‘The change in the shuttle’s delta vee when it was retrieved started the process of revival.’
‘Yes, ma’am. A simple tilt trigger. Fortunately, she was found before she woke up.’
‘She hid herself carefully. She didn’t stay inside the ship. So she must have realised that the ship might have been retrieved by her enemies rather than by her friends,’ Sri said.
She was trying to imagine the foresight and calm with which the girl and the other passengers on the shuttle had made arrangements for her long-term survival. It was impressive. So was the self-sacrifice of the other passengers, all of them members of Avernus’s entourage, all found dead and frozen aboard the shuttle. She examined the pumps and filters and yeast culture that had kept Yuli alive, then had a long and interesting discussion with the crew who were analysing her genome and proteome.
It seemed that Yuli was Avernus’s biological daughter, not a clone. Also, she possessed a number of intriguing and novel cuts in the genes that controlled development of her brain and nervous system. Her hippocampus was larger than average; the synaptic connections in her reticular formation, her visual cortex, and her neocortex, especially in Wernicke’s area, which controlled language processing and speech, were extremely rich; there were subtle alterations to the myelin that sheathed the axons of her motor and sensory nerves. In short, her nerve action potential speeds were ramped up, and her reflexes and her various levels of information-processing and decision-making were faster than those of ordinary humans. There were other cuts, too. Some were common to most Outers - physiological adaptations to low gravity, alterations to her retinas so that she could see more acutely in low levels of light, and so on - but there were also modifications to the structure of her muscle fibres, mitochondrial ATP production and storage, and the oxygen-carrying capacity of her haemoglobin. And there were extensive tweaks to her metabolism, too. She could synthesise essential amino acids, for instance. Sri discussed everything with the crew, suggested two different methods for determining the girl’s true age, and wrote up a summary for Arvam Peixoto.
She didn’t tell him about the test she’d performed. A simple cross-match of the girl’s DNA against the sample she’d brought from Titan, proving that Yuli was the child of Avernus and Gunter Lasky. If the old pirate hadn’t been lying about his relationship with Avernus, Sri thought, if he didn’t know that he was the father of the gene wizard’s daughter, she might be able to find a use for that bit of information. And if the girl didn’t know who her father was, it might be possible to use it as a bargaining point, or to gain her trust.
Sri was granted a meeting with Arvam Peixoto the day after he returned to the garden habitat. They began by talking about Berry. Arvam shrugged off Sri’s complaints about the boy being allowed to fly, saying that it was perfectly safe, that he should be allowed to take a few small risks.
‘I have three sons of my own,’ he said. ‘They had active and healthy childhoods. Much of it spent outdoors. Hiking and hunting, horse riding, sailboats . . . And yes, hang-gliders too. They might have suffered a few bumps and scrapes, but it was important for them to be able to test their limits. Finding out about what you can do, it’s part of growing up.’
‘Berry isn’t robust,’ Sri said. ‘And he can be a little clumsy at times. Accident-prone.’
‘Healthy exercise will toughen him up and improve his sense of self-esteem. And this is just the place for it. Safe, and self-contained. Also, when he’s given a little freedom to be himself there’s a marked improvement in his temper and manners,’ Arvam said. ‘And he needs all the help he can get in that department.’
‘He needs intellectual stimulation,’ Sri said. ‘And he isn’t getting enough here.’
They both knew that this wasn’t about the risk to Berry: it was about control. They were like divorced parents battling over custody rights.
‘I find it curious that you didn’t ever cut him to fix up his little . . . deficiencies,’ Arvam said.
‘It’s illegal. Anti-evolutionary.’
‘That didn’t stop you tweaking the genome of your other son.’
Sri felt a cold fist in her stomach. Until now, she’d always believed that no one else knew about the work she had done on Alder. She’d edited his genome very carefully, making sure that his beauty, charm, and charisma did not exceed the human norm, destroying all the evidence.
‘Don’t worry,’ Arvam said. ‘Your secret’s safe with me. And besides, if it ever came to it you’d be answerable to worse crimes than a little cosmetic gene-play. So tell me the truth: why didn’t you bestow similar gifts on Berry?’
‘I left him in his natural state out of respect for his father.’
‘Ah yes. Poor Stamount. You still wear his ring, I see.’
Sri wore it on the third finger of her left hand. A lattice of bone grown from a culture of Stamount Horne’s osteoblasts after he had been killed fighting bandits in the Andes. Sri hadn’t exactly loved the man, but she had respected and admired him. They had been a good match, and would have done much together if he had lived. He had sometimes been as cruel and capricious as Arvam Peixoto, but his cruelty always had a purpose; unlike Arvam’s crude bludgeoning, it had been as honed as a scalpel, and wielded with masterly skill.
‘Stamount was a fine man, and I am sure that his son will grow up into a fine man too,’ Arvam said. ‘Now, if you have no more complaints to lay at my feet, I’ll allow you a glimpse of our prisoner, as I promised.’
‘She hasn’t talked, then.’
‘Oh, she talks. But so far not about anything important. You can discuss everything with the team who are questioning her. As a matter of fact, their chief is waiting for you right now, in the interrogation suite.’
The room where Yuli was being questioned was as bright and sterile as an operating theatre. White walls, white floor, a ceiling that burned with bright and even white light. No shadows anywhere. Everything lit with stark particularity. The girl was encased in a machine like a coffin or an iron lung of the long ago, with only her head showing. An MRI cap clamped over her shaven scalp. Her skin pale and perfect as porcelain. Her eyes large and green. The lids were taped open and a delicate apparatus dripped artificial tears so that her corneas wouldn’t dry out, and her head was secured so that she had to stare at the memo space hanging above her, which was presently showing a slow parade of faces while a lilting voice asked her to identify them. She said nothing. Her jaw was clenched and a muscle jumped and jumped in her cheek. It was the only indication that she was suffering a tremendous white-hot bowel-ripping agony. The machine was playing on her nervous system like a concert pianist, subtle ever-changing variations and arpeggios that ensured that she could not grow accustomed to the pain.
Standing in the adjacent room, watching her through a polarised patch of wall, Captain Doctor Aster Gavilán, the interrogation team’s chief, told Sri that the girl had endured pain induction for more than twenty hours now, yet still showed no sign of cooperation.
‘We began with drugs, of course, but they didn’t work. Her metabolism is different; her nervous system is very different. So now we are using pain, but she has withstood more pain than anyone ever tested in this device. She feels it. I know that she feels it. Elevated levels of histamine in her blood, activity in her nervous and endocrine systems, brain scans . . . She is not blocking the pain at any level. But she hasn’t broken. Amazing.’
‘That isn’t what I’d call it,’ Sri said.
Captain Doctor Gavilán was a dark-complexioned middle-aged woman, plump-breasted as a pigeon. She studied Sri for a moment, her head cocked to one side, then said, ‘If you are disappointed in our progress, I can assure you we have other resources. Mutilation, for instance. People who should know better talk about the separation of the mind and the body. In my experience, subjects who can withstand substantial amounts of pain break as soon as you begin to brand and cut them.’
Sri was sickened by the avid glint in the woman’s gaze. ‘I’m disappointed in your progress, Captain Doctor. And disgusted by your methods.’
‘This girl is living proof of the Outers’ plans to speed up human evolution and push it in unacceptable directions. She has been turned into a monster. A crime against God and Gaia. We came here to put an end to such abominations. It is a holy task, and we must not flinch or hesitate while carrying it out. Think of her as an asset,’ Captain Doctor Gavilán said, her tone sweet as poisoned honey. ‘The key to finding Avernus.’
Sri studied the little girl locked in the gleaming apparatus, watched the muscle in the corner of her jaw jump, jump again. ‘Torture rarely yields useful information,’ she said.
‘The general believes that she will cooperate.’
‘The general is mistaken,’ Sri said.
She phoned Arvam Peixoto, explained what she wanted to do, told him that she could only do it on her terms, without any kind of interference from other parties.
‘That sounds like a demand,’ Arvam said. ‘Be careful.’
‘You need my help. Captain Doctor Gavilán is a fool and a fanatic. And her methods are unsound. She has failed to make any kind of progress because she does not understand the nature of her subject.’
‘Can you guarantee that your methods will yield results?’
‘I can guarantee that I will try my best. If it doesn’t work, I won’t ever ask you for anything else. I’ll walk away, and you can let Captain Doctor Gavilán and her little crew of pain kings do their worst.’
Arvam Peixoto gave Sri seven days. Yuli was moved out of the interrogation centre, installed in a suite of rooms, and subjected to a light routine of vanilla interrogation sessions by a pair of psychologists. Meanwhile, Sri gave the crew who’d been analysing her genome a new project: identify and synthesise a pheromone that, unlike standard hypnotics and truth drugs, would gain traction in the girl’s tweaked metabolism and make her pliable and open to suggestion.
Fortunately, Sri already had a model she could adapt - the mix of subtle chemicals that her elder son secreted from his sweat glands. She and the crew worked up a virtual replica of Yuli’s olfactory receptors and tested a myriad modifications of Alder’s pheromonal perfume against it, substituting a nitrogen atom for a sulphur atom, adding an acetyl tail or deleting a cis-double bond, and so on, and so forth. The most likely candidates were tested on Yuli herself by introducing minute amounts of each one in turn to the air in her suite while she was being interviewed by the psychologists and monitoring changes in her responses to the psychologists’ questions and gross physical reactions such as her pupil dilation, and skin temperature and conductance.
Sri drove the crew hard. They worked around the clock for four days, fueled by protein blends, caffeine and tailored pharmaceuticals, and at last they had a single candidate that, although inducing only small downwards revision in the results of standard tests for aversion and antagonism, and correspondingly small increases in cooperation and friendliness, was the best Sri could do in the impossibly tight time-frame. She slept for six hours and then, after an intense coaching session with the psychologists, entered Yuli’s suite for the first time.
The rooms were small and softly lit, decorated in soothing blues and greens. Flowers growing in pots, lush halflife turf softening the floors, piped birdsong. The little girl sprawled on her tummy on a big bean bag, dressed in clean white coveralls and reading an ancient novel, Moby-Dick, clicking through the page on a slate at a fast and steady rate. She didn’t look up when Sri came in, shrugged when Sri asked if she could sit down.
Sri perched on the lip of a sling chair and folded her hands in her lap. ‘I want to apologise for what happened to you. It was a mistake. They didn’t understand you.’
‘But you do.’
‘Of course not. But I’d like to try.’
‘You want to be my friend because you want to get inside my head. And you want to get inside my head because you want to know my mother’s secrets. I know who you are, Professor Doctor. You collaborated on the Rainbow Bridge biome with my mother. You were on that barge, the day the biome’s lake was supposed to be quickened. You were so anxious and eager to meet her that you were actually trembling. Vibrating. You’re vibrating a little now, aren’t you? Not just because you are frightened of me, although you are, but also because you think I might bring you closer to what you want most in all the worlds.’
Yuli’s tone was light and amused. Her green gaze, almost exactly the shade of chlorophyll a, was still fixed on the slate. Her hair was beginning to grow back, a faint black stubble on her scalp. A plastic collar was locked tight around her neck; it would deliver a crude paralysing blast if she attempted to attack Sri or did anything that the soldiers monitoring her every move deemed inappropriate.
Sri said, ‘ You see other people very clearly, Yuli. Use that perception to examine your own situation. See how I could help you. And your mother, too.’
‘A dead man came walking across the water that day. And that funny little ceremony promptly dissolved into chaos. The veneer of so-called civilised behaviour is very thin and brittle, isn’t it? Here we are now, being polite to each other. What is it that could shatter that, I wonder?’
‘I’m not like the others, Yuli. I’m not part of the military thing they have here. I’m a scientist, like your mother.’
The girl yawned, showing tiny spaced teeth in clean pink gums. ‘My mother isn’t a scientist. She’s a gene wizard. If you don’t know the difference, there’s no help for you.’
‘Science is one of the tools that she uses. Also imagination, and a way of seeing the world at a slant that’s quite unique. But science is as fundamental to her work as anything else. I admire your mother’s work, Yuli. I want to understand it. I want to understand her.’
‘I’m not like my mother,’ Yuli said. ‘I’m not even a scientist, much less a gene wizard. So I can’t help you. I’m sorry, but there it is. You think I’m lying. You think I am the key to your heart’s desire. Well, I’m not. And nothing you can say will change that. You might as well save your breath and give me back to the military.’