Free House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

troves, but all they had told me was that there were many theories about the curators, and that few of the accounts could be reconciled with each other. The Vigilance thrived on collating information, but by the same token it seemed mischievously keen to spread misinformation about itself.
    I was thinking about that, wondering what chip of dubious value I would add to the mosaic, when fields snared Dalliance and brought her to a halt relative to one of the larger bodies in the swarm. We had fallen about halfway into the shell: the light of the star was beginning to bleed through the‘floor’ of swarm bodies below me, its yellow-white brilliance diminished to a deep, brooding scarlet.
    A voice, more ancient than old-growth civilisations, deeper than time, slower than glaciers, boomed across the bridge in Trans. ‘State the purpose of your visit, shatterling.’
    I had rehearsed my answer countless times. ‘I have nothing to offer that is worthy of the Vigilance. I am here only to open my troves for your inspection, worthless though they are, and to pass on the goodwill and blessings of Gentian Line, the House of Flowers.’
    ‘Do you wish to access our archives?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, for one never lied to the Vigilance. ‘But I do not expect that access to be provided. As I said, I am here on a goodwill basis.’
    ‘Please wait,’ the voice rumbled, sounding like a distant landslide. ‘Your case is under referral.’
    I waited.
    I waited a week. Then a month. Then half a year. Then six and a half years. All the while, Dalliance was pinned in place, going nowhere.
    I was asleep when the voice boomed again, but I had taken precautions to have myself roused to full consciousness the instant anything happened.
    ‘You will be admitted into the node. No further action is required on your part at present.’
    One of the circular apertures in the swarm body revealed itself to be an irising door, wide enough for Dalliance to fit through. The fields cajoled my ship inside, prodded her down a narrowing shaft, then left her floating at the centre of a spherical holding bay. According to Dalliance’s inertial measurements - far from foolproof - we were still some distance from the centre of the swarm body. The walls around us were dimpled with smooth, perfectly round craters, the rims of which glowed arterial red. The fields had released their hold, but with the door closed behind me, there was nothing to do but wait.
    So I waited. Eleven and a half years this time.
    It may sound as if, to a shatterling, accustomed to crossing the galaxy in circuits lasting hundreds of thousands of years, eleven years is nothing. But our minds are not wired that way. Those eleven and a half years consumed lifetimes.
    But at the end of it all, I was joined by another presence. One of the craters irised open and a vehicle began to intrude into the holding bay. It was bulbous, with a dome-shaped prow connected to an ovoid hull, and various smaller ovoids branching off the hull. It was about six times smaller than Dalliance - seven or eight hundred metres from end to end. The technology was more primitive-looking than I had been expecting. The brassy brown hull had a corroded look to it in places, mottled and scarred in others, and there were crude mechanical connections running between the ovoid sections suggestive of the docking collars on primitive spacecraft. As it cleared the door, the ship began to tilt, turning its long axis through ninety degrees. It did this with great ponderousness, as if it moved to a different, slower physics than Dalliance. Some change occurred to the domed part of the hull, the opaque plating becoming milky and then translucent, as if smoke was clearing from behind a window. Behind the translucence loomed a complicated structure, some kind of leathery, biologically derived machinery ...
    The machinery was a face, looking out at me through the glass of a helmet. It was not human, but I could tell that it had been human,