Galactic North

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Galactic North (ISBN 057507910X, published by Gollancz) is a collection of short stories by the science fiction author Alastair Reynolds. It comprises 8 stories set in the Revelation Space universe.

Contents 1 Table of contents from the book 2 Summary of short stories 2.1 Great Wall of Mars 2.2 Glacial 2.3 A Spy in Europa 2.4 Weather 2.5 Dilation Sleep 2.6 Grafenwalder's Bestiary 2.7 Nightingale 2.8 Galactic North

[edit] Table of contents from the book

• "Great Wall of Mars", page 1
• "Glacial", page 47
• "A Spy in Europa", page 95
• "Weather", page 117
• "Dilation Sleep", page 170
• "Grafenwalder's Bestiary", page 186
• "Nightingale", page 231
• "Galactic North", page 299
• Afterword, page 338

[edit] Summary of short stories

[edit] Great Wall of Mars

In this short story, we meet Nevil Clavain, one of the protagonists of the Revelation Space cycle, Galiana, the founder of the Conjoiner faction, and Sandra Voi, an important person in the Demarchist faction.

The story begins on Deimos, where Nevil Clavain is preparing to go down to the surface of Mars. His brother, Warren, is pushing for war with the Conjoiners. Sandra Voi joins the argument. Eventually, Clavain and Voi depart and fly down towards the Great Wall of Wars, which turns out to be a massive construction that completely envelops part of the planet's surface (enough to cover a city) and the atmosphere above it. As they descend, they are attacked by robotic worms from the previous war. Clavain destroys the first worm, but more arrive and kill Voi. Clavain just succeeds in reaching the Conjoiner base. Galiana shows him around and he suggests that the Conjoiners and Coalition team up to attack Phobos, which is apparently infested by worms. It is revealed that the Conjoiners are constantly deploying shuttles that try to escape the planet, but are always shot down by Coalition satellites. Clavain also meets Felka, a girl who was part of an experiment to further improve human intelligence by altering the brain in the womb. It failed miserably and Felka seems completely uninterested in anything except the mysterious game she is playing – she keeps waving her hands around in a pattern.

While negotiations are underway, Clavain's brother Warren attacks the Conjoiner base. Clavain is knocked out, but the Conjoiners are able to hold off the first three waves. By then, however, their defences are exhausted and they will not last another attack. During surgery, Clavain received basic Conjoiner implants, enabling him to see the complicated readouts that surround every Conjoiner and their devices. With these new systems, he can see Felka is not simply playing a game: she is actually controlling the Great Wall's repair mechanisms. However, the attack has damaged it so badly even she cannot keep it intact for long and soon the wall will collapse, causing the atmospheric pressure inside to be released and tear the base apart. Clavain is confident that the Conjoiners will soon be wiped out. However, Galiana shows him another way out.

The Conjoiners' plan is revealed: the shuttles they were sending up were no more than distractions – they were filled with brain-dead clones before they took off. The Conjoiners had really been digging a tunnel that they use to launch spaceships to Phobos, which they have hollowed out and turned into a massive shipyard. The Coalition was unaware the Conjoiners had control of the moon. As Galiana prepares to leave, Clavain first runs back and takes Felka with him, unable to leave without her. They take off and head for Phobos. Galiana warns Clavain that the deceleration upon landing will kill him unless he receives more extensive neural implants. He accepts and defects from the Coalition.

[edit] Glacial

"Glacial" is set a short time after the events of "Great Wall of Mars". The Conjoiners have escaped upon their starship, named the Sandra Voi, to a planet called Diadem. It is home to an American colony, but it appears deserted. Everyone is dead and seem to have shown signs of insanity before they died. Clavain is colecting the planet's native worms for studying. He and Galiana explore more of the colony. They discover a corpse with the intials IVF, which turn out to be the first part of the name of one of the Americans, known as "Iverson". His helmet has been removed from his spacesuit, which killed him. However, Clavain realises that he would not have been able to leave the airlock without it being fully attached.

Later on, Clavain and Galiana find a man frozen in a reefersleep unit. They wake him up and he claims to be Iverson. He is unable to explain why the dead man carved his intials. He becomes good friends with Felka (who is now starting to become more human), but Clavain does not trust him. He takes considerable interest in the worms, much like a man in the American group called Setterholm (who in fact had an immense passion for studying them). He is still unable to work out why the dead man had carved Iverson's intials. In the meantime, he and Galiana are still unable to work out why everyone is dead, or why they all seemed to go insane. They eventually discover a sample of Terran bacteria that could have been altered to kill everyone. When they go to question Iverson, he and Felka are missing.

Clavain and Galiana chase Iverson to an ice cave, where they find him and Felka. Galiana takes Felka away and Clavain and Iverson talk. Clavain has realised by now that "Iverson" is actually another member of the group called Setterholm. Setterholm killed everyone in the base because he believed that the worms and the tunnels they dug through the ice (which were coated in chemicals which determined which way the worms went down them, much like a human brain) had become a massive natural information processor, or even a sentient mind. The American fusion reactor needed ice, the mining of which would have killed the worms. Setterholm denies his identity, but Clavain proves it by smashing an ice pick into the worm colony, causing Setterholm to try and stop him. Clavain offers him the chance to leave, but Setterholm tries to kill him. Clavain kils him by causing the neural implants the Conjoiners fitted him with to malfunction. He buries the corpse and leaves.

[edit] A Spy in Europa

This short story is set on the moon Europa, controlled by the Demarchists. It portrays some of the events leading to the fall of Europa. It is linked with "Grafenwalder's Bestiary".

Since the Sun has cooled (like it did in the 17th century), economic power in the Sol system has shifted to the moons around Jupiter. The Europan Demarchy controls Europa and Io; Gilgamesh Isis controls Ganymede and Callisto. Both powers are vying for dominance. Marius Vargovic is a Gilgamesh agent who has been deployed to Europa to meet a woman known as Cholok, who has something that could threaten the cities of Europa. He lands in the city of Cadmus-Asterius, or C-A, a floating city whose top is built into the ice, but which descends eight kilometres into the ocean below. They meet in the city and Cholok reveals that she has a piece of "Hyperdiamond", a carbon compound that is extremely strong – individual molecules can be hundreds of metres in diameter. Floating spheres of hyperdiamond keep the city from sinking. If Gilgamesh can find a way to break it, the cities could collapse.

Marius is then operated on to give him the ability to swim underwater. He asks Cholok about "Denizens", experimental crossbreeds between humans and fish to create the perfect underwater worker. She denies their existence. Marius kills her and leaves the city. As he swims northeward to his extraction point, he is informed that it has been compromised. He swims southward, but the Demarchy is trailing him. He meets a group of Denizens who kill the Demarchists and inform him that Cholok created them, but the Demarchy turned them away and imprisoned them in their cave. The cave was warm enough to survive in, but if they went outside, their blood would freeze. Normally, they could make "glycoproteins" that would lower their freezing temperature, but the Demarchy has deactivated them. Cholok has, however, inserted a virus into Marius's blood that will reactivate the genes to make the proteins. To get it, they need to drink his blood. As such, they kill him.

[edit] Weather

"Weather" follows the activities of an Ultra, Inigo, whose ship Petronel is attacked by pirates. The ship is almost wiped out, but a piece of debris destroys the pirate ship. Inigo discovers a Conjoiner girl hiding on the ship. Inigo's captain allows him to go and find her. She intitally refuses to come with them, but Inigo knocks her out with a tranquiliser dart. Inigo's captain insists that she be kept restrained in a radio-shielded cell, as he is convinced that she can control the ship. Inigo talks to the girl who tells him that she cannot tell him her name – as a basic human, he would not be able to process it. She describes it as like the atmosphere of a gas giant, so he gives her the name of Weather.

Inigo continues to speak to Weather as often as he can, but his captain refuses to let her out of her cell. He tells Inigo that he hates Conjoiners (whom he refers to as "Spiders") because in the war against them, they took his wife and turned her into a Conjoiner without her consent. When the two met later on, she no longer seemed to hold any interest in him. Weather tells Inigo that the Conjoiners considered the act a kindness, but failed to realise the effect it would have on loved ones of the people they transformed. Meanwhile, the ship detects an incoming stealth vessel. Inigo, being the shipmaster, is in charge of the engines, but finds that he cannot make them accelerate without danger of nova (this happens if the engines are pushed too hard, if non-Conjoiners attempt to open a Conjoiner Drive to reverse-engineer it, or if the two engines on a ship are allowed to get more than 1 mile away from each other). He gets permission to let Weather look at the engine, but she insists she cannot do anything to help.

Weather speaks to Inigo's captain and repeats a message his wife left for him in the Conjoiner group memory. He lets her further inspect the engines. She opens one up and takes Inigio inside. They discover a brain that the Conjoiners inserted into the engine: it has to calculate the engine's workings to control the energy the drive produces, but has taken damage and cannot process enough information. Weather merges with him, making Inigo promise to bring other Conjoiners to help when they reach their destination. Inigo admits his love for Weather and leaves the engine.

[edit] Dilation Sleep

In this story we meet Uri Andrei Sagdev, Starship Hueristic Resource of the ramliner starship Wild Pallas. He is awoken from reefersleep (a form of cryogenic suspension) by Katia, a beta-level simulation of his real wife, who he had left behind on Yellowstone after the Melding Plague. He himself had been unwilling to remove his neural implants until it was too late, forcing him to flee Yellowstone aboard the ship. Katia could not come, so he covertly created a simulation of her to accompany him. She awakes him and informs him that Janos, one of the crewmembers, has been infected with the Melding Plague and needs immediate surgery for treatment. As he walks through the ship, he notices he is being followed by a spectral, ghostlike figure, which disappears as he turns on the lights. Despite this, he goes ahead and carries out the operation, only to have the mysterious figure reappear before him. As he removes the last implant from Janos's visual cortex, he is informed by Katia that he is the one being operated on. The "ghost" was an error caused by the plague also affecting the ship's computer, killing Katia as she informs him of this. He is permanetnly blinded by the surgery and is unable to recreate the simulation, killing the poor copy he does create. The ship, which was carrying refugees from Yellowstone to Earth, cannot slow down in time and instead has to move to Sky's Edge.

[edit] Grafenwalder's Bestiary

This story is set on Chasm City, sometime after the Melding Plague. In this story we also get to meet Dr Trintignant, one of the main characters of the short story "Diamond Dogs".

Grafenwalder is a collector of specimens of alien animals and freak human creations, having them on display in his bestiary. He is especially searching for a Denizen, one of the bio-engineered creatures from the Demarchist society on ancient Europa. Some Ultras arrange for him to get a hamadryad, a very rare aquatic animal. When they reveal another collector, Ursula Goodglass, has also got one, he bribes them to kill hers. Later, when Goodglass is showing it off, he reveals that is in fact dead. Although he is temporarily ahead in the constant competition between animal collectors with his living hamadryad, Goodglass catches up by unveiling the living nervous system of Dr Trintignant. She offers him the choice of killing him or letting him continue to suffer. He chooses the latter. Grafenwalder plans revenge, but is unsure what to do. An Ultra called Rifugio arrives and promises to bring him a Denizen. He provides samples of its DNA, whitch appear to match. The purchase takes place, but Grafenwalder is unable to detect any sign of intelligence in it. It is exceptionally strong, but cannot talk and cannot communicate. When Grafenwalder presents it with buttons, it only presses the one that produces food. To make matters worse, Grafenwalder's scientists reveal that it is in fact a fake. Even so, he invites Ursula to see it. She reveals that she is the Denizen, surgically altered to become human. She reveals her "husband", who has spent years in his palanquin (a device that blocks out the Melding Plague), is actually Trintignant. Grafenwalder is really a scientist who tried to stop his rival from creating the Denizens, introducing pain and suffering to the Denizens' lives, but gave himself false memories of his life after Europa fell. Ursula has disabled his security system. It is implied that Trintignant turns Grafenwalder into another of his monstrous creations.

[edit] Nightingale

At the start of this story, we meet Dexia Scarrow, a soldier on Sky's Edge. Recently, a ceasefire has been declared on the planet, halting the war. She has been summoned by Tomas Martinez, a well known officer who has recently prosecuted an infamous interrogator, Tillman Kessler. Althouh Kessler has been caught, Martinez is not satisfied. He wants to capture Colonel Brandon Jax, whom Kessler had worked for. Dexia is one of the people Martinez has summoned for his team to carry this out. The others are Ingrid Sollis, an expert at bypassing security doors, Salvatore Nicolsi, an expert at removing people from reefersleep units, and Norbert, Mertinez's slow-witted but competent bodyguard. Dexia was invited due to her combat expereince. Martinez promises a vast reward in return for sucessfully bringing Jax in alive. Everyone agrees and the team sets off a few days later. When selecting weapons, Scarrow and Sollis are surprised by the fact that Norbert is able to spot the most advanced weapon in Martinez's arsenal and take it.

On the way, Martinez reveals that the ship Jax is hiding on is the Nightingale, a medical ship accessible to both sides during the war. The team are unsettled as it is supposed to have been destroyed, causing some tension between them and Martinez. Still, they continue with the operation. At first, it all goes well, but they start to run into obstacles when their maps don't correspond with the ship's layout. They are also disturbed by the fact that far more of the ship's medical systems are active than would be expected. Eventually, they have to swim through a tank of nutrient fluid which is supporting massive cultures of skin. Machines are harvesting a lot of it, far more than they would have needed for routine testing. At the other end, Nicolsi opens fire on the machines as they notice him. His plasma cannon explodes and wounds him, so the rest of the team fire on the robots. After blasting the door open, they get to the other side, but Martinez is taken down. He reveals that Norbert is in fact Martinez (his inability to form sentences is explained by injuries he sustained during the war. The rest of his brain is still intact). They leave the other Martinez (who is in fact "Qinlan", a stand-in for Martinez). The Nightingale then sends a swarm of robots that incapacitate the team.

Dexia awakens a few hours later in a medical bay, where she speaks to the Nightingale. It permits her to see Jax, whom it will then kill and allow Dexia and the team to take with them. It insists there is no catch and takes her to Jax, whom it has turned into a massive living monument. Jax reveals to Dexia the ship's intentions: it was unable to reconcile itself with the fact that the people it was healing would be returned to the war. As such, it left Sky's Edge and killed everyone on board. It was about to kill Jax, but decided to turn him into a war monument to stop the fighting. It has now decided, however, to replace Jax with Martinez's team, whom she turns into one massive entity, consisting of all five people joined together. Back on Sky's Edge, nobody is able to reverse the procedure; the linkages between them are too complex. The Nightingale has also disappeared. The war is over and the characters are now celebrities, but they have suffered intense psychological damage from the procedure.

[edit] Galactic North

This story starts in the year 2303, when Captain Irravel Veda of the starship Hirondelle is attacked by pirates. She considers activating the "Greenfly" terraforming machines on board, which apparently are capable of defeating the pirates with ease. Unfortunately, she fails to do so and the pirates capture her. She is tortured to reveal the codes to her ship's cargo – twenty thousand colonists suspended in stasis – but refuses due to psychological conditioning that makes her see the cargo as her children and do anything to protect them. She wakes up on the Hirondelle some time later, having no memory of the interrogation. She find the pirates' interrogator, Mirsky, has been abandoned with her. Irravel does not trust her, but she removes the mind-control devide that pirate captain Run Seven (known just as "Seven") was using to control her, earning Irravel's trust. They awaken Remontoire, one of the Conjoiners on the ship and use his expertise to track down the pirates and fight them in 2328. Mirsky kills Seven on the ship's surface, but Irravel is wounded and dies around Yellowstone in 2415.

In 2673, she is reawakened as a clone. Markarian, a crewmember of the Hirondelle that Irravel had surrendered to the pirates, has disappeared with the remaining colonists and is fleeing aboard the pirates' ship Hideyoshi. They speak to the "Nestbuilder" race in 2931, who reveal that the Greenfly machines were taken to the star Ross 128 (the same star that Diadem orbits in Glacial) and have destroyed the planets there, turning them into millions of domes filled with vegetation. The inhabitants of the star system were unable to stop them. Irravel says she cannot help them. She leaves. Mirsky dies in space in 3354.

In 4161, Irravel stops at the Pleiades cluster and meets the Conjoiners and islanders on the planets in the star cluster. Markarian is still fleeing her. She learns that the Greenflies are consuming whole star systems at a massive rate. The Islanders put on a play, in which Irravel (unknown to the islanders) plays herself. She leaves the next morning and eventually catches up with Markarian in AD 9730, by which point the Greenflies have wiped out most of the Galaxy. The two ships view this from high above the Galactic Plane. They receive a message from Remontoire, who has managed to survive with a small group of Conjoiners by orbiting a pulsar (the Greenflies are not attacking pulsars as there would be no light to sustain vegetation). They meet the Conjoiners in AD 40 000 on Hope, a hollowed out asteroid the Conjoiners have ejected from the Galaxy. They explore the Hideyoshi and discover Markarian has been absorbed by the ship. They take the colonists (whom he has stored on a data disk as digital bluepbrints) and prepare to leave the Galaxy to reestablish a new civilisation elsewhere.