Revelation Space Read Free Page B

it could imitate his style more reliably than he could, given the current distractions. Later, if there was time, he would need to proof those texts, but for now he gave them no more than a glance as he moved to the room’s escritoire. The ornate writing desk was decorated in marble and malachite, inset with japanwork scenes of early space exploration.
    Sylveste opened a drawer and removed a simulation cartridge, an unmarked grey slab, like a ceramic tile. There was a slot in the escritoire’s upper surface. He would only have to insert the cartridge to invoke Calvin. He hesitated, nonetheless. It had been some time—months, at least—since he had brought Calvin back from the dead, and that last encounter had gone spectacularly badly. He had promised himself he would only invoke Calvin again in the event of crisis. Now it was a matter of judging whether the crisis had really arrived—and if it was sufficiently troublesome to justify an invocation. The problem with Calvin was that his advice was only reliable about half the time.
    Sylveste pressed the cartridge into the escritoire.
    Fairies wove a figure out of light in the middle of the room: Calvin seated in a vast seigneurial chair. The apparition was more realistic than any hologram—even down to subtle shadowing effects—since it was being generated by direct manipulation of Sylveste’s visual field. The beta-level simulation represented Calvin the way fame best remembered him, as he had been when he was barely fifty years old, in his heyday on Yellowstone. Strangely, he looked older than Sylveste, even though the image of Calvin was seventy years younger in physiological terms. Sylveste was eight years into his third century, but the longevity treatments he had received on Yellowstone had been more advanced than any available in Calvin’s time.
    Other than that, their features and build were the same, both of them possessing a permanent amused curve to the lips. Calvin wore his hair shorter and was dressed in Demarchist Belle Epoque finery, rather than the relative austerity of Sylveste’s expeditionary dress: billowing frock shirt and elegantly chequered trousers hooked into buccaneer-boots, his fingers aglint with jewels and metal. His impeccably shaped beard was little more than a rust-coloured delineation along the line of his jaw. Small entoptics surrounded his seated figure, symbols of Boolean and three-valued logics and long cascades of binary. One hand fingered the bristles beneath his chin, while the other toyed with the carved scroll that ended the seat’s armrest.
    A wave of animation slithered over the projection, the pale eyes gaining a glisten of interest.
    Calvin raised his fingers in lazy acknowledgement. “So . . . ” he said. “The shit’s about to match coordinates with the fan.”
    “You presume a lot.”
    “No need to presume anything, dear boy. I just tapped into the net and accessed the last few thousand news reports.” He craned his neck to survey the stateroom. “Nice pad you’ve got here. How are the eyes, by the way?”
    “They’re functioning as well as can be expected.”
    Calvin nodded. “Resolution’s not up to much, but that was the best I could do with the tools I was forced to work with. I probably only reconnected forty per cent of your optic nerve channels, so putting in better cameras would have been pointless. Now if you had halfway decent surgical equipment lying around on this planet, I could perhaps begin to do something. But you wouldn’t give Michelangelo a toothbrush and expect a great Sistine Chapel.”
    “Rub it in.”
    “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Calvin said, all innocence. “I’m just saying that if you had to let her take the Lorean, couldn’t you at least have persuaded Alicia to leave us some medical equipment?”
    His wife had led the mutiny against him twenty years earlier; a fact Calvin never allowed Sylveste to forget.
    “So I made a kind of self-sacrifice.” Sylveste waved an arm to