Hideaway

HIDEAWAY Alastair Reynolds

PART ONE

There was, Merlin thought, a very fine line between beauty and terror. Most certainly where the Way was concerned. Tempting as it was to think that the thing they saw through the cutter's windows was only a mirage, there would always come a point when the mysterious artefact known as the syrinx started purring, vibrating in its metal harness. Somehow it was sensing the Way's proximity, anxious to perform the function for which it had been designed.

It seemed to bother all of them except Sayaca.

'Krasnikov,' she mouthed, shaping the unfamiliar word like an oath.

She was the youngest and brightest of the four disciples who had agreed to accompany Merlin on this field trip. At first the others had welcomed her into Merlin's little entourage, keen to hear her insights on matters relating to the Way and the enigmatic Waymakers. But in the cutter's cramped surroundings Sayaca's charms had worn off with impressive speed.

'Krasnikov?' Merlin said. 'Sorry, doesn't mean anything to me either.' He watched as the others pulled faces. 'You're going to have to enlighten us, Sayaca.'

'Krasnikov was . . .' she paused. 'Well, a human, I suppose - tens of kiloyears ago, long before the Waymakers, even before the Flourishing. He had an idea for moving faster than light, one that didn't involve wormholes or tachyons.'

'It can't work, Sayaca,' said a gangly, greasy-scalped adolescent called Weaver. 'You can't move faster than light without manipulating matter with negative energy density.'

'So what, Weaver? Do you think that would have bothered the Waymakers? '

Merlin smiled, thinking that the trouble with Sayaca was that when she made a point it was almost always a valid one.

'But the Way doesn't actually allow faster-than-light travel,' said one of the others. 'That much we do know.'

'Of course. All I'm saying is that the Waynet might have been an attempt to make a network of Krasnikov tubes, which didn't quite work out the way the builders intended.'

'Mm,' Merlin said. 'And what exactly is a Krasnikov tube?'

'A tube-shaped volume of altered space-time, light-years from end to end. Just like one branch of the Waynet. The point was to allow roundtrip journeys to other star systems in arbitrarily short objective time.'

'Like a wormhole?' Weaver asked.

'No; the mathematical formulation's utterly different.' She sighed, looking to Merlin for moral support. He nodded for her to continue, knowing that she had already alienated the others beyond any reasonable point of return. 'But there must have been a catch. It's clear that two neighbouring Krasnikov tubes running in opposite directions violate causality. Perhaps when that happened--'

'They got something like the Waynet?'

Sayaca nodded to Merlin. 'Not a static tube of restructured space-time, but a rushing column of it, moving at a fraction below light-speed. It was still useful, of course. Ships could slip into the Way, cross interstellar space at massive tau factors and then decelerate instantaneously at the other end simply by leaving the stream.'

'All very impressive,' Weaver said. 'But if you're such an expert, why can't you tell us how to make the syrinx work properly?'

'You wouldn't understand if I did,' Sayaca said.

Merlin was about to intervene - tension was one thing, but he could not tolerate an argument aboard the cutter - when his glove rescued him. It had begun tickling the back of his hand, announcing a private call from the mother ship. Relieved, he unhitched from a restraint harness and kicked himself away from the four adolescents. 'I'll be back shortly,' he said. 'Try not to strangle each other, will you?'

The cutter was a slender craft only forty metres long, so it was normal enough that tempers had become frayed in the four days that they had been away from the Starthroat. The air smelled edgy too: thick with youthful pheromones he did not remember from the last trip. The youngsters were all getting older, no longer his unquestioning devotees.

He pushed past the syrinx. It sat within a metal harness, its long axis aligned with the ship's. The conic device was tens of thousands of years old, but its matt-black surface was completely unmarred. It was still purring too, like a well-fed cat. The closer they got to the Way, the more it would respond. It wanted to be set free, and shortly - Merlin hoped - it would get its wish.

The seniors would not be pleased, of course.

Beyond the syrinx was a narrow, transparent-walled duct that led back to Merlin's private quarters. He kicked himself along the passage, comfortable in free-fall after four days of adaptation. The view was undeniably impressive; as always he found himself slowing to take it in.

The stars were clumped ahead, shifted from their real positions and altered in hue and brightness by the aberration caused by the cutter's motion. They were moving at nine-tenths of the speed of light. Set against this distorted starfield, far to one side, was the huge swallowship - the Starthroat - that Merlin's people called home. The swallowship was far too distant to see as anything other than a prick of hot blue light pointing aft, like a star that had been carelessly smudged. Yet apart from the four people with him here, every other human he knew was inside Starthroat.

And then there was the Way.

It lay in the opposite hemisphere of the sky, stretching into the infinite distance fore and aft. It was like a ghostly pipeline alongside which they were flying - a pipeline ten thousand kilometres thick and thousands of light-years long. It shimmered faintly - twinkling as tiny particles of cosmic debris annihilated themselves against its skin. Most of those impacts were due to dust specks that had rest velocities of only a few kilometres a second against the local stellar rest frame - so the transient glints seemed to slam past at eye-wrenching velocities. Not just a pipeline, then - but a glass pipeline running thick with twinkling fluid that flowed at frightening speed.

And perhaps soon they would relearn the art of riding it.

He pushed into his quarters, confronting his brother's image on the comms console. Although they were not twins - Gallinule was a year younger - they still looked remarkably alike. It was almost like looking in a mirror.

'Well?' Merlin said.

'Trouble, I'm afraid.'

'Let me guess. It has something to do with Quail.'

'Well, the captain's not happy, let's put it like that. First you take the syrinx without authorisation, then the cutter - and then you have the balls not to come back when the old bastard tells you to.' The face on the screen was trying not to smile, but Merlin could tell he was quietly impressed. 'But that's not actually the problem. When I say trouble I mean for all of us. Quail wants all the seniors in his meeting room in eight hours.'

Just time, Merlin thought, for him to drop the syrinx and make it back to Starthroat. Not as good as having time to run comprehensive tests, but still damnably tempting. It was almost suspiciously convenient.

'I hadn't heard of any crisis on the horizon.'

'Me neither, and that's what worries me. It's something we haven't thought of.'

'The Huskers stealing a lead on us? Fine. I expect to be comfortably senile by the time they get within weapons range.'

'Just be there, will you? Or there'll be two of us in trouble.'

Merlin smiled. 'What else are brothers for?'

The long oval meeting room was hundreds of metres inside Starthroat's armoured hull. Covered in a richly detailed fresco, the walls enclosed a hallowed mahogany table of ancient provenance. Just as the table's extremities now sagged with age, time had turned the fresco dark and sepia. In one corner a proctor was slowly renovating the historic artwork, moving with machine diligence from one scene of conflict to another, brightening hues, sharpening brushstrokes that had become indistinct with age.