“Thank you,” Sylveste said. “It’s . . . an improvement.”
“I think we’d better move,” said Falkender. “We’re five minutes behind schedule as it is.”
Sylveste nodded, and just the action of tipping his head was enough to spark pulsing migraines. Still, they were nothing compared with what he had endured until Falkender’s work.
He helped himself from the couch and stepped towards the door. Maybe it was because he now moved to the door with a purpose—because, for the first time, he actually expected to step through it—but the action suddenly seemed perverse and alien. He felt as if he were casually stepping off a precipice. He now had no balance. It was as if his inner equilibrium had become accustomed to no vision, and was now thrown by its return. The dizziness faded, though, just as two True Path heavies emerged from the outer corridor and took him by the elbows.
Falkender trailed behind. “Be careful. There may be perceptual glitches . . . ”
But though Sylveste heard his words, they meant nothing to him. He knew where he was now, and that knowledge was momentarily too overpowering. He was back home, after more than twenty years of exile.
His prison was Mantell, a place he had not seen—and barely even visited in his memory—since the coup.
TEN
Approaching Delta Pavonis, 2564
Volyova sat alone in the huge sphere of the bridge, under the holographic display of the Resurgam system. Her seat, like the other vacant ones around her, was mounted on a long, telescopic, highly articulated arm, so that it could be steered to almost any point in the sphere. Hand under chin, she had been staring into the orrery for hours, like a child transfixed by some glittery toy.
Delta Pavonis was a chip of warm-red ambergris fixed at the middle, the system’s eleven major planets spaced around it on their respective orbits, positioned at their true positions; smears of asteroidal debris and comet-shards following their own ellipses; the whole orrery haloed by a tenuous Kuiper belt of icy flotsam; tugged into slight asymmetry by the presence of the neutron star which was Pavonis’s dark twin. The picture was a simulation, rather than an enlargement of what lay ahead. The ship’s sensors were acute enough to glean data at this range, but the view would have been distorted by relativistic effects, and—worse—would have been a snapshot of the system as it was years earlier, with the relative positions of the planets bearing no resemblence to the present situation. Since the ship’s approach strategy would depend critically on using the system’s larger gas giants for camouflage and gravitational braking, Volyova needed to know where things would be when they got there, not how they had been five years ago. And not only that. Before the ship arrived in the Resurgam system, its advance envoys would already have skimmed by invisibly, and it was just as crucial to arrange their passage at the optimum planetary alignment.
“Release pebbles,” she said, satisfied now that she had run enough simulations. Heeding her,
Infinity
deployed one thousand of the tiny probes, firing them ahead of the decelerating ship in a slowly spreading pattern. Volyova spoke a command into her bracelet and a window opened ahead of her, captured by a camera on the hull. The entire ensemble of pebbles contracted into the distance, apparently tugged away by an invisible force. The cloud diminished as it fell further and further ahead of the ship, until all Volyova could see was a blurred nimbus, diminishing quickly. The pebbles were moving at almost the speed of light, and would reach the Resurgam system months ahead of the ship. The swarm, by then, would be wider than the orbit of Resurgam around the sun. Each tiny probe would align itself towards the planet and catch photons across the electromagnetic spectrum. The data from each pebble would be sent in a tightly focused laser pulse back towards the ship. The resolution of any one unit in the swarm would be tiny, but by combining their results, a very sharp and detailed picture of Resurgam could be assembled. It would not tell Sajaki where Sylveste was, but it would give him an idea of the likely centres of power on the planet, and—more importantly—what kind of defences they were capable of mustering.
That was one thing on which Sajaki and Volyova had been in complete agreement. Even if they found Sylveste, it seemed unlikely that he would agree to come aboard without coercion.
“Do you know what they did to Pascale?” Sylveste said.
“She’s safe,” said the eye surgeon, as he led Sylveste along tracheal, rock-clad tunnels deep in Mantell. “That’s what I’ve heard, at least,” he added, lessening Sylveste’s ease. “But I could be wrong. I don’t think Sluka would have killed her without good reason, but she may have had her frozen.”
“Frozen?”
“Until she’s useful. You’ll understand by now that Sluka thinks long-term.”
Continual waves of nausea kept threatening to overwhelm him. His eyes hurt, but, as he kept reminding himself, it was vision. That at least was something. Without it he was powerless, not even capable of effective disobedience. With it, escape might still be impossible, but at least he was spared the stumbling indignity of the blind. What vision he had, though, would have shamed the lowliest invertebrate. Spatial perception was haphazard, and colour existed in his world now only via nuances of grey-greens.
What he knew—what he remembered—was this.
He had not seen Mantell since the night of the coup twenty years earlier. The first coup, he corrected himself. Now that Girardieau had been overthrown, Sylveste had to get used to thinking of his own dethronement in purely historical terms. Girardieau’s regime had not immediately closed the place down, even though its Amarantin-directed research conflicted with their Inundationist agenda. For five or six years after the coup they had kept the place running, but one by one they had moved Sylveste’s best researchers back to Cuvier, replacing them with eco-engineers, botanists and geopower specialists. Finally, Mantell had been reduced to a skeleton-crewed test station, whole portions mothballed or derelict. It should have stayed that way, but trouble was already looming from outside elements. For years it had been rumoured that True Path’s leaders in Cuvier, Resurgam City, or whatever they were calling it now, were under direction from individuals beyond, a clique of one-time Girardieau sympathisers who had fallen out of favour during the machinations of the first coup. Supposedly, these brigands had altered their physiologies to cope with the dusty, oxygen-depleted atmosphere beyond the domes, using biotech purchased from Captain Remilliod.
Stories like that could be expected. But after sporadic attacks against a number of outposts, they began to look far less speculative. Mantell had been abandoned at some point, Sylveste knew, which meant that the current occupants might have been here for much longer than the time since Girardieau’s assassination. Months, or possibly even years.
Certainly they acted as if they owned the place. He knew when they entered a room that it was the one where Gillian Sluka had addressed him upon his arrival, however long ago that was. He failed to recognise it, though: it was entirely possible that during his tenancy in Mantell he had known this room intimately, but there were no longer any points of reference to aid him. The room’s décor and furnishings—such as there were—had been completely replaced. She stood with her back to him, next to a table, gloved hands knitted primly above her hip. She wore a knee-length fluted jacket with leather shoulder patches, the colour rendered as murky olive by his eyes. Her hair was collected in a braided tail which hung between her shoulder blades. She was not projecting entoptics. On either side of the room, planetary globes orbited on slender, swan-necked plinths. Something approximating daylight slatted down from the ceiling, though his eyes leeched it of any warmth.
“When we first spoke after your imprisonment,” she said, in her croak of a voice, “I almost had the impression you couldn’t place me.”
“I’d always assumed you were dead.”
“That was what Girardieau’s people wished you to think. The story about our crawler being hit by a landslide—all lies. We were attacked—they thought you were aboard, of course.”
“Why didn’t they kill me later, when they found me at the dig?”
“They realised you were more useful to them alive than dead, of course. Girardieau was no fool—he always used you profitably.”
“If you’d stayed with the dig, none of it would have happened. How did you survive, anyway?”
“Some of us got out of the crawler before Girardieau’s henchmen reached it. We took what equipment we could; made it into the Bird’s Claw canyons and set up bubbletents. That’s all I saw for a year, you know: the inside of a bubbletent. I was hurt quite badly in the attack.”
Sylveste brushed his fingers over the mottled surface of one of Sluka’s pedestal-mounted globes. What they represented, he saw now, was the topography of Resurgam at different epochs during the planned Inundationist terraforming program. “Why didn’t you join Girardieau in Cuvier?” he asked.
“He considered me too embarrassing to admit back into his fold. He was prepared to let us live, but only because killing us would have attracted too much attention. There were lines of communication, but they broke down.” She paused. “Fortunately we took some of Remilliod’s trinkets with us. The scavenger enzymes were the most useful. The dust doesn’t hurt us.”
He studied the globes again. With his impaired vision, he could only guess at the colours of the planetscapes, but he assumed that the spheres represented a steady march towards blue-green verdure. What were now merely upraised plateaux would become landmasses limned by ocean. Forests would fester across steppes. He looked to the furthest globes, which represented some remote version of Resurgam several centuries hence. Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer star-bridges reached from the equator towards orbit. How would that delicate future vision fare, he wondered, if Resurgam’s sun again erupted, as it had done so nine hundred and ninety thousand years ago, just when Amarantin civilisation was approaching a human level of sophistication?
Not, he ventured, terribly well.
“Apart from the biotech,” he said, “what else did Remilliod give you? You appreciate I’m curious.”
She seemed ready to humour him.
“You haven’t asked me about Cuvier. That surprises me.” She added: “Or your wife.”
“Falkender told me Pascale was safe.”
“She is. Perhaps I’ll allow you to join her at some point. For now, I wish your attention. We haven’t secured the capital. The rest of Resurgam is ours, but Girardieau’s people still hold Cuvier.”
“The city’s still intact?”
“No,” she said. “We . . . ” she looked over his shoulder, directly at Falkender. “Fetch Delaunay, will you? And have him bring one of Remilliod’s gifts.”
Falkender left, leaving them alone.
“I understand there was some agreement between you and Nils,” Sluka said. “Although the rumours I’ve heard are too contradictory to make much sense. Do you mind enlightening me?”
“There was never anything formal,” Sylveste said. “No matter what you may have heard.”
“I understand his daughter was brought in to paint you in an unflattering light.”
“It made sense,” Sylveste said wearily. “There’d be a certain cachet in having the biography scripted by a member of the family who was holding me prisoner. And Pascale was young, but not so young that it wasn’t time for her to make her mark. There were no losers: Pascale could hardly fail, though in fairness she applied herself to the task excellently.” He winced inwardly, remembering how close she had come to exposing the truth about Calvin’s alpha-level simulation. More than ever he was convinced that she had correctly guessed the facts, but had held back from committing them to the biography. Now, of course, she knew much more: what had happened around Lascaille’s Shroud, and how Carine Lefevre’s death was not the clear-cut thing he had made it seem upon his return to Yellowstone. But he had not spoken to her since that announcement. “As for Girardieau,” he said, “he had the satisfaction of seeing his daughter associated with a genuinely important project. Not to mention the fact that I was opened to the world for closer scrutiny. I was the prize butterfly in his collection, you see—but until the biography, he’d had no easy means of showing me off.”
“I’ve experienced the biography,” Sluka said. “I’m not entirely sure Girardieau got what he wanted.”
“All the same, he promised to keep his word.” His eyes faltered, and for a moment the woman he was addressing seemed to be a woman-shaped hole cut in the fabric of the room’s volume, a hole through which infinities lay.
The odd moment passed. He continued, “I wanted access to Cerberus/Hades. I think—towards the end—Nils was almost ready to give it to me, provided the colony had the means.”
“You think there’s something out there?”
“If you’re acquainted with my ideas,” Sylveste said, “then you must bow to their logic.”
“I find them intriguing—like any delusional construct.”
As she spoke, the door opened and a man Sylveste had not seen before entered, shadowed by Falkender. The new man—whom he assumed to be Delaunay—was bulldog-stocky. His wore several days’ growth of beard, a purple beret resting on his scalp. There were red weals around his eyes and a pair of dust goggles around his neck. His chest was crossed by webbing and his feet vanished into ochre mukluks.
“Show the nasty little thing to our guest,” Sluka said.
Delaunay was carrying an obviously heavy black cylinder in one hand, gripped in a thick handle.
“Take it,” Sluka told Sylveste.
He did; it was as heavy as he had expected. The handle was attached to the top of the cylinder; beneath it was a single green key. Sylveste put the cylinder down on the table; it was too heavy to hold comfortably for any length of time.