“How long ago?”
“Eighteen years ago.” Before Khouri could interject, the Mademoiselle added, “Shiptime, that is. In worldtime, I estimate between eight and ninety years prior to your recruitment.”
“Sylveste,” Khouri said, wonderingly. “Sajaki said that the reason Sylveste went missing was because they brought him aboard this ship, to fix Captain Brannigan. Do the dates tie together?”
“Conclusively, I would say. This would have been 2460— twenty or so years after Sylveste returned from the Shrouders.”
“And you think he brought—whatever it is—with him?”
“All we know is what Sajaki told us, which is that Sylveste accepted the Calvin simulation in order to heal Captain Brannigan. At some point during the operation Sylveste must have been connected to the ship’s dataspace. Perhaps that was how the stowaway gained access. Thereafter—very soon after, I suspect—it entered the gunnery through the one-way door.”
“And it’s been there ever since?”
“So it appears.”
This seemed to be a pattern: whenever Khouri felt she had things ordered in her head, or at least approximately so, some new fact would dash her scheme to shreds. She felt like a mediaeval astronomer, creating ever more intricate clockwork cosmologies to incorporate every new observational oddity. Now, in some way she could not begin to guess, Sylveste was related to the gunnery. At least she could take comfort in her ignorance. Even the Mademoiselle was foxed.
“You mentioned the thing was hostile,” she said carefully, not really sure she wanted to ask any more questions, in case the answers were too difficult to assimilate.
“Yes.” Hesitating now. “The dogs were a mistake,” she said. “I was too impetuous. I should have realised that Sun Stealer—”
“Sun Stealer?”
“What it calls itself. The stowaway, I mean.”
This was bad. How did she know the thing’s name? Fleetingly, Khouri remembered that Volyova had once asked her if that name meant anything to her. But there was more to it than that. It was as if she had been hearing that name in her dreams for some time now. Khouri opened her mouth to speak, but the Mademoiselle was already talking. “It used the dogs to escape, Khouri. Or at least for a part of itself to escape. It used them to get into your head.”
Sylveste had no reliable way of marking the time in his new prison. All he remained certain of was that many days had passed since his capture. He suspected he was being drugged, forced into comalike sleep, barren of dreams. When he did dream, which was rarely, he had sight, but his dreams always revolved around his imminent blindness and the preciousness of the sight he retained. When he awoke he saw only grey, but after some time—days, he guessed—the grey had lost its geometric structure. The pattern had been imposed on his brain for too long; now his brain was simply filtering it out. What remained was a colourless infinity, no longer even recognisably grey, but simply a bright absence of hue.
He wondered what he was missing. Perhaps his actual surroundings were so dull and Spartan that his mind would sooner or later have performed the same filtering trick, even if he still had his sight. He sensed only the echoless enclosure of rock; many megatonnes of it. He thought constantly of Pascale, but it became harder by the day to hold her in his mind. The grey seemed to be seeping into his memories, smearing over them like wet concrete. Then there came a day, just after Sylveste had finished his rations, when the cell door was unlocked and two voices joined him.
The first was that of Gillian Sluka.
“Do what you can with him,” her croak of a voice said. “Within limits.”
“He should be put under while I operate,” said the other voice, male and treacle-thick. Sylveste recognised the cabbagy smell of the man’s breath.
“He should, but he won’t be.” The voice hesitated, then added: “I’m not expecting any miracles, Falkender. I just want the bastard to see me.”
“Give me a few hours,” Falkender said. There was a thump as the man placed something down on the cell’s blunt-edged table. “I’ll do my best,” he said, almost mumbling. “But from what I know, these eyes were nothing special before you had him blinded.”
“One hour.”
She slammed the door as she exited. Sylveste, cocooned in silence since his capture, felt its reverberations jar his skull. For too long he had been striving to pick up the softest of noises, clues to his fate. There had been none, but in the process he had become sensitised to silence.
He smelled Falkender loom nearer. “A pleasure to work with you, Dr. Sylveste,” he said, almost diffidently. “I’m confident I can undo most of the damage she had inflicted on you, given time.”
“She gave you one hour,” Sylveste said. His own voice sounded foreign; it had been too long since he had done much except mumble incoherently to himself in his sleep. “What can you possibly do in one hour?”
He heard the man rummage through his tools. “At the very least improve things for you.” He punctuated his remarks with clucking noises. “Of course, I can do more if you don’t struggle. But I can’t promise that this will be pleasant for you.”
“I’m sure you’ll do your best.”
The man’s fingers skated over his eyes, lightly probing.
“I always admired your father, you know.” Another cluck, reminding Sylveste of one of Janequin’s chickens. “It’s well known that he fashioned these eyes for you.”
“His beta-level simulation,” Sylveste corrected.
“Of course, of course.” He could visualise Falkender waving aside this vaporous distinction. “And not the alpha, either—we all know that vanished years ago.”
“I sold it to the Jugglers,” Sylveste said blankly. After years of holding it in, the truth had popped out of his mouth like a small sour pip.
Falkender made an odd tracheal sound which Sylveste eventually decided might be the man’s mode of chuckling. “Of course, of course. You know, I’m surprised no one ever accused you of that. But that’s human cynicism for you.” A shrill whirring sound filled the air, followed by a nerve-searing vibration. “I think you can say goodbye to colour perception,” Falkender said. “Monochrome’s going to be about the best I can manage.”
Khouri had been hoping for some mental breathing-space, some time in which to collect her thoughts, in which to listen quietly for the breathing of the invasive presence in her head. But the Mademoiselle was still speaking.
“I believe Sun Stealer has already attempted this once before,” she said. “I’m speaking of your predecessor, of course.”
“You mean the stowaway tried to get into Nagorny’s head?”
“Exactly that. Except in Nagorny’s case, there would have been no bloodhounds on which to hitch a ride. Sun Stealer must have had to resort to something cruder.”
Khouri considered what she had learnt from Volyova about this whole incident.
“Crude enough to drive Nagorny mad?”
“Evidently so,” her companion nodded. “And perhaps Sun Stealer only attempted to impose his will on the man. Escape from the gunnery was impossible, so Sun Stealer merely tried to make Nagorny his puppet. Perhaps it was all done via subconscious suggestion, while he was in the gunnery.”
“Exactly how much trouble am I in?”
“Little, for now. There were only a few dogs—not enough for him to do much damage.”
“What happened to the dogs?”
“I decrypted them, of course—learnt their messages. But in doing so, I opened myself up to him. To Sun Stealer. The dogs must have limited him somewhat, because his attack on me was far from subtle. Fortunately, because otherwise I might not have deployed my defences in time. He was not particularly hard to defeat, but of course I was only dealing with a tiny part of him.”
“Then I’m safe?”
“Well, not quite. I ousted him—but only from the implant in which I reside. Unfortunately my defences do not extend to your other implants, including those Volyova installed in you.”
“He’s still in my head?”
“He may not have even needed the dogs,” the Mademoiselle said. “He might have entered Volyova’s implants as soon as she placed you in the gunnery for the first time. But he certainly found the dogs advantageous. If he hadn’t tried to invade me with them, I might not have sensed his presence in your other implants.”
“I feel the same.”
“Good. It means my countermeasures are effective. You recall how I used countermeasures against Volyova’s loyalty therapies?”
“Yes,” Khouri said, gloomily uncertain that those had worked quite as well as the Mademoiselle liked to imagine.
“Well, these are much the same. The only difference is, I’m using them against those sites in your mind which Sun Stealer has occupied. For the last two years, we’ve been waging a kind of . . . ” She paused, and then seemed to experience a moment of epiphany. “I suppose you could call it a cold war.”
“It would have to be cold.”
“And slow,” the Mademoiselle said. “The cold robbed us of the energies for anything more. And, of course, we had to be careful that we did not harm you. Your being injured was no use to either myself or Sun Stealer.”
Khouri remembered why this conversation was possible in the first place.
“But now that I’m warmed . . . ”
“You understand well. Our campaign has intensified since the warming. I think Volyova may even suspect something. A trawl is reading your brain even now, you see. It may have detected the neural war Sun Stealer and I are waging. I would have relented—but Sun Stealer would have used the moment to overwhelm my countermeasures.”
“But you can hold him at bay . . .”
“I believe so. But should I not succeed in holding Sun Stealer at bay, I felt you needed to know what happened.”
That much was reasonable: better to know that Sun Stealer was in her than to suffer the delusion that she was clean.
“I also wished to warn you. The bulk of him remains in the gunnery. I’ve no doubt that he will try to enter you fully, or as fully as is possible, when he finds the chance.”
“You mean, next time I’m in the gunnery?”
“I admit the options are limited,” the Mademoiselle said. “But I thought it best that you knew the entirety of the situation.”
Khouri was, she thought, still a long way from anything that approximated that. But what the ghost said was correct. Better to appreciate the danger than ignore it.
“You know,” she said, “if Sylveste really was responsible for this thing, killing him won’t pose too many problems for me.”
“Good. And the news is not unremittingly bad, I assure you. When I sent those dogs into the gunnery I also sent in an avatar of myself. And I know from the reports that the dogs returned that my avatar remained undetected by Volyova, at least during those early days. That was, of course, more than two years ago . . . but I’ve no reason to suspect that the avatar has been found since.”
“Assuming it hasn’t been destroyed by Sun Stealer.”
“A reasonable point,” she conceeded. “But if Sun Stealer is as intelligent as I suspect, he won’t do anything that might draw attention to himself. He can’t know for certain that this avatar isn’t something Volyova has sent into the system. She has enough doubts of her own, after all.”
“Why did you do it?”
“So that, if necessary, I might gain control of the gunnery.”
If Calvin had had any grave, Sylveste thought, then his father would be spinning in it faster than Cerberus spun around the neutron star Hades, aggrieved at the abuse of his own handiwork. Except Calvin had had already been dead, or at least non-corporeal, long before his simulation had engineered Sylveste’s vision. Such thought-games held the pain at bay, at least part of the time. And, in truth, there had never really been a time since his capture when he had not been in pain. Falkender was flattering himself if he imagined his surgery was exacerbating Sylveste’s agony to any significant degree.
Eventually—miraculously—it began to abate.
It was like a vacuum opening in his mind, a cold, void-filled ventricle which had not been there before. Taking the pain away was like taking away some inner buttress. He felt himself collapsing, whole eavestones of his psyche grinding loose under their suddenly unsupported weight. It took an effort to restore some of his own internal equilibrium.
And now there were colourless, evanescent ghosts in his vision.
By the second they hardened into distinct shapes. The walls of a room—as bland and unfurnished as he had imagined—and a masked figure crouched low over him. Falkender’s hand was immersed in a kind of chrome glove which ended not in fingers but in a crayfish-like explosion of tiny glistening manipulators. One of the man’s eyes was monocled by a lens system, connected to the glove by a segmented steel cable. His skin had the pallor of a lizard’s underbelly: his one visible eye was unfocused and cyanotic. Dried specks of blood sprinkled his brow. The blood was grey-green, but Sylveste knew well enough what it was.
In fact, now that he noticed, everything was grey-green.
The glove retracted, and Falkender pulled it from his wrist with the other hand. A caul of lubricant sheened the hand which had been under the glove.
He began to pack his kit away. “Well, I never promised miracles,” he said. “And you shouldn’t have been expecting any.”
When he moved, it was jerkily, and it took moments for Sylveste to grasp that his eyes were only perceiving three of four images a second. The world moved with the stuttering motion of the pencil cartoons children made in the corners of books, flicked into life between thumb and forefinger. Every few seconds there were upsetting inversions of depth, when Falkender would appear to be a man-shaped recess carved into the cell’s wall, and sometimes part of his visual field would jam, not changing for ten or more seconds, even if he looked to another part of the room.
Still, it was vision, or at least vision’s idiot cousin.