The Prefect

CHAPTER 10

They did not look like people at all, but rather luminous pink branching coral formations, vast, dendritic and mysteriously chambered. For many seconds, Gaffney stared in mesmerised fascination at the three-dimensional patterns, awed at what he was seeing. If human souls could be frozen and captured in light, they would look something like this. Now that the flesh-and-blood individuals were deceased, and since none of the three had subjected themselves to alpha-level scanning, these beta-levels represented the last link with the living as far as Vernon Tregent, Anthony Theobald and Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious were concerned. Panoply might not regard beta-levels as anything other than forensic information, akin to photographs or bloodstains, but Gaffney was more open-minded. He didn’t hold with the orthodox view that only alpha-level simulations were to be accorded full human rights. The exterior effect was the only thing that mattered, not what was going on behind the mask. That was why it did not unduly concern him that he did not know exactly what Aurora was. So she might be a machine, rather than a living person. So what? What mattered was her compassion, her evident concern for the well-being of the hundred million souls orbiting Yellowstone. He’d had his doubts at first, of course. She had come to him five years earlier, four years after he’d been promoted to head of Panoply’s Internal Security division. He’d been a senior for years before that, and an outstanding field for as long again. He’d given his life to Panoply, and asked for nothing in return except the assurance that his colleagues cared about their duties as much as he did. He had invested his own identity in the idea of service, eschewing marriage and social relationships in preference to a life of disciplinary self-control. He lived and breathed the ideals of Panoply, the martial life of a career prefect. He didn’t just accept the sacrifices of his profession, he welcomed them.

But then something had happened that caused Gaffney to question the worth of Panoply, and by inference his own fitness as a human being. He had been sent to investigate possible voting anomalies in a habitat known as Hell-Five. It was a strange world, built around a perfect hemisphere of rock, as if a round asteroid had been sliced in two. Airtight structures rose up from both the flat face and the underlying pole, densely packed skyscrapers wrapped in coiling pressurised passageways. Once, Hell-Five had been a gambler’s paradise, before the fashion for such things waned. It had moved through several social models after that, each less remunerative than the last, before settling on the one Gaffney had witnessed during his visit. Within months of assuming its new identity, Hell-Five had become a dazzling success, with other habitats paying handsomely to access its lucrative new export.

That export was human misery.

Once a month, one of the habitat’s extremely wealthy citizens was selected at random. That unfortunate individual would be tortured, their excruciation prolonged via medical intervention until they eventually succumbed to death. Money flowed into Hell-Five’s coffers via the sale of viewing rights and the fact that the citizens of other habitats could sponsor a particular mode of torture, often after a series of escalating auctions.

The system sickened Gaffney to the marrow. He’d observed many extremes of human society in his tours of the Glitter Band, but nothing to compare with the depravities of Hell-Five. One glimpse of one of the victims-in-progress had sent him reeling. He had experienced a deep-seated conviction that Hell-Five was simply wrong; a social abomination that needed to be corrected, if not wiped out of existence.

But Panoply—and therefore Gaffney himself—could do nothing to curtail it. Panoply was concerned only with matters of security and voting rights as they pertained to the Glitter Band as a whole. What went on inside a given habitat—provided those activities did not contravene technological or weapons moratoriums, or deny citizens free voting rights—was entirely outside Panoply’s jurisdiction; a matter for local constabulary alone.

By these criteria, Hell-Five had done nothing wrong.

Gaffney found himself unable to accept this state of affairs. The phenomenon of the torture states, and the citizens’ collective refusal to see them ended, showed that the people could not be trusted with absolute freedom. Nor could Panoply be trusted to step in when a moral cancer began to spread through the Glitter Band.

Gaffney saw then that something had to be done. Too much power had been devolved to the habitats. For their own safety, central government needed to be reasserted. The citizens would never vote for that, of course; even the moderate states were wary of ceding too much authority to an organisation like Panoply. But needs must, no matter how unwilling the populace. Children were playing with some very sharp knives: it was a wonder more blood hadn’t already been spilled.

Gaffney had begun to express his thoughts in his personal journal. It was a way of clarifying and organising his precepts. He saw that Panoply had to change—perhaps even cease to exist—if the people were not to be abandoned to their own worst natures. He was aware that his ideas were heretical; that they cut against everything Sandra Voi’s name had stood for these past two hundred years. But history was not made by reasonable or cautious individuals. Sandra Voi had hardy been cautious or reasonable herself. Aurora had revealed herself to him soon after.

“You’re a good man, Sheridan. Yet you feel beleaguered, as if all those around you have forgotten their true responsibilities.” Gaffney had blinked at the sudden appearance of the face on his private security pane.

“Who are you?”

“A fellow sympathiser. A friend, if you wish.” He was inside Panoply. If she was reaching him, then she had to be inside as well. But he knew even then that she was not, and that Aurora had powers of infiltration and stealth that made a mockery of walls and doors, whether real or virtual. If she was a beta- or gamma-level, she was cleverer and more agile than most.

“Are you human?”

The question had clearly amused her.

“Does it really matter what I am, provided we share the same ideals?”

“My ideals are my own business.”

“Not now they aren’t. I’ve seen your words, shared your theories.” She nodded in answer to the question he’d barely begun to frame.

“Yes, I’ve looked into your private journals. Don’t be shocked, Sheridan. There is nothing shaming about them. Quite the contrary. I found them courageous. You are that rarest of creatures: a man with the wisdom to see beyond his own time.”

“I’m a prefect. It’s my job to think about the future.”

“But some people are better at it than others. You are a seer, Sheridan: much like myself. We just use different methods. Your policeman’s instincts tell you that Hell-Five is a symptom, a diagnostic of a looming pathology that may tax even Panoply’s resources. I see the future through a different lens, but I perceive the same ominous patterns, the same subtle indications of times of great crisis to come.”

“What do you see?”

“The end of everything, Sheridan. Unless brave men take the right action now to avert that catastrophe.”

She had looked at him testingly, like a teacher judging a bright but wayward pupil.

“The words in your journal show that you care. But caring is not enough. Words must become deeds.”

“I’m doing what I can. When my ideas are finalised, I can approach the other seniors—”.

“And have them drum you out of the organisation?”

“If I could only express myself properly—”.

“It’ll make no difference. You’re advocating authoritarian control. You know it is the right thing to do, but to most people the very idea is poison.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that.”

“Of course it doesn’t. You see that, just as you feel it in your heart. Authoritarian control can also be a form of kindness, like a mother hugging an infant to her breast to stop it thrashing and wailing. But no amount of rational persuasion will convince the populace. They must simply be shown.”

“Then it’ll never happen. Even if Panoply had the will, it’d never have the power to seize the Glitter Band. The citizenry won’t even let us carry guns!”

“There are other ways of asserting control, Sheridan. It doesn’t have to involve prefects storming every habitat in the ten thousand and declaring a new regime.”

“How, then?”

“It can happen between one moment and the next, if the right preparations are made.”

“I don’t follow.”

“For a long time I’ve been thinking along similar lines to yourself. After much deliberation, I’ve concluded that the transition to central authority must happen instantly, before there is a possibility of panic and counter-reaction.”

“The means don’t exist,” he told her.

“But what if we arranged things such that they do?”

“They’d notice our preparations.”

“Not if we are better than them. That’s no problem. Between the two of us, Sheridan, I think we can be very good indeed.”

Years after that first conversation with Aurora, Gaffney found himself thinking of all the preparations they had made, all the perils and impediments they had overcome. The thing that struck him, given all that he now knew, was how Aurora had never once uttered an actual untruth. She had not needed to tell him about her own visions of the future, but she had done so nonetheless. And as their relationship deepened, as the bonds of conspiracy grew thicker and more tangled, so she had allowed him to learn the true nature of that lens of which she had first spoken: the machine called Exordium, and the unwilling sleepers who on her behalf peered into its misty depths and reported what they saw. He had even walked amongst them, privy to a secret that would have ripped the system wide open had it become known. He felt sorry for those dreaming prisoners. But what they were doing was a beautiful, necessary thing.

History would thank them.

Hell-Five had shown Gaffney that the very nature of the Glitter Band embodied the seed of its own destruction. But Aurora had sucked information out of the future and seen the end itself: not as some vague, ill-determined catastrophe, but a specific event that could almost be tied down to a specific date.

A time of plague. A time of corruption and foulness.

It was coming and there was nowhere to hide.

But between them they had done something: perhaps not enough to avert the crisis, but at least to deflect some of its impact when it arrived. In a very short while, the Glitter Band would be relieved of the burden of self-determination.

This, Gaffney knew, was the time of the most acute risk. He had taken care of almost everything. But the one thing that might create difficulties for Aurora had still not been neutralised. Now he was also confronted with the thorny issues of the beta-levels. Gaffney had hoped that none would survive the attack, and that any backed-up copies retrieved from other habitats would be too out-of-sync to point Dreyfus towards the truth.

But Dreyfus was on to something. Gaffney had accessed the logs concerning the other prefect’s usage of the Search Turbines. The man was showing an unhealthy interest in the details of Delphine’s art, as if he instinctively knew that there was more to the habitat’s demise than met the eye. Dreyfus might not be aware of the Clockmaker connection, but given the man’s demonstrated resourcefulness, it might only be a matter of time before he found a link. So he had to be impeded. Gaffney’s hands moved to initiate the command he had already composed. From elsewhere in the data troves laid open for his inspection, he retrieved a slow-acting, high-stealth cybervirus. The software weapon was ancient and wouldn’t stand a chance against a properly shielded installation. But the beta-levels were a different matter. He threaded copies of the virus into their architectures at a level that would withstand superficial scrutiny. For now it did nothing. It was dormant, waiting until it was called into action. Waiting until the witnesses were resurrected from the dead again. Sparver was blowing his upturned, flat-ended nose into his sleeve while Dreyfus poured tea. His hyperpig respiratory system liked the air on cutters even less than Dreyfus’ did.

“You were quicker than I was expecting,” Dreyfus observed.

“Any hitches?” Sparver stared at his sleeve until it cleaned itself.

“Not at all. I got in and out without a snag.”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing to write home about. A piece of free-floating junk about the same size as the cutter. I grappled in and spacewalked. Took me about two minutes to find the right module and patch in a froptic. After that it was plain sailing.” His gently slanted eyes were pink-rimmed, as if he’d been up all night drinking vodka.

“Heard from Thalia since I left, Boss?” Dreyfus shook his head.

“I reckoned she’d work faster without me breathing down her neck every five minutes.”

“She’ll get the job done, don’t worry about that.”

“I sincerely hope so.”

“You have doubts?”

“I can’t help worrying. She’s a good deputy, but she’s barely out of school. I know she wants to prove to us all how good she is, but sometimes I think she’s overcompensating for what happened to her father.”

“What was your take on that?”

“I didn’t know Jason Ng all that well. But from what I did know, I never had cause to doubt his abilities or his dedication to Panoply.”

“So you were surprised?”

“We all were.”

“You ever talk to Thalia about it?”

“The subject’s never come up.”

Sparver smiled.

“She’d hardly be the one to raise it, would she?”

“Whatever I might think of her father, it has no bearing on my opinion of Thalia. I wouldn’t have selected her for my squad if I’d had doubts.” Dreyfus took his cup and sipped at it gently, blowing on the tea to cool it.

“Isn’t that all the reassurance she needs?”

“There are still prefects who won’t look her in the eye when she goes to the refectory,” Sparver said.

“I know how that feels.”

“They also resent her because she was promoted to Deputy Field One ahead of most of her classmates.”

“I just sometimes wonder if we truly understand what it’s like for her, working for the same organisation that tarred and feathered her father.”

Dreyfus shrugged. He had no real opinion on the matter. Jason Ng had been outwardly competent and trustworthy, but it was a matter of record that he had obstructed an investigation into a mid-rank habitat suspected of voting fraud. He had been found dead, having committed suicide in a cargo airlock. Postmortem audits revealed how Ng had been receiving bribes from parties connected to the habitat. He had killed himself because his culpability was about to be made public, and he wished to spare Thalia the shame of watching her father go through a humiliating tribunal.

Dreyfus didn’t care. He did not believe in an inherited disposition for accepting bribes or perverting investigations. If anything, he believed that Thalia would make a better prefect than many of her peers. She wanted both to redeem her father’s sins and show that she was not a slave to her genes.

“She’s a good deputy,” he said again.

“That’s all that matters to me. And I have every confidence that she’ll pull this off without our assistance.”

“You didn’t sound confident just now.”

“I’m entitled to entertain reasonable qualms. But that’s all they are. And face it, Sparv: Thalia chose to bite this one off on her own. She’d hardly welcome the arrival of a back-up squad, even if we could spare the personnel.”

“You’re right, as usual. I just have this horrible feeling that we’re dancing to someone else’s tune, spreading ourselves too thinly. We’ve got Thalia trying to seal the Perigal security hole; we’ve got you and me trying to nail whoever murdered Ruskin-Sartorious; we’ve got the rest of Panoply trying to keep the habitats and the Ultras from cutting each other’s throats. Is it me or is this starting to feel like an unusually busy week?”

“Look on the bright side,” Dreyfus said.

“Thalia’s going to be done soon: that’ll be one case closed. And we’re making solid progress on the Ruskin-Sartorious investigation.” He studied Sparver with sudden intensity.

“We are, aren’t we? Or did you just drop in for tea and sympathy?”

“Tea. For sympathy I go elsewhere. Mind if I use your wall? I want to show you what I got from the router.”

Dreyfus extended a hand.

“Go ahead. It’s group-conjurable.”

With the slightly exaggerated patience Dreyfus had sometimes come to recognise in his underlings,

Sparver walked him through the data. There were five columns of information: the time of arrival of an incoming transmission, its point of origin (the next node up the line), its intended destination (the next node down the line), the time when it had been forwarded—typically only a few nanoseconds after it had come in—and a final column giving some sketchy information concerning the contents of the transmission.

“There’s a lot of CTC traffic coming through,” Sparver said, indicating a proportion of columns with a particular flag in the fifth column.

“That we can dispense with. It’s just navigational housekeeping data, keeping tabs on all the ships and drones moving through the Band.” Sparver removed the CTC data, leaving many blank lines in the wall display. Dreyfus felt cheered: they were getting somewhere. But his glad frame of mind didn’t last long. The remaining data shuffled up to fill the gaps, leaving the wall looking much as it had before. He reminded himself that he was only seeing a small, illustrative portion of the entire router log, and that there were millions of lines above and below the visible segment.

“Now we do a similar filtering on polling traffic,” Sparver said.

“That takes care of another major chunk of the data. Run the same trick on traffic on the major trade nets and we delete another big chunk. It may not look like an improvement, but we’ve already shrunk the log by about half. But we can do better still. Clear out all router housekeeping and we drop another ten per cent. Clear out standard abstraction packets and we’re down to about twenty per cent of our original file.”

It must still have been tens of thousands of lines.

“We’ll need to do better than that, even,” Dreyfus said.

“And we can. Now we filter on the target address of Ruskin-Sartorious.” Sparver scrolled up and down to show that he had now reduced the log to a mere thousand lines or so.

Dreyfus scratched at his left eyebrow.

“Why didn’t we just jump to this point in the first place?”

“Doesn’t work like that,” Sparver said.

“Like almost every habitat in the Glitter Band, Ruskin-Sartorious would have handled onward forwarding of third-party data, including CTC services, trade talk, abstraction packets, the works. We’d still have had to strip all that from the list even if we narrowed it down to messages only going to Ruskin-Sartorious.”

“Would have been faster, though.”

“But logically equivalent. The system doesn’t care in which order you do the filtering.”

“I’ll take your word for it. But we’re still looking at a mass of data.”

“We’re not done. Now we start getting clever.”

“I thought we were already being clever.”

“Not enough.” Sparver smiled—he was clearly enjoying himself.

“See that number in the fourth column?”

“Yes,” Dreyfus said guardedly.

“Timetag for outgoing transmission.”

“That’s our clue. The message that came through to Ruskin-Sartorious was voice-only, right?”

“According to Vernon and Delphine. What difference does the message format make?”

Sparver drank from his cup.

“It makes a world of difference. When a transmission goes through the router, it’s subjected to a certain amount of routine processing. Cyclic redundancy error-checking, that kind of thing. If there’s a fault, the router sends a message back to the previous sender, asking for a

repeat transmission.” Dreyfus nodded provisionally.

“Makes sense.”

“The point is, all that error-checking takes a finite amount of time. And the heavier the data burden—the more content there is in the message—the more number-crunching needs to be done.”

“Ah. I think I see where you’re going.”

“The key’s in the outgoing timetag, Boss. Compared to most of the traffic the router would have forwarded to Ruskin-Sartorious, voice-only comms are hardly worth mentioning. The processing delay would have been almost zero.”

“So when the time difference between the incoming and outgoing tags is smallest—”.

“We’ll probably have isolated our message. Or at least some possible candidates.”

“Do it,” Dreyfus said excitedly. Sparver was ahead of him. Now the wall showed only a dozen transmissions, all falling within the likely interval when Delphine had been warned to break off negotiations with the Ultras.

“We’re still not down to one—” Dreyfus began.

“But we’re getting damned warm. Now we can apply some good old intuitive police work. We look at the originating nodes. Check out the second column, Boss—I’ve resolved the addresses into recognisable names. Now, I’m willing to bet that most of them will correspond to habitats that have either been in contact with Ruskin-Sartorious over a long period of time, or which are places we’d expect to broadcast to the entire Glitter Band on a fairly regular basis.”

“Can you check that?”

“Already did. You ready for this?” Sparver sent a command to the wall. Now there was only one transmission entry left.

“You’ll need to look over the eleven I rejected, but I’m pretty confident we can rule them out. This one, on the other hand, sticks out like the proverbial.”

“In what way?”

“The point of origin isn’t anywhere I recognise, which immediately sets off my alarm bells. It’s just a rock, a free-floating chunk of unprocessed asteroid drifting in one of the middle orbits.”

“Someone’s got to own it.”

“The claim on the rock goes back to a family or combine called Nerval-Lermontov. Whether that means anything or not, I don’t know.”

“Nerval-Lermontov,” Dreyfus said, repeating the name slowly.

“I know that family name from somewhere.”

“But then you know a lot of families.”

“They could be innocent. Is there any reason to think this rock isn’t just another router?”

“Maybe it is. But here’s the odd thing. Whoever made the call, whoever sent that signal from the Nerval-Lermontov rock—whether it originated there, or was just routed through it—that was the only time they ever contacted Ruskin-Sartorious through that particular node.”

“You’re right,” Dreyfus said approvingly.

“Alarm bells. Lots of them.” Sparver put down his tea, the china clinking delicately against Dreyfus’ table.

“Never say we pigs don’t have our uses.” A flying horse had been waiting for Thalia when she arrived in the Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass. The animal’s wings beat the air with dreamlike slowness, slender legs treading air as if galloping on the spot. Its skin was transparent, affording an anatomically precise view of its tightly packed internal organs, its highly modified skeleton and musculature. The insectile wings were blade-slender, intricately veined, with no visible skeletal underpinnings. Thalia’s pegasus wasn’t the only flying thing in the air. There were other flying horses, visible as slowly flapping translucent forms in the far distance. Some of them had riders; others must have been on their way to pick up passengers or were engaged in some errand of their own. There were also much more colourful things, suggestive of giant patterned moths, striped fish or elaborately tailed Chinese dragon kites. The pegasuses appeared to be confined to the habitat’s low-gravity regions (with those prismatic wings it wasn’t surprising) but the other flying forms had free roam of the entire interior. Amongst them, almost too small to make out, were the star-shaped forms of flying people, with wings or aerodynamic surfaces of their own. Thalia tried her glasses, but the overlay revealed no significant points of difference compared to naked reality. This confirmed everything that she had read about the Hourglass during her flight: the people here preferred to shape matter, not information. Gradually, she became aware of gravity pushing her deeper into the saddle. The horse was aiming itself at a tongue-like landing deck, buttressed out from a spired white mansion near the top of a city constructed on the slopes of the Hourglass’s midpoint constriction. As she neared the touchdown point, Thalia observed a civic welcoming party gathered around the perimeter of the deck. A pair of functionaries rushed to the side of the pegasus to help Thalia disembark as soon as the horse’s hooves clinked against glass flooring. The pull of gravity could still not have been more than a tenth of a gee, but the horse’s wings were beating constantly, fanning the air with an audible whoosh on each twisting downbeat. The functionaries—who were more or less baseline human in appearance—moved out of the way once Thalia was on her feet. A giant panda-like man, all black and white fur, ambled across to meet her. He moved with remarkable grace despite his obvious mass. His huge head was as wide as a vacuum helmet, his true eyes barely visible in the black ovals of his eyepatches. He stopped munching on a thin greenish stick and passed it to a functionary.

“Welcome, Deputy Field Prefect Ng,” he said in an unctuous tone.

“I am Mayor Graskop. It is a pleasure to welcome you to our modest little world. We trust your stay will be both pleasant and productive.” He offered her his paw in greeting. Thalia’s own small hand disappeared into a padding of warm, damp fur. She noticed that Mayor Graskop had five fingers and a thumb, all digits tipped with a shiny black nail.

“Thank you for sending the horse.”

“Did you like it? We’d have cultured something unique if we’d had more notice of your visit.”

“It was a very nice horse, thank you. You didn’t need to go to any more trouble.”

The mayor released his grip.

“Our understanding is that you wish to access our polling core.”

“That’s correct. What I have to do won’t take too long. It’s quite straightforward.”

“And afterwards? You’ll stay to enjoy some of our hospitality, won’t you? It’s not often we get a visitor from Panoply.”

“I’d love to, Mayor, but now isn’t a good time.”

He tilted his huge monochrome head.

“Trouble outside, is there? We’d heard reports, although I confess we don’t pay as much attention to such matters as we ought.”

“No,” Thalia said diplomatically.

“No trouble. Just a schedule I have to stick to.”

“But you will stay, just for a short while.” When the mayor spoke, she glimpsed fierce ranks of sharp white teeth and caught the sugary whiff of animal digestive products.

“I can’t. Not really.”

“But you simply must, Prefect.” He looked at the other members of the welcoming party, daring Thalia to disappoint them. Their faces, for the most part, were still recognisably human, albeit furred, scaled or otherwise distorted according to some zoological model. Their eyes were disturbingly beautiful, liquid and intense and childlike.

“We won’t detain you without good reason,” the mayor insisted.

“We receive so very few outsiders, let alone figures of authority. On such rare occasions that we do, it’s our custom to host an impromptu contest, or tournament, and to invite our honoured guest to participate in the judging. We were hoping you’d help with the adjudication in an air-joust—”

“I’d love to, but—”

He grinned triumphantly.

“Then it’s settled. You will stay.” He clasped his paws together in anticipation.

“Oh, how wonderful. A prefect as judge!”

“I’m not—”

“Let’s deal with the trifling business of the polling core, shall we? Then we can move on to the main event. It will be a wonderful air-joust! Are you happy to follow me? If you don’t like our low gravity, we can arrange a palanquin.”

“I’m doing just fine,” Thalia said tersely.