The Prefect (28 page)

Thalia smiled tightly. ‘Nothing personal, though. I guess I'd be pretty upset if someone had taken my toys from the pram as well. I'm just saying that right now we could all use a degree of perspective. Because this is not the end of the world.'

She relaxed her stance just enough to let them know that the dressing down was over, for the moment.

‘You,' she said, pointing at the woman in the flame-red dress. ‘That train you saw earlier. Is it still stopped?'

‘Yes,' the woman said, stammering out her answer. ‘I can still see it. It's not going anywhere.'

‘I was hoping we could take the train back to the endcap. As I said, help'll be on its way soon enough regardless, but if it would make any of you happier, I could use the transmitter on my ship to call Panoply.'

‘Would that work?' asked a chastened Caillebot.

‘Absolutely. Since it's outside Aubusson, it won't have been affected by the abstraction outage. Looks like we're stuck here for the duration, though, unless any of you knows another way to get to the docking hub.'

‘I'm not seeing any aerial traffic,' said a man with a strangely comedic face. 'All flights must have been grounded along with that volantor.'

‘We could walk,' Parnasse said. ‘It's less than ten kilometres to the endcap.'

‘Are you serious?' Paula Thory asked.

‘No one's saying you'd have to come with us.' He nodded in Thalia's direction. 'I think the girl's right: once word gets out, they'll send help. But like she said, this is a sticky time for Panoply. We might be looking at a fair bit longer than an hour, or ninety minutes. Could be two hours, could be three, even longer.'

‘So what does walking accomplish?' Thory asked.

Parnasse shrugged his broad farmer's shoulders. He'd rolled up his sleeves, revealing hairy red arms knotted with muscle. ‘Not much, except it means we'd stand a chance of meeting the specialists when they come through the door. At least Thalia could fill them in on exactly what she was doing before the system went tits-up.' He glanced at her. ‘Right, girl?'

‘It might save some time,' she said. ‘If we can get to the hub, I can also talk to Panoply and give them some technical background before the squad arrives.' The hypothetical squad, she reminded herself. The one she could not say for sure would actually be on its way. ‘Either way, it's no worse than staying here. I can't do a thing for the core now.'

‘People out there,' Parnasse said, ‘are going to be just a tad upset if they see a Panoply uniform. You could be looking at an eight-hundred-thousand-strong lynch mob.'

‘They can fume and rage all they want,' Thalia said, touching her whiphound for reassurance. ‘I'm the prefect here, not them. And if they want to find out what happens when one of them even thinks of laying a finger on me, they're more than welcome.'

‘Fighting talk,' Parnasse said, in little more than a mutter. ‘I like the sound of that.'

The gruff curator, Thalia realised, was the only one of them who was unequivocally on her side. Perhaps he had a grudging respect for her ability with cybernetic systems, in spite of all that had just befallen them, or maybe he was just prickly enough to defend her because everyone else wanted her hide.

‘We can cover ten kilometres in less than two hours,' she said. ‘Provided we don't have to detour to cross those window bands, of course.'

‘We won't,' Parnasse said. ‘Not much, anyway. We can use the pedestrian bridges under the rail line, and even if those are blocked for one reason or another, there are always the parkland connections. There's a lot of greenery, a lot of cover.'

Thalia nodded: she'd seen where the window bands were bridged by tongues of parkland or tree-lined aqueducts and rail-line viaducts.

‘Of course,' she said, ‘we'll still have four kilometres to climb to the hub.'

‘Shouldn't be a problem,' said Cuthbertson, raising a tentative hand as he spoke. ‘Volantors depend on abstraction for nav services, same as Miracle Bird does. But elevators don't. There isn't a reason in the world why they shouldn't work.'

‘And the trains?' asked Thory. ‘Got an explanation for why
they
aren't running?'

‘Someone panicked, that's all. Activated the emergency stop.'

‘All over Aubusson?' asked the woman in the red dress. ‘I've been looking out of this window for a long time now and can see far enough to make out six or seven lines. I'm damned if I've seen one moving train in all that time.'

Cuthbertson's certainty had slipped a notch. ‘So a lot of people panicked. Or maybe Utility pulled the plug because they panicked.'

‘Could affect the elevators, in that case,' the woman said.

‘I don't know. I think the elevators run on a different supply, independent of Utility. Point is, we won't lose anything by finding out.' Cuthbertson turned to face Cyrus Parnasse. ‘I'm coming with you, Curator. Miracle Bird can act as look-out, in case we run into any mobs.'

‘That bird of yours can still fly, even when it's twitching like that?' asked Thalia.

‘It'll manage. It's adapting already.' The mechanical owl turned its dish-like face to look at Cuthbertson. ‘Aren't you, boy?'

‘I'm an excellent bird.'

‘So that's three of us,' Thalia said. ‘Not counting the owl. That's a good number. If we encounter trouble, we shouldn't be too conspicuous.'

‘I'm coming, too,' said Caillebot. ‘If there's anyone who knows the layout of the parks and gardens in this cylinder, it's me.'

‘You can count me in as well,' said Meriel Redon.

‘You sure?' Thalia asked. ‘You'll be safe and sound up here until the back-up squad arrives.'

‘I've made my mind up. I've never been one for sitting around when I could be walking. Makes me nervous.'

Thalia nodded heavily. ‘I think five is the limit, folks. Any more and we'll be slower than we need to be. The rest of you can sit tight and wait until abstraction comes back up.'

‘Are you issuing orders now?' Paula Thory asked.

Thalia thought about it for an instant. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘Looks like I am. So start dealing with it, lady.'

Dreyfus absorbed the truth of the Conjoiner's revelations, convinced in his heart that she had no reason to lie. ‘I think I know who Aurora is,' he said slowly. ‘But she shouldn't be here. She shouldn't be anywhere. She should have died - she should have
ended
- fifty-five years ago.'

‘Who is she?'

‘Unless someone else is using the same name, we're dealing with a dead girl. One of the Eighty, the group of human volunteers who took part in Calvin Sylveste's immortality experiments. Do you know what I'm talking about?'

‘Of course. We learned of those experiments with horror and dismay. His methods were conceptually flawed. Failure was inevitable.'

‘Except maybe it wasn't,' Dreyfus said, ‘because Aurora Nerval-Lermontov appears to be very much with us. At least one of the Transmigrants must have persisted, despite what the records say.'

‘You have no evidence of this.'

‘I know that her family owned this rock.' By way of an afterthought, he added, 'Do you think you're ready to trust me yet?'

‘Turn around,' she said after due consideration. ‘I have released my hold on your suit. Your communication functions are still disabled.'

He turned to look at her. She was wearing a suit herself, but of Conjoiner design. It had the glossy sheen of something moulded from luxury chocolate. For a moment he was looking at a featureless black oval instead of a head. Then her helmet melted back into the ruff-like collar of the neck ring.

He saw her face.

He'd seen stranger things in the Glitter Band. There was very little about her that wasn't baseline human, at first glance. She was a woman of uncertain age - he' d have said forty or so, except that he knew she was probably much older than that, because Conjoiners were as long-lived as any human splinter faction. Piercingly intelligent eyes, coloured a very pale green; wide, freckled cheekbones; a jaw that some might have considered too strong, but which was actually exactly in proportion with the rest of her face. She was bald, the top of her skull rising to a sharp mottled ridge that began halfway up her brow, betraying the enlarged cranial cavity she must have needed for her supercharged, machine-clotted brain.

That was where her true strangeness lay: beneath the skin, beneath the bone. The people in the wilder habitats might employ Mixmasters to sculpt themselves into exotic forms, but they seldom did anything to the functional architecture of their minds. Even the people who were wired into extreme levels of abstraction were still human in the way they processed the data entering their brains. That couldn't be said for the Conjoiner woman. She might be able to emulate human consciousness when it suited her, but her natural state of mind was something Dreyfus would never be able to grasp, any more than a horse could grasp algebra.

‘Do you want to tell me your name?' Dreyfus asked.

‘For your purposes I will call myself Clepsydra. If this is problematic for you, you may call me Waterclock, or simply Clock.'

‘You sound as if that isn't your real name.'

‘My real name would split your mind open like wood under an axe.'

‘Clepsydra it is, then. What exactly are you doing here, assuming you're ready to tell me?'

‘Surviving. That has been enough, lately.'

‘Tell me about this ship. What's it doing here? What use is it to Aurora?'

‘Our ship returned to this system nearly fifty years ago. We were experiencing difficulties. We'd encountered something in deep interstellar space: a machinelike entity of hostile nature. The ship had survived by sloughing part of itself, in the manner of a lizard shedding its tail. On the long return journey it had reorganised itself as best as it could, but it was still damaged. We were attempting to make contact with the Mother Nest, but our communications systems were not functioning properly.' Clepsydra swallowed, a gesture that all of a sudden made her look helplessly human. ‘Aurora found us first. She lured us in with promises of help and then swallowed us inside this place. We have been inside it ever since: unable to escape, unable to contact the Nest.'

‘That still doesn't tell me what Aurora wanted of you.'

‘That is more difficult to explain.'

‘Try me.'

‘Aurora wanted us to dream, Prefect. That is why she - why it - kept us here. Aurora made us dream the future. She desired our intelligence concerning future events. We prognosticated. And when we saw something in our prognostications that she didn't like, Aurora punished us.'

‘No one can dream the future.'

‘We can,' Clepsydra said blithely. ‘We have a machine that lets us. We call it Exordium.'

Thalia's walking party made their way to the elevator shaft that pierced the middle of the sphere from pole to pole. The high-capacity car was still waiting for them, exactly as they had left it, down to the pale-yellow watercolour panels of scenes from Yellowstone.

‘It's powered up,' Parnasse said. ‘That's good. Shouldn't be any problem getting down now.'

Thalia, the last of the five to enter, cleared the trelliswork doors. They scissored shut behind her.

‘It's not moving. I'm asking it and it isn't moving,' Caillebot said.

‘That's because it isn't hearing you. Abstraction's two-way,' Parnasse said, with the weary air of a man who shouldn't have to explain such things.

‘Then how do we get it to move? Are there manual controls?'

‘We don't need them just yet. Do we, Thalia?'

‘He's right,' she said. ‘Panoply operatives need to be free to move wherever and whenever we want, even without abstraction. We distribute the voiceprint patterns of authorised personnel to all habitats as a matter of routine.' She spoke up. ‘This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng. Recognise my voiceprint.'

‘Voiceprint recognised, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.'

Thalia breathed a little easier. ‘Please descend to ground level.'

There was an uncomfortable moment when nothing happened, and then the elevator began to descend.

‘Glad that worked,' Thalia said under her breath. Parnasse glanced at her with a sly smile as if he'd overheard.

‘That's good,' Caillebot said. ‘I was beginning to wonder what would happen if we'd been stuck up there.'

‘We'd have taken the stairs,' Parnasse said witheringly. ‘You're familiar with the concept of stairs, right?'

Caillebot shot him a warning look but didn't reply.

The elevator continued its smooth descent, passing through the neck connecting the sphere to the stalk. They were in the hollow atrium now. Far below, visible through the trellised glass windows on the outside of the car, the lobby lay completely deserted. Thalia had half-expected that at least some citizens would be converging on the polling core, demanding to know what was wrong and exactly when it would be fixed, but there was no sign of them. She couldn't exactly say why, but something made her touch the whiphound again.

The car completed its descent, coming to a smooth halt at the lobby level, and the trelliswork doors clattered open. Again, Thalia was struck by the emptiness of the lobby. It felt even more still than when they had first passed through it, their footsteps echoing loudly.

‘Okay, people,' she said, ‘let's stick together. Like the man said, there could be some angry citizens out there, and we may be the ones they decide to take it out on.'