“Technically speaking,” Sajaki said, “both.”
The lift thundered to a halt. When the doors opened it was like being slapped in the face with a cold wet cloth. Khouri was glad for the advice about the warm clothes, although she still felt mortally chilled. “Thing was,” she continued, “they weren’t all bastards. Lorean was the old guy’s father, and he was still some kind of a folk hero, even after he died, and the old guy—what was his name again?”
“Calvin.”
“Right. Even after Calvin killed all those people. Then Calvin’s son came along—Dan, that would have been—and he tried to make amends, in his own way, with the Shrouder thing.” Khouri shrugged. “I wasn’t around then, of course. I only know what people told me.”
Sajaki led them through gloomy grey-green lit corridors, huge and perhaps mutant janitor-rats scrabbling away as their footfalls neared. What he took them into resembled the inside of a choleraic’s trachea—corridors thick and glutinous with dirty carapacial ice; veinous with buried tentacular ducts and power lines, slick with something nastily like human phlegm. Ship-slime, Volyova called it—an organic secretion caused by malfunctioning biological recycler systems on an adjacent level.
Mostly, though, it was the cold of which Khouri took heed.
“Sylveste’s part in things is rather complex,” Sajaki said. “It’ll take a while to explain. First, though, I’d like you to meet the Captain.”
Sylveste walked around himself, checking that nothing was seriously out of place. Satisfied, he cancelled the image and joined Girardieau in the pre-fab’s ante-room. The music reached a crescendo, then settled into a burbling refrain. The pattern of lights altered, voices dropping to a hush.
Together, they stepped into the glare, into the basso sound-field of the organ’s drone. A meandering path led to the central temple, carpeted for the occasion. Chime-trees lined it, cased in protective domes of clear plastic. The chime-trees were spindly, articulated sculptures, their many arms tipped with curved, coloured mirrors. At odd times, the trees would click and reconfigure themselves, moved by what seemed to be million-year-old clockwork buried in pedestals. Current thinking had it that the trees were elements of some citywide semaphore system.
The organ’s noise magnified as they stepped into the temple. Its egg-shaped dome was permeated by petal-shaped expanses of elaborate stained-glass, miraculously intact despite the slow predations of time and gravity. Filtered through the toplights, the air in the temple seemed suffused with a calming pink radiance. The central portion of the enormous room was taken up by the rising foundation of the spire which rose above the temple; wide and flared like the base of a sequoia. Temporary seating for a hundred top-level Cuvier dignitaries bowed out in a fan-shape from one side of the pillar; easily accommodated by the building, despite its one-quarter scale. Sylveste scanned the racks of watchers, recognising about a third of them. Perhaps a tenth had been his allies before the coup. Most of them wore heavy outer garments, plump with, furs. He recognised Janequin amongst them, sagelike with his smoke-white goatee and long silvery hair waterfalling from his bald pate. He looked more simian than ever. Some of his birds were in the hall, released from a dozen bamboo boxes. Sylveste had to admit that they were now strikingly good facsimiles, even down to the bobbed crest and the speckle-shimmer of their turquoise plumage. They had been adapted from chickens by careful manipulation of homeobox genes. The audience, many of whom had not seen the birds before today, applauded. Janequin turned the colour of bloodied snow, and seemed anxious to sink into his brocade overcoat.
Girardieau and Sylveste reached a sturdy table at the focus of the audience. The table was ancient: its woodwork eagle and Latinate inscriptions dated back to the Amerikano set-tiers on Yellowstone. Its corners were chipped. A varnished mahogany box sat on the table, sealed by delicate gold clasps.
A woman of serious demeanour stood behind the table, dressed in an electric-white gown. The gown’s clasp was a complex dual sigil, combining the Resurgam City/Inundationist governmental seal with the emblem of the Mixmasters: two hands holding a cat’s cradle of DNA. She was, Sylveste knew, not a true Mixmaster. The Mixmasters were a cliquish guild of Stoner bioengineers and geneticists, and none of their sanctum had journeyed to Resurgam. Yet their symbol—which
had
travelled—denoted general expertise in life-sciences: genesculpting, surgery or medicine.
Her unsmiling face was sallow in the stained light, hair collected in a bun, pierced by two syringes.
The music quietened.
“I am Ordinator Massinger,” she said, voice ringing out across the chamber. “I am empowered by the Resurgam expeditionary council to marry individuals of this settlement, unless such union conflicts with the genetic fitness of the colony.”
The Ordinator opened the mahogany box. Just below the lid lay a leatherbound object the size of a Bible. She removed it and placed it on the table, then folded it open with a creak of leather. The exposed surfaces were matt grey, like wet slate, glistening with microscopic machinery.
“Place one hand each on the page nearest you, gentlemen.”
They placed their palms on the surface. There was a fluorescent sweep as the book took their palm-prints, followed by a brief tingle as biopsies were taken. When they were done, Massinger took the book and pressed her own hand against the surface.
Massinger then asked Nils Girardieau to state his identity to the gathered. Sylveste watched faint smiles ghost the audience. There was something absurd about it, after all, though Girardieau made no show of this himself.
Then she asked the same of Sylveste.
“I am Daniel Calvin Lorean Soutaine-Sylveste,” he said, using the form of his name so rarely employed that it almost took an effort of memory to bring it to mind. He went on, “The only biological son of Rosalyn Soutaine and Calvin Sylveste, both of Chasm City, Yellowstone. I was born on the seventeenth of January, in the hundred and twenty-first standard year after the resettlement of Yellowstone. My calendrical age is two hundred and fifteen. Allowing for medichine programs, I have a physiological age of sixty, on the Sharavi scale.”
“How do you knowingly manifest?”
“I knowingly manifest in one incarnation only, the biological form now speaking.”
“And you affirm that you are not wittingly manifested via alpha-level or other Turing-capable simulacra, in this or any other solar system?”
“None of which I am aware.”
Massinger made small annotations in the book using a pressure stylus. She had asked Girardieau precisely the same questions: standard parts of the Stoner ceremony. Ever since the Eighty, Stoners had been intensely suspicious of simulations in general, particularly those that purported to contain the essence or soul of an individual. One thing they especially disliked was the idea of one manifestation of an individual—biological or otherwise—making contracts to which the other manifestations were not bound, such as marriage.
“These details are in order,” Massinger said. “The bride may step forward.”
Pascale moved into the roseate light. She was accompanied by two women wearing ash-coloured wimples, a squad of float-cams and personal security wasps and a semitransparent entourage of entoptics: nymphs, seraphim, flying-fish and hummingbirds, star-glitter dew-drops and butterflies, in slow cascade around her wedding dress. The most exclusive entoptic designers in Cuvier had created them.
Girardieau raised his thick, hauserlike arms and bid his daughter forward.
“You look beautiful,” he murmured.
What Sylveste saw was beauty reduced to digital perfection. He knew that Girardieau saw something incomparably softer and more human, like the difference between a swan and a hard glass sculpture of a swan.
“Place your hand on the book,” the Ordinator said.
An imprint of moisture from Sylveste’s band was still visible, like a wider shoreline around Pascale’s island of pale flesh. The Ordinator asked her to verify her identity, in the same manner as she had asked Girardieau and Sylveste. Pascale’s task was simple enough: not only had she been born on Resurgam, but she had never left the planet. Ordinator Massinger delved deeper into the mahogany box. While she did so, Sylveste’s eyes worked the audience. He saw Janequin, looking paler than ever, fidgety. Deep within the box, polished to a blueish antiseptic lustre, lay a device like a cross between an old-style pistol and a veterinarian’s hypodermic.
“Behold the wedding gun,” the Ordinator said, holding the box aloft.
Bone-splinteringly cold as it was, Khouri soon stopped noticing the temperature except as an abstract quality of the air. The story that her two crewmates was relating was far too strange for that.
They were standing near the Captain. His name, she now knew, was John Armstrong Brannigan. He was old, inconceivably so. Depending on the system one adopted in measuring his age, he was anywhere between two hundred and half a thousand years old. The details of his birth were unclear now, hopelessly tangled in the countertruths of political history. Mars, some said, was the place where he had been born, yet it was equally possible that he had been born on Earth, Earth’s city-jammed moon or in any one of the several hundred habitats which drifted through cislunar space in those days.
“He was already over a century old before he ever left Sol system,” Sajaki said. “He waited until it was possible to do so, then was among the first thousand to leave, when the Conjoiners launched the first ship from Phobos.”
“At least, someone called John Brannigan was on that ship,” Volyova said.
“No,” Sajaki said. “There’s no doubt. I know it was him. Afterwards . . . it becomes less easy to place him, of course. He may have deliberately blurred his own past, to avoid being tracked down by all the enemies he must have made in that time. There are many sightings, in many different systems, decades apart . . . but nothing definite.”
“How did he come to be your Captain?”
“He turned up centuries later—after several landfalls elsewhere, and dozens of unconfirmed apparitions—on the fringe of the Yellowstone system. He was ageing slowly, due to the relativistic effects of starflight, but he was still getting older, and longevity techniques were not as well developed as in our time.” Sajaki paused. “Much of his body was now prosthetic. They said that John Brannigan no longer needed a spacesuit when he left his ship; that he breathed vacuum, basked in intolerable heat and quenching cold, and that his sensory range encompassed every spectrum imaginable. They said that little remained of the brain with which he had been born; that his head was merely a dense loom of intermeshed cybernetics, a stew of tiny thinking machines and precious little organic material.”
“And how much of that was true?”
“Perhaps more of it than people wished to believe. There were certainly lies: that he had visited the Jugglers on Spindrift years before they were generally discovered; that the aliens had wrought wondrous transformations on what remained of his mind, or that he had met and communicated with at least two sentient species so far unknown to the rest of humanity.”
“He did meet the Jugglers eventually,” Volyova said, in Khouri’s direction. “Triumvir Sajaki was with him at the time.”
“That was much later,” Sajaki snapped. “All that’s germane here is his relationship with Calvin.”
“How did they cross paths?”
“No one really knows,” Volyova said. “All that we know for sure is that he became injured, either through an accident or some military operation that went wrong. His life wasn’t in danger, but he needed urgent help, and to go to one of the official groups in the Yellowstone system would have been suicide. He’d made too many enemies to be able to place his life in the hands of any organisation. What he needed were loosely scattered individuals in whom he could place personal trust. Evidently Calvin was one of them.”
“Calvin was in touch with Ultra elements?”
“Yes, though he would never have admitted so in public.” Volyova smiled, a wide toothy crescent opening beneath the bib of her cap. “Calvin was young and idealistic then. When this injured man was delivered to him, he saw it as a godsend. Until then he had had no means of exploring his more outlandish ideas. Now he had the perfect subject, the only requirement being total secrecy. Of course, they both gained from it: Calvin was able to try out his radical cybernetic theories on Brannigan, while Brannigan was made well and became something more than he had been before Calvin’s work. You might describe it as the perfect symbiotic relationship.”
“You’re saying the Captain was a guinea pig for that bastard’s monstrosities?”
Sajaki shrugged, the movement puppetlike within his swaddling clothes.
“That was not how Brannigan saw it. As far as the rest of humanity was concerned, he was already a monster before the accident. What Calvin did was merely take the trend further. Consummate it, if you like.”
Volyova nodded, although there was something in her expression which suggested she was not quite at ease with her crewmate. “And in any case, this was prior to the Eighty. Calvin’s name was unsullied. And among the more overt extremes of Ultra life, Brannigan’s transformation was only slightly in excess of the norm.” She said it with tart distaste.
“Carry on.”
“Nearly a century passed before his next encounter with the Sylveste clan,” Sajaki said. “By which time he was commanding this ship.”
“What happened?”
“He was injured again. Seriously, this time.” Gingerly, like someone testing himself against a candle flame, he whisked his fingers across the limiting extent of the Captain’s silvery growth. The Captain’s outskirts looked frothy, like the brine left on a rockpool by the retreating tide. Sajaki delicately swabbed his fingers against the front of his jacket, but Khouri could tell that they did not feel clean; that they itched and crawled with subepidermal malignance.