Just make the flowers and stop complaining.”
Five minutes later Merlin steeled himself as the lock sequenced and the ramp
lowered to kiss the ground. The cold hit him like a lover’s slap. He heard an order
from the soldiers’ leader, and the massed ranks adjusted their aim. They’d been
pointing at the ship before. Now it was only Merlin they were interested in.
He raised his right hand palm open, the newly spun flowers in his left.
“Hello. My name’s Merlin.” He thumped his chest for emphasis and said the
name again, slower this time. “Mer-lin. I don’t think there’s much chance of you
being able to understand me, but just in case... I’m not here to cause trouble.” He
forced a smile, which probably looked more feral than reassur-ing. “Now. Who’s in
charge?”
The leader shouted another order. He heard a rattle of a hundred safety
catches being released. Suddenly, the ship’s idea of sending out a proctor first
sounded splendidly sensible. Merlin felt a cold line of sweat trickle down his back.
After all that he had survived so far, both during his time with the Cohort and since
he had become an adventuring free agent, it would be something of a letdown to die
by being shot with a chemically propelled projectile. That was only one step above
being mauled and eaten by a wild animal.
Merlin walked down the ramp, one cautious step at a time. “No weap-ons,” he
said. “Just flowers. If I wanted to hurt you, I could have hit you from space with
charm-torps.”
When he reached the apron, the leader gave another order and a trio of
soldiers broke formation to cover Merlin from three angles, with the barrels of their
weapons almost touching him. The leader—a cruel-looking young man with a scar
down the right side of his face—shouted something in Merlin’s direction, a word
that sounded vaguely like “distal,” but which was in no language Merlin recognized.
When Merlin didn’t move, he felt a rifle jab into the small of his back. “Distal,” the
man said again, this time with an emphasis bordering on the hysterical.
摘要：

MINLA’SFLOWERSALASTAIRREYNOLDSAlastairReynoldsisafrequentcontributortoInterzone,andhasalsosoldtoAsimov’sScienceFiction,SpectrumSF,andelsewhere.Hisfirstnovel,RevelationSpace,waswidelyhailedasoneofthemajorSFbooksoftheyear;itwasquicklyfollowedbyChasmCity,RedemptionArk,AbsolutionGap,andCenturyRain,allbi...

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