SISS looked as real as he remembered. The Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies had its organisational centre in a wheel-shaped structure dating from the Amerikano days, although there was not a single cubic nanometre which had not been reprocessed many times over the intervening centuries. The wheel’s hub sprouted two grey, mushroom-shaped hemispheres, pocked with docking interfaces and the modest defence systems permitted by Demarchist ethics. The wheel’s edge was a hectic accretion of living modules, labs and offices, embedded in a matrix of bulk chitin polymer, linked by a tangle of access tunnels and supply pipes walled in shark-collagen.
“It’s good.”
“You think so?” Pascale’s voice was distant.
“That’s how it was,” Sylveste said. “How it felt when I visited him.”
“Thanks, I . . . well, this was nothing—the easy part. Fully documented. We had blueprints for SISS, and there are even some people in Cuvier who knew your father, like Janequin. The hard part’s what happened afterwards—where we have so little to go on except what you told them on your return.”
“I’m sure you’ve done an excellent job of it.”
“Well, you’ll see—sooner rather than later.”
The shuttle coupled with the docking interface. Institute security servitors were waiting beyond the lock, validating his identity.
“Calvin won’t be thrilled,” said Gregori, the Institute’s housekeeper. “But I suppose it’s too late to send you home now.”
They had been through this ritual two or three times in the last few months, Gregori always washing his hands of the consequences. It was no longer necessary to have someone escort Sylveste through the shark-collagen tunnels to the place where they kept him; the thing.
“You’ve nothing to worry about, Gregori. If Father gives you any trouble, just tell him I ordered you to show me around.”
Gregori arched his eyebrows, the emotionally attuned entoptics around him registering amusement.
“Isn’t that just what you’re doing, Dan?”
“I was trying to keep things amicable.”
“Utterly futile, dear boy. We’d all be much happier if you just followed your father’s lead. You know where you are with a good totalitarian regime.”
It took twenty minutes to navigate the tunnels, moving radially outwards to the rim, passing through scientific sections where teams of thinkers—human and machine—grappled endlessly with the central enigma of the Shrouds. Although SISS had established monitoring stations around all the Shrouds so far discovered, most of the information-processing and collating took place around Yellowstone. Here elaborate theories were assembled and tested against the facts, which were scant, but unignorable. No theory had lasted more than a few years.
The place where they kept him, the thing Sylveste had come to see, was a guarded annex on the rim; a generously large allocation of volume ‘given the lack of evidence that the thing within was actually capable of appreciating the gift. The thing’s name—his name—was Philip Lascaille.
He did not have many visitors now. There had been lots in the early days, shortly after his return. But interest had dwindled when it became clear that Lascaille could tell his inquisitors nothing, useful or otherwise. But, as Sylveste had quickly appreciated, the fact that no one paid Lascaille much attention these days could actually work to his advantage. Even Sylveste’s relatively infrequent visits—once or twice a month—had been sufficiently far from the norm to enable a kind of rapport to form between the two of them . . . between himself and the thing Lascaille had become.
Lascaille’s annex contained a garden, under an artificial sky glazed the deep blue of cobalt. A breeze had been created, sufficient to finger the windchimes suspended from the bower of over-arching trees which fringed the garden.
The garden had been landscaped with paths, rockeries, knolls, trellises and goldfish ponds, the effect being of a rustic maze, so that it always took a minute or so to find Lascaille. When Sylveste did find him the man was usually in the same state: naked or half-naked, filthy to some degree, his fingers smeared with the rainbow shades of crayons and chalks. Sylveste would always know he was getting warm when he saw something scrawled on the stone path; either a complex symmetrical pattern, or what looked like an attempt at mimicking Chinese or Sanskrit calligraphy, without actually knowing any real letters. At other times the things which Lascaille marked on the path looked like Boolean algebra or semaphore.
Then—it was always only a question of time—he would round a corner and Lascaille would be there, working on another marking, or carefully erasing one he had worked on previously. His face would be frozen in a rictus of total concentration, and every muscle in his body would be rigid with the exertion of the drawing, and the process would take place in complete silence, except for the stirring of the windchimes, the quiet whisper of the water or the scraping of his crayons and chalks against stone.
Sylveste would often have to wait hours for Lascaille to even register his presence, which would generally amount to nothing more than the man turning his face to him for an instant, before continuing. Yet the same thing always happened in that instant. The rictus would soften, and in its place would be—if only for a moment—a smile; one of pride or amusement or something utterly beyond Sylveste’s fathoming.
And then Lascaille would return to his chalks. And there would be nothing to suggest that this was a man—the only man—the only human being—to ever touch the surface of a Shroud and return alive.
“Anyway,” Volyova said, quenching what remained of her thirst, “I’m not expecting it to be easy, but I have no doubts that I will find a recruit sooner or later. I’ve begun to advertise, stating our planned destination. As far as the work is concerned, I say only that it requires someone with implants.”
“But you’re not going to take the first one that comes along,” Hegazi said. “Surely?”
“Of course not. Though they won’t know it, I’ll be vetting my candidates for some kind of military experience in their backgrounds. I don’t want someone who’s going to crack up at the first hint of trouble, or someone unwilling to submit to discipline.” She was beginning to relax now, after all her difficulties with Nagorny. A girl was playing on stage, working a gold teeconax through endlessly spiralling ragas. Volyova did not greatly care for music; never had done. But there was something mathematically beguiling about the music which for a moment worked against her prejudices. She said: “I’m confident of success. We need only concern ourselves with Sajaki.”
At that moment Hegazi nodded towards the door, where bright daylight forced Volyova to squint. A figure stood there, majestically silhouetted in the glare. The man was garbed in a black anklelength cloak and a vaguely defined helmet, the light making it resemble a halo cast around his head. His profile was split diagonally by a long smooth stick which he gripped two-handedly.
The Komuso stepped into the darkness. What looked like a kendo stick was only his bamboo shakuhachi; a traditional musical instrument. With well-rehearsed rapidity he slid the thing into a sheath concealed behind the folds of his cloak. Then, with imperial slowness, he removed the wicker helmet. The Komuso’s face was difficult to make out. His hair was brilliantined, slickly tied back in a scythe-shaped tail. His eyes were lost behind sleek assassin’s goggles, infrared sensitive facets dully catching the room’s tinted light.
The music had come to an abrupt stop, the girl with the teeconax vanishing magically from the stage.
“They think it’s a police bust,” Hegazi breathed, the room quiet enough now that he didn’t need to raise his voice. “The local cops send in the basket-cases when they don’t want to bloody their own hands.”
The Komuso swept the room, flylike eyes targeting the table where Hegazi and Volyova sat. His head seemed to move independently of the rest of his body, like some species of owl. With a bustle of his cloak he cruised towards them, appearing to glide more than locomote. Nonchalantly Hegazi kicked a spare seat out from under the table, simultaneously taking an unimpressed drag on his cigarette.
“Good to see you, Sajaki.”
He dropped the wicker helmet next to their drinks, ripping the goggles away from his eyes as he did so. He lowered himself into the vacant chair, then turned casually around to the rest of the bar. He made a drinking gesture, imploring the people to get on with their own business while he attended to his. Gradually the conversation rumbled back into life, although everyone was keeping half an eye on the three of them.
“I wish the circumstances merited a celebratory drink,” Sajaki said.
“They don’t?” Hegazi said, looking as crestfallen as his extensively modified face permitted.
“No, most certainly not.” Sajaki examined the nearly spent glasses on the table and lifted Volyova’s, downing the few drops which remained. “I’ve been doing some spying, as you might gather from my disguise. Sylveste isn’t here. He isn’t in this system any more. As a matter of fact, he hasn’t been here for somewhere in the region of fifty years.”
“Fifty years?” Hegazi whistled.
“That’s quite a cold trail,” Volyova said. She tried not to sound gloating, but she had always known this risk existed. When Sajaki had given the order to steer the lighthugger towards the Yellowstone system, he had done so on the basis of the best information available to him at the time. But that was decades ago, and the information had been decades old even when he received it.
“Yes,” Sajaki said. “But not as cold as you might think. I know exactly where he went to, and there’s no reason to assume he’s ever left the place.”
“And where would this be?” Volyova asked, with a sinking feeling in her stomach.
“A planet called Resurgam.” Sajaki placed Volyova’s glass down on the table. “It’s quite some distance from here. But I’m afraid, dear colleagues, that it must be our next port of call.”
He fell into his past again.
Deeper this time; back to when he was twelve. Pascale’s flashbacks were nonsequential; the biography was constructed with no regard for the niceties of linear time. At first he was disoriented, even though he was the one person in the universe who ought not to have been adrift in his own history. But the confusion slowly gave way to the realisation that her way was the right one; that it was right to treat his past as shattered mosaic of interchangeable events; an acrostic embedded with numerous equally legitimate interpretations.
It was 2373; only a few decades after Bernsdottir’s discovery of the first Shroud. Whole academic disciplines had sprung up around the central mystery, as well as numerous government and private research agencies. The Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies was only one of dozens of such organisations, but it also happened to be backed by one of the wealthiest—and most powerful—families in the whole human bubble. But when the break came, it was not via the calculated moves of large scientific organisations. It was through one man’s random and dedicated madness.
His name was Philip Lascaille.
He was a SISS scientist working at one of the permanent stations near what was now called Lascaille’s Shroud, in the trans Tau Ceti sector. Lascaille was also one of a team kept on permanent stand-by should there ever be a need for human delegates to travel to the Shroud, although no one considered that this was very likely. But the delegates existed, with a ship kept in readiness to carry them the remaining five hundred million kilometres to the boundary, should the invitation ever arrive.
Lascaille decided not to wait.
Alone, he boarded and stole the SISS contact craft. By the time anyone realised what was happening, it was far too late to stop him. A remote destruct existed, but its use might have been construed by the Shroud as an act of aggression, something no one wanted to risk. The decision was to let fate take its course. No one seriously expected to see Lascaille come back alive. And though he did eventually return, his doubters had in a sense been right, because a large portion of his sanity had not come back with him.
Lascaille had come very close indeed to the Shroud before some force had propelled him back out again—perhaps only a few tens of thousands of kilometres from the surface, although at that range there was no easy way of telling where space ended and the Shroud began. No one doubted that he had come closer than any other human being, or for that matter any living creature.
But the cost had been horrific.
Not all of Philip Lascaille—not even most of him—had come back. Unlike those who had gone before him, his body had not been pulped and shredded by incomprehensible forces near the boundary. But something no less final appeared to have happened to his mind. Nothing remained of his personality, except for a few residual traces which served only to heighten the almost absolute obliteration of everything else. Enough brain function remained for him to keep himself alive without machine assistance, and his motor control seemed completely unimpaired. But there was no intelligence left; no sense that Lascaille perceived his surroundings except in the most simplistic manner; no indication that he had any grasp of what had happened to him, or was even aware of the passage of time; no indication that he retained the ability to memorise new experiences or retrieve those that had happened to him before his trip to the Shroud. He retained the ability to vocalise, but while Lascaille occasionally spoke well-formed words, or even fragments of sentences, nothing he uttered made the slightest sense.
Lascaille—or what remained of Lascaille—was returned to the Yellowstone system, and then to the SISS habitat, where medical experts desperately tried to construct a theory for what might have happened. Eventually—and it was more out of desperation than logic—they decided that the fractal, restructured spacetime around the Shroud had not been able to support the information density of his brain. In passing through it, his mind had been randomised on the quantum level, although the molecular processes of his body had not been noticeably affected. He was like a text which had been transcribed imprecisely—so that much of the meaning was lost—and then retranscribed.