He stepped casually round the stump.
‘You’re always asking too many questions,’ Sajaki said, and then drew something from his kimono that might have been a syringe.
Nekhebet Isthmus, Resurgam, 2566
Sylveste reached anxiously into his pocket, feeling for the vial which he felt sure would be missing. He touched it; a minor miracle.
Down below, dignitaries were filing into the Amarantin city, moving slowly towards the temple at the city’s heart. Snatches of their conversation reached him with perfect clarity, though never long enough for him to hear more than a few words. He was hundreds of metres above them, on the human-installed balustrade which had been grafted to the black wall of the city-englobing egg.
It was his wedding day.
He had seen the temple in simulations many times, but it had been so long since he had actually visited the place that he had forgotten how overpowering its size could be. That was one of the odd, persistent defects of simulations: no matter how precise they became, the participant remained aware that they were not reality. Sylveste had stood beneath the roof of the Amarantin spire-temple, gazing up to where the angled stone arches intersected hundreds of metres above, and had felt not the slightest hint of vertigo, or fear that the age-old structure would choose that moment to collapse upon him. But now — visiting the buried city for only the second time in person — he felt a withering sense of his own smallness. The egg in which it was encased was itself uncomfortably large, but that at least was the product of a recognisably mature technology — even if the Inundationists elected to ignore the fact. The city which rested within, on the other hand, looked more like the product of some fifteenth-century fever-dream fantasist, not least because of the fabulous winged figure which rested atop the temple spire. And all of it — the more he looked — seemed to exist only to celebrate the return of the Banished Ones.
None of it made sense. But at least it forced his mind off the ceremony ahead.
The more he looked, the more he realised — against his first impression — that the winged thing really was an Amarantin, or, more accurately, a kind of hybrid Amarantin/angel, sculpted by an artist with a deep and scholarly understanding of what the possessing of wings would actually entail. Seen without his eyes’ zoom facility, the statue was cruciform, shockingly so. Enlarged, the cruciform shape became a perched Amarantin with glorious, outspread wings. The wings were metalled in different colours, each small trailing feather sparkling with a slightly different hue. Like the human representation of an angel, the wings did not simply replace the creature’s arms, but were a third pair of limbs in their own right.
But the statue seemed more real than any representation of an angel Sylveste had ever seen in human art. It appeared — the thought seemed absurd — anatomically correct. The sculptor had not just grafted the wings onto the basic Amarantin form, but had subtly re-engineered the creature’s underlying physique. The manipulatory forelimbs had been moved slightly lower down the torso, elongated to compensate. The chest of the torso swelled much wider than the norm, dominated by a yokelike skeletal/muscular form around the creature’s shoulder area. From this yoke sprouted the wing, forming a roughly triangular shape, kitelike. The creature’s neck was longer than normal, and the head seemed even more streamlined and avian in profile. The eyes still faced forwards — though like all Amarantin, its binocular vision was limited — but were set into deep, grooved bone channels. The creature’s upper mandible nostril parts were flared and rilled, as if to draw the extra air into the lungs required for the beating of the wings. And yet not everything was right. Assuming that the creature’s body was approximately similar in mass to the Amarantin norm, even those wings would have been pitifully inadequate for the task of flying. So what were they — some kind of gross ornamentation? Had the Banished Ones gone in for radical bio-engineering, only to burden themselves with wings of ridiculous impracticality?
Or had there been another purpose?
‘Second thoughts?’
Sylveste was jolted suddenly from his contemplation.
‘You still don’t think this is a good idea, do you?’
He turned around from the balustrade which looked across the city.
‘It’s a little late to voice my objections, I think.’
‘On your wedding day?’ Girardieau smiled. ‘Well, you’re not home and dry yet, Dan. You could always back out.’
‘How would you take that?’
‘Very badly indeed, I suspect.’
Girardieau was dressed in starched city finery, cheeks lightly rouged for the attendant swarms of float-cams. He took Sylveste by the forearm and led him away from the edge.
‘How long have we been friends, Dan?’
‘I wouldn’t exactly call it friendship; more a kind of mutual parasitism.’
‘Oh come on,’ Girardieau said, looking disappointed. ‘Have I made your life any more of a misery these last twenty years than was strictly necessary? Do you think I took any great pleasure in locking you away?’
‘Let’s say you approached the task with no little enthusiasm.’
‘Only because I had your best interests at heart.’ They stepped off the balcony into one of the low tunnels which threaded the black shell around the city. Cushioned flooring absorbed their footsteps. ‘Besides,’ Girardieau continued, ‘if it wasn’t transparently obvious, Dan, there was something of a feeding frenzy at the time. If I hadn’t put you in custody, some mob would eventually have taken out their anger on you.’
Sylveste listened without speaking. He knew much of what Girardieau said was true on a theoretical level, but that there was no guarantee that it reflected the man’s actual motives at the time.
‘The political situation at the time was much simpler. Back then we didn’t have True Path making trouble.’ They reached an elevator shaft and entered the carriage, its interior antiseptically clean and new. Prints hung on the wall, showing various Resurgam vistas before and after the Inundationist transformations. There was even one of Mantell. The mesa in which the research outpost was embedded was draped in foliage, a waterfall running off the top, blue, cloud-streaked skies beyond it. In Cuvier, there was a whole sub-industry devoted to creating images and simulations of the future Resurgam, ranging from water-colour artists to skilled sensorium designers.
‘And on the other hand,’ Girardieau said, ‘there are radical scientific elements coming out of the woodwork. Only last week, one of True Path’s representatives was shot dead in Mantell, and believe me, it wasn’t one of our agents who did it.’
Sylveste felt the carriage begin to convey them down, towards the city level.
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that with fanatics on both sides, you and I are beginning to look like distinct moderates. Depressing thought, isn’t it?’
‘Out-radicalised on both fronts, you mean.’
‘Something like that.’
They emerged through the black, graven wall of the city-shell into a small crowd of media types who were running through last-minute preparations for the event. Reporters wore buff-coloured float-cam glasses, choreographing the cams which hovered around them like drab party balloons. One of Janequin’s genetically engineered peacocks was pecking around the group, its tail hissing behind it. Two security officers stepped forwards garbed in black with gold Inundationist sigils on their shoulders, surrounded by flocks of deliberately threatening entoptics. Servitors loitered behind them. They ran full-spectrum ident scans on Sylveste and Girardieau, then motioned them to a small temporary structure which had been placed near a nestlike froth of Amarantin dwellings.
The inside was almost bare, apart from a table and two skeletal chairs. There was a bottle of Amerikano red wine on the table, next to a pair of wine goblets, engraved with frosted-glass landscapes.
‘Sit down,’ Girardieau said. He swaggered around the table and decanted measures of wine into both glasses. ‘I don’t know why you’re so damned nervous. It isn’t as i
f this is your first time.’
‘My fourth, actually.’
‘All Stoner ceremonies?’
Sylveste nodded. He thought of the first two: small-scale affairs, to minor-league Stoner women, the faces of whom he could almost not separate in his memory. Both had withered under the glare of publicity that the family name attracted. By contrast, his marriage to Alicia — his last wife — had been sculpted as a publicity move from the onset. It had focused attention on the upcoming Resurgam expedition, giving it the final monetary push it needed. The fact that they had been in love had been almost inconsequential, merely a happy addendum to the existing arrangement.
‘That’s a lot of baggage to be carrying around in your head now,’ Girardieau said. ‘Don’t you ever wish you could be rid of the past each time?’
‘You find the ceremony unusual.’
‘Perhaps I do.’ Girardieau wiped a red smear of wine from his lips. ‘I was never part of Stoner culture, you see.’
‘You came with us from Yellowstone.’
‘Yes, but I wasn’t born there. My family were from Grand Teton. I only arrived on Yellowstone seven years before the Resurgam expedition departed. Not really enough time to become culturally adapted to Stoner tradition. My daughter, on the other hand… well, Pascale’s never known anything but Stoner society. Or at least the version of it we imported when we came here.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You must have the vial with you now, I suppose. May I see it?’
‘I could hardly refuse you.’
Sylveste reached in his pocket and removed the little glass cylinder he had been carrying with him all day. He passed it to Girardieau, who nervously tinkered with it, tipping it this way and that. He watched the bubbles within, slipping to and fro as if in a spirit level. Something darker hung within the fluid, fibrous and tendrilled.
He placed the vial down; it made a delicate glassy chime as it settled on the tabletop. Girardieau studied it with barely masked horror.
‘Was it painful?’
‘Of course not. We’re not sadists, you know.’ Sylveste smiled, secretly enjoying Girardieau’s discomfort. ‘Would you rather we exchanged camels, perhaps?’
‘Put it away.’
Sylveste slipped the vial back into his pocket. ‘Now tell me who’s the nervous one, Nils.’
Girardieau poured himself another measure of wine. ‘Sorry. Security are edgy as hell. Don’t know what’s got them so bothered, but it’s rubbing off on me, I suppose.’
‘I didn’t notice anything.’
‘You wouldn’t.’ Girardieau shrugged; a bellows-like movement that began somewhere below his abdomen. ‘They claim everything’s normal, but after twenty years I read them better than they imagine.’
‘I wouldn’t worry. Your police are very efficient people.’
Girardieau shook his head briefly, as if he had taken a bite from a particularly sour lemon. ‘I don’t expect the air between us to ever be completely cleared, Dan. But you could at least give me the benefit of the doubt.’ He nodded towards the open door. ‘Didn’t I give you complete access to this place?’
Yes, and all that had done was to replace a dozen questions with a thousand more. ‘Nils…’ he began, ‘how are the colony’s resources these days?’
‘In what sense?’
‘I know things have been different since Remilliod came through. Things which would have been unthinkable in my day… could be done now, if the political will was there.’
‘What kinds of things?’ Girardieau asked dubiously.
Sylveste reached into his jacket again, but this time, instead of the vial, he removed a piece of paper which he spread before Girardieau. The paper was marked with complex circular figures. ‘You recognise these marks? We found them on the obelisk and all over the city. They’re maps of the solar system, made by the Amarantin.’
‘Somehow, having seen this city, I find that easier to believe now than I once did.’
‘Good, then hear me out.’ Sylveste drew his finger along the widest circle. ‘This represents the orbit of the neutron star, Hades.’
‘Hades?’
‘That was the name it was given when they first surveyed the system. There’s a lump of rock orbiting it, too — about the size of a planetary moon. They called it Cerberus.’ Then he brushed his finger across the cluster of graphicforms attending the neutron star/planet double system. ‘Somehow, this was important to the Amarantin. And I think it might have some bearing on the Event.’
Girardieau buried his head in his hands theatrically, then looked back at Sylveste. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Carefully — never allowing his gaze to move from Girardieau’s eyes — he folded away the paper and replaced it in his pocket. ‘We have to explore it, and find out what killed the Amarantin. Before it kills us as well.’
When Sajaki and Volyova came to Khouri’s quarters, they told her to put on something warm. Khouri noticed that they were both wearing heavier than usual shipwear — Volyova in a zipped-up flying jacket, Sajaki in muffled, high-collared thermals, quilted in a mosaic of nova-diamond patches.
‘I’ve screwed up, haven’t I?’ Khouri said. ‘This is where I get the airlock treatment. My scores in the combat simulations haven’t been good enough. You’re going to ditch me.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Sajaki said, only his nose and forehead protruding above the furline of his collar. ‘If we were going to kill you, do you think we’d worry about you catching a chill?’
‘And,’ Volyova said, ‘your indoctrination finished weeks ago. You’re now one of our assets. To kill you now would be a form of treason against ourselves.’ Beneath the bib of her cap only her mouth and chin were visible; she exactly complemented Sajaki, the two of them forming one bland composite face.
‘Nice to know you care.’
Still unsure of her position — the possibility that they might be planning something nasty was still looming large — she dug through what passed for her belongings until she found a thermal jacket. Manufactured by the ship, it was similar to Sajaki’s harlequin job, except that it fell almost to her knees.
An elevator journey took them into an unexplored region of the ship — at least, well away from what Khouri considered known territory. They had to change elevators several times, walking through interconnecting tunnels which Volyova said were necessary because of virus damage taking out large sections of the transit system. The décor and technological level of the walk-though areas was always subtly different, suggesting to Khouri that whole districts of the ship had been left fallow at different stages over the last few centuries. She remained nervous, but something in Sajaki and Volyova’s demeanour told her that what they had in mind was more akin to an initiation ceremony than a cold execution. They reminded her of children embarked on some piece of malicious tomfoolery — Volyova at least, though Sajaki looked and acted a good deal more authoritarian, like a functionary carrying out a grim civic duty.
‘Since you’re part of us now,’ he said, ‘it’s time you learnt a little more about the set-up. You might also appreciate knowing our reason for going to Resurgam.’
‘I assumed it was trade.’
‘That was the cover story, but let’s face it, it was never very convincing. Resurgam doesn’t have much in the way of an economy — the purpose of the colony is pure research — and it certainly lacks the resources to buy much from us. Of course, our data on the colony is necessarily old, and once we’re there we’ll trade what we can, but that could never be the sole reason for our voyage there.’
‘So what is?’
The lift they were in was decelerating. ‘The name Sylveste mean anything to you?’ Sajaki asked. Khouri did her best to act normally, as if the question were reasonable, and not one which had gone off in her cranium like a magnesium flare.
‘Well, of course. Everyone on Yellowstone knew about Sylveste. Guy was practically a god to them. Or maybe the devil.’ She paused, hoping her reactions sounded norm
al. ‘Wait though; which Sylveste are we talking about here? The older one, the guy who botched up those immortality experiments? Or his son?’
‘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; venous 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 city-wide semaphore system.