“No; I’ve already told you; stop thinking so parochially.”
He was not going to tell her anything useful; she could see that. Certain it would not get her far, she said: “Who are you, then?” “Carlos Manoukhian.”
That worried her more than the way he handled the gun. He said it too truthfully. It was not a cover-name. And now that she knew it—and guessed that this man was at best some kind of criminal, laughable as that category seemed in Chasm City’s lawlessness—it meant he planned to kill her later.
The cable-car’s door clammed shut. Manoukhian pressed a button on the console which purged the Chasm City air, blasting out in steam jets below the car as it lofted itself via a nearby cable.
“Who are you, Manoukhian?”
“I help the Mademoiselle.” As if that was not blindingly obvious. “We have a special relationship. We go back a long way.”
“And what does she want with me?”
“I would have thought it was obvious by now,” Manoukhian said. He was still keeping the gun on her, even as he kept one eye on the car’s navigation console. “There’s someone she wants you to assassinate.”
“That’s what I do for a living.”
“Yeah.” He smiled. “Difference is, this guy hasn’t paid for it.”
The biography, needless to say, had not been Sylveste’s idea. Instead, the initiative had come from the one man Sylveste would have least suspected. It had been six months earlier; during one of the very few occasions when he had spoken face-to-face with his captor. Nils Girardieau had brought up the subject almost casually, mentioning that he was surprised no one had taken on the task. After all, the fifty years on Resurgam virtually amounted to another life, and even though that life was now capped by an ignominious epilogue, it did at least put his earlier life into a perspective it had lacked during the Yellowstone years. “The problem was,” Girardieau said, “your previous biographers were too close to the events—too much part of the societal milieu they were attempting to analyse. Everyone was in thrall to either Cal or yourself, and the colony was so claustrophobic there was no room to step back and see the wider perspective.”
“You’re saying Resurgam is somehow less claustrophobic?”
“Well, obviously not—but at least we have the benefit of distance, both in time and space.” Girardieau was a squat, muscular man with a shock of red hair. “Admit it, Dan—when you think back to your life on Yellowstone, doesn’t it sometimes seem like it all happened to someone else, in a century very remote from our own?”
Sylveste was about to laugh dismissively, except that—for once—he found himself in complete agreement with Girardieau. It was an unsettling moment, as if a basic rule of the universe had been violated.
“I still don’t see why you’d want to encourage this,” Sylveste said, nodding towards the guard who was presiding over the conversation. “Or are you hoping you can somehow profit from it?”
Girardieau had nodded. “That’s part of it—maybe most of it, if you want the truth. It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that you’re still a figure of fascination to the populace.”
“Even if most of them would be fascinated to see me hung.”
“You’ve a point, but they’d probably insist on shaking your hand first—before helping you to the gibbet.”
“And you think you can milk this appetite?”
Girardieau had shrugged. “Obviously, the new regime determines who gains access to you—and we also own all your records and archival material. That gives us a headstart already. We have access to documents from the Yellowstone years which no one beyond your immediate family even know exist. We’d exercise a certain discretion in using them, of course—but we’d be fools to ignore them.”
“I understand,” Sylveste said, because suddenly it was all very clear to him. “You’re actually going to use this to discredit me, aren’t you.”
“If the facts discredit you. . . ” Girardieau left the remark hanging in the air.
“When you deposed me . . . wasn’t that good enough for you?”
“That was nine years ago.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning long enough for people to forget. Now they need a gentle reminder.”
“Especially as there’s a new air of discontent abroad.”
Girardieau winced, as if the remark was in spectacularly poor taste. “You can forget about True Path—especially if you think they might turn out to be your salvation. They wouldn’t have stopped at imprisoning you.”
“All right,” Sylveste said, boring rapidly. “What’s in it for me?”
“You assume there has to be something?”
“Generally, yes. Otherwise, why bother telling me about it?”
“Your co-operation might be in your best interest. Obviously, we could work from the material we’ve seized—but your insights would be valuable. Especially in the more speculative episodes.”
“Let me get this straight. You want me to authorise a hatchet job? And not just give it my blessing but actually help you assassinate my character?”
“I could make it worth your while.” Girardieau nodded around the confines of the room in which Sylveste was held. “Look at the freedom I’ve given Janequin, to continue his peacock hobby. I could be just as flexible in your case, Don. Access to recent material on the Amarantin; the ability to communicate with your colleagues; share your opinions—perhaps even the occasional excursion beyond the building.”
“Field work?”
“I’d have to consider it. Something of that magnitude . . . ” Sylveste was suddenly, acutely aware that Girardieau was acting. “A period of grace might be advisable. The biography’s in development now, but it’ll be several months before we need your input. Maybe half a year. What I propose is that we wait until you’ve begun to give us what we need. You’ll be working with the biography’s author, of course, and if that relationship is successful—if she considers it successful—then perhaps we’ll be ready to enter into discussions about limited field work. Discussions, mind—no promises.”
“I’ll try and contain my enthusiasm.”
“Well, you’ll be hearing from me again. Is there anything you need to know before I leave?”
“One thing. You mentioned that the biographer would be a woman. Might I ask who it’ll be?”
“Someone with illusions waiting to be shattered, I suspect.”
Volyova was working near the cache one day, thinking of weapons, when a janitor-rat dropped gently onto her shoulder and spoke into her ear.
“Company,” said the rat.
The rats were a peculiar quirk of the Nostalgia for Infinity; quite possibly unique aboard any lighthugger. They were only fractionally more intelligent than their feral ancestors, but what made them useful—what turned them from pest into utility—was that they were biochemically linked into the ship’s command matrix. Every rat had specialised pheromonal receptors and transmitters which allowed it to receive commands and transmit information back to the ship, encoded into complex secreted molecules. They foraged for waste, eating virtually anything organic which was not nailed down or still breathing. Then they ran some rudimentary preprocessing in their guts before going elsewhere in the ship, excreting pellets into larger recycler systems. Some of them had even been equipped with voiceboxes and a small hardwired lexicon of useful phrases, triggered into vocalisation when external stimuli satisfied biochemically programmed conditions.
In Volyova’s case, she had programmed the rats to alert her as soon as they began to process human detritrus—dead skin cells, and the like—which had not come from her. She would know when the other crew members were awake, even if she was in a completely different district of the ship.
“Company,” the rat squeaked again.
“Yes, I heard first time.” She lowered the little rodent to the deck, and then swore in all the languages at her disposal.
The defensive wasp which had accompanied Pascale buzzed a little nearer to Sylveste as it picked up the stress overtones in his voice. “You want to know about the Eighty? I’ll tell you. I don’t feel the slightest hint of remorse for any of them. They all knew the risks. And there were seventy-nine volunteers, not eighty. People conveniently forget that the eightieth was my father.”
“You can hardly blame them.”
“Assuming stupidity is an inherited trait, then no, I can’t.” Sylveste tried to relax himself. It was difficult. At some point in the conversation, the militia had begun to dust the domed-in air outside with fear gas. It was staining the reddened daylight to something nearer black. “Look,” Sylveste said evenly. “The government appropriated Calvin when I was arrested. He’s quite capable of defending his own actions.”
“It isn’t his actions I want to ask you about.”
Pascale made an annotation in her compad. “It’s what became of him—his alpha-level simulation—afterwards. Now, each of the alphas comprised in the region of ten to the power eighteen bytes of information,” she said, circling something. “The records from Yellowstone are patchy, but I was able to learn a little. I found that sixty-six of the alphas resided in orbital data reservoirs around Yellowstone; carousels, chandelier cities and various Skyjack and Ultra havens. Most had crashed, of course, but no one was going to erase them. Another ten I traced to corrupted surface archives, which leaves four missing. Three of those four are members of the seventy-nine, affiliated to either very poor or very extinct family lines. The other is the alpha recording of Calvin.”
“Is there a point to this?” he asked, trying not to sound as if the issue particularly concerned him.
“I just can’t accept that Calvin was lost in the same way as the others. It doesn’t add up. The Sylveste Institute didn’t need creditors or trustees to safeguard their heirlooms. It was one of the wealthiest organisations on the planet right up until the plague hit. So what became of Calvin?”
“You think I brought it to Resurgam?”
“No; the evidence suggests it was already long lost by then. In fact, the last time it was definitely present in the system was more than a century before the Resurgam expedition departed.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Sylveste said. “Check the records more closely and you’ll see that the alpha was moved into an orbital data cache in the late twenty-fourth. The Institute relocated premises thirty years later, so it was certainly moved then. Then in ’39 or ’40 the Institute was attacked by House Reivich. They wiped the data cores.”
“No,” Pascale said. “I excluded those instances. I’m well aware that in 2390 around ten to the eighteen bytes of something was moved into orbit by the Sylveste Institute, and the same amount relocated thirty-seven years later. But ten to the eighteen bytes of information doesn’t have to be Calvin. It could as easily be ten to the eighteen bytes of metaphysical poetry.”
“Which proves nothing.”
She passed him the compad, her entourage of seahorses and fish scattering like fireflies. “No, but it certainly looks suspicious. Why would the alpha vanish around the time you went to meet the Shrouders, unless the two events were related?”
“You’re saying I had something to do with it?”
“The subsequent data-movements could only have been faked by someone within the Sylveste organisation. You’re the obvious suspect.”
“A motive wouldn’t go amiss.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said, returning the compad to her lap. “I’m sure I’ll think of one.”
Three days after the janitor-rat had warned her of the crew’s awakening, Volyova felt sufficiently prepared to meet them. It was never something she particularly looked forward to, for although she did not actively dislike human company, neither had Volyova ever had any difficulty in adjusting to solitude. But things were worse now. Nagorny was dead, and by now the others would be well aware of that fact.
Ignoring the rats, and subtracting Nagorny, the ship now carried six crew members. Five, if one elected not to include the Captain. And why include him, when—as far as the other crew were aware, he was not even capable of consciousness, let alone communication? They carried him only because they hoped to make him well. In all other respects the ship’s real centre of power was vested in the Triumvirate. That was Yuuji Sajaki, Abdul Hegazi and—of course—herself. Below the Triumvirate there were currently two more crew, of equal rank. Their names were Kjarval and Sudjic; chimerics who had only recently joined ship. Finally—the lowest rank of all—was the Gunnery Officer, the role Nagorny had filled. Now that he was dead the role had a certain potentiality, like a vacant throne.
During their periods of activity, the other crew tended to stay within certain well-defined districts of the ship, leaving the rest to Volyova and her machines. It was morning now, by shiptime: here up in the crew levels, the lights still followed a diurnal pattern, slaved to a twenty-four hour clock. She went first to the reefersleep room and found it empty, with all but one of the sleep caskets open. The other one, of course, belonged to Nagorny. After reattaching his head Volyova had placed the body in the casket and cooled it down. Later, she had arranged for the unit to malfunction, allowing Nagorny to warm. He had been dead already, but it would take a skilled pathologist to tell that now. Clearly none of the crew had felt much inclined to examine him closely.
She thought about Sudjic again. Sudjic and Nagorny had been close, for a while. It would not pay to underestimate Sudjic.
Volyova left the reefersleep chamber, explored several other likely places of meeting, and then found herself entering one of the forests, navigating through immense thickets of dead vegetation until she neared a pocket where UV lamps were still burning. She approached a glade, making her way unsteadily down the rustic wooden stairs which led to the floor. The glade was quite idyllic—more so now that the rest of the forest was so bereft of life. Shafts of yellow sunlight knifed through a shifting bower of palm trees overhead. There was a waterfall in the distance, feeding a steep-walled lagoon. Parrots and macaws occasionally kited from tree to tree or made ratcheting calls from their perches.