Revelation Space

SEVEN

Never quite forgetting that she was aboard a ship (it was the ever-so-slightly irregular pattern of the induced gravity, caused by tiny imbalances in the thrust stream, which in turn reflected mysterious quantum capriciousness in the bowels of the Conjoiner drives) Volyova entered the green seclusion of the glade alone and hesitated at the top of the rustic staircase which led down to the grass. If Sajaki was aware of her presence, he chose not to show it, kneeling silently and motionlessly next to the gnarled tree stump which was their informal meeting place. But he undoubtedly sensed her. Volyova knew that Sajaki had visited the Pattern Jugglers on the aquatic world Wintersea, accompanying Captain Brannigan, back when Captain Brannigan was capable of leaving the ship. She did not know what the purpose of that trip had been—for either of them—but there had been rumours that the Pattern Jugglers had tampered with his neocortex, embossing neural patterns which configured an unusual degree of spatial awareness: the ability to think in four or five dimensions. The patterns had been the rarest kind of Juggler transform: one that lingered.

Volyova ambled down the staircase and allowed her foot to creak on the lowest tread. Sajaki turned to regard her with no visible hint of surprise.

“Something up?” he asked, reading her expression.

“It concerns the stavlennik,” she said, momentarily lapsing back into Russish. “The protegee, I mean.”

“Tell me about it,” Sajaki said absently. He wore an ash-grey kimono, damp grass darkening his knees to olive-black. His Komuso’s shakuhachi rested on the stump’s mirror-smooth, elbow-polished surface. He and Volyova were now the only two crewmembers yet to enter reefersleep, two months out from Yellowstone.

“She’s one of us now,” Volyova said, kneeling opposite him. “The core of her indoctrination is complete.”

“I welcome this news.”

Across the glade a macaw screeched, then left its perch in a flurry of clashing primary colours. “We can introduce her to Captain Brannigan.”

“No time like the present,” Sajaki said, smoothing a wrinkle from his kimono. “Or do you have second thoughts?”

“About meeting the Captain?” She clucked nervously. “None at all.”

“Then it’s deeper than that.”

“What?”

“Whatever’s on your mind, Ilia. Come on. Spit it out.”

“It’s Khouri. I’m no longer willing to risk her suffering the same kind of pychotic episodes as Nagorny.” She stopped, expecting—hoping, even—for some response from Sajaki. But instead all she got was the white-noise of the waterfall, and a total absence of expression on her crewmate’s face. “What I mean,” she continued—almost stammering with her own uncertainty—”is that I’m no longer sure she’s a suitable subject at this stage.”

“At this stage?” Sajaki spoke so softly she largely read his lips.

“I mean, to go into the gunnery immediately after Nagorny. It’s too dangerous, and I think Khouri is too valuable to risk.” She stopped, swallowed, and drew breath into her lungs for what she knew would be the hardest thing to say. “I think we need another recruit—someone less gifted. With an intermediate recruit I can iron out the remaining wrinkles before going ahead with Khouri as primary candidate.”

Sajaki picked up his shakuhachi and sighted along it thoughtfully. There was a little raised burr at the end of the bamboo, perhaps from the time when he had used the stick on Khouri. He rubbed it with his thumb, smoothing it back down.

When he spoke, it was with a calm so total that it was worse than any possible display of anger.

“You’re suggesting we look for another recruit?”

He made it sound as if what she was proposing was easily the most absurd, deranged thing he had ever heard uttered.

“Only in the interim,” she said, aware that she was speaking too quickly, hating herself for it, despising her sudden deference to the man. “Just until everything’s stable. Then we can use Khouri.”

Sajaki nodded. “Well, that sounds sensible. Goodness knows why we didn’t think of it earlier, but I suppose we had other things on our minds.” He put down the shakuhachi, although his hand did not stray far from its hollow shaft. “But that can’t be helped. What we have to do now is find ourselves another recruit. Shouldn’t be too hard, should it? I mean, we hardly taxed ourselves recruiting Khouri. Admittedly we’re two months into interstellar space and our next port of call is a virtually unheard-of outpost—but I don’t envisage any great problem in finding another subject. I expect we’ll have to turn them away in droves, don’t you?”

“Be reasonable,” she said.

“In what sense am I being anything other than reasonable, Triumvir?”

A moment ago she had been scared; now she was angry. “You haven’t been the same, Yuuji-san. Not since…”

“Not since what?”

“Not since you and the Captain visited the jugglers. What happened there, Yuuji? What did the aliens do to your head?”

He looked at her oddly, as if the question were a perfectly valid one which it had never struck him to ask himself. It was, fatefully, a ruse, Sajaki moved quickly with the shakuhachi, so that all Volyova really saw was a teak-coloured blur in the air. The blow was relatively soft—Sajaki must have pulled at the last moment—but, gashing into her side, it was still sufficient to send her sprawling into the grass. For the first instant, it was not the pain or the shock of being attacked by Sajaki that overwhelmed her, but the prickly cold wetness of the grass brushing against her nostrils.

He stepped casually round the stump.

“You’re always asking too many questions,” Sajaki said, and then drew something from his kimono that might have been a syringe.

Sylveste reached anxiously into his pocket, feeling for the vial which he felt sure would be missing.

He touched it; a minor miracle.

Down below, dignitaries were filing into the Amarantin city, moving slowly towards the temple at the city’s heart. Snatches of their conversation reached him with perfect clarity, though never long enough for him to hear more than a few words. He was hundreds of metres above them, on the human-installed balustrade which had been grafted to the black wall of the city-englobing egg.

It was his wedding day.

He had seen the temple in simulations many times, but it had been so long since he had actually visited the place that he had forgotten how overpowering its size could be. That was one of the odd, persistent defects of simulations: no matter how precise they became, the participant remained aware that they were not reality. Sylveste had stood beneath the roof of the Amarantin spire-temple, gazing up to where the angled stone arches intersected hundreds of metres above, and had felt not the slightest hint of vertigo, or fear that the age-old structure would choose that moment to collapse upon him. But now—visiting the buried city for only the second time in person—he felt a withering sense of his own smallness. The egg in which it was encased was itself uncomfortably large, but that at least was the product of a recognisably mature technology—even if the Inundationists elected to ignore the fact. The city which rested within, on the other hand, looked more like the product of some fifteenth-century fever-dream fantasist, not least because of the fabulous winged figure which rested atop the temple spire. And all of it—the more he looked—seemed to exist only to celebrate the return of the Banished Ones.

None of it made sense. But at least it forced his mind off the ceremony ahead.

The more he looked, the more he realised—against his first impression—that the winged thing really was an Amarantin, or, more accurately, a kind of hybrid Amarantin/angel, sculpted by an artist with a deep and scholarly understanding of what the possessing of wings would actually entail. Seen without his eyes’ zoom facility, the statue was cruciform, shockingly so. Enlarged, the cruciform shape became a perched Amarantin with glorious, outspread wings. The wings were metalled in different colours, each small trailing feather sparkling with a slightly different hue. Like the human representation of an angel, the wings did not simply replace the creature’s arms, but were a third pair of limbs in their own right.

But the statue seemed more real than any representation of an angel Sylveste had ever seen in human art. It appeared—the thought seemed absurd—anatomically correct. The sculptor had not just grafted the wings onto the basic Amarantin form, but had subtly re-engineered the creature’s underlying physique. The manipulatory forelimbs had been moved slightly lower down the torso, elongated to compensate. The chest of the torso swelled much wider than the norm, dominated by a yokelike skeletal/muscular form around the creature’s shoulder area. From this yoke sprouted the wing, forming a roughly triangular shape, kitelike. The creature’s neck was longer than normal, and the head seemed even more streamlined and avian in profile. The eyes still faced forwards—though like all Amarantin, its binocular vision was limited—but were set into deep, grooved bone channels. The creature’s upper mandible nostril parts were flared and rilled, as if to draw the extra air into the lungs required for the beating of the wings. And yet not everything was right. Assuming that the creature’s body was approximately similar in mass to the Amarantin norm, even those wings would have been pitifully inadequate for the task of flying. So what were they—some kind of gross ornamentation? Had the Banished Ones gone in for radical bio-engineering, only to burden themselves with wings of ridiculous impracticality?

Or had there been another purpose?

“Second thoughts?”

Sylveste was jolted suddenly from his contemplation.

“You still don’t think this is a good idea, do you?”

He turned around from the balustrade which looked across the city.

“It’s a little late to voice my objections, I think.”

“On your wedding day?” Girardieau smiled. “Well, you’re not home and dry yet, Dan. You could always back out.”

“How would you take that?”

“Very badly indeed, I suspect.”

Girardieau was dressed in starched city finery, cheeks lightly rouged for the attendant swarms of float-cams. He took Sylveste by the forearm and led him away from the edge.

“How long have we been friends, Dan?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it friendship; more a kind of mutual parasitism.”

“Oh come on,” Girardieau said, looking disappointed. “Have I made your life any more of a misery these last twenty years than was strictly necessary? Do you think I took any great pleasure in locking you away?”

“Let’s say you approached the task with no little enthusiasm.”

“Only because I had your best interests at heart.” They stepped off the balcony into one of the low tunnels which threaded the black shell around the city. Cushioned flooring absorbed their footsteps. “Besides,” Girardieau continued, “if it wasn’t transparently obvious, Dan, there was something of a feeding frenzy at the time. If I hadn’t put you in custody, some mob would eventually have taken out their anger on you.”

Sylveste listened without speaking. He knew much of what Girardieau said was true on a theoretical level, but that there was no guarantee that it reflected the man’s actual motives at the time.

“The political situation at the time was much simpler. Back then we didn’t have True Path making trouble.” They reached an elevator shaft and entered the carriage, its interior antiseptically clean and new. Prints hung on the wall, showing various Resurgam vistas before and after the Inundationist transformations. There was even one of Mantell. The mesa in which the research outpost was embedded was draped in foliage, a waterfall running off the top, blue, cloud-streaked skies beyond it. In Cuvier, there was a whole sub-industry devoted to creating images and simulations of the future Resurgam, ranging from water-colour artists to skilled sensorium designers.

“And on the other hand,” Girardieau said, “there are radical scientific elements coming out of the woodwork. Only last week, one of True Path’s representatives was shot dead in Mantell, and believe me, it wasn’t one of our agents who did it.”

Sylveste felt the carriage begin to convey them down, towards the city level.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that with fanatics on both sides, you and I are beginning to look like distinct moderates. Depressing thought, isn’t it?”

“Out-radicalised on both fronts, you mean.”

“Something like that.”

They emerged through the black, graven wall of the city-shell into a small crowd of media types who were running through last-minute preparations for the event. Reporters wore buff-coloured float-cam glasses, choreographing the cams which hovered around them like drab party balloons. One of Janequin’s genetically engineered peacocks was pecking around the group, its tail hissing behind it. Two security officers stepped forwards garbed in black with gold Inundationist sigils on their shoulders, surrounded by flocks of deliberately threatening entoptics. Servitors loitered behind them. They ran full-spectrum ident scans on Sylveste and Girardieau, then motioned them to a small temporary structure which had been placed near a nestlike froth of Amarantin dwellings.

The inside was almost bare, apart from a table and two skeletal chairs. There was a bottle of Amerikano red wine on the table, next to a pair of wine goblets, engraved with frosted-glass landscapes.

“Sit down,” Girardieau said. He swaggered around the table and decanted measures of wine into both glasses. “I don’t know why you’re so damned nervous. It isn’t as if this is your first time.”

“My fourth, actually.”

“All Stoner ceremonies?”

Sylveste nodded. He thought of the first two: small-scale affairs, to minor-league Stoner women, the faces of whom he could almost not separate in his memory. Both had withered under the glare of publicity that the family name attracted. By contrast, his marriage to Alicia—his last wife—had been sculpted as a publicity move from the onset. It had focused attention on the upcoming Resurgam expedition, giving it the final monetary push it needed. The fact that they had been in love had been almost inconsequential, merely a happy addendum to the existing arrangement.

“That’s a lot of baggage to be carrying around in your head now,” Girardieau said. “Don’t you ever wish you could be rid of the past each time?”

“You find the ceremony unusual.”

“Perhaps I do.” Girardieau wiped a red smear of wine from his lips. “I was never part of Stoner culture, you see.”

“You came with us from Yellowstone.”

“Yes, but I wasn’t born there. My family were from Grand Teton. I only arrived on Yellowstone seven years before the Resurgam expedition departed. Not really enough time to become culturally adapted to Stoner tradition. My daughter, on the other hand… well, Pascale’s never known anything but Stoner society. Or at least the version of it we imported when we came here.” He lowered his voice. “You must have the vial with you now, I suppose. May I see it?”

“I could hardly refuse you.”

Sylveste reached in his pocket and removed the little glass cylinder he had been carrying with him all day. He passed it to Girardieau, who nervously tinkered with it, tipping it this way and that. He watched the bubbles within, slipping to and fro as if in a spirit level. Something darker hung within the fluid, fibrous and tendrilled.

He placed the vial down; it made a delicate glassy chime as it settled on the tabletop. Girardieau studied it with barely masked horror.

“Was it painful?”

“Of course not. We’re not sadists, you know.” Sylveste smiled, secretly enjoying Girardieau’s discomfort. “Would you rather we exchanged camels, perhaps?”

“Put it away.”

Sylveste slipped the vial back into his pocket. “Now tell me who’s the nervous one, Nils.”

Girardieau poured himself another measure of wine. “Sorry. Security are edgy as hell. Don’t know what’s got them so bothered, but it’s rubbing off on me, I suppose.”

“I didn’t notice anything.”

“You wouldn’t.” Girardieau shrugged; a bellows-like movement that began somewhere below his abdomen. “They claim everything’s normal, but after twenty years I read them better than they imagine.”

“I wouldn’t worry. Your police are very efficient people.”

Girardieau shook his head briefly, as if he had taken a bite from a particularly sour lemon. “I don’t expect the air between us to ever be completely cleared, Dan. But you could at least give me the benefit of the doubt.” He nodded towards the open door. “Didn’t I give you complete access to this place?”

Yes, and all that had done was to replace a dozen questions with a thousand more. “Nils…” he began, “how are the colony’s resources these days?”

“In what sense?”

“I know things have been different since Remilliod came through. Things which would have been unthinkable in my day… could be done now, if the political will was there.”

“What kinds of things?” Girardieau asked dubiously.

Sylveste reached into his jacket again, but this time, instead of the vial, he removed a piece of paper which he spread before Girardieau. The paper was marked with complex circular figures. “You recognise these marks? We found them on the obelisk and all over the city. They’re maps of the solar system, made by the Amarantin.”

“Somehow, having seen this city, I find that easier to believe now than I once did.”

“Good, then hear me out.” Sylveste drew his finger along the widest circle. “This represents the orbit of the neutron star, Hades.”

“Hades?”

“That was the name it was given when they first surveyed the system. There’s a lump of rock orbiting it, too—about the size of a planetary moon. They called it Cerberus.” Then he brushed his finger across the cluster of graphicforms attending the neutron star/planet double system. “Somehow, this was important to the Amarantin. And I think it might have some bearing on the Event.”

Girardieau buried his head in his hands theatrically, then looked back at Sylveste. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Carefully—never allowing his gaze to move from Girardieau’s eyes—he folded away the paper and replaced it in his pocket. “We have to explore it, and find out what killed the Amarantin. Before it kills us as well.” When Sajaki and Volyova came to Khouri’s quarters, they told her to put on something warm. Khouri noticed that they were both wearing heavier than usual shipwear—Volyova in a zipped-up flying jacket, Sajaki in muffled, high-collared thermals, quilted in a mosaic of nova-diamond patches.

“I’ve screwed up, haven’t I?” Khouri said. “This is where I get the airlock treatment. My scores in the combat simulations haven’t been good enough. You’re going to ditch me.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Sajaki said, only his nose and forehead protruding above the furline of his collar. “If we were going to kill you, do you think we’d worry about you catching a chill?”

“And,” Volyova said, “your indoctrination finished weeks ago. You’re now one of our assets. To kill you now would be a form of treason against ourselves.” Beneath the bib of her cap only her mouth and chin were visible; she exactly complemented Sajaki, the two of them forming one bland composite face.

“Nice to know you care.”

Still unsure of her position—the possibility that they might be planning something nasty was still looming large—she dug through what passed for her belongings until she found a thermal jacket. Manufactured by the ship, it was similar to Sajaki’s harlequin job, except that it fell almost to her knees.

An elevator journey took them into an unexplored region of the ship—at least, well away from what Khouri considered known territory. They had to change elevators several times, walking through interconnecting tunnels which Volyova said were necessary because of virus damage taking out large sections of the transit system. The dйcor and technological level of the walk-though areas was always subtly different, suggesting to Khouri that whole districts of the ship had been left fallow at different stages over the last few centuries. She remained nervous, but something in Sajaki and Volyova’s demeanour told her that what they had in mind was more akin to an initiation ceremony than a cold execution. They reminded her of children embarked on some piece of malicious tomfoolery—Volyova at least, though Sajaki looked and acted a good deal more authoritarian, like a functionary carrying out a grim civic duty.

“Since you’re part of us now,” he said, “it’s time you learnt a little more about the set-up. You might also appreciate knowing our reason for going to Resurgam.”

“I assumed it was trade.”

“That was the cover story, but let’s face it, it was never very convincing. Resurgam doesn’t have much in the way of an economy—the purpose of the colony is pure research—and it certainly lacks the resources to buy much from us. Of course, our data on the colony is necessarily old, and once we’re there we’ll trade what we can, but that could never be the sole reason for our voyage there.”

“So what is?”

The lift they were in was decelerating. “The name Sylveste mean anything to you?” Sajaki asked.

Khouri did her best to act normally, as if the question were reasonable, and not one which had gone off in her cranium like a magnesium flare.

“Well, of course. Everyone on Yellowstone knew about Sylveste. Guy was practically a god to them. Or maybe the devil.” She paused, hoping her reactions sounded normal. “Wait though; which Sylveste are we talking about here? The older one, the guy who botched up those immortality experiments? Or his son?”

“Technically speaking,” Sajaki said, “both.”

The lift thundered to a halt. When the doors opened it was like being slapped in the face with a cold wet cloth. Khouri was glad for the advice about the warm clothes, although she still felt mortally chilled. “Thing was,” she continued, “they weren’t all bastards. Lorean was the old guy’s father, and he was still some kind of a folk hero, even after he died, and the old guy—what was his name again?”

“Calvin.”

“Right. Even after Calvin killed all those people. Then Calvin’s son came along—Dan, that would have been—and he tried to make amends, in his own way, with the Shrouder thing.” Khouri shrugged. “I wasn’t around then, of course. I only know what people told me.”

Sajaki led them through gloomy grey-green lit corridors, huge and perhaps mutant janitor-rats scrabbling away as their footfalls neared. What he took them into resembled the inside of a choleraic’s trachea—corridors thick and glutinous with dirty carapacial ice; venous with buried tentacular ducts and power lines, slick with something nastily like human phlegm. Ship-slime, Volyova called it—an organic secretion caused by malfunctioning biological recycler systems on an adjacent level.

Mostly, though, it was the cold of which Khouri took heed.

“Sylveste’s part in things is rather complex,” Sajaki said. “It’ll take a while to explain. First, though, I’d like you to meet the Captain.”

Sylveste walked around himself, checking that nothing was seriously out of place. Satisfied, he cancelled the image and joined Girardieau in the pre-fab’s ante-room. The music reached a crescendo, then settled into a burbling refrain. The pattern of lights altered, voices dropping to a hush.

Together, they stepped into the glare, into the basso sound-field of the organ’s drone. A meandering path led to the central temple, carpeted for the occasion. Chime-trees lined it, cased in protective domes of clear plastic. The chime-trees were spindly, articulated sculptures, their many arms tipped with curved, coloured mirrors. At odd times, the trees would click and reconfigure themselves, moved by what seemed to be million-year-old clockwork buried in pedestals. Current thinking had it that the trees were elements of some city-wide semaphore system.

The organ’s noise magnified as they stepped into the temple. Its egg-shaped dome was permeated by petal-shaped expanses of elaborate stained-glass, miraculously intact despite the slow predations of time and gravity. Filtered through the toplights, the air in the temple seemed suffused with a calming pink radiance. The central portion of the enormous room was taken up by the rising foundation of the spire which rose above the temple; wide and flared like the base of a sequoia. Temporary seating for a hundred top-level Cuvier dignitaries bowed out in a fan-shape from one side of the pillar; easily accommodated by the building, despite its one-quarter scale. Sylveste scanned the racks of watchers, recognising about a third of them. Perhaps a tenth had been his allies before the coup. Most of them wore heavy outer garments, plump with furs. He recognised Janequin amongst them, sagelike with his smoke-white goatee and long silvery hair waterfalling from his bald pate. He looked more simian than ever. Some of his birds were in the hall, released from a dozen bamboo boxes. Sylveste had to admit that they were now strikingly good facsimiles, even down to the bobbed crest and the speckle-shimmer of their turquoise plumage. They had been adapted from chickens by careful manipulation of homeobox genes. The audience, many of whom had not seen the birds before today, applauded. Janequin turned the colour of bloodied snow, and seemed anxious to sink into his brocade overcoat.

Girardieau and Sylveste reached a sturdy table at the focus of the audience. The table was ancient: its woodwork eagle and Latinate inscriptions dated back to the Amerikano settlers on Yellowstone. Its corners were chipped. A varnished mahogany box sat on the table, sealed by delicate gold clasps.

A woman of serious demeanour stood behind the table, dressed in an electric-white gown. The gown’s clasp was a complex dual sigil, combining the Resurgam City/Inundationist governmental seal with the emblem of the Mixmasters: two hands holding a cat’s cradle of DNA. She was, Sylveste knew, not a true Mixmaster. The Mixmasters were a cliquish guild of Stoner bioengineers and geneticists, and none of their sanctum had journeyed to Resurgam. Yet their symbol—which had travelled—denoted general expertise in life-sciences: genesculpting, surgery or medicine.

Her unsmiling face was sallow in the stained light, hair collected in a bun, pierced by two syringes.

The music quietened.

“I am Ordinator Massinger,” she said, voice ringing out across the chamber. “I am empowered by the Resurgam expeditionary council to marry individuals of this settlement, unless such union conflicts with the genetic fitness of the colony.”

The Ordinator opened the mahogany box. Just below the lid lay a leather-bound object the size of a Bible. She removed it and placed it on the table, then folded it open with a creak of leather. The exposed surfaces were matt grey, like wet slate, glistening with microscopic machinery.

“Place one hand each on the page nearest you, gentlemen.”

They placed their palms on the surface. There was a fluorescent sweep as the book took their palm-prints, followed by a brief tingle as biopsies were taken. When they were done, Massinger took the book and pressed her own hand against the surface.

Massinger then asked Nils Girardieau to state his identity to the gathered. Sylveste watched faint smiles ghost the audience. There was something absurd about it, after all, though Girardieau made no show of this himself.

Then she asked the same of Sylveste.

“I am Daniel Calvin Lorean Soutaine-Sylveste,” he said, using the form of his name so rarely employed that it almost took an effort of memory to bring it to mind. He went on, “The only biological son of Rosalyn Soutaine and Calvin Sylveste, both of Chasm City, Yellowstone. I was born on the seventeenth of January, in the hundred and twenty-first standard year after the resettlement of Yellowstone. My calendrical age is two hundred and twenty-three. Allowing for medichine programs, I have a physiological age of sixty, on the Sharavi scale.”

“How do you knowingly manifest?”

“I knowingly manifest in one incarnation only, the biological form now speaking.”

“And you affirm that you are not wittingly manifested via alpha-level or other Turing-capable simulacra, in this or any other solar system?”

“None of which I am aware.”

Massinger made small annotations in the book using a pressure stylus. She had asked Girardieau precisely the same questions: standard parts of the Stoner ceremony. Ever since the Eighty, Stoners had been intensely suspicious of simulations in general, particularly those that purported to contain the essence or soul of an individual. One thing they especially disliked was the idea of one manifestation of an individual—biological or otherwise—making contracts to which the other manifestations were not bound, such as marriage.

“These details are in order,” Massinger said. “The bride may step forward.”

Pascale moved into the roseate light. She was accompanied by two women wearing ash-coloured wimples, a squad of float-cams and personal security wasps and a semi-transparent entourage of entoptics: nymphs, seraphim, flying-fish and hummingbirds, star-glitter dewdrops and butterflies, in slow cascade around her wedding dress. The most exclusive entoptic designers in Cuvier had created them.

Girardieau raised his thick, hauserlike arms and bid his daughter forward.

“You look beautiful,” he murmured.

What Sylveste saw was beauty reduced to digital perfection. He knew that Girardieau saw something incomparably softer and more human, like the difference between a swan and a hard glass sculpture of a swan.

“Place your hand on the book,” the Ordinator said.

An imprint of moisture from Sylveste’s hand was still visible, like a wider shoreline around Pascale’s island of pale flesh. The Ordinator asked her to verify her identity, in the same manner as she had asked Girardieau and Sylveste. Pascale’s task was simple enough: not only had she been born on Resurgam, but she had never left the planet. Ordinator Massinger delved deeper into the mahogany box. While she did so, Sylveste’s eyes worked the audience. He saw Janequin, looking paler than ever, fidgety. Deep within the box, polished to a bluish antiseptic lustre, lay a device like a cross between an old-style pistol and a veterinarian’s hypodermic.

“Behold the wedding gun,” the Ordinator said, holding the box aloft.

Bone-splinteringly cold as it was, Khouri soon stopped noticing the temperature except as an abstract quality of the air. The story that her two crewmates was relating was far too strange for that.

They were standing near the Captain. His name, she now knew, was John Armstrong Brannigan. He was old, inconceivably so. Depending on the system one adopted in measuring his age, he was anywhere between two hundred and half a thousand years old. The details of his birth were unclear now, hopelessly tangled in the countertruths of political history. Mars, some said, was the place where he had been born, yet it was equally possible that he had been born on Earth, Earth’s city-jammed moon or in any one of the several hundred habitats which drifted through cislunar space in those days.

“He was already over a century old before he ever left Sol system,” Sajaki said. “He waited until it was possible to do so, then was among the first thousand to leave, when the Conjoiners launched the first ship from Phobos.”

“At least, someone called John Brannigan was on that ship,” Volyova said.

“No,” Sajaki said. “There’s no doubt. I know it was him. Afterwards… it becomes less easy to place him, of course. He may have deliberately blurred his own past, to avoid being tracked down by all the enemies he must have made in that time. There are many sightings, in many different systems, decades apart… but nothing definite.”

“How did he come to be your Captain?”

“He turned up centuries later—after several landfalls elsewhere, and dozens of unconfirmed apparitions—on the fringe of the Yellowstone system. He was ageing slowly, due to the relativistic effects of starflight, but he was still getting older, and longevity techniques were not as well developed as in our time.” Sajaki paused. “Much of his body was now prosthetic. They said that John Brannigan no longer needed a spacesuit when he left his ship; that he breathed vacuum, basked in intolerable heat and quenching cold, and that his sensory range encompassed every spectrum imaginable. They said that little remained of the brain with which he had been born; that his head was merely a dense loom of intermeshed cybernetics, a stew of tiny thinking machines and precious little organic material.”

“And how much of that was true?”

“Perhaps more of it than people wished to believe. There were certainly lies: that he had visited the Jugglers on Spindrift years before they were generally discovered; that the aliens had wrought wondrous transformations on what remained of his mind, or that he had met and communicated with at least two sentient species so far unknown to the rest of humanity.”

“He did meet the Jugglers eventually,” Volyova said, in Khouri’s direction. “Triumvir Sajaki was with him at the time.”

“That was much later,” Sajaki snapped. “All that’s germane here is his relationship with Calvin.”

“How did they cross paths?”

“No one really knows,” Volyova said. “All that we know for sure is that he became injured, either through an accident or some military operation that went wrong. His life wasn’t in danger, but he needed urgent help, and to go to one of the official groups in the Yellowstone system would have been suicide. He’d made too many enemies to be able to place his life in the hands of any organisation. What he needed were loosely scattered individuals in whom he could place personal trust. Evidently Calvin was one of them.”

“Calvin was in touch with Ultra elements?”

“Yes, though he would never have admitted so in public.” Volyova smiled, a wide toothy crescent opening beneath the bib of her cap. “Calvin was young and idealistic then. When this injured man was delivered to him, he saw it as a godsend. Until then he had had no means of exploring his more outlandish ideas. Now he had the perfect subject, the only requirement being total secrecy. Of course, they both gained from it: Calvin was able to try out his radical cybernetic theories on Brannigan, while Brannigan was made well and became something more than he had been before Calvin’s work. You might describe it as the perfect symbiotic relationship.”

“You’re saying the Captain was a guinea pig for that bastard’s monstrosities?”

Sajaki shrugged, the movement puppetlike within his swaddling clothes.

“That was not how Brannigan saw it. As far as the rest of humanity was concerned, he was already a monster before the accident. What Calvin did was merely take the trend further. Consummate it, if you like.”

Volyova nodded, although there was something in her expression which suggested she was not quite at ease with her crewmate. “And in any case, this was prior to the Eighty. Calvin’s name was unsullied. And among the more overt extremes of Ultra life, Brannigan’s transformation was only slightly in excess of the norm.” She said it with tart distaste.

“Carry on.”

“Nearly a century passed before his next encounter with the Sylveste clan,” Sajaki said. “By which time he was commanding this ship.”

“What happened?”

“He was injured again. Seriously, this time.” Gingerly, like someone testing himself against a candle flame, he whisked his fingers across the limiting extent of the Captain’s silvery growth. The Captain’s outskirts looked frothy, like the brine left on a rockpool by the retreating tide. Sajaki delicately swabbed his fingers against the front of his jacket, but Khouri could tell that they did not feel clean; that they itched and crawled with subepidermal malignance.

“Unfortunately,” Volyova said, “Calvin was dead.”

Of course. He had died during the Eighty; had in fact been one of the last to lose his corporeality.

“All right,” Khouri said. “But he died in the process of having his brain scanned into a computer. Couldn’t you just steal the recording and persuade it to help you?”

“We would, had that been possible.” Sajaki’s low voice reverberated from the throated curve of the corridor. “His recording, his alpha-level simulation, had vanished. And there were no duplicates—the alphas were copy-protected.”

“So basically,” Khouri said, hoping to shatter the morguelike atmosphere of the proceedings, “you were up shit creek without a Captain.”

“Not quite,” Volyova said. “You see, all this took place during a rather interesting period in Yellowstone’s history. Daniel Sylveste had just returned from the Shrouders, and was neither insane nor dead. His companion hadn’t been so lucky, but her death only gave additional poignancy to his heroic return.” She halted, then asked, with birdlike eagerness: “Did you ever hear of his ‘thirty days in the wilderness’, Khouri?”

“Maybe once. Remind me.”

“He vanished for a month a century ago,” Sajaki said. “One minute the toast of Stoner society, the next nowhere to be found. There were rumours that he’d gone out of the city dome; jammed on an exosuit and gone to atone for the sins of his father. Shame it isn’t true; would have been quite touching. Actually,” Sajaki nodded at the floor, “he came here for a month. We took him.”

“You kidnapped Dan Sylveste?” Khouri almost laughed at the audaciousness of it all. Then she remembered they were talking about the man she was meant to kill. Her impulse to laugh evaporated quickly.

“Invited aboard is probably a preferable term,” Sajaki said. “Though I admit he didn’t have a great deal of choice in the matter.”

“Let me get this straight,” Khouri said. “You kidnapped Cal’s son? What good was that going to do you?”

“Calvin took a few precautions before he subjected himself to the scanner,” Sajaki said. “The first was simple enough, although it had to be initiated decades before the culmination of the project. Simply put, he arranged to have every subsequent second of his life monitored by recording systems. Every second: waking, sleeping, whatever. Over the years, machines learnt to emulate his behaviour patterns. Given any situation, they could predict his responses with astonishing accuracy.”

“Beta-level simulation.”

“Yes, but a beta-level sim orders of magnitude more complex than any previously created.”

“By some definitions,” Volyova said, “it was already conscious; Calvin had already transmigrated. Calvin may or may not have believed that, but he still kept on refining the sim. It could project an image of Calvin which was so real, so like the actual man, that you had the forceful sense that you were really in his presence. But Calvin took it a step further. There was another mode of insurance available to him.”

“Which was?”

“Cloning.” Sajaki smiled, nodded almost imperceptibly in Volyova’s direction.

“He cloned himself,” she said. “Using illegal black genetics techniques, calling in favours from some of his shadier clients. Some of them were Ultra, you see—otherwise we wouldn’t know any of this. Cloning was embargoed technology on Yellowstone; young colonies almost always outlaw it in the interests of ensuring maximum genetic diversity. But Calvin was cleverer than the authorities, and wealthier than those he was forced to bribe. That way he was able to pass off the clone as his son.”

“Dan,” Khouri said, the monosyllabic word carving its own angular shape in the refrigerated air. “You’re telling me Dan is Calvin’s clone?”

“Not that Dan knows any of this,” Volyova said. “He’d be the last person Calvin wanted to know. No; Sylveste is as much party to the lie as any of the populace ever were. He thinks he’s his own man.”

“He doesn’t realise he’s a clone?”

“No, and as time goes by his chances of ever finding out get smaller and smaller. Beyond Calvin’s Ultra allies, almost no one knew, and Calvin set up incentives to keep those that did quiet. There were a few unavoidable weak links—Calvin had no choice but to recruit one of Yellowstone’s top geneticists—and Sylveste picked the same man for the Resurgam expedition, not realising the intimate connection they shared. But I doubt that he’s learnt the truth since, or even come close to guessing it.”

“But every time he looks in a mirror…”

“He sees himself, not Calvin.” Volyova smiled, evidently enjoying the way their revelation was upsetting some of Khouri’s basic certainties. “He was a clone, but that didn’t mean he had to resemble Cal down to the last skin pore. The geneticist—Janequin—knew how to induce cosmetic differences between Cal and Dan’s makeup, enough so that people would see only the expected familial traits. Obviously, he also incorporated traits from the woman who was supposed to be Dan’s mother, Rosalyn Soutaine.”

“The rest was simple,” Sajaki said. “Cal raised his clone in an environment carefully structured to emulate the surroundings he had known as a boy—even down to the same stimuli at certain periods in the boy’s development, because Cal couldn’t be sure which of his own personality traits were due to nature or nurture.”

“All right,” Khouri said. “Accepting for the moment that all of this is true—what was the point? Cal must have known Dan wouldn’t follow the same developmental path, no matter how closely he manipulated the boy’s life. What about all those decisions that take place in the womb?” Khouri shook her head. “It’s insane. At the very best, all he’d end up with would be a crude approximation to himself.”

“I think,” Sajaki said, “that that was all that Cal hoped for. Cal cloned himself as a precaution. He knew the scanning process that he and the other members of the Eighty would have to endure would destroy his material body, so he wanted a body to which he could return if life in the machine turned out not to be to his liking.”

“And did it?”

“Maybe, but that was beside the point. At the time of the Eighty, the retransfer operation was still beyond the technology of the day. There was no real hurry: Cal could always have the clone put in reefersleep until he needed it, or simply reclone another one from the boy’s cells. He was thinking well ahead.”

“Assuming the retransfer ever became possible.”

“Well, Calvin knew it was a long shot. The important thing was that there was a second fall-back option apart from retransfer.”

“Which was?”

“The beta-level simulation.” Sajaki’s voice had become as slow, cold and icy as the breezes in the Captain’s chamber. “Although not formally capable of consciousness, it was still an incredibly detailed facsimile of Calvin. Its relative simplicity meant it would be easier to encode its rules into the wetware of Dan’s mind. Much easier than imprinting something as volatile as the alpha.”

“I know the primary recording—the alpha—disappeared,” she said. “There was no Calvin left to run the show. And I guess Dan began to act a little more independently than Calvin might have wished.”

“To put it mildly,” Sajaki said, nodding. “The Eighty marked the beginning of the decline of the Sylveste Institute. Dan soon escaped its shackles, more interested in the Shrouder enigma than cybernetic immortality. He kept possession of the beta-level sim, though he never realised its exact significance. He thought of it more as an heirloom than anything else.” The Triumvir smiled. “I think he would have destroyed it had he realised what it represented, which was his own annihilation.”

Understandable, Khouri thought. The beta-level simulation was like a trapped demon waiting to inhabit a new host body. Not properly conscious, but still dangerously potent, by virtue of the subtle ingenuity with which it mimicked true intelligence.

“Cal’s precautionary measure was still useful to us,” Sajaki said. “There was enough of Cal’s expertise encoded in the beta to mend the Captain. All we had to do was persuade Dan to let Calvin temporarily inhabit his mind and body.”

“Dan must have suspected something when it worked so easily.”

“It was never easy,” Sajaki admonished. “Far from it. The periods when Cal took over were more akin to some kind of violent possession. Motor control was a problem: in order to suppress Dan’s own personality, we had to give him a cocktail of neuro-inhibitors. Which meant that when Cal finally got through, the body he found himself in was already half-paralysed by our drugs. It was like a brilliant surgeon performing an operation by giving orders to a drunk. And—by all accounts—-it wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences for Dan. Quite painful, he said.”

“But it worked.”

“Just. But that was a century ago, and now it’s time for another visit to the doctor.”

“Your vials,” said the Ordinator.

One of the wimpled aides from Pascale’s party stepped forward, brandishing a vial identical in size and shape to the one which Sylveste removed from his pocket. They were not the same colour: the fluid in Pascale’s vial had been tinted red, against the yellow hue of Sylveste’s. Similar darkish fronds of material orbited within. The Ordinator took both vials and held them aloft for a few moments before placing them side by side on the table, in clear view of the audience.

“We are ready to begin the marriage,” she said. She then performed the customary duty of asking if there were anyone present who had any bioethical reasons as to why the marriage should not take place.

There was, of course, no objection.

But in that odd, loaded moment of branching possibilities, Sylveste noted a veiled woman in the audience reach into a purse and uncap a dainty, jewel-topped amber perfume jar.

“Daniel Sylveste,” said the Ordinator. “Do you take this woman to be your wife, under Resurgam law, until such time as this marriage is annulled under this or any prevailing legal system?”

“I do,” Sylveste said.

She repeated the question to Pascale.

“I do,” Pascale said.

“Then let the bonding be done.”

Ordinator Massinger took the wedding gun from the mahogany box and snapped it open. She loaded the reddish vial—the one Pascale’s party had delivered—into the breech, then reclosed the instrument. Status entoptics briefly haloed it. Girardieau placed his hand on Sylveste’s upper arm, steadying him as the Ordinator pressed the conic end of the instrument against his temple, just above his eye-level. Sylveste had been right when he told Girardieau that the ceremony was not painful, but neither was it entirely pleasant. What it was was a sudden flowering of intense cold, as if liquid helium were being blasted into his cortex. The discomfort was brief, however, and the thumb-sized bruise on his skin would not last more than a few days. The brain’s immune system was weak by comparison with the body as a whole, and Pascale’s cells—floating as they did in a stew of helper medichines—would soon bond with Sylveste’s own. The volume was tiny—no more than a tenth of one per cent of the brain’s mass—but the transplanted cells carried the indelible impression of their last host: ghost threads of holographically distributed memory and personality.

The Ordinator removed the spent red vial and slotted the yellow one in its place. It was Pascale’s first wedding under the Stoner custom, and her trepidation was not well disguised. Girardieau held her hands as the Ordinator delivered the neural material, Pascale visibly flinching as it happened.

Sylveste had let Girardieau think the implant was permanent, but this was never the case. The neural tissue was tagged with harmless radioisotope trace elements, enabling it to be routed out and destroyed, if necessary, by divorce viruses. So far, Sylveste had never taken that option, and imagined he never would, no matter how many marriages down the line he was. He carried the smoky essences of all his wives—as they carried him—as he would carry Pascale. Indeed, on the faintest level, Pascale herself now carried traces of his previous wives.

That was the Stoner way.

The Ordinator carefully replaced the wedding gun in its box. “According to Resurgam law,” she began, “the marriage is now formalised. You may—”

Which was when the perfume hit Janequin’s birds.

The woman who had uncapped the amber jar was gone, her seat glaringly vacant. Fragrant, autumnal, the odour from the jar made Sylveste think of crushed leaves. He wanted to sneeze.

Something was wrong.

The room flashed turquoise blue, as if a hundred pastel fans had just opened. Peacocks’ tails, springing open. A million tinted eyes.

The air turned grey.

“Get down!” Girardieau screamed. He was scrabbling madly at his neck. There was something hooked in it, something tiny and barbed. Numbly, Sylveste looked at his tunic and saw half a dozen comma-shaped barbs clinging to it. They had not broken the fabric, but he dared not touch them.

“Assassination tools!” Girardieau shouted. He slumped under the table, dragging Sylveste and his daughter with him. The auditorium was chaos now, a frenzied mass of agitated people trying to escape.

“Janequin’s birds were primed!” Girardieau said, virtually screaming in Sylveste’s ear. “Poison darts—in their tails.”

“You’re hit,” Pascale said, too stunned for her voice to carry much emotion. Light and smoke burst over their heads. They heard screams. Out of the corner of his eye, Sylveste saw the perfume woman holding a sleekly evil pistol in a two-handed grip. She was dousing the audience with it, its fanged barrel spitting cold pulses of boser energy. The float-cams swept round her, dispassionately recording the carnage. Sylveste had never seen a weapon like the one the woman used. He knew it could not have been manufactured on Resurgam, which left only two possibilities. Either it had arrived from Yellowstone with the original settlement, or it had been sold by Remilliod, the trader who had passed through the system since the coup. Glass—Amarantin glass that had survived ten thousand centuries—broke shrilly above. Like pieces of shattered toffee, it crashed down in jagged shards into the audience. Sylveste watched, powerless, as the ruby planes buried themselves in flesh, like frozen lightning. The terrified were already screaming loud enough to drown out the cries of those in pain.

What remained of Girardieau’s security team was mobilising, but terribly slowly. Four of the militia were down, their faces punctured by the barbs. One had reached the seating, struggling with the woman who had the gun. Another was opening fire with his own sidearm, scything through Janequin’s birds.

Girardieau meanwhile was groaning. His eyes were rolling, bloodshot, hands grasping at thin air.

“We have to get out of here,” Sylveste said, shouting in Pascale’s ear. She seemed still dazed from the neural transfer, blearily oblivious to what was happening.

“But my father…”

“He’s gone.”

Sylveste eased Girardieau’s dead weight onto the cold floor of the temple, careful to keep behind the safety of the table.

“The barbs were meant to kill, Pascale. There’s nothing we can do for him. If we stay, we’ll just end up following him.”

Girardieau croaked something. It might have been “Go’, or it might only have been a final senseless exhalation.

“We can’t leave him!” Pascale said.

“If we don’t, his killers end up winning.”

Tears slashed her face. “Where can we go?”

He looked around frantically. Smoke from concussion shells was filling the chamber, probably from Girardieau’s own people. It was settling in lazy pastel spirals, like scarves tossed from a dancer. Just when it was almost too dark to see, the room plunged into total blackness. The lights beyond the temple had obviously been turned off, or destroyed.

Pascale gasped.

His eyes slipped into infrared mode, almost without him having to think about it.

“I can still see,” he whispered to her. “As long as we stay together, you don’t have to worry about the darkness.”

Praying that the danger from the birds was gone, Sylveste rose slowly to his feet. The temple glowed in grey-green heat. The perfume woman was dead, a fist-sized hot hole in her side. Her amber jar was smashed at her feet. He guessed it had been some kind of hormonal trigger, keyed to receptors Janequin had put in the birds. He had to have been part of it. He looked—but Janequin was dead. A tiny dagger sat in his chest, trailing hot rivulets down his brocade jacket.

Sylveste grabbed Pascale and shoved her along the ground towards the exit, a vaulted archway gilded with Amarantin figurines and bas-relief graphicforms. It seemed that the perfume woman had been the only assassin actually present, if one discounted Janequin. But now her friends were entering, garbed in chameleoflage. They wore closefitting breather masks and infrared goggles.

He pushed Pascale behind a jumble of upturned tables.

“They’re looking for us: he hissed. “But they probably think we’re already dead.”

Girardieau’s surviving security people had fallen back and taken up defensive positions, kneeling within the fan-shaped auditorium. It was no match: the newcomers carried much heavier weapons, heavy boser-rifles. Girardieau’s militia countered with low-yield lasers and projectile weapons, but the enemy were cutting them apart with blithe, impersonal ease. At least half the audience were unconscious or dead; they had caught the brunt of the peacock venom salvo. Hardly the most surgically precise of assassination tools, those birds—but they had been allowed into the auditorium completely unchecked. Sylveste observed that two were still alive, despite what he had at first imagined. Still triggered by trace molecules of the perfume which remained aloft, their tails were flicking open and shut like the fans of nervous courtesans.

“Did your father carry a weapon?” Sylveste said, instantly regretting his use of the past tense. “I mean, since the coup.”

“I don’t think so,” Pascale said.

Of course not; Girardieau would never have confided such a thing to her. Quickly Sylveste felt around the man’s still body, hoping to find the padded hardness of a weapon beneath his ceremonial clothes.

Nothing.

“We’ll have to do without,” Sylveste said, as if the stating of this fact would somehow alleviate the problem it encapsulated. “They’re going to kill us if we don’t run,” he said, finally.

“Into the labyrinth?”

“They’ll see us,” Sylveste said.

“But maybe they won’t think it’s us,” Pascale said. “They might not know you can see in the dark.” Though she was effectively blind, she managed to look him square in the face. Her mouth was open, an almost circular vacancy of expression or hope. “Let me say goodbye to my father first.”

She found his body in the darkness, kissed him for the last time. Sylveste looked to the exit. At that moment the soldier guarding it was hit by a shot from what remained of Girardieau’s militia. The masked figure crumpled, his body heat pooling liquidly into the floor around his body, spreading smoky white maggots of thermal energy into the stonework.

The way was clear, for the moment. Pascale found his hand and together they began to run.