Revelation Space

THREE

He was woken by shouting.

Sylveste checked his tactile bedside clock, feeling the position of the hands. He had an appointment today; in less than hour. The commotion outside had beaten the alarm by a few minutes. Curious, he threw aside the sheets of his bunk and fumbled towards the high, barred window. He was always half-blind first thing in the morning, as his eyes stammered through their wake-up systems check. They threw planar sheets of primary colour across his surroundings, making it seem as if the room had been redecorated overnight by a squad of overenthusiastic cubists.

He pulled aside the curtain. Sylveste was tall, but he could not see through the little window—at least not at a useful angle—unless he stood on a pile of books appropriated from his shelves; old printed facsimile editions. Even then the view was less than inspiring. Cuvier was built in and around a single geodesic dome, most of which was occupied with six-or seven-storey rectangular structures thrown up in the first days of the mission, designed for durability rather than aesthetic appeal. There had been no self-repairing structures, and the need to safeguard against a dome failure had resulted in buildings which were not only able to withstand razorstorms, but which could also be pressurised independently. The grey, small-windowed structures were linked by roadways, along which a few electric vehicles would normally be moving.

Not today, though.

Calvin had given the eyes a zoom/record facility, but it took concentration to use, rather like that needed to invert an optical illusion. Stick figures, foreshortened by the angle, enlarged and became agitated individuals rather than amorphous elements of a swarm. It was not so that he could now read their expressions or even identify their faces, but the people in the street defined their own personalities in the way they moved, and he had become acutely good at reading such nuances. The main mob was moving down Cuvier’s central thoroughfare behind a barricade of slogan boards and improvised flagstaffs. Apart from a few daubed storefronts and an uprooted japonica sapling down the mall, the mob had caused little damage, but what they failed to see was the troop of Girardieau militia mobilising at the far end of the mall. They had just disgorged from a van and were buckling on chameleoflage armour, flicking through colour modes until they all wore the same calming shade of chrome-yellow.

He washed with warm water and a sponge, then carefully trimmed his beard and tied back his hair. He dressed, slipping on a velvet shirt and trousers followed by a kimono, decorated with lithographic Amarantin skeletons. Then he breakfasted—the food was always there in a little slot by the time the alarm rang—and checked the time again. She would be here shortly. He made the bed and upended it so that it formed a couch, in dimpled scarlet leather.

Pascale, as always, was accompanied by a human bodyguard and a couple of armed servitors, but they did not follow her into the room. What did was a tiny buzzing blur like a clockwork wasp. It looked harmless, but he knew that if he so much as broke wind in the biographer’s direction, what he would have to show for it would be an additional orifice in the centre of his forehead.

“Good morning,” she said.

“I’d say it’s anything but,” Sylveste said, nodding towards the window. “Actually, I’m surprised you made it here at all.”

She sat down on a velvet-cushioned footstool. “I have connections in security. It wasn’t difficult, despite the curfew.”

“It’s come to a curfew, now?”

Pascale wore a pillbox hat in Inundationist purple, the geometric line of her blunt black fringe beneath emphasising the pale expressionless cast of her face. Her outfit was tight-fitting, striped purple and black jacket and trousers. Her entoptics were dewdrops, seahorses and flying fish, trailing pink and lilac glitter. She sat with her feet angled together, touching at the toes, her upper body leaning slightly towards him, as his did towards hers.

“Times have changed, Doctor. You of all people should appreciate that.”

He did. He had been in prison, in the heart of Cuvier, for ten years now. The new regime which had succeeded his after the coup had become as fragmentary as the old, in the time-honoured way of all revolutions. Yet while the political landscape was as divided as ever, the underlying topology was quite different. In his time, the schism had been between those who wanted to study the Amarantin and those who wanted to terraform Resurgam, thereby establishing the world as a viable human colony rather than a temporary research outpost. Even the Inundationist terraformers had been prepared to admit that the Amarantin might once have been worthy of study. These days, however, the extant political factions differed only in the rates of terraforming they advocated, ranging from slow schemes spread across centuries to atmospheric alchemies so brutal that humans might have to evacuate the planet’s surface while they were being wrought. One thing was clear enough: even the most modest proposals would destroy many Amarantin secrets for eternity. But few people seemed particularly bothered by that—and for the most part those who did care were too scared to raise their voices. Apart from a skeleton staff of bitter, underfunded researchers, hardly anyone admitted to an interest in the Amarantin at all now. In ten years, study of the dead aliens had been relegated to an intellectual backwater.

And things would only get worse.

Five years earlier, a trade ship had passed through the system. The lighthugger had furled its ramscoop fields and moved into orbit around Resurgam; a bright and temporary new star in the heavens. Its commander, Remilliod, had offered a wealth of technological marvels to the colony: new products from other systems, and things which had not been seen since before the mutiny. But the colony could not afford everything Remilliod had to sell. There had been bloody arguments in favour of buying this over that; machines rather than medicine; aircraft rather than terraforming tools. Rumours, too, of underhand deals; trade in weapons and illegal technologies, and while the general standard of living on the colony was higher than in Sylveste’s time—witness the servitors, and the implants Pascale now took for granted—unhealable divisions had opened amongst the Inundationists.

“Girardieau must be frightened,” Sylveste said.

“I wouldn’t know,” she said, a touch too hastily. “All that matters to me is that we have a deadline.”

“What is it you want to talk about today?”

Pascale glanced down at the compad she balanced on her knees. In six centuries computers had assumed every shape and architecture imaginable, but something like a simple drawing slate—flat, with a handwritten entry-mode—had seldom been out of fashion for long. “I’d like to talk about what happened to your father,” Pascale said.

“You mean the Eighty? Isn’t the whole thing already sufficiently well-documented for your needs?”

“Almost.” Pascale touched the tip of her stylus against her cochineal-dark lips. “I’ve examined all the standard accounts, of course. For the most part they’ve answered my questions. There’s just one small matter I haven’t been able to resolve to my total satisfaction.”

“Which is?”

He had to hand it to Pascale. The way she answered, without the slightest trace of real interest in her voice, it really was just as if this were a loose end that needed clearing up. It was a skill; one that almost lulled him into carelessness. “It’s about your father’s alpha-level recording,” Pascale said.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to know what really happened to it afterwards.” In the soft interior rain, the man with the trick gun directed Khouri to a waiting cable-car. It was as unmarked and inconspicuous as the palanquin he had abandoned in the Monument.

“Get in.”

“Just a moment—” But as soon as Khouri opened her mouth, he pushed the end of the gun into the small of her back. Not painfully—it was done firmly, not to hurt—but to remind her that it was there. Something in that gentleness told her the man was a professional, and that he was far more likely to use the gun than someone who would have prodded her aggressively. “All right; I’m moving. Who is this Mademoiselle anyway? Someone behind a rival Shadowplay house?”

“No; I’ve already told you; stop thinking so parochially.”

He was not going to tell her anything useful; she could see that. Certain it would not get her far, she said: “Who are you, then?”

“Carlos Manoukhian.”

That worried her more than the way he handled the gun. He said it too truthfully. It was not a cover-name. And now that she knew it—and guessed that this man was at best some kind of criminal, laughable as that category seemed in Chasm City’s lawlessness—it meant he planned to kill her later.

The cable-car’s door clammed shut. Manoukhian pressed a button on the console which purged the Chasm City air, blasting out in steam jets below the car as it lofted itself via a nearby cable.

“Who are you, Manoukhian?”

“I help the Mademoiselle.” As if that was not blindingly obvious. “We have a special relationship. We go back a long way.”

“And what does she want with me?”

“I would have thought it was obvious by now,” Manoukhian said. He was still keeping the gun on her, even as he kept one eye on the car’s navigation console. “There’s someone she wants you to assassinate.”

“That’s what I do for a living.”

“Yeah.” He smiled. “Difference is, this guy hasn’t paid for it.”

The biography, needless to say, had not been Sylveste’s idea. Instead, the initiative had come from the one man Sylveste would have least suspected. It had been six months earlier; during one of the very few occasions when he had spoken face to face with his captor. Nils Girardieau had brought up the subject almost casually, mentioning that he was surprised no one had taken on the task. After all, the fifty years on Resurgam virtually amounted to another life, and even though that life was now capped by an ignominious epilogue, it did at least put his earlier life into a perspective it had lacked during the Yellowstone years. “The problem was,” Girardieau said, “your previous biographers were too close to the events—too much part of the societal milieu they were attempting to analyse. Everyone was in thrall to either Cal or yourself, and the colony was so claustrophobic there was no room to step back and see the wider perspective.”

“You’re saying Resurgam is somehow less claustrophobic?”

“Well, obviously not—but at least we have the benefit of distance, both in time and space.” Girardieau was a squat, muscular man with a shock of red hair. “Admit it, Dan—when you think back to your life on Yellowstone, doesn’t it sometimes seem like it all happened to someone else, in a century very remote from our own?”

Sylveste was about to laugh dismissively, except that—for once—he found himself in complete agreement with Girardieau. It was an unsettling moment, as if a basic rule of the universe had been violated.

“I still don’t see why you’d want to encourage this,” Sylveste said, nodding towards the guard who was presiding over the conversation. “Or are you hoping you can somehow profit from it?”

Girardieau had nodded. “That’s part of it—maybe most of it, if you want the truth. It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that you’re still a figure of fascination to the populace.”

“Even if most of them would be fascinated to see me hung.”

“You’ve a point, but they’d probably insist on shaking your hand first—before helping you to the gibbet.”

“And you think you can milk this appetite?”

Girardieau had shrugged. “Obviously, the new regime determines who gains access to you—and we also own all your records and archival material. That gives us a headstart already. We have access to documents from the Yellowstone years which no one beyond your immediate family even knows exist. We’d exercise a certain discretion in using them, of course—but we’d be fools to ignore them.”

“I understand,” Sylveste said, because suddenly it was all very clear to him. “You’re actually going to use this to discredit me, aren’t you.”

“If the facts discredit you…” Girardieau left the remark hanging in the air.

“When you deposed me… wasn’t that good enough for you?”

“That was nine years ago.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning long enough for people to forget. Now they need a gentle reminder.”

“Especially as there’s a new air of discontent abroad.”

Girardieau winced, as if the remark was in spectacularly poor taste. “You can forget about True Path—especially if you think they might turn out to be your salvation. They wouldn’t have stopped at imprisoning you.”

“All right,” Sylveste said, boring rapidly. “What’s in it for me?”

“You assume there has to be something?”

“Generally, yes. Otherwise, why bother telling me about it?”

“Your co-operation might be in your best interest. Obviously, we could work from the material we’ve seized—but your insights would be valuable. Especially in the more speculative episodes.”

“Let me get this straight. You want me to authorise a hatchet job? And not just give it my blessing but actually help you assassinate my character?”

“I could make it worth your while.” Girardieau nodded around the confines of the room in which Sylveste was held. “Look at the freedom I’ve given Janequin, to continue his peacock hobby. I could be just as flexible in your case, Dan. Access to recent material on the Amarantin; the ability to communicate with your colleagues; share your opinions—perhaps even the occasional excursion beyond the building.”

“Field work?”

“I’d have to consider it. Something of that magnitude…” Sylveste was suddenly, acutely aware that Girardieau was acting. “A period of grace might be advisable. The biography’s in development now, but it’ll be several months before we need your input. Maybe half a year. What I propose is that we wait until you’ve begun to give us what we need. You’ll be working with the biography’s author, of course, and if that relationship is successful—if she considers it successful—then perhaps we’ll be ready to enter into discussions about limited field work. Discussions, mind—no promises.”

“I’ll try and contain my enthusiasm.”

“Well, you’ll be hearing from me again. Is there anything you need to know before I leave?”

“One thing. You mentioned that the biographer would be a woman. Might I ask who it’ll be?”

“Someone with illusions waiting to be shattered, I suspect.”

Volyova was working near the cache one day, thinking of weapons, when a janitor-rat dropped gently onto her shoulder and spoke into her ear.

“Company,” said the rat.

The rats were a peculiar quirk of the Nostalgia for Infinity; quite possibly unique aboard any lighthugger. They were only fractionally more intelligent than their feral ancestors, but what made them useful—what turned them from pest into utility—was that they were biochemically linked into the ship’s command matrix. Every rat had specialised pheromonal receptors and transmitters which allowed it to receive commands and transmit information back to the ship, encoded into complex secreted molecules. They foraged for waste, eating virtually anything organic which was not nailed down or still breathing. Then they ran some rudimentary preprocessing in their guts before going elsewhere in the ship, excreting pellets into larger recycler systems. Some of them had even been equipped with voiceboxes and a small hardwired lexicon of useful phrases, triggered into vocalisation when external stimuli satisfied biochemically programmed conditions.

In Volyova’s case, she had programmed the rats to alert her as soon as they began to process human detritus—dead skin cells, and the like—which had not come from her. She would know when the other crew members were awake, even if she was in a completely different district of the ship.

“Company,” the rat squeaked again.

“Yes, I heard first time.” She lowered the little rodent to the deck, and then swore in all the languages at her disposal.

The defensive wasp which had accompanied Pascale buzzed a little nearer to Sylveste as it picked up the stress overtones in his voice. “You want to know about the Eighty? I’ll tell you. I don’t feel the slightest hint of remorse for any of them. They all knew the risks. And there were seventy-nine volunteers, not eighty. People conveniently forget that the eightieth was my father.”

“You can hardly blame them.”

“Assuming stupidity is an inherited trait, then no, I can’t.” Sylveste tried to relax himself. It was difficult. At some point in the conversation, the militia had begun to dust the domed-in air outside with fear gas. It was staining the reddened daylight to something nearer black. “Look,” Sylveste said evenly. “The government appropriated Calvin when I was arrested. He’s quite capable of defending his own actions.”

“It isn’t his actions I want to ask you about.”

Pascale made an annotation in her compad. “It’s what became of him—his alpha-level simulation—afterwards. Now, each of the alphas comprised in the region of ten to the power eighteen bytes—of information,” she said, circling something. “The records from Yellowstone are patchy, but I was able to learn a little. I found that sixty-six of the alphas resided in orbital data reservoirs around Yellowstone; carousels, chandelier cities and various Skyjack and Ultra havens. Most had crashed, of course, but no one was going to erase them. Another ten I traced to corrupted surface archives, which leaves four missing. Three of those four are members of the seventy-nine; affiliated to either very poor or very extinct family lines. The other is the alpha recording of Calvin.”

“Is there a point to this?” he asked, trying not to sound as if the issue particularly concerned him.

“I just can’t accept that Calvin was lost in the, same way as the others. It doesn’t add up. The Sylveste Institute didn’t need creditors or trustees to safeguard their heirlooms. It was one of the wealthiest organisations on the planet right up until the plague hit. So what became of Calvin?”

“You think I brought it to Resurgam?”

“No; the evidence suggests it was already long lost by then. In fact, the last time it was definitely present in the system was more than a century before the Resurgam expedition departed.”

“I think you’re wrong,” Sylveste said. “Check the records more closely and you’ll see that the alpha was moved into an orbital data cache in the late twenty-fourth. The Institute relocated premises thirty years later, so it was certainly moved then. Then in “39 or “40 the Institute was attacked by House Reivich. They wiped the data cores.”

“No,” Pascale said. “I excluded those instances. I’m well aware that in 2390 around ten to the eighteen bytes of something was moved into orbit by the Sylveste Institute, and the same amount relocated thirty-seven years later. But ten to the eighteen bytes of information doesn’t have to be Calvin. It could as easily be ten to the eighteen bytes of metaphysical poetry.”

“Which proves nothing.”

She passed him the compad, her entourage of seahorses and fish scattering like fireflies. “No, but it certainly looks suspicious. Why would the alpha vanish around the time you went to meet the Shrouders, unless the two events were related?”

“You’re saying I had something to do with it?”

“The subsequent data-movements could only have been faked by someone within the Sylveste organisation. You’re the obvious suspect.”

“A motive wouldn’t go amiss.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said, returning the compad to her lap. “I’m sure I’ll think of one.”

Three days after the janitor-rat had warned her of the crew’s awakening, Volyova felt sufficiently prepared to meet them. It was never something she particularly looked forward to, for although she did not actively dislike human company, neither had Volyova ever had any difficulty in adjusting to solitude. But things were worse now. Nagorny was dead, and by now the others would be well aware of that fact.

Ignoring the rats, and subtracting Nagorny, the ship now carried six crew members. Five, if one elected not to include the Captain. And why include him, when—as far as the other crew were aware, he was not even capable of consciousness, let alone communication? They carried him only because they hoped to make him well. In all other respects the ship’s real centre of power was vested in the Triumvirate. That was Yuuji Sajaki, Abdul Hegazi and—of course—herself. Below the Triumvirate there were currently two more crew, of equal rank. Their names were Kjarval and Sudjic; chimerics who had only recently joined ship. Finally—the lowest rank of all—was the Gunnery Officer, the role Nagorny had filled. Now that he was dead the role had a certain potentiality, like a vacant throne.

During their periods of activity , the other crew tended to stay within certain well-defined districts of the ship, leaving the rest to Volyova and her machines. It was morning now, by shiptime: here up in the crew levels, the lights still followed a diurnal pattern, slaved to a twenty-four hour clock. She went first to the reefersleep room and found it empty, with all but one of the sleep caskets open. The other one, of course, belonged to Nagorny. After reattaching his head Volyova had placed the body in the casket and cooled it down. Later, she had arranged for the unit to malfunction, allowing Nagorny to warm. He had been dead already, but it would take a skilled pathologist to tell that now. Clearly none of the crew had felt much inclined to examine him closely.

She thought about Sudjic again. Sudjic and Nagorny had been close, for a while. It would not pay to underestimate Sudjic.

Volyova left the reefersleep chamber, explored several other likely places of meeting, and then found herself entering one of the forests, navigating through immense thickets of dead vegetation until she neared a pocket where UV lamps were still burning. She approached a glade, making her way unsteadily down the rustic wooden stairs which led to the floor. The glade was quite idyllic—more so now that the rest of the forest was so bereft of life. Shafts of yellow sunlight knifed through a shifting bower of palm trees overhead. There was a waterfall in the distance, feeding a steep-walled lagoon. Parrots and macaws occasionally kited from tree to tree or made ratcheting calls from their perches.

Volyova gritted her teeth, despising the artificiality of the place.

The four living crew were eating breakfast around a long wooden table, piled high with bread, fruit, slices of meat and cheese, jars of orange juice and flasks of coffee. Across the glade, two holographically projected jousting knights were doing their best to disembowel each other.

“Good morning,” she said, stepping from the staircase onto the authentically dewy grass.

“I don’t suppose there’s any coffee left?”

They looked up, some of them twisting around on their stools to meet her. She registered their reactions as their cutlery clinked discreetly down, three of them murmuring a hushed greeting. Sudjic said nothing at all, while only Sajaki actually raised his voice.

“Glad to see you, Ilia.” He snatched a bowl from the table. “Care for some grapefruit?”

“Thanks. Perhaps I will.”

She walked towards them and took the plate from Sajaki, the fruit glistening with sugar. Deliberately she sat between the two other women: Sudjic and Kjarval. Both were currently black-skinned and bald, apart from fiery tangles of dreadlocks erupting from their crowns. Dreadlocks were important to Ultras: they symbolised the number of reefersleep stints that each had done; the number of times each had almost kissed the speed of light. The two women had joined after their own ship had been pirated by Volyova’s crew. Ultras traded loyalties as easily as the water ice, monopoles and data they used for currency. Both were overt chimerics, although their transformations were modest compared to Hegazi. Sudjic’s arms vanished below her elbows into elaborately engraved bronze gauntlets, inlaid with ormoluwork windows which revealed constantly shifting holographics, diamond nails projecting from the too-slender fingers of her mock hands. Most of Kjarval’s body was organic, but her eyes were feline cross-hatched red ellipses, and her flat nose exhibited no nostrils; merely sleekly rilled apertures, as if she was partially adapted to aquatic living. She wore no clothes, but apart from eyes, nostrils, mouth and ears, her skin was seamless, like an all-enveloping sheath of ebony neoprene. Her breasts lacked nipples; her fingers were dainty but without nails, and her toes were little more than vague suggestions, as if she had been rendered by a sculptor anxious to begin another commission. As Volyova sat down, Kjarval observed her with indifference that was a little too studied to be genuine.

“It’s good to have you with us,” Sajaki said. “You’ve been very busy while we were sleeping. Anything much happen?”

“This and that.”

“Intriguing.” Sajaki smiled. “This and that. I don’t suppose that between ‘this’ and ‘that’ you noticed anything which might shed some light on Nagorny’s death?”

“I wondered where Nagorny was. Now you’ve answered my question.”

“But you haven’t answered mine.”

Volyova dug into her grapefruit. “The last time I saw him he was alive. I have no idea… how did he die, incidentally?”

“His reefersleep unit warmed him prematurely. Various bacteriological processes ensued. I don’t suppose we need to go into the details, do we?”

“Not over breakfast, no.” Evidently they had not examined him closely at all: if they had, they might have noticed the injuries he had sustained during his death, for all that she had tried to disguise them. “I’m sorry,” she said, flashing a glance towards Sudjic. “I meant no disrespect.”

“Of course not,” Sajaki said, tearing a hunk of bread in half. He fixed Sudjic with his close-set ellipsoidal eyes, like someone staring down a rabid dog. The tattoos which he had applied during his infiltration of the Bloater Skyjacks were gone now, but there were fine whitish trails where they had been, despite the patient ministrations which had been visited upon him in reefersleep. Perhaps, Volyova thought, Sajaki had instructed his medichines to retain some trace of his exploits among the Bloaterians; a trophy of the economic gains he had wrested from them. “I’m sure we all absolve Ilia of any responsibility for Nagorny’s death—don’t we, Sudjic?”

“Why should I blame her for an accident?” Sudjic said.

“Precisely. And there’s an end to the matter.”

“Not quite,” Volyova said. “Now may not be the best time to raise the matter, but…” She trailed off. “I was going to say that I wanted to extract the implants from his head. But even if I was allowed to do so, they’d probably be damaged.”

“Can you make new ones?” Sajaki said.

“Given time, yes.” She said it with a sigh of resignation. “I’ll need a new candidate, too.”

“When we lay over around Yellowstone,” Hegazi said, “you can search for someone there, can’t you?”

The knights were still clashing across the glade, but no one was paying them very much attention now, even though one of them seemed to be having difficulties with an arrow inserted through his faceplate.

“I’m sure someone suitable will turn up,” Volyova said.

The cold air in the Mademoiselle’s house was the cleanest Khouri had tasted since arriving on Yellowstone. Which was really saying very little. Clean, but not fragrant. More like the smells she remembered from the hospital tent on Sky’s Edge, redolent of iodine and cabbage and chlorine, the last time she had seen Fazil.

Manoukhian’s cable-car had carried them across the city, through a partially flooded subsurface aqueduct. They had arrived in an underground cavern. From there, Manoukhian had ushered Khouri into a lift which ascended with ear-popping speed. The lift had brought them to this dark, echoey hallway. More than likely it was just a trick of acoustics, but Khouri felt as if she had just stepped into a huge unlit mausoleum. Filigreed windows floated overhead, but the light which leaked through them was midnight pale. Given that it was still day outside, the effect was subtly disturbing.

“The Mademoiselle has no passion for daylight,” Manoukhian said, leading her on.

“You don’t say.” Khouri’s eyes were starting to adjust to the gloom. She began to pick out big hulking things standing in the hall. “You’re not from around here, are you, Manoukhian?”

“I guess that makes two of us.”

“Was it a clerical error that brought you to Yellowstone as well?”

“Not quite.” She could tell that Manoukhian was deciding how much he could get away with telling. That was his one weakness, Khouri thought. For a hit-man, or whatever he was, the man liked to talk too much. The trip over had been one long series of brags and boasts about his exploits in Chasm City—stuff, which, if it had been coming from anyone other than this cool customer with the foreign accent and trick gun, she would have dismissed out of hand. But with Manoukhian, the worrying thing was that a lot of it might have been true. “No,” he said, his urge to spin a story obviously triumphing over his professional instincts towards surliness. “No; it wasn’t a clerical error. But it was a kind of mistake—or an accident, at any rate.”

There were lots of the hulking things. It was difficult to make out their overall shapes, but they all rested on slim poles jutting from black plinths. Some were like sections of smashed eggshell, while others more resembled delicate husks of brain coral. Everything had a metallic sheen, rendered colourless in the sallow light of the hallway.

“You had an accident?”

“No… not me. She did. The Mademoiselle. That’s how we met each other. She was… I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, Khouri. She finds out, I’m dead meat. Pretty easy to dispose of bodies in the Mulch. Hey, you know what I found there the other day? You’re not going to believe any of this, but I found a whole fucking…”

Manoukhian went off on a boast. Khouri brushed her fingers against one of the sculptures, feeling its cool metal texture. The edges were very sharp. It was as if she and Manoukhian were two furtive art lovers who had broken into a museum in the middle of the night. The sculptures seemed to be biding their time. They were waiting for something—but not with infinite reserves of patience.

She was perplexingly glad of the gunman’s company.

“Did she make these?” Khouri asked, interrupting Manoukhian’s flow.

“Perhaps,” Manoukhian said. “In which case you could say she suffered for her art.” He stopped, touching her on the shoulder. “All right. You see those stairs?”

“I guess you want me to use them.”

“You’re learning.”

Gently, he stuck the gun in her back—just to remind her it was still there. Through a porthole in the wall next to the dead man’s quarters Volyova could see a tangerine-coloured gas giant planet, its shadowed southern pole flickering with auroral storms. They were deep inside the Epsilon Eridani system now; coming in at a shallow angle to the ecliptic. Yellowstone was only a few days away; already they were within light-minutes of local traffic, threading through the web of line-of-sight communications which linked every significant habitat or spacecraft in the system. Their own ship had changed, too. Through the same window Volyova could just see the front of one of the Conjoiner engines. The engines had automatically hauled in their scoop fields as the ship dropped below ramming speed, subtly altering their shapes to in-system mode, the intake maw closing like a flower at dusk. Somehow the engines were still producing thrust, but the source of the reaction mass or the energy to accelerate it was just another mystery of Conjoiner technology. Presumably there was a limit on how long the drives could function like this, or else they would never have needed to trawl space for fuel during interstellar cruise mode…

Her mind was wandering, trying to focus on anything but the issue at hand.

“I think she’s going to be trouble,” Volyova said. “Serious trouble.”

“Not if I read her correctly.” Triumvir Sajaki dispensed a smile. “Sudjic knows me too well. She knows I wouldn’t take the trouble of actually reprimanding her if she made a move against a member of the Triumvirate. I wouldn’t even give her the luxury of leaving the ship when we get to Yellowstone. I’d simply kill her.”

“That might be a little harsh.”

She sounded weak and despised herself for it, but it was how she felt. “It’s not as if I don’t sympathise with her. After all Sudjic had nothing personal against me until I… until Nagorny died. If she does anything, couldn’t you just discipline her?”

“It’s not worth it,” Sajaki said. “If she has the mind to do something to you, she won’t stop at petty aggravation. If I lust discipline her she’ll find a way to hurt you permanently. Killing her would be the only reasonable option. Anyway—I’m surprised that you see her side of things. Hasn’t it occurred to you that some of Nagorny’s problems might have rubbed off on her?”

“You’re asking me whether I think she’s completely sane?”

“It doesn’t matter. She won’t move against you—you have my word on that.” Sajaki paused. “Now, can we get this over with? I’ve had enough of Nagorny for one life.”

“I know exactly how you feel.”

It was several days after her first meeting with the crew. They were standing outside the dead man’s quarters, on level 821, preparing to enter his rooms. They had remained sealed since his death—longer, as far as the others were concerned. Even Volyova had not entered them, wary of disturbing something which might place her there.

She spoke into her bracelet. “Disable security interdict, personal quarters Gunnery Officer Boris Nagorny, authorisation Volyova.”

The door opened before them, emitting a palpable draught of highly chilled air.

“Send them in,” Sajaki said.

The armed servitors took only a few minutes to sweep the interior, certifying that there were no obvious hazards. It would have been unlikely, of course, since Nagorny had probably not planned to die quite when Volyova had arranged it. But with characters like him, one could never be sure.

They stepped in, the servitors having already activated the room lights.

Like most of the psychopaths she had encountered, Nagorny had always seemed perfectly happy with the smallest of personal spaces. His quarters were even more determinedly cramped than her own. A fastidious neatness had been at work there, like a poltergeist in reverse. Most of his belongings—there were not many—had been securely racked down, and so had not been disturbed by the ship’s manoeuvres when she killed him.

Sajaki grimaced and held a sleeve up to his nose. “That smell.”

“It’s borscht. Beetroot. I think Nagorny was partial to it.”

“Remind me not to try it.”

Sajaki closed the door behind them.

There was a residual frigidity to the air. The thermometers said that it was now room temperature, but it seemed as if the molecules in the air carried an imprint of the months of cold. The room’s overpowering spartanness did not offset this chill. Volyova’s quarters seemed opulent and luxurious by comparison. It was not simply a case of Nagorny neglecting to personalise his space. It was just that in so doing he had so miserably failed by normal standards that his efforts actually contradicted themselves and made the room seem even bleaker than had it been empty.

What failed to help matters was the coffin.

The elongated object had been the only thing in the room not lashed down when she killed Nagorny. It was still intact, but Volyova sensed that the thing had once stood upright, dominating the room with a fearful premonitory grandeur. It was huge and probably made of iron. The metal was as ebon and light-sucking as the surface of a Shrouder emboitement. All its surfaces had been carved in bas-relief, too intricately rendered to give up all their secrets in one glance. Volyova stared in silence. Are you trying to say, she thought, that Boris Nagorny was capable of this?

“Yuuji,” she said. “I don’t like this at all.”

“I don’t very much blame you.”

“What kind of madman makes his own coffin?”

“A very dedicated one, I’d say. But it’s here, and it’s probably the only glimpse into his mind we have. What do you make of the embellishments?”

“Undoubtedly a projection of his psychosis, a concretisation.” Now that Sajaki was forcing calm she was slipping into subservience. “I should study the imagery. It might give me insight.” She paused, added: “So that we don’t make the same mistake twice, I mean.”

“Prudent,” Sajaki said, kneeling down. He stroked his gloved forefinger over the intagliated rococo surface. “We were very lucky you were not forced to kill him, in the end.”

“Yes,” she said, giving him an odd look. “But what are your thoughts on the embellishments, Yuuji-san?”

“I’d like to know who or what Sun Stealer was,” he said, drawing her attention to those words, etched in Cyrillic on the coffin. “Does that mean anything to you? Within the terms of his psychosis, I mean. What did it mean to Nagorny?”

“I haven’t the faintest.”

“Let me hazard a guess, anyway. I’d say that in Nagorny’s imagination Sun Stealer represented somebody in his day-to-day experience, and I see two obvious possibilities.”

“Himself or me,” Volyova said, knowing that Sajaki was not to be easily distracted. “Yes, yes, that much is obvious… but this doesn’t in any way help us.”

“You’re quite sure he never mentioned this Sun Stealer?”

“I would remember a thing like that.”

Which was quite true. And of course she did remember: he had written those words on the wall in her quarters, in his own blood. The expression meant nothing to her, but that did not mean she was in any sense unfamiliar with it. Towards the unpleasant termination of their professional relationship, Nagorny had spoken of little else. His dreams were thick with Sun Stealer, and—like all paranoiacs—he saw evidence of Sun Stealer’s malignant work in the most humdrum of daily annoyances. When one of the ship’s lights failed unaccountably or a lift directed him to the wrong level, this was Sun Stealer’s doing. It was never a simple malfunction, but always evidence of the deliberate machinations of a behind-the-scenes entity only Nagorny could detect. Volyova had stupidly ignored the signs. She had hoped—in fact come as close to praying as was possible for her—that his phantom would return to the netherworld of his unconscious. But Sun Stealer had stayed with Nagorny; witness the coffin on the floor.

Yes… she would remember a thing like that.

“I’m sure you would,” Sajaki said, knowingly. Then he returned his attention to the engravings. “I think first we should make a copy of these marks,” he said. “They may help us, but this damned Braille effect isn’t easy to make out with the eye. What do you think these are?” He moved his palm across a kind of radial pattern. “Birds’ wings? Or rays of sunlight shining from above? They look more like birds’ wings to me. Now why would he have bird wings on his mind? And what kind of language is this meant to be?”

Volyova looked, but the crawling complexity of the coffin was too much to take in. It was not that she was uninterested—not at all. But what she wanted was the thing to herself, and Sajaki as far away from it as possible. There was too much evidence here of the canyon depths to which Nagorny’s mind had plummeted.

“I think it merits more study,” she said carefully. “You said ‘first’. What do you intend to do after we make a copy of it?”

“I would have thought that was obvious.”

“Destroy the damned thing,” she surmised.

Sajaki smiled. “Either that or give it to Sudjic. But personally I’d settle for destroying it. Coffins aren’t good things to have on a ship, you know. Especially home-made ones.”

The stairs went up for ever. After a while—already in the two hundreds—Khouri lost count. But just when her knees felt as if they were going to buckle, the staircase came to an abrupt end, presenting her with a long, long white corridor whose sides were a series of recessed arches. The effect was like standing in a portico under moonlight. She walked along the corridor’s echoey length until she arrived at the double doors which ended it. They were festooned with organic black scrollwork, inset with faintly tinted glass. A lavender light poured through them from the room beyond.

Evidently she had arrived.

It was entirely possible that this was a trap of some kind, and that to enter the room beyond would be a form of suicide. But turning back was not an option either—Manoukhian, for all his charm, had made that abundantly clear. So Khouri grasped the handle and let herself in. Something in the air made her nose tickle pleasantly, a blossomy perfume negating the sterility of the rest of the house. The smell made Khouri feel unwashed, although it was only a few hours since Ng had woken her and told her to go and kill Taraschi. In the meantime she had accumulated a month’s worth of dirt from the Chasm City rain, suffused with her own sweat and fear.

“I see Manoukhian managed to get you here in one piece,” said a woman’s voice.

“Me or him?”

“Both, dear girl,” the invisible speaker said. “Your reputations are equally formidable.”

Behind her the double doors clicked shut. Khouri began to take in her surroundings; difficult in the strange pink light of the room. The enclosure was kettle-shaped, with two eyelike shuttered windows set into one concave wall.

“Welcome to my place of residence,” the voice said. “Make yourself at home, won’t you.”

Khouri walked to the shuttered windows. To one side of the windows sat a pair of reefersleep caskets, gleaming like chromed silverfish. One of the units was sealed and running, while the other was open; a chrysalis ready to enfold the butterfly.

“Where am I?”

The shutters whisked open.

“Where you always were,” the Mademoiselle said.

She was looking out across Chasm City. But it was from a higher vantage point than she had ever known. She was actually above the Mosquito Net, perhaps fifty metres from its stained surface. The city lay below the Net like a fantastically spiny sea-creature preserved in formaldehyde. She had no idea where she was; except that this had to be one of the tallest buildings; one that she had probably assumed was uninhabited.

The Mademoiselle said: “I call this place the Chateau des Corbeaux; the House of Ravens; by virtue of its blackness. You’ve undoubtedly seen it.”

“What do you want?” Khouri said, finally.

“I want you to do a job for me.”

“All this for that? I mean, you had to kidnap me at gunpoint just to ask me to do a job? Couldn’t you go through the usual channels?”

“It isn’t the usual sort of job.”

Khouri nodded towards the open reefersleep unit. “Where does that come into it?”

“Don’t tell me it alarms you. You came to our world in one, after all.”

“I just asked what it meant.”

“All in good time. Turn around, will you?”

Khouri heard a slight bustle of machinery behind her, like the sound of a filing cabinet opening.

A hermetic’s palanquin had entered the room. Or had it been here all along, concealed by some artifice? It was as dark and angular as a metronome, lacking ornamentation, and with a roughly welded black exterior. It had no appendages or obvious sensors, and the tiny viewing monocle set into its front was as dark as a shark’s eye.

“You are doubtless already familiar with my kind,” said the voice emanating from the palanquin. “Do not be disturbed.”

“I’m not,” Khouri said.

But she was lying. There was something disturbing about this box; a quality she had never experienced in the presence of Ng or the other hermetics she had known. Perhaps it was the austerity of the palanquin, or the sense—entirely subliminal—that the box was seldom unoccupied. None of this was helped by the smallness of the viewing window, or the feeling that there was something monstrous behind that dark opacity.

“I can’t answer all your questions now,” the Mademoiselle said. “But obviously I didn’t bring you here just to see my predicament. Here. Perhaps this will assist matters.”

A figure grew to solidity next to the palanquin, imaged by the room itself.

It was a woman, of course—young, but paradoxically clothed in the kind of finery which no one had worn on Yellowstone since the plague; enrobed in swirling entoptics. The woman’s black hair was raked back from a noble forehead, held in a clasp inwoven with lights. Her electric-blue gown left her shoulders bare, cut away in a daring dйcolletage. Where it reached the floor it blurred into nothingness.

“This is how I was,” the figure spoke. “Before the foulness.”

“Can’t you still be like that?”

“The risk of leaving enclosure is too great—even in the hermetic sanctuaries. I distrust their precautions.”

“Why have you brought me here?”

“Didn’t Manoukhian explain things fully?”

“Not exactly, no. Other than explaining how it wouldn’t be good for my health not to go along with him.”

“How indelicate of him. But not inaccurate, it must be admitted.” A smile upset the pale composure of the woman’s face. “What do you suppose were my reasons for bringing you here?”

Khouri knew that, whatever else had happened, she had seen too much to return to normal life in the city.

“I’m a professional assassin. Manoukhian saw me at work and told me I was as good as my reputation. Now—maybe I’m jumping to conclusions here—but it occurs to me you might want someone killed.”

“Yes, very good.” The figure nodded. “But did Manoukhian tell you this would not be the same as your usual contracts?”

“He mentioned an important difference, yes.”

“And would this trouble you?” The Mademoiselle studied her intensely. “It’s an interesting point, isn’t it? I’m well aware that your usual targets consent to be assassinated before you go after them. But they do so in the knowledge that they will probably evade you and live to boast about it. When you do catch them, I doubt that many of them go gently.”

She thought of Taraschi. “Usually not, no. Usually they’re begging me not to do it, trying to bribe me, that kind of thing.”

“And?”

Khouri shrugged. “I kill them anyway.”

“The attitude of a true professional. You were a soldier, Khouri?”

“Once.” She did not really want to think about that now. “How much do you know about what happened to me?”

“Enough. That your husband was a soldier as well—a man named Fazil—and that you fought together on Sky’s Edge. And then something happened. A clerical error. You were put aboard a ship destined for Yellowstone. No one realised the error until you woke up here, twenty years later. Too late by then to return to the Edge—even if you knew Fazil was still alive. He would be forty years older by the time you got back.”

“Now you know why becoming an assassin didn’t exactly give me any sleepless nights.”

“No; I can imagine how you felt. That you owed the universe no favours—nor anyone living in it.”

Khouri swallowed. “But you don’t need an ex-soldier for a job like this. You don’t even need me: I don’t know who you want to take out, but there are better people around than me. I mean, I’m technically good—I only miss one shot in twenty. But I know people who only miss one in fifty.”

“You suit my needs in another manner. I need someone who is more than willing to leave the city.” The figure nodded towards the open reefersleep casket. “And by that, I mean a long journey.”

“Out of the system?”

“Yes.” Her voice was patient and matronly, as if the rudiments of this conversation had been rehearsed dozens of times. “Specifically, a distance of twenty light-years. That’s how far away Resurgam is.”

“I can’t say I’ve heard of it.”

“I would be troubled if you had.” The Mademoiselle extended her left hand, and a little globe sprang into existence a few inches above her palm. The world was deathly grey—there were no oceans, rivers or greenery. Only a skein of atmosphere—visible as a fine arc near the horizon—and a pair of dirty-white icecaps suggested this was anything other than some airless moon. “It’s not even one of the newer colonies—not what we’d call a colony, anyway. There are only a few tiny research outposts on the whole planet. Until recently Resurgam has been of no significance whatsoever. But all that has changed.” The Mademoiselle paused, seeming to collect her thoughts, perhaps debating how much to reveal at this stage. “Someone has arrived on Resurgam—a man called Sylveste.”

“That’s not a very common name.”

“Then you are aware of his clan’s standing in Yellowstone. Good. That simplifies matters enormously. You will have no difficulty finding him.”

“There’s more to it than just finding him, isn’t there?”

“Oh yes,” the Mademoiselle said. Then she snatched at the globe with her hand, crushing it between her fingers, rivulets of dust pouring between them. “Very much more.”