Alastair Reynolds - House of Suns

House of Suns
By Alastair Reynolds
Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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PART ONE

I
was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on
the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the
Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.
I was a girl then, a single individual called Abigail Gentian.
During the thirty years of my childhood, Ionly saw a fraction of that
vast, rambling, ever-changing mansion. Even as I grew older, and gained
the authority to wander where it suited me, I doubt that I ever explored more
than a hundredth of it. I was intimidated by the long, forbidding corridors of
mirror and glass, the corkscrewing staircases rising from dark cellars and
vaults where even the adults never went, the rooms and parloursthat –
although the adults and housekeepers never said as much in my presence
– were alleged to be haunted, or in some way not convivial to anything other
than transitory occupation. The elevators and dumb waiters alarmed me
when they moved without apparent instruction, obeying some inscrutable
whim of the house’s governing persona. It was a mansion of ghosts and
monsters, with ghouls inthe shadows and demons scuttling behind the
wainscotting.
I had one true friend, although I cannot now remember his name. He
arrived occasionally, but only ever for short visits. I would be allowed to

watch the approach and docking of his private shuttle, viewing it from the
airtight vantage of a glass-windowed belvedere perched above the
mansion’s highest tower. I was always pleased whenMadame Kleinfelter
allowed me up to the belvedere, and not just because such an occurrence
signalled the arrival of my only true companion. From there I could see the
entirety of the house, and much of the world on which it was built. The
house curved away in all directions until it met the sharp bend of the
planetoid’s jagged horizon, a thin margin of rock marking the limit of my
home.
Itwas a strange building, although for a long time I had nothing to
compare it with. There was no organised plan to it, no hint of symmetry or
harmony – or if there ever had been, that underlying order had been lost
beneath countless additions and alterations – work that was still ongoing.
Though the planetoid had no atmosphere, and therefore no weather, the
house was designed as if it belongedon a world where it rained and
snowed. Every distinct part of it, every wing and tower, was surmounted by
a steep-sided, blue-tiled roof. There were thousands of roofs, meeting
each other at odd, unsettling angles. Chimneys and turrets, belvederes and
clock towers punctuated the haphazard, dinosaur-backed roofline. Some
parts of the house were only one or two storeys high; others had twentyor
more levels, with the tallest parts rising like mountains from the foothills of
surrounding structures. Windowed bridges spanned the gaps between
towers, a silent, distant figure occasionally stealing behind their illuminated
portholes. It was less a house than a city in which you could walk from one
side to the other without ever stepping outside.
Later in life I would learn the reasonfor my home being the way it
was, the reason why the building work never ceased, but as a child I simply
accepted it unquestioningly. I knew the house was different from the ones I
saw in books and story-cubes, but then nothing in those books or cubes
resembled any significant aspect of my life. Even before I could read, I
knew that we were rich, and it had been impressed on me that there wereonly a handful of other families whose wealth could be compared to our
own.
‘You’re a very special young lady, Abigail Gentian,’ was what my
mother told me on one of the many occasions when her ageless face
addressed me from one of the house’s panes. ‘You’re going to do great
things with your life.’
She had no idea.
It did not take me long to realise that the little boy must also be the...