The Prefect

CHAPTER 11

Dreyfus was settled before his console, composing a query for the Search Turbines. He sought priors on the Nerval-Lermontov family, certain that the name meant something but incapable of dredging the relevant information from the event-congested registers of his own ageing memory. Yet he had no sooner launched the request, and was dwelling on the idle possibility of trawling his own mind, when he felt a sudden brief shudder run through the room. It was as if Panoply had suffered an earthquake.

He lifted his cuff, ready to call his deputy, fearing the worst. But he had not even uttered Sparver’s name before his console informed him that there had been a major incident in the Turbine hall.

Dreyfus stepped through his clotheswall and made his way from his room through the warrens of the rock to the non-centrifuge section where the Search Turbines were located. Even before he arrived, he realised that the incident had been grave. Prefects, technicians and machines were rushing past him. By the time he reached the entrance to the free-fall hall, medical crews were bringing out the wounded. Their injuries were shocking.

A conveyor band drew him into the vastness of the hall. He stared in stupefied amazement at the spectacle. There were no longer four Search Turbines, but three. The endmost cylinder was gone, save for the sleeve-like anchor points where it emerged from the chamber’s inner surface. The transparent shrouding had shattered into countless dagger-like shards, many of which were now embedded in the walling. Dreyfus couldn’t imagine the outward force that would have been necessary to rupture the armoured sheathing, which was the same kind of glass-like substance they used to form spacecraft hulls. As for the machinery that would have been whirling inside the glass just before it broke loose, nothing remained except a dusty residue, lathered several centimetres thick over every surface and hanging in the air in a choking blue-grey smog. The Turbine—its layered data stacks and whisking retrieval blades—had pulverised itself efficiently, leaving no components larger than a speck of grit. It was designed to do that, Dreyfus reminded himself, so that no information could be recovered by hostile parties in the event of a takeover of Panoply. But it was not meant to self-destruct during the course of normal operations.

He studied the other Turbines. The sheathing on the nearest of the three, the one that had been closest to the destroyed unit, was riven by several prominent cracks. The apparatus inside was spinning down, decelerating visibly. The other two units were undergoing the same failsafe shutdown, even though their casings appeared intact.

Keeping out of the way of the medical staff attending to hall technicians who’d been lacerated by glass and high-speed Turbine shrapnel—they’d already pulled out the most seriously wounded—Dreyfus found his way to a woman named Trajanova. She was the prefect in charge of archives, and considered supremely competent by all concerned. Dreyfus did not dissent from that view, but he did not like Trajanova and he knew that the feeling was mutual. He’d employed her once as a deputy, then dismissed her because she did not have the necessary instincts for fieldwork. She had never forgiven him for that and their rare meetings were tense, terse affairs. Dreyfus was nevertheless relieved to see that she had suffered no conspicuous injuries save for a gashed cheek. She was pressing her sleeve to it, her uniform dispensing disinfectant and coagulant agents. She had headphones lowered around her neck, glasses pushed up over her brow and a fine dusting of blue-grey debris on her clothes and skin.

Trajanova must have seen the look on his face.

“Before you ask, I have no idea what just happened.”

“I was about to ask if you were all right. Were you in here when it happened?”

“Behind the fourth stack, the furthest one from the unit that blew. Running search-speed diagnostics.”

“And?”

“It just went. One second it was spinning, next second it didn’t exist any more. I’d have been deafened if I hadn’t had the phones on.”

“You were lucky.”

She scowled, pulling her sleeve away to reveal the dried blood on her cuff.

“Funny. I’d say it was fairly unlucky of me to have been in here in the first place.”

“Was anyone killed?”

“I don’t think so. Not permanently.” She rubbed at dust-irritated eyes.

“It was a mess, though. The glass did the worst harm. That’s hyperdiamond, Dreyfus. It takes a lot to make it shatter. It was like a bomb going off in here.”

“Was it a bomb? I mean, seriously: could a bomb have caused this?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t think so. The unit just spun loose, all of a sudden. There was no bang, no flash, before it happened.”

“Those things run near critical break-up speed, don’t they?”

“That’s the idea. We spin them as fast as they can go. Any slower and you’d be the first to moan about retrieval lag.”

“Could the unit have overspun?” She answered his question with look of flat denial.

“They don’t do that.”

“Could the assembly have been fatigued?”

“All the units are subjected to routine de-spin and maintenance, one at a time. You don’t usually notice because we take the burden on the other three Turbs. The unit that failed got a clean bill of health during the last spin-down.”

“You’re sure of that?” Her face said: Don’t question my competence, and I won’t question yours.

“If it hadn’t, it wouldn’t be spinning, Prefect.”

“I had to ask. Something went terribly wrong here. Could a badly formed query have caused the break-up?”

“That’s a bizarre question.”

“It’s just that I sent something through about a second before the accident.”

“The units would have handled millions of queries in that interval,” she said.

“Millions? There aren’t millions of prefects.”

“Most of the queries coming through are machine-generated. Panoply talking to itself, consolidating its own knowledge base. The Turbs don’t care whether it’s a human or a machine sending the query. All are treated with equal priority.”

“It still felt related to me.”

“It can’t have been your query that did this. That would be absurd.”

“Maybe so. But I’m conducting a sensitive investigation and just at the point when I think I’m getting somewhere, when I might be about to connect my case to one of our glorious families, when I might be about to hurt someone, one of my primary investigative tools is sabotaged.”

“Whatever this was, it can’t have been sabotage,” Trajanova said.

“You sound very certain.”

“Maybe it’s escaped your attention, but this is an ultra-secure facility inside what is already an ultra-secure organisation. No one gets inside this room without at least Pangolin clearance, and no one—not even the supreme prefect herself—gets to access the Search Turbines from outside the rock. Frankly, I can’t think of a facility it would be harder to sabotage.”

“But a prefect could do it,” he said.

“Especially if they had Pangolin clearance.”

“I was keeping our discussion within the realms of possibility,” Trajanova said.

“I can think of a million reasons why our enemies might want to smash the Search Turbines. But a prefect, someone already inside the organisation? You mean a traitor?”

“I’m just running through the possibilities. It’s not so very difficult to believe, is it?”

“I suppose not,” Trajanova said slowly, staring him hard in the eye.

“After all, there’s a traitor’s daughter in the organisation even as we speak. Have you talked to her recently?”

“With Thalia Ng? No, she’s too busy acquitting herself excellently on field duties.” He smiled coldly.

“I think we’re done here, aren’t we?”

“Unless you want to help me clean up this mess.”

“I’ll leave that to the specialists. How long before we’ll have the other Turbs back up to speed?” She glanced over her shoulder at the intact tubes.

“They’ll have to be thoroughly checked for stress flaws. Thirteen hours, at the very minimum, before I’ll risk spin-up. Even then we’ll be running at a low retrieval rate. Sorry if that inconveniences you, Prefect.”

“It’s not that it inconveniences me. What I’m worried about is that it’s conveniencing someone else.” Dreyfus scratched dust from the corners of his eyes, where it had begun to gather in gooey grey clumps.

“Keep looking into the sabotage angle, Trajanova. If you find anything, I want to hear about it immediately.”

“Maybe it would help if you told me about this magic query of yours,” she said.

“Nerval-Lermontov.”

“What about Nerval-Lermontov?”

“I wanted to know where the hell I’d heard that name before.” She looked at him with icy contempt.

“You didn’t need the Search Turbines for that, Dreyfus. I could have told you myself. So could any prefect with a basic grasp of Yellowstone history.” He ignored the insult.

“And?”

“The Eighty.” It was all he needed to be told.

The corvette was a medium-enforcement vehicle, twice as large as a cutter, and with something in the region of eight times as much armament. Panoply’s rules dictated that it was the largest craft that could be operated by a prefect, as opposed to a dedicated pilot. Dreyfus had the necessary training, but as always in such matters he preferred his deputy to handle the actual flying, when the ship wasn’t taking care of itself.

“Not much to look at,” Sparver said as a magnified image leapt onto one of the panes.

“Basically just a big chunk of unprocessed rock, with a beacon saying ’keep away—I’m owned by somebody’.”

“Specifically, the Nerval-Lermontov family.”

“Is that name still ringing a bell with you?”

“Someone jogged my memory,” Dreyfus said, thinking back to his less-than-cordial conversation with Trajanova.

“Turns out that Nerval-Lermontov was one of the families tied up with the Eighty.”

“Really?”

“I remember now. I was a boy at the time, but it was all over the system. The Nerval-Lermontovs were one of the families kicking up the biggest stink.”

“They lost someone?”

“A daughter, I think. She became a kind of emblem for all the others. I can see her face, but not her name. It’s on the tip of my tongue…”

Sparver dug between his knees and handed Dreyfus a compad.

“I already did my share of homework, Boss.”

“Before the Turbines went down?”

“I didn’t need them. Remember that case we worked a couple of years ago, involving the disputed ownership of a carousel built by one of the families? I copied reams of Eighty-related stuff onto my compad back then, and it’s all still there, with summaries for all the players.”

“Including the Nerval-Lermontovs?”

“Take a look for yourself.”

Dreyfus did as Sparver suggested, plunging deep into Chasm City history. The article was several thousand lines long, a summary that could easily have been expanded by a factor of ten or a hundred had Sparver selected different text filters. The system’s major families were nothing if not well documented.

Dreyfus hit the Eighty. One name leapt out at him across fifty-five years of history.

“Aurora,” he said, with a kind of reverence.

“Aurora Nerval-Lermontov. She was just a girl—twenty-two years old when she went under Cal’s machines.”

“Poor kid. No wonder they were pissed off.”

They had been, too, Dreyfus remembered. And who wouldn’t be? Calvin Sylveste had promised true immortality to his seventy-nine volunteers. Their minds would be scanned at sub-neuronal resolution, with the resultant structures uploaded into invulnerable machines. Rather than just being static snapshots, Calvin’s Transmigrants would continue to think, to feel, once they’d been mapped into computer space. They would be true alpha-level simulations, their mental processes indistinguishable from those of a flesh-and-blood human being. The only catch was that the scanning process had to be performed with such rapidity, such fidelity, that it was destructive. The scanned mind was ripped apart layer by layer, until nothing lucid remained.

It wouldn’t have mattered if the procedure had worked. All had been well for a while, but shortly after the last volunteer had gone under—Calvin Sylveste had been the eightieth subject in his own experiment—problems began to emerge with the earliest subjects. Their simulations froze, or became locked in pathological loops, or regressed to levels of autistic disengagement from the outside universe. Some vital detail, some animating impulse, was missing from the design.

“Do you believe in coincidence, Sparver?”

Sparver tapped one of the thruster controls. The rock had doubled in size, its wrinkled ash-grey surface details becoming more distinct. The potato-shaped asteroid was more than two kilometres wide at its fattest point.

“Why d’you ask?”

“Because I was already wondering why the Sylveste family kept coming up in this investigation. Now we’ve got another hit.”

“They’re a big octopus. Sooner or later you’re bound to trip over another tentacle.”

“So you don’t think there’s anything odd about this?”

“The Sylvestes weren’t a charity. Only families with influence and money were able to buy themselves a slot in Cal’s experiment. And only families with influence and money can afford to hold on to rocks like this. The key here is the Nerval-Lermontovs, not the Sylvestes.”

“They tried to take down the Sylvestes, didn’t they?”

“Everyone tried. Everyone failed. This is their system. We just live in it.”

“And the Nerval-Lermontovs? They’ve been quiet since the Eighty, haven’t they? They’re hardly big players any more. If they were, I’d have recognised the name sooner. So what the hell are they doing implicating themselves in the Ruskin-Sartorious affair?”

“Maybe they were used. Maybe when we dig into this place, we’ll find it was just used to bounce signals from somewhere else.”

Dreyfus felt some of his earlier elation abate. Perhaps his cherished instincts had failed him this time. If necessary, they could go outside and read the message stack, just as they’d done with the Vanguard Six router. Sparver had sounded confident that the process was repeatable, but what if it wasn’t quite so easy to backtrack the signal a second time?

Dreyfus was musing on that theme when the rock launched its attack.

It came fast and without warning; it was only when the assault was over that he was able to piece together the approximate sequence of events. Across the face of the rock, small regions of the crust erupted outwards as if a dozen low-yield mines had just detonated, showering rubble and debris into space. The shattered material rained into the corvette, the noise like a thousand hammer blows against the hull.

Alarms began to shriek, damage reports cascading across the display surfaces. Dreyfus heard the whine as the corvette’s own weapons began to upgrade their readiness posture. Sparver grunted something unintelligible and began to coordinate the response with manual control inputs. But the attack had not really begun in earnest. The eruptions on the rock were merely caused by the emergence of concealed weapons, tucked under ten or twenty metres of camouflaging material. Dark-muzzled kinetic slug-launchers rolled out and spat their cargoes at the corvette. Dreyfus flinched as the walls of the corvette’s cabin appeared to ram inwards, before a cooler part of his mind reminded him that this was the corvette doing its best to protect the living organisms inside it. The wall flowed around his body, head to toe, forming an instant contoured cocoon. Then he felt the corvette swerve with what would have been bone-snapping acceleration under any other circumstances. With the little consciousness available to him, he hoped that the corvette had taken similar care of Sparver.

The swerve saved them. Otherwise, the first kinetic slug would have taken them nose-on, where the corvette’s armour was thinnest. As it was the slug still impacted, gouging a trench along the entire lateral line of the ship, taking out weapons and sensory modules in a roar of agonised matter that was still nerve-shreddingly loud even through the cushioning of the cocoon. The ship swerved again, and then once more, harder this time. Two more slugs rammed into it. Then the corvette began to give back something of what it had taken.

Many of its weapons had been damaged by the slug impacts, or could not be brought to bear without presenting too much tempting cross section to the still-active slug launchers. But it was still able to respond with an awesome concentration of destructive force. Dreyfus felt rather than heard the subsonic drone of the Gatling guns. Another salvo of debris rained against the hull: that was the Gatling guns churning up the rock’s surface even more, kicking more material into space. Four sequenced shoves as the corvette deployed and then traded momentum with its missiles, spitting them out like hard pips. The foam-phase-tipped warheads selected their own targets, punching hundred-metre-wide craters in the crust.

The Gatling guns resumed firing.

Then, with disarming suddenness, all was silent save for the occasional clang as some small piece of debris knocked into the ship.

“I am holding at maximum readiness condition,” the corvette said, its voice dismayingly calm and unhurried, as if it was delivering a weather report.

“Situational analysis indicates that the offensive object has been downgraded to threat status gamma. This analysis may be flawed. If you nonetheless wish me to stand down to moderate readiness, please issue an order.”

“You can stand down,” Dreyfus said.

The cocoon released him. He felt like a single man-sized bruise, with a headache to match. Nothing appeared broken, though, and he was at least alive.

“I think this just stopped being a peripheral investigation,” Sparver said.

Dreyfus spat blood. At some point during the attack he must have bitten his tongue.

“How’s the ship doing?” he enquired.

Sparver glanced at one of the status panes.

“Good news is we’ve still got power, air and attitude control.”

“And the bad news?”

“Sensors are shot to hell and long-range comms don’t appear to be working either. I don’t think we’re going to be able to call home for help.”

The absurdity of their predicament rankled Dreyfus. They were still inside the Glitter Band, in the teeming thick of human civilisation, no more than a thousand kilometres from the nearest inhabited structure. And yet they might as well have been far beyond the system, drifting in interstellar space, for all the difference it made.

“Can we reach anyone else?” he asked.

“We still have signalling lasers. If we can get a visual signal to a passing ship, we might be able to divert them.”

Sparver had already called up a navigation display showing all nearby traffic within a radius of five thousand kilometres. Dreyfus stared at it intently, but the spherical imaging surface kept malfunctioning, crowding with ghost signals caused by the damage the corvette had taken.

“Not much out there,” Sparver observed.

“Certainly not within manual signalling range.”

Dreyfus jabbed a finger at a persistent echo in the display, an object on a slow course through the scanning volume.

“That one’s real, and it looks close, too. What is it?”

“Just a robot freighter, according to the transponder flag. Probably inbound from the high-energy manufactories on Marco’s Eye.”

“It’ll pass within three thousand klicks of us. That’s almost nothing out here.”

“But it won’t respond to us even if we score a direct hit with the laser. I don’t think we’ve got any option but to limp home, and hope no one runs into us.”

Dreyfus nodded ruefully. In the congested traffic flows of the Glitter Band, a ship with impaired sensor capability was a dangerous thing indeed. That went double for a ship that was stealthed to the point of near-invisibility.

“How long will that take?”

Sparver closed his eyes as he ran the numbers.

“Ninety minutes, maybe a little less.”

“And then another hour before we can reasonably expect to get another ship out here; longer if it has to be reassigned from some other duty.” Dreyfus shook his head.

“Too long. Every instinct in my body says we don’t walk away.”

“So we drop a surveillance drone. We’re carrying one.”

“A drone won’t help us if someone decides to run as soon as we’re out of range.”

“I don’t think there’s anyone down there.”

“We don’t know that.” Dreyfus unwebbed himself enough that he could soothe his back, sore after the corvette’s spine-jarring evasive swerves.

“Which is why we need to take a look. Maybe we’ll find a transmitter when we’re down there. Then we can call in the big guns.”

Thalia ran a finger around her collar, stiffening it back into shape. She gathered her equipment and composed herself as the airlock cycled. Spine straight, chin up, eyes sharp. She might feel tired, she might feel embittered by what she had witnessed only a couple of hours earlier, but she was still on duty. The locals would neither know nor care that they were merely the last stop on a demanding itinerary, the last obstacle before sleep and rest and some grudging expression of gratitude from the seniors. She reminded herself that she was still well ahead of her anticipated schedule, and that if all went according to plan from now on she would be back inside Panoply barely a day and a half after she had departed.

The Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass upgrade had gone flawlessly, but then she’d been detained while the locals had her sit in as a guest adjudicator in their impromptu tournament. It had turned out to be both unpleasant and draining, a combination of beauty pageant and gladiatorial combat, with the entrants all radically biomodified, none of them lacking in teeth and claws. She’d been assured that the most bloodied, humiliated or deceased participants would all be stitched back together again, but the entire experience had left her feeling soiled and manipulated.

Szlumper Oneill had been even worse, but for different reasons. Szlumper Oneill was a Voluntary Tyranny that had turned nasty, and nothing could be done about it.

Citizens in the Voluntary Tyrannies had no rights at all: no freedoms, no means of expression beyond what they could achieve through the usual voting channels. Their entire lives were under the authoritarian control of whatever regime held sway in their particular habitat. Typically, they’d be guaranteed the basic needs: food, water, heating, minimal medical care, somewhere to sleep, even access to sex and rudimentary forms of entertainment. In return they might have to perform some daily activity, however drudge-like and purposeless the work itself might be. They’d be stripped of identity, forced to dress alike, even—in the most extreme cases—compelled to undergo surgery to eradicate distinguishing features.

For some people—a small but not entirely insignificant fraction of the Glitter Band citizenry—life in a Voluntary Tyranny was perversely liberating because it allowed them to shut off an entire part of their minds that dealt with the usual anxieties of hierarchy and influence. They were looked after and told what to do. It was like becoming a child again, a regression to a state of dependence on the adult machinery of the state.

But sometimes the VTs went wrong.

No one was exactly sure what triggered the shift from benevolent-yet-rigid state to dystopian nightmare, but it had happened enough times that it had begun to look as inevitable as the radioactive decay of an unstable isotope. Something unspeakable would ooze from the social woodwork, a form of corrupting sap. Citizens who tried to resist or leave were rounded up and punished. Panoply could do nothing, since it had no remit to interfere in the government of a state unless the state’s citizens were being denied abstraction access and voting rights, or unless there was a majority mandate from the wider citizenry of the ten thousand.

Szlumper Oneill was an object lesson in how bad things could get. Representatives of the Interior Administration had escorted Thalia to the polling core, and they’d done their best to shield her from the populace. But she’d still seen enough to get the picture. While Thalia had been setting up her equipment at the core, an old man had broken through a cordon and rushed to plead with her. He’d fallen to his knees, clutching her trouser-hems with knotted, arthritic fingers.

“Prefect,” he said, through toothless gums.

“You can do something for us. Please do something, before it’s too late.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, barely able to speak.

“I wish I could, but—”

“Help us. Please.”

The police had arrived. They’d fired electrified barbs into the man and dragged him away, his body still palsied by the stun currents. He couldn’t speak, but he’d managed to keep his face directed at Thalia as he receded, his lips still forming a plea. As the cordon closed around him again, Thalia made out a blur of fists and sticks raining down on frail bones.

She’d completed the upgrade. She did not want to think about what had happened to the old man. She prayed that this next and final upgrade would go smoother, so that she could return to Panoply and wipe the mild taste of complicity from her mouth. She was glad now that she had left House Aubusson till last. It promised to be the simplest of the upgrades; the one that would place the least demands on her concentration.

The habitat had the form of a hollow cylinder with rounded ends, rotating slowly around its long axis to provide gravity. From a distance, just before she dozed off during transit, Thalia had seen a pale-green sausage banded by many sets of windows, their facets spangling as the habitat’s dreamily slow spin caused sunlight to flare off them. At the nearer end ticked the intricate clockwork of de-spun docking assemblies, where huge ships were reduced to microscopic details against the mind-numbing scale of the structure. The sausage was an entire world, sixty kilometres from end to end, more than eight kilometres across.

Weightlessness prevailed even after Thalia had disembarked from the cutter and passed through a series of rotating transfer locks. Instead of the teeming concourse she had been expecting, she found herself in a diplomatic receiving area. It was a zero-gravity sphere walled in pale-pink marble, inlaid with monochrome friezes depicting the early history of space colonisation: men in bulbous spacesuits covered in what looked like canvas; surface-to-orbit transports that resembled white fireworks lashed together; space stations so ramshackle in appearance that they looked as if they’d fall apart at the first breath of solar wind. Laughable, yes, Thalia thought: undoubtedly so. But without those canvas suits and firework rockets, without those treehouse space stations, Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng would not be floating in the marbled reception bay of a sixty-kilometre-long habitat, one of ten thousand other structures that carried a human freight of one hundred million souls, orbiting an inhabited world that happened to host the most dazzling, bejewelled city in human experience, a world that circled the sun of another solar system entirely, a system that formed the mercantile and cultural nexus of a human civilisation encompassing many such worlds, many stars, bound together by wonderful sleek ships that crossed the interstellar night in mere years of starflight.

This was the future, she thought. This was what it felt like to be alive in a time of miracles and wonders.

And she had the nerve to feel tired?

A servitor, resembling a mechanical owl assembled from sheets of hammered bronze, floated in the middle of the space. It spread its wing primaries and clacked open its hinged beak. It had the piping voice of a steam-age automaton.

“Greetings, Deputy Field Prefect Ng. I am Miracle Bird. It is a pleasure to welcome you inside House Aubusson. A reception is waiting on the half-gravity landing stage. Please be so kind as to follow me.”

“A reception,” Thalia said, gritting her teeth.

“That’ll be nice.”

The bronze bird led Thalia into an elevator carriage. The carriage’s windowless interior was covered in polished teak and dimpled maroon plush, offset with ivory Japan-work. The bird inverted itself and tucked its talons into hooks on what was evidently to become the ceiling. With a whirr of geared mechanics, its head spun around.

“We will descend now. Please be so kind as to fold down the seat and secure yourself. Gravity will increase.”

Thalia took the cue and parked herself on the fold-out seat, tucking her equipment cylinder between her knees. She felt a rush of acceleration, blood pooling in the top of her head.

“We are descending now,” the bird informed her.

“We have some distance to travel. Would you care to see the view on the way?”

“If it isn’t too much trouble.”

The panel opposite Thalia morphed into transparency. She found herself looking down the length of House Aubusson, all sixty kilometres of it. She had boarded the elevator on the inner surface of one of the endcaps of the sausage-shaped habitat, and was now travelling from the pole of the endcap hemisphere towards the point where it joined the main cylinder of the structure. The elevator’s trajectory curved gradually from vertical to horizontal, even though the cabin remained at the same angle. They had been moving for some while already, yet the ground was still the better part of four kilometres below, enough to make even the nearest surface features appear small and toy-like. For now the sloping terrain whizzing past Thalia consisted of featureless white cladding and fused regolith mined from Marco’s Eye, interrupted here and there by some huge Art Deco chunk of environmental-regulation machinery.

Apart from the endcaps, the entire interior surface of the habitat was landscaped. Sixty kilometres away, atmospheric haze diluted detail and colour into a twinkling wash of pale blue, indistinguishable from ocean or sky. Nearer—until about halfway along the cylinder—it was still possible to make out the signatures of communities, grids or whorls embossed like thumbprints into clay. There were no huge cities, but there were dozens, even hundreds, of towns, villages and hamlets nestled amidst dense-packed greenery, curving around the shores of artificial seas and lakes and along the banks of man-made rivers and streams. There were hills, valleys, rock faces and waterfalls. There were sprays of mist shot through with rainbows. There were low-lying clouds, seemingly pasted onto the curving landscape. Nearer still, Thalia made out not merely communities, but individual buildings, marinas, plazas, parks, gardens and recreation grounds. Few of the buildings were more than a few hundred metres tall, as if they dared not violate the wide blue emptiness that made up most of the habitat’s volume. There was no interior illumination source, but from her descending vantage point Thalia easily made out the bands of windows she had seen before, from outside. Now that she was looking down the length of the interior of the habitat, they became a series of dark concentric rings, Thalia counting a dozen or more of them before perspective and haze made it difficult to separate one from the next. House Aubusson might pass into the shadow of Yellowstone during each ninety-minute orbit around the planet, but it was most unlikely that its citizens would live or work on anything other than the standard twenty-six-hour cycle of Chasm City time. Far above and below the ecliptic plane of the Glitter Band, client mirrors would steer illumination onto those windows even when the habitat was out of direct line of sight of Epsilon Eridani.

Thalia felt the elevator slowing.

“We are arriving now,” the metal owl said, just as the view outside switched from distant vistas to the interior of a windowed landing stage. The door opened; Thalia disembarked. Her legs felt like springy concertinas in the half-standard gravity. Across the platform, with their backs to the window, stood a motley-looking welcoming committee. There were about a dozen of them, men and women of all ages and appearances, dressed in what appeared to be civilian clothes. Thalia looked around helplessly, wondering who she should be talking at.

“Hello, Prefect,” said a plump woman with apple-red cheeks, stepping forward from the group. There was a nervous catch in her voice, as if she was not accustomed to public speaking.

“Welcome to the halfway house. We’d have met you at the hub, but it’s been a long time since any of us were in zero-gravity.”

Thalia put down the cylinder.

“It’s all right. I’m used to making my own way.”

A lanky, stooping man raised his hand.

“Did Miracle Bird tell you everything you needed to know?”

“Does the owl belong to you?”

“Indeed,” the man said, beaming. He raised an arm, bent at the elbow, and the owl flapped out of the elevator, crossed the space between Thalia and the party and made a precision touchdown on the man’s sleeve.

“I’m an excellent bird,” the owl said.

“It’s my hobby,” he said, stroking the creature under its segmented neck.

“Making mechanical animals, using only techniques available to the PreCalvinists. Keeps me off the streets, my wife says.”

“That’s nice for you,” Thalia commented.

“They were going to go with one of Bascombe’s automata until they remembered what happened the last time one of them malfunctioned. That’s when Miracle Bird got bumped to the top of the list.”

“What list?” Thalia looked at the peculiar gathering. There was nothing ragged or untidy about any of the individual members of the group—everyone was well dressed, colourful without being gaudy, well groomed, respectable in demeanour—but the cumulative effect was far from harmonious. Like a circus troupe, she thought, not a civic delegation.

“Who are you people?”

“We’re your reception committee,” the plump woman said.

“That’s what the owl told me.”

Another individual stepped forward to speak. He was a severe-looking gentleman in an ash-grey skin-tight suit with deep lines on either side of his mouth and a shock of stiff grey-white hair shaved close at the temples, his long-boned hands knitted together.

“Perhaps one of us should explain. You are inside one of the most egalitarian states in the Glitter Band.” He had a very low, very reassuring voice, one that made Thalia think of dark knotted wood, polished smooth by generations of hands.

“Comparatively few states practise true Demarchist principles behind their own doors, in the sense of abolishing all governmental structures, all formalised institutions of social control. Yet that is absolutely the case in House Aubusson. Possibly you were expecting a formal reception, attended by dignitaries of varying rank and pomposity?”

“I might have been,” Thalia allowed.

“In Aubusson, there are no dignitaries. There is no authority except the transparent government of the collective will. All citizens wield a similar amount of political power, leveraged through the machinery of democratic anarchy. You ask who we are. I’ll tell you, beginning with myself. I am Jules Caillebot, a landscape gardener. Most recently I worked on the redevelopment of the botanic gardens in the quarter adjoining the open-air theatre in Valloton, a community between the fifth and sixth windows.” He gestured towards the plump woman who had been the first to speak.

“I’m an utter nobody,” she said, with a kind of cheery defiance, her earlier nervousness no longer apparent.

“At least some people in Aubusson have heard of Jules, but no one knows me from Adam. I’m Paula Thory. I keep butterflies, and not even very rare or beautiful ones.”

“Hello,” Thalia said.

Paula Thory nudged the man who’d made the owl.

“Go on, then,” she said.

“I know you’re itching to tell her.”

“I’m Broderick Cuthbertson. I make mechanical animals. It’s my—”

“Hobby, yes. You said.” Thalia smiled nicely.

“There’s an active subculture of automaton builders in Aubusson. I mean real automaton builders, obviously. Strictly PreCalvinist. Otherwise it’s just cheating.”

“I can imagine.”

“Meriel Redon,” said a young, willowy-looking woman, raising a tentative hand.

“I make furniture out of

wood.”

“Cyrus Parnasse,” another man said, a beefy, red-faced farmer type with a burr to his voice who could have stepped out of the Middle Ages about five minutes ago.

“I’m a curator in the Museum of Cybernetics.”

“I thought the Museum of Cybernetics was in House Sylveste.”

“Ours isn’t as big,” Parnasse said.

“Or as flashy or dumbed-down. But we like it.”

One by one the others introduced themselves, until the last of the twelve had spoken. As if obeying some process of collective decision-making that took place too subtly for Thalia to detect, they all turned to look at Jules Caillebot again.

“We were selected randomly,” he explained.

“When it was known that an agent of Panoply was to visit, the polling core shuffled the names of all eight hundred thousand citizens and selected the twelve you see standing before you. Actually, there was a bit more to it than that. Our names were presented to the electorate, so that our fitness for the task could be certified by a majority. Most people voted ’no objection’, but one of the original twelve was roundly rejected by a percentage of citizens too large for the core to ignore. Something of a philanderer, it seems. He’d made enough enemies that when his one shot at fame arose, he blew it.”

“If you call this fame,” Parnasse, the museum curator, said.

“In a couple of hours you’ll be out of Aubusson, girl, and we’ll all have returned to deserved obscurity. It is that kind of visit, isn’t it? If this is a lockdown, no one warned us.”

“No one ever warns you,” Thalia said dryly, not taking to the grumpy undercurrent she had heard in the man’s voice.

“But no, this isn’t a lockdown, just a routine polling core upgrade. And whether or not you think being part of this reception party is something to be proud of, I am grateful for the welcome.” She picked up the cylinder, relishing its lightness before she returned to full gravity.

“All I really need is someone to show me to the polling core, although I can locate it myself if you prefer. You can all stick around if you want, but it isn’t necessary.”

“Do you want to go straight to the core?” asked Jules Caillebot.

“You can if you like. Or we can first take some tea, some refreshments, and then perhaps a leisurely stroll in one of the gardens.”

“No prizes for guessing whose gardens,” someone said, with a snigger.

Thalia raised a calming hand.

“It’s kind of you to offer, but my bosses won’t be too happy if I’m late back at Panoply.”

“We can be at the core in twenty minutes,” Jules Caillebot said.

“It’s just beyond the second window band. You can see it from here, in fact.”

Thalia had been expecting the core to be buried in the skin of the world, like a subcutaneous implant.

“We can?”

“Let me show you. The new housing’s rather elegant, even if I say so myself.”

“That’s one opinion,” Parnasse rumbled, just loud enough for Thalia to hear.

They led her to the window. The remaining two kilometres of the endcap curved away below her to merge with the level terrain of the main cylinder. Caillebot, the landscape gardener, stood next to her and pointed into the middle distance.

“There,” he said, whispering.

“You see the first and second window bands? Now focus on the white bridge crossing the second band, close to that kidney-shaped lake. Follow the line of the bridge for a couple of kilometres, until you come to a ring of structures grouped around a single tall talk.”

“I’ve got it,” Thalia said. Since it lay directly ahead, the stalk was aligned with her local vertical too closely to be coincidence given the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree curvature of the habitat. She had presumably been directed down the appropriate elevator line for a visit to the polling core.

“Remind you of anything?” Caillebot asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Milk splashing into milk, perhaps. That ring of stalks, with the little spheres on top of each one, and then the tall one in the middle—”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Parnasse said.

“A perfect representation of a physical instant. That’s the original Museum of Cybernetics. Then the Civic Planning Committee got it into their heads that what it really needed was a gigantic single stalk rising from the middle, to house the polling core in the sphere on top. Completely ruined the purity of the original concept, needless to say. You can’t get a central stalk and a ring of stalks from a single splash, no matter how hard you try.”

“Why did the core need a new housing?”

“It didn’t,” Parnasse said, before anyone else had a chance to contribute.

“It worked fine the way it used to be, out of sight and out of mind. Then the Civic Planning Committee decided we needed to celebrate our embracing of true Demarchist principles by making the core a visible symbol that could be seen from anywhere in the habitat.”

“Most people like the new arrangement,” Caillebot said, with a strained smile.

Parnasse wasn’t having it.

“You’re only saying that because they had to rip out the old gardens to accommodate the new stalk. The ones put in by your rival. You’d feel differently if you actually had to work there.”

Thalia coughed, deciding it was best not to take sides at this point. Moving a core was hardly routine, but Panoply would have been consulted, and if there had been any technical objection it would not have been permitted.

“I need to see it close up, no matter what the controversies,” she said.

“We’ll be there in no time at all,” Caillebot said, extending a hand back towards the wall where a row of elevator doors stood open.

“Would you like some help with that equipment? It’ll be heavier on the surface.”

“I’ll cope,” Thalia said.

Miracle Bird opened its metal beak and emitted a raucous mechanical chime as it took flight and led the way towards the elevators.