Alastair Reynolds - Diamond Dogs

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Alastair Reynolds

Diamond Dogs

ONE

I met Childe in the Monument to the Eighty.

It was one of those days when I had the place largely to myself, able to walk from aisle to aisle without

seeing another visitor; only my footsteps disturbed the air of funereal silence and stillness.

I was visiting my parents' shrine. It was a modest affair: a smooth wedge of obsidian shaped like a

metronome, undecorated save for two cameo portraits set in elliptical borders. The sole moving part was a

black blade which was attached near the base of the shrine, ticking back and forth with magisterial

slowness. Mechanisms buried inside the shrine ensured that it was winding down, destined to count out

days and then years with each tick. Eventually it would require careful measurement to detect its

movement.

I was watching the blade when a voice disturbed me.

'Visiting the dead again, Richard?'

'Who's there?' I said, looking around, faintly recognising the speaker but not immediately able to place

him.

'Just another ghost.'

Various possibilities flashed through my mind as I listened to the man's deep and taunting voice - a

kidnapping, an assassination - before I stopped flattering myself that I was worthy of such attention.

Then the man emerged from between two shrines a little way down from the metronome.

'My God,' I said.

'Now do you recognise me?'

He smiled and stepped closer: as tall and imposing as I remembered. He had lost the devil's horns since

our last meeting - they had only ever been a bio-engineered affectation - but there was still something

satanic about his appearance, an effect not lessened by the small and slightly pointed goatee he had

cultivated in the meantime.

Dust swirled around him as he walked towards me, suggesting that he was not a projection.

'I thought you were dead, Roland.'

'No, Richard,' he said, stepping close enough to shake my hand. 'But that was most certainly the effect I

desired to achieve.'

'Why?' I said.

'Long story.'

'Start at the beginning, then.'

Roland Childe placed a hand on the smooth side of my parents' shrine. 'Not quite your style, I'd have

thought?'

'It was all I could do to argue against something even more ostentatious and morbid. But don't change

the subject. What happened to you?'

He removed his hand, leaving a faint damp imprint. 'I faked my own death. The Eighty was the perfect

cover. The fact that it all went so horrendously wrong was even better. I couldn't have planned it like that

if I'd tried.'

No arguing with that, I thought. It had gone horrendously wrong.

More than a century and a half ago, a clique of researchers led by Calvin Sylveste had resurrected the

old idea of copying the essence of a living human being into a computer-generated simulation. The

procedure - then in its infancy - had the slight drawback that it killed the subject. But there had still been

volunteers, and my parents had been amongst the first to sign up and support Calvin's work. They had

offered him political protection when the powerful Mixmaster lobby opposed the project, and they had

been amongst the first to be scanned.

Less than fourteen months later, their simulations had also been amongst the first to crash.

None could ever be restarted. Most of the remaining Eighty had succumbed, and now only a handful

remained unaffected.

'You must hate Calvin for what he did,' Childe said, still with that taunting quality in his voice.

'Would it surprise you if I said I didn't?'

'Then why did you set yourself so vocally against his family after the tragedy?'

'Because I felt justice still needed to be served.' I turned from the shrine and started walking away,

curious as to whether Childe would follow me.

'Fair enough,' he said. 'But that opposition cost you dearly, didn't it?'

I bridled, halting next to what appeared a highly realistic sculpture but was almost certainly an

embalmed corpse.

'Meaning what?'

'The Resurgam expedition, of course, which just happened to be bankrolled by House Sylveste. By

rights, you should have been on it. You were Richard Swift, for heaven's sake. You'd spent the better part

of your life thinking about possible modes of alien sentience. There should have been a place for you on

that ship, and you damned well knew it.'

'It wasn't that simple,' I said, resuming my walk. 'There were a limited number of slots available and

they needed practical types first - biologists, geologists, that kind of thing. By the time they'd filled the

most essential slots, there simply wasn't any room for abstract dreamers like myself.'

'And the fact that you'd pissed off House Sylveste had nothing whatsoever to do with it? Come off it,

Richard.'

We descended a series of steps down into the lower level of the Monument. The atrium's ceiling was a

cloudy mass of jagged sculptures: interlocked metal birds. A party of visitors was arriving, attended by

servitors and a swarm of bright, marble-sized float-cams. Childe breezed through the group, drawing

annoyed frowns but no actual recognition, although one or two of the people in the party were vague

acquaintances of mine.

'What is this about?' I asked, once we were outside.

'Concern for an old friend. I've had my tabs on you, and it was pretty obvious that not being selected for

that expedition was a crushing disappointment. You'd thrown your life into contemplation of the alien.

One marriage down the drain because of your self-absorption. What was her name again?'

I'd had her memory buried so deeply that it took a real effort of will to recall any exact details about my

marriage.

'Celestine. I think.'

'Since when you've had a few relationships, but nothing lasting more than a decade. A decade's a mere

fling in this town, Richard.'

'My private life's my own business,' I responded sullenly. 'Hey. Where's my volantor? I parked it here.'

'I sent it away. We'll take mine instead.'

Where my volantor had been was a larger, blood-red model. It was as baroquely ornamented as a

funeral barge. At a gesture from Childe it clammed open, revealing a plush gold interior with four seats,

one of which was occupied by a dark, slouched figure.

'What's going on, Roland?'

'I've found something. Something astonishing that I want you to be a part of; a challenge that makes

every game you and I ever played in our youth pale in comparison.'

'A challenge?'

'The ultimate one, I think.'

He had pricked my curiosity, but I hoped it was not too obvious. 'The city's vigilant. It'll be a matter of

public record that I came to the Monument, and we'll have been recorded together by those float-cams.'

'Exactly,' Childe said, nodding enthusiastically. 'So you risk nothing by getting in the volantor.'

'And should I at any point weary of your company?'

'You have my word that I'll let you leave.'

I decided to play along with him for the time being. Childe and I took the volantor's front pair of seats.

Once ensconced, I turned around to acquaint myself with the other passenger, and then flinched as I saw

him properly.

He wore a high-necked leather coat which concealed much of the lower half of his face. The upper part

was shadowed under the generous rim of a Homburg, tipped down to shade his brow. Yet what remained

visible was sufficient to shock me. There was only a blandly handsome silver mask; sculpted into an

expression of quiet serenity. The eyes were blank silver surfaces, what I could see of his mouth a thin,

slightly smiling slot.

'Doctor Trintignant,' I said.

He reached forward with a gloved hand, allowing me to shake it as one would the hand of a woman.

Beneath the black velvet of the glove I felt armatures of hard metal. Metal that could crush diamond.

'The pleasure is entirely mine,' he said.

Airborne, the volantor's baroque ornamentation melted away to mirror-smoothness. Childe pushed

ivory-handled control sticks forward, gaining altitude and speed. We seemed to be moving faster than the

city ordinances allowed, avoiding the usual traffic corridors. I thought of the way he had followed me,

researched my past and had my own volantor desert me. It would also have taken considerable

resourcefulness to locate the reclusive Trintignant and persuade him to emerge from hiding.

Clearly Childe's influence in the city exceeded my own, even though he had been absent for so long.

'The old place hasn't changed much,' Childe said, swooping us through a dense conglomeration of

golden buildings, as extravagantly tiered as the dream pagodas of a fever-racked Emperor.

'Then you've really been away? When you told me you'd faked your death, I wondered if you'd just

gone into hiding.'

He answered with a trace of hesitation, 'I've been away, but not as far as you'd think. A family matter

came up that was best dealt with confidentially, and I really couldn't be bothered explaining to everyone

why I needed some peace and quiet on my own.'

'And faking your death was the best way to go about it?'

'Like I said, I couldn't have planned the Eighty if I'd tried. I had to bribe a lot of minor players in the

project, of course, and I'll spare you the details of how we provided a corpse . . . but it all worked

swimmingly, didn't it?'

'I never had any doubts that you'd died along with the rest of them.'

'I didn't like deceiving my friends. But I couldn't go to all that trouble and then ruin my plan with a few

indiscretions.'

'You were friends, then?' solicited Trintignant.

'Yes, Doctor,' Childe said, glancing back at him. 'Way back when. Richard and I were rich kids -

relatively rich, anyway -with not enough to do. Neither of us were interested in the stock market or the

social whirl. We were only interested in games.'

'Oh. How charming. What kinds of game, might I ask?'

'We'd build simulations to test each other - extraordinarily elaborate worlds filled with subtle dangers

and temptations. Mazes and labyrinths; secret passages; trapdoors; dungeons and dragons. We'd spend

months inside them, driving each other crazy. Then we'd go away and make them even harder.'

'But in due course you grew apart,' the Doctor said. His synthesised voice had a curious piping quality.

'Yeah,' Childe said. 'But we never stopped being friends. It was just that Richard had spent so much

time devising increasingly alien scenarios that he'd become more interested in the implied psychologies

behind the tests. And I'd become interested only in the playing of the games; not their construction.

Unfortunately Richard was no longer there to provide challenges for me.'

'You were always much better than me at playing them,' I said. 'In the end it got too hard to come up

with something you'd find difficult. You knew the way my mind worked too well.'

'He's convinced that he's a failure,' Childe said, turning round to smile at the Doctor.

'As are we all,' Trintignant answered. 'And with some justification, it must be said. I have never been

allowed to pursue my admittedly controversial interests to their logical ends. You, Mister Swift, were

shunned by those who you felt should have recognised your worth in the field of speculative alien

psychology. And you, Mister Childe, have never discovered a challenge worthy of your undoubted

talents.'

'I didn't think you'd paid me any attention, Doctor.'

'Nor had I. I have surmised this much since our meeting.'

The volantor dropped below ground level, descending into a brightly lit commercial plaza lined with

shops and boutiques. With insouciant ease, Childe skimmed us between aerial walkways and then nosed

the car into a dark side-tunnel. He gunned the machine faster, our speed indicated only by the passing of

red lights set into the tunnel sides. Now and then another vehicle passed us, but once the tunnel had

branched and rebranched half a dozen times, no further traffic appeared. The tunnel lights were gone now

and when the volantor's headlights grazed the walls they revealed ugly cracks and huge, scarred absences

of cladding. These old sub-surface ducts dated back to the city's earliest days, before the domes were

thrown across the crater.

Even if I had recognised the part of the city where we had entered the tunnel system, I would have been

hopelessly lost by now.

'Do you think Childe has brought us together to taunt us about our lack of respective failures, Doctor?' I

asked, beginning to feel uneasy again despite my earlier attempts at reassurance.

'I would consider that a distinct possibility, were Childe himself not conspicuously tainted by the same

lack of success.'

'Then there must be another reason.'

'Which I'll reveal in due course,' Childe said. 'Just bear with me, will you? You two aren't the only ones

I've gathered together.'

Presently we arrived somewhere.

It was a cave in the form of a near-perfect hemisphere, the great domed roof arching a clear three

hundred metres from the floor. We were obviously well below Yellowstone's surface now. It was even

possible that we had passed beyond the city's crater wall, so that above us lay only poisonous skies.

But the domed chamber was inhabited.

The roof was studded with an enormous number of lamps, flooding the interior with synthetic daylight.

An island stood in the middle of the chamber, moated by a ring of uninviting water. A single bone-white

bridge connected the mainland to the island, shaped like a great curved femur. The island was dominated

by a thicket of slender, dark poplars partly concealing a pale structure situated near its middle.

Childe brought the volantor to a rest near the edge of the water and invited us to disembark.

'Where are we?' I asked, once I had stepped down.

'Query the city and find out for yourself,' Trintignant said.

The result was not what I was expecting. For a moment there was a shocking absence inside my head,

the neural equivalent of a sudden, unexpected amputation.

The Doctor's chuckle was an arpeggio played on a pipe organ. 'We have been out of range of city

services from the moment we entered his conveyance.'

'You needn't worry,' Childe said. 'You are beyond city services, but only because I value the secrecy of

this place. If I imagined it'd have come as a shock to you, I'd have told you already.'

'I'd have at least appreciated a warning, Roland,' I said.

'Would it have changed your mind about coming here?'

'Conceivably.'

The echo of his laughter betrayed the chamber's peculiar acoustics. 'Then are you at all surprised that I

didn't tell you?'

I turned to Trintignant. 'What about you?'

'I confess my use of city services has been as limited as your own, but for rather different reasons.'

'The good Doctor needed to lie low,' Childe said. 'That meant he couldn't participate very actively in

city affairs. Not if he didn't want to be tracked down and assassinated.'

I stamped my feet, beginning to feel cold. 'Good. What now?'

'It's only a short ride to the house,' Childe said, glancing towards the island.

Now a noise came steadily nearer. It was an antiquated, rumbling sound, accompanied by a odd,

rhythmic sort of drumming, quite unlike any machine I had experienced. I looked towards the femoral

bridge, suspecting as I did that it was exactly what it looked like: a giant, bio-engineered bone, carved

with a flat roadbed. And something was approaching us over the span: a dark, complicated and unfamiliar

contraption, which at first glance resembled an iron tarantula.

I felt the back of my neck prickle.

The thing reached the end of the bridge and swerved towards us. Two mechanical black horses

provided the motive power. They were emaciated black machines with sinewy, piston-driven limbs,

venting steam and snorting from intakes. Malignant red laser-eyes swept over us. The horses were

harnessed to a four-wheeled carriage slightly larger than the volantor, above which was perched a

headless humanoid robot. Skeletal hands gripped iron control cables which plunged into the backs of the

horses' steel necks.

'Meant to inspire confidence, is it?' I asked.

'It's an old family heirloom,' Childe said, swinging open a black door in the side of the carriage. 'My

uncle Giles made automata. Unfortunately - for reasons we'll come to - he was a bit of a miserable

bastard. But don't let it put you off.'

He helped us aboard, then climbed inside himself, sealed the door and knocked on the roof. I heard the

mechanical horses snort; alloy hooves hammered the ground impatiently. Then we were moving, curving

around and ascending the gentle arc of the bridge of bone.

'Have you been here during the entire period of your absence, Mister Childe?' Trintignant asked.

He nodded. 'Ever since that family business came up, I've allowed myself the occasional visit back to

the city - just like I did today - but I've tried to keep such excursions to a minimum.'

'Didn't you have horns the last time we met?' I said.

He rubbed the smooth skin of his scalp where the horns had been. 'Had to have them removed. I

couldn't very well disguise myself otherwise.'

We crossed the bridge and navigated a path between the tall trees which sheltered the island's structure.

Childe's carriage pulled up to a smart stop in front of the building and I was afforded my first

unobstructed view of our destination. It was not one to induce great cheer. The house's architecture was

haphazard: whatever basic symmetry it might once have had was lost under a profusion of additions and

modifications. The roof was a jumbled collision of angles and spires, jutting turrets and sinister oubliettes.

Not all of the embellishments had been arranged at strict right angles to their neighbours, and the style

and apparent age of the house varied jarringly from place to place. Since our arrival in the cave the

overhead lights had dimmed, simulating the onset of dusk, but only a few windows were illuminated,

clustered together in the left-hand wing. The rest of the house had a forebidding aspect, the paleness of its

stone, the irregularity of its construction and the darkness of its many windows suggesting a pile of skulls.

Almost before we had disembarked from the carriage, a reception party emerged from the house. It was

a troupe of servitors - humanoid household robots, of the kind anyone would have felt comfortable with

in the city proper - but they had been reworked to resemble skeletal ghouls or headless knights. Their

mechanisms had been sabotaged so that they limped and creaked, and they had all had their voiceboxes

disabled.

'Had a lot of time on his hands, your uncle,' I said.

'You'd have loved Giles, Richard. He was a scream.'

‘I’ll take your word for it, I think.'

The servitors escorted us into the central part of the house, then took us through a maze of chill, dark

corridors.

Finally we reached a large room walled in plush red velvet. A holoclavier sat in one corner, with a book

of sheet music spread open above the projected keyboard. There was a malachite escritoire, a number of

well-stocked bookcases, a single chandelier, three smaller candelabra and two fireplaces of distinctly

gothic appearance, in one of which roared an actual fire. But the room's central feature was a mahogany

table, around which three additional guests were gathered.

'Sorry to keep everyone waiting,' Childe said, closing a pair of sturdy wooden doors behind us. 'Now.

Introductions.'

The others looked at us with no more than mild interest.

The only man amongst them wore an elaborately ornamented exoskeleton: a baroque support structure

of struts, hinged plates, cables and servo-mechanisms. His face was a skull papered with deathly white

skin, shading to black under his bladelike cheekbones. His eyes were concealed behind goggles, his hair a

spray of stiff black dreadlocks.

Periodically he inhaled from a glass pipe, connected to a miniature refinery of bubbling apparatus

placed before him on the table.

'Allow me to introduce Captain Forqueray,' Childe said. 'Captain - this is Richard Swift and . . . um,

Doctor Trintignant.'

'Pleased to meet you,' I said, leaning across the table to shake Forqueray's hand. His grip felt like the

cold clasp of a squid.

'The Captain is an Ultra; the master of the lighthugger Apollyon, currently in orbit around Yellowstone,'

Childe added.

Trintignant refrained from approaching him.

'Shy, Doctor?' Forqueray said, his voice simultaneously deep and flawed, like a cracked bell.

'No, merely cautious. It is a matter of common knowledge that I have enemies amongst the Ultras.'

Trintignant removed his Homburg and patted his crown delicately, as if smoothing down errant hairs.

Silver waves had been sculpted into his head-mask, so that he resembled a bewigged Regency fop dipped

in mercury.

'You've enemies everywhere,' said Forqueray between gurgling inhalations. 'But I bear you no personal

animosity for your atrocities, and I guarantee that my crew will extend you the same courtesy.'

'Very gracious of you,' Trintignant said, before shaking the Ultra's hand for the minimum time

compatible with politeness. 'But why should your crew concern me?'

'Never mind that.' It was one of the two women speaking now. 'Who is this guy, and why does

everyone hate him?'

'Allow me to introduce Hirz,' Childe said, indicating the woman who had spoken. She was small

enough to have been a child, except that her face was clearly that of an adult woman. She was dressed in

austere, tight-fitting black clothes which only emphasised her diminutive build. 'Hirz is - for want of a

better word - a mercenary.'

'Except I prefer to think of myself as an information retrieval specialist. I specialise in clandestine

infiltration for high-level corporate clients in the Glitter Band - physical espionage, some of the time.

Mostly, though, I'm what used to be called a hacker. I'm also pretty damned good at my job.' Hirz paused

to swig down some wine. 'But enough about me. Who's the silver dude, and what did Forqueray mean

about atrocities?'

'You're seriously telling me you're unaware of Trintignant's reputation?' I said.

'Hey, listen. I get myself frozen between assignments. That means I miss a lot of shit that goes down in

Chasm City. Get over it.'

I shrugged and - with one eye on the Doctor himself - told Hirz what I knew about Trintignant. I

sketched in his early career as an experimental cyberneticist, how his reputation for fearless innovation

had eventually brought him to Calvin Sylveste's attention.

Calvin had recruited Trintignant to his own research team, but the collaboration had not been a happy

one. Trintignant's desire to find the ultimate fusion of flesh and machine had become obsessive; even —

some said — perverse. After a scandal involving experimentation on unconsenting subjects, Trintignant

had been forced to pursue his work alone, his methods too extreme even for Calvin.

So Trintignant had gone to ground, and continued his gruesome experiments with his only remaining

subject.

Himself.

'So let's see,' said the final guest. 'Who have we got? An obsessive and thwarted cyberneticist with a

taste for extreme modification. An intrusion specialist with a talent for breaking into highly protected -

and dangerous - environments. A man with a starship at his disposal and the crew to operate it.'

Then she looked at Childe, and while her gaze was averted I admired the fine, faintly familiar profile of

her face. Her long hair was the sheer black of interstellar space, pinned back from her face by a jewelled

clasp which flickered with a constellation of embedded pastel lights. Who was she? I felt sure we had met

once or maybe twice before. Perhaps we had passed each other amongst the shrines in the Monument to

the Eighty, visiting the dead.

'And Childe,' she continued. 'A man once known for his love of intricate challenges, but long assumed

dead.' Then she turned her piercing eyes upon me. 'And, finally, you.'

'I know you, I think—' I said, her name on the tip of my tongue.

'Of course you do.' Her look, suddenly, was contemptuous. 'I'm Celestine. You used to be married to

me.'

All along, Childe had known she was here.

'Do you mind if I ask what this is about?' I said, doing my best to sound as reasonable as possible,

rather than someone on the verge of losing their temper in polite company.

Celestine withdrew her hand once I had shaken it. 'Roland invited me here, Richard. Just the same way

he did you, with the same veiled hints about having found something.'

'But you're . . .'

'Your ex-wife?' She nodded. 'Exactly how much do you remember, Richard? I heard the strangest

rumours, you know. That you'd had me deleted from your long-term memory.'

'I had you suppressed, not deleted. There's a subtle distinction.'

She nodded knowingly. 'So I gather.'

I looked at the other guests, who were observing us. Even Forqueray was waiting, the pipe of his

apparatus poised an inch from his mouth in expectation. They were waiting for me to say something;

anything.

'Why exactly are you here, Celestine?'

'You don't remember, do you?'

'Remember what?'

'What it was I used to do, Richard, when we were married.'

'I confess I don't, no.'

Childe coughed. 'Your wife, Richard, was as fascinated by the alien as you were. She was one of the

city's foremost specialists on the Pattern Jugglers, although she'd be entirely too modest to admit it

herself.' He paused, apparently seeking Celestine's permission to continue. 'She visited them, long before

you met, spending several years of her life at the study station on Spindrift. You swam with the Jugglers,

didn't you, Celestine?'

'Once or twice.’

'And allowed them to reshape your mind, transforming its neural pathways into something deeply -

albeit usually temporarily - alien.'

'It wasn't that big a deal,' Celestine said.

'Not if you'd been fortunate enough to have it happen to you, no. But for someone like Richard - who

craved knowledge of the alien with every fibre of his existence - it would have been anything but

mundane.' He turned to me. 'Isn't that true?'

'I admit I'd have done a great deal to experience communion with the Jugglers,' I said, knowing that it

was pointless to deny it. 'But it just wasn't possible. My family lacked the resources to send me to one of

the Juggler worlds, and the bodies that might ordinarily have funded that kind of trip - the Sylveste

Institute, for instance - had turned their attentions elsewhere.'

'In which case Celestine was deeply fortunate, wouldn't you say?'

'I don't think anyone would deny that,' I said. 'To speculate about the shape of alien consciousness is

one thing; but to drink it; to bathe in the full flood of it - to know it intimately, like a lover . . .' I trailed off

for a moment. 'Wait a minute. Shouldn't you be on Resurgam, Celestine? There isn't time for the expedi-

tion to have gone there and come back.'

She eyed me with raptorial intent before answering, 'I never went.'

Childe leant over and refreshed my glass. 'She was turned down at the last minute, Richard. Sylveste

had a grudge against anyone who'd visited the Jugglers; he suddenly decided they were all unstable and

couldn't be trusted.'

I looked at Celestine wonderingly. 'Then all this time . . . ?'

'I've been here, in Chasm City. Oh, don't look so crushed, Richard. By the time I learned I'd been turned

down, you'd already decided to flush me out of your past. It was better for both of us this way.'

'But the deception . . .'

Childe put one hand on my shoulder, calmingly. 'There wasn't any. She just didn't make contact again.

No lies; no deception; nothing to hold a grudge about.'

I looked at him, angrily. 'Then why the hell is she here?'

'Because I happen to have use for someone with the skills that the Jugglers gave to Celestine.'

'Which included?' I said.

'Extreme mathematical prowess.'

'And why would that have been useful?'

Childe turned to the Ultra, indicating that the man should remove his bubbling apparatus.

'I'm about to show you.'

The table housed an antique holo-projection system. Childe handed out viewers which resembled

lorgnette binoculars, and, like so many myopic opera buffs, we studied the apparitions which floated into

existence above the polished mahogany surface.

Stars: incalculable numbers of them - hard white and blood-red gems, strewn in lacy patterns against

deep velvet blue.

Childe narrated:

'The better part of two and a half centuries ago, my uncle Giles - whose somewhat pessimistic

handiwork you have already seen - made a momentous decision. He embarked on what we in the family

referred to as the Program, and then only in terms of extreme secrecy.'

Childe told us that the Program was an attempt at covert deep space exploration.

Giles had conceived the work, funding it directly from the family's finances. He had done this with

such ingenuity that the apparent wealth of House Childe had never faltered, even as the Program entered

its most expensive phase. Only a few select members of the Childe dynasty had even known of the Pro-

gram's existence, and that number had dwindled as time passed.

The bulk of the money had been paid to the Ultras, who had already emerged as a powerful faction by

that time.

They had built the autonomous robot space probes according to this uncle's desires, and then launched

them towards a variety of target systems. The Ultras could have delivered his probes to any system within

range of their lighthugger ships, but the whole point of the exercise was to restrict the knowledge of any

possible discoveries to the family alone. So the envoys crossed space by themselves, at only a fraction of

the speed of light, and the targets they were sent to were all poorly explored systems on the ragged edge

of human space.

The probes decelerated by use of solar sails, picked the most interesting worlds to explore, and then fell

into orbit around them.

Robots were sent down, equipped to survive on the surface for many decades.

Childe waved his hand across the table. Lines radiated out from one of the redder suns in the display,

which I assumed was Yellowstone's star. The lines reached out towards other stars, forming a three-

dimensional scarlet dandelion several dozen light-years wide.

'These machines must have been reasonably intelligent,' Celestine said. 'Especially by the standards of

the time.'

Childe nodded keenly. 'Oh, they were. Cunning little blighters. Subtle and stealthy and diligent. They

had to be, to operate so far from human supervision.'

'And I presume they found something?' I said.

'Yes,' Childe said testily, like a conjurer whose carefully scripted patter was being ruined by a persistent

heckler. 'But not immediately. Giles didn't expect it to be immediate, of course - the envoys would take

decades to reach the closest systems they'd been assigned to, and there'd still be the communicational

timelag to take into consideration. So my uncle resigned himself to forty or fifty years of waiting, and that

was erring on the optimistic side.' He paused and sipped from his wine. 'Too bloody optimistic, as it

happened. Fifty years passed . . . then sixty . . . but nothing of any consequence was ever reported back to

Yellowstone, at least not in his lifetime. The envoys did, on occasion, find something interesting - but by

then other human explorers had usually stumbled on the same find. And as the decades wore on, and the

envoys failed to justify their invention, my uncle grew steadily more maudlin and bitter.'

'I'd never have guessed,' Celestine said.

'He died, eventually - bitter and resentful; feeling that the universe had played some sick cosmic trick

on him. He could have lived for another fifty or sixty years with the right treatments, but I think by then

he knew it would be a waste of time.'

'You faked your death a century and a half ago,' I said.

'Didn't you tell me it had something to do with the family business?'

He nodded in my direction. 'That was when my uncle told me about the Program. I didn't know

anything about it until then - hadn't heard even the tiniest hint of a rumour. No one in the family had. By

then, of course, the project was costing us almost nothing, so there wasn't even a financial drain to be

concealed.'

'And since then?'

'I vowed not to make my uncle's mistake. I resolved to sleep until the machines sent back a report, and

then sleep again if the report turned out to be a false alarm.'

'Sleep?' I said.

He clicked his fingers and one entire wall of the room whisked back to reveal a sterile, machine-filled

chamber.

I studied its contents.

There was a reefersleep casket of the kind Forqueray and his ilk used aboard their ships, attended by

numerous complicated hunks of gleaming green support machinery. By use of such a casket, one might

prolong the four hundred-odd years of a normal human lifespan by many centuries, though reefersleep

was not without its risks.

'I spent a century and a half in that contraption,' he said, 'waking every fifteen or twenty years whenever

a report trickled in from one of the envoys. Waking is the worst part. It feels like you're made of glass; as

if the next movement you make - the next breath you take - will cause you to shatter into a billion pieces.

It always passes, and you always forget it an hour later, but it's never easier the next time.' He shuddered

visibly. 'In fact, sometimes I think it gets harder each time.'

'Then your equipment needs servicing,' Forqueray said dismissively. I suspected it was bluff. Ultras

often wore a lock of braided hair for every crossing they had made across interstellar space and survived

all the myriad misfortunes which might befall a ship. But that braid also symbolised every occasion on

which they had been woken from the dead, at the end of the journey.

They felt the pain as fully as Childe did, even if they were not willing to admit it.

'How long did you spend awake each time?' I asked.

'No more than thirteen hours. That was usually sufficient to tell if the message was interesting or not.

I'd allow myself one or two hours to catch up on the news; what was going on in the wider universe. But I

had to be disciplined. If I'd stayed awake longer, the attraction of returning to city life would have become

overwhelming. That room began to feel like a prison.'

'Why?' I asked. 'Surely the subjective time must have passed very quickly?'

'You've obviously never spent any time in reefersleep, Richard. There's no consciousness when you're

frozen, granted - but the transitions to and from the cold state are like an eternity, crammed with strange

dreams.'

'But you hoped the rewards would be worth it?'

Childe nodded. 'And, indeed, they may well have been. I was last woken six months ago, and I've not

returned to the chamber since. Instead, I've spent that time gathering together the resources and the people

for a highly unusual expedition.'

Now he made the table change its projection, zooming in on one particular star.

'I won't bore you with catalogue numbers, suffice to say that this is a system which no one around this

table - with the possible exception of Forqueray - is likely to have heard of. There've never been any

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AlastairReynoldsDiamondDogsCopyright(c)AlastairReynolds2002ONEImetChildeintheMonumenttotheEighty.ItwasoneofthosedayswhenIhadtheplacelargelytomyself,abletowalkfromaisletoaislewithoutseeinganothervisitor;onlymyfootstepsdisturbedtheairoffunerealsilenceandstillness.Iwasvisitingmyparents'shrine.Itwasamod...

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Alastair Reynolds - Diamond Dogs

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