Slow Bullets Read online

  He moved between the corpses, then kept going. We tracked his progress for many hours, wondering if he would eventually turn back. When night fell, he stopped and made camp, utilising the thermal sleeping bag we had given him. In the morning, though, he continued on the same course. His progress was exhaustingly slow, but I doubted that I would have been any quicker given the combined difficulty of the terrain and the surface conditions.

  “He’s going in roughly the right direction,” Prad announced, when we had all arrived at much the same conclusion. “Three weeks at this pace, he should make the outskirts of . . . what is the name of that place, Murash?”

  “Uskeram,” she answered.

  “Will they welcome him?”

  “In Skilmer we spoke of an Uskeram welcome.” She paused. “It was not a good thing.”

  “If he’s careful with the rations, they should see him through,” I said, before swinging around to address the individual members of the Trinity. “I’d like to know your plans, if you don’t mind. Do you want to stick around until Orvin reaches Uskeram?”

  “I would rather not wait three weeks to find out whether or not we have skip capability,” Yesli said.

  “I agree,” Spry said. “Before you sent Orvin down there . . . did you think to tell him when we might return?”

  “I said it might be a little while. I don’t imagine he will ever stop watching the sky.”

  “Nervously, I hope,” Spry said.

  After a silence Yesli said: “Something’s happened here, and I’m not sure what. You acted against the wishes of the Trinity, Scur, and that can’t be taken lightly.”

  “I wouldn’t expect it to be.”

  “Equally . . . I’m not even sure this counts as a crime. If it is a crime, I’m not sure we have a word for it.”

  “She can’t go unpunished,” Sacer said indignantly.

  But Spry met this remark with a dry laugh. “Look around you, Sacer. We’ve been ripped out of time, thrown into a dark age, told that there’s an alien horror out there that will probably come back and kill us. Our ship is half dead and we have a faint chance of saving the tiniest fraction of its memory before it vanishes into oblivion. Some of us are saints and some of us are sinners, and thanks to Scur we have very little idea of who’s who any more. This is our own special circle of hell, and it comes with metal walls and a skipdrive that may blow up the instant we test it. Remind me which part of this isn’t already a punishment?”

  “It’s all right,” I said, grateful for Spry’s words but knowing I could not hope to get off quite that lightly. “I know what I did, and I expect to be punished. I broke our laws, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect the rule of law.”

  “Then I might add something,” Prad said quietly.

  “Go on,” Yesli replied.

  “It was Scur’s wish that I not be implicated in her plot. That is why she struck me, so that it would seem as if she forced me to act against my wishes. But the truth is that once I had some idea of her intentions, I went along with it willingly. And I am proud that I did so.”

  “Be very careful,” Sacer said.

  “Oh, I am very careful. Very risk averse, as Scur well knows. But I am proud of this. It was good that we not kill this man, and good that we gave him a chance to do some good himself.”

  “He won’t,” Sacer said.

  “Perhaps he won’t, or perhaps he will. We are all different since the wakening. Who is to say Orvin will not change, given time? At the very least, I do not think it can fail to be an interesting experiment. And it has cost us very little.”

  “Except a death,” Sacer said. “We could have used his skin and blood.”

  “In the years to come,” Prad said, “I doubt that there will be any great shortage of corpses.”

  Prad had been right about many things. As much as it pains me to report, he was right about that as well.

  ______________

  There is not much more to say. They never punished me for my one crime, such as it was. I remained a free woman aboard the ship. I broke bread with the best and the worst of my fellow survivors, and I left my share of blood on the walls. It has taken me most of my life to cut these words.

  We skipped, and we lived.

  A hundred times, a hundred systems. Always knowing that they might be out there somewhere, waiting to poison our stars again, to take our technology away from us.

  We have not found them yet. Or been found by them.

  And we have raised a hundred worlds from darkness, or tried. I do not doubt that we sometimes did more harm than good—that we prolonged suffering, instead of ending it. But what else could we do? We had nothing to guide us but our instincts. We had no wisdom to draw on but the marks we had made on the walls, back when the world was young. And none of us had been born for this. The war had made us what we were—traitors, cowards, murderers and sadists. We were all dregs of one sort or another. Even the best of us had sometimes lied about what we had done, or how we had found our way aboard Caprice.

  A year or two before he died, Prad told me that he had found an anomaly in my slow bullet readout. It had been a small thing, easily overlooked. I remember now that he had mentioned corrupted sectors, parity errors. It might have been nothing more than the sort of random corruption that had befallen the bullet during the centuries that we were frozen in hibo.

  Or it might have been something else. A sign, perhaps, that the contents of my bullet had been deliberately altered before I ever entered the ship.

  That one history had been replaced by another.

  I say it is strange because here, now, at the end of my own life—or near it—I cannot say that Prad was wrong or right. I should remember, but I do not. My mother’s love of Giresun, my sister Vavarel, my family, my father’s sense of honour, my time in the war, my encounter with Orvin. Did all of that happen to me, or did I steal some of it from another soldier? In the chaos of the ceasefire, Prad told me, such things would have been possible. If a bullet can be altered, overwritten now, then it could also have happened back then. If the money was there, and the need sufficient.

  Equally, perhaps it was just a random anomaly.

  Who can tell?

  I say this now because I have nothing to lose. All that I now remember is what I have cut on these walls. These marks are all that define me. If my name is not Scur, then I have certainly become Scur. And I have tried to do right by that name.

  I mention this now because there will not be another chance. I am going to die—this seems certain—but not for several months. There is something growing in my head that the surgeons cannot fix. It presses on my optic nerve, confuses my seeing. It explains the mistakes I have made in my cutting, the difficulty I have had in focusing.

  I have a year, if all goes well. And that is time to make a difference.

  In a little while, before we skip again, I will be sent down to another frozen world. There is no chance of my returning, and no chance of the world’s medicine doing me any good. Like Orvin, I will have a limited time in which to offer my guidance. Unlike Orvin, who perhaps knew me better than I know myself, I do not expect to be judged for my efforts—at least not while I am alive. But perhaps when you return, you will decide how I have done.

  Until then, whoever I was, whatever I did, whoever you are, think well of me.

  I called myself Scur. I was a soldier in the war.

  I set my hand to these words.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALASTAIR REYNOLDS is the author of eleven novels, including the Revelation Space series, and has also published over fifty short stories.

  Reynolds earned a degree in Astronomy from Newcastle and then received a Ph.D. from St. Andrews in Scotland. In 1991, he started a fellowship at the European Space Agency, where his two-year position lasted thirteen years.

  The first of his short stories was published in 1990 while he was in graduate school. His first novel, Revelation Space, was published in 2000. His second novel, Chasm City,
won the 2001 British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel. His other novels include the Poseidon’s Children series. He also has written a Dr. Who tie-in novel, Harvest of Time. Reynolds has earned recognition for many of his novellas and short stories, including the 2010 Sidewise Award for Alternate History for “The Fixation.”

  Reynolds cites some of his literary influences as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl, Gregory Benford, and Joe Haldeman. His film and television influences include Doctor Who, Star Trek, The Time Machine, Fantastic Voyage, and From Russia with Love.

  Reynolds currently lives with his family in Wales.