TWENTY-ONE
Approaching Cerberus/Hades, 2566
Sylveste had always known this point would come. But until now he had managed to keep it quarantined from his thoughts, acknowledging its existence without focusing his attention on what it actually entailed, the way a mathematician might ignore an invalidated part of a proof until the rest was rigorously tested and found to be free not just of glaring contradictions but of the least hint of error.
Sajaki had insisted that they journey alone to the Captain’s level, forbidding Pascale or any of the crew to accompany them. Sylveste did not argue the point, although he would have preferred his wife to be with him. It was the first time that Sylveste had been alone with Sajaki since arriving on the Infinity, and as they took the elevator downship, Sylveste ransacked his mind for something to talk about; anything except the atrocity that lay ahead of them.
‘Ilia says her machines aboard the Lorean will need another three or four days,’ Sajaki said. ‘You’re quite certain you wish her work to continue?’
‘I have no second thoughts,’ Sylveste said.
‘Then I have no choice but to comply with your wishes. I’ve weighed the evidence and decided to believe your threat.’
‘You imagine I hadn’t worked that out for myself already? I know you too well, Sajaki. If you didn’t believe me, you’d have forced me into helping the Captain while we were still around Resurgam, and then quietly disposed of me.’
‘Not true, not true.’ Sajaki’s voice had an amused quality to it. ‘You underestimate my sheer curiosity. I think I’d have indulged you this far just to see how much of your story was true.’
Sylveste was incapable of believing that for a moment, but equally, he saw no point in debating it. ‘Just how much of it don’t you believe, now that you’ve seen Alicia’s message?’
‘But that could so easily have been faked. The damage to her ship could have been inflicted by her own crew. I shan’t believe things entirely until something jumps out of Cerberus and starts attacking us.’
‘I rather suspect you’ll get your wish,’ Sylveste said. ‘In four or five days. Unless Cerberus really is dead.’
They spoke no more until they had reached their destination.
It was not, of course, the first time he had seen the Captain — not even during this visit. But the totality of what had become of the man was still shocking; each time it was as if Sylveste had never properly set eyes on the scene before. True enough: this was his first visit to the Captain’s level since Calvin had renewed his eyes using the ship’s superior medical capabilities, but there was more to it than that. It was also the case that the Captain had changed since last time; perceptibly now — as if his rate of spread was accelerating, racing towards some unguessable future state even as the ship raced towards Cerberus. Perhaps, Sylveste thought, he had arrived in the nick of time — assuming that any intervention at all could help the Captain now.
It was tempting to think that this quickening was significant; perhaps even symbolic. The man, after all, had been sick — if one could properly call this state sickness — for many decades, and yet he had chosen this period in which to enter a new phase of his malady. But that was an erroneous view. One had to consider the Captain’s timeframe: relativistic flight had compressed those decades to a mere handful of years. His latest blooming was less unlikely than it seemed; there was nothing ominous about it.
‘How does this work?’ Sajaki asked. ‘Do we follow the same procedures as last time?’
‘Ask Calvin — he’ll be running things.’
Sajaki nodded slowly, as if the point had only just occurred to him. ‘You should have a say in things, Dan. It’s you he’ll be working through.’
‘Which is exactly why you don’t need to consider my feelings — I won’t even be present.’
‘I don’t believe that for one moment. You’ll be there, Dan — fully aware, too, from what I remember last time. Maybe not in control, but you’ll be participating. And you won’t like it — we know that much from last time.’
‘You’re an expert all of a sudden.’
‘If you didn’t hate this, why would you have kept away from us?’
‘I didn’t. I wasn’t in any position to run.’
‘I’m not just talking about the time when you were in prison. I’m talking about you coming here in the first place; to this system. What were you doing if you weren’t running from us?’
‘Maybe I had reasons for coming here.’
For a moment Sylveste wondered if Sajaki was going to push the matter further, but the moment passed and the Triumvir seemed to mentally discard that line of enquiry. Perhaps the topic bored him. It struck Sylveste that Sajaki was a man who existed in the present and thought largely about the future, and for whom the past held few enticements. He was not interested in sifting through possible motivations or might-have-beens, perhaps because, on some level, Sajaki was not really capable of grasping these issues.
Sylveste had heard that Sajaki had visited the Pattern Jugglers, as he himself had done prior to the Shrouder mission. There was only one reason for visiting the Jugglers, which was to submit oneself to their neural transformations, opening the mind to new modes of consciousness unavailable through human science. It was said — rumoured, perhaps — that no Juggler transform was without its deficits; that there was no resculpting of the human mind which did not result in some pre-existing faculty being lost. There were, after all, only a finite number of neurones in the human brain, and a corresponding finite limit to the number of possible interneuronal connections. The Jugglers could rewire that network, but not without destroying prior connectional pathways. Perhaps Sylveste himself had lost something, but if that were the case, he could not locate the absence. In Sajaki’s case, it might be more obvious. The man was missing some instinctive grasp of human nature, almost an autism. There was an aridity in his conversations, but it was only clear if one paid proper attention. In Calvin’s laboratories back on Yellowstone, Sylveste had once spoken to an early, historically preserved computer system which had been created several centuries before the Transenlightenment, during the first flourishing of artificial intelligence research. The system purported to mimic natural human language, and initially it did, answering inputted questions with apparent cognisance. But the illusion lasted for no more than a few exchanges; eventually one realised that the machine was steering the conversation away from itself, deflecting questions with a sphinxlike impassiveness. It was far less extreme with Sajaki, but the same sense of evasion was present. It was not even particularly artful. Sajaki made no effort to disguise his indifference to these matters; there was no sociopathic gloss of superficial humanity. And why should Sajaki even bother to deny his nature? He had nothing to lose, and in his own way, he was no more or less alien than any of the other crew.
Eventually, when it became obvious that he was not going to pursue Sylveste any further about his reasons for coming to Resurgam, Sajaki addressed the ship, asking it to invoke Calvin and project his simulated image onto the Captain’s level. The seated figure appeared almost immediately. As usual Calvin subjected his witnesses to a brief pantomime of burgeoning awareness, stretching in his seat and looking around him, though without a glimmer of real interest.
‘Are we about to begin?’ he asked. ‘Am I about to enter you? Those machines I used on your eyes were like a tantalus, Dan — for the first time in years I remember what I’ve been missing.’
“Fraid not,’ Sylveste said. ‘This is just a — how should we call it? Exploratory dig?’
‘Then why bother invoking me?’
‘Because I’m in the unfortunate position of requiring your advice.’ As he spoke, a pair of servitors emerged from the darkness along the corridor. They were hulking machines which rode on tracks and whose upper torsos sprouted a glistening mass of specialised manipulators and sensors. They were antiseptically clean and highly polished, but they looked about a thousand years old, as if t
hey had just trundled out of a museum. ‘There’s nothing in them that the plague can touch,’ Sylveste said. ‘No components small enough to be invisible to the naked eye; nothing replicating, self-repairing or shape-shifting. All the cybernetics are elsewhere — kilometres away upship, with only optical connections to the drones. We won’t hit him with anything replicating until we use Volyova’s retrovirus.’
‘Very thoughtful.’
‘Of course,’ Sajaki said, ‘for the delicate work, you’ll have to hold the scalpel yourself.’
Sylveste touched his brow. ‘My eyes aren’t so immune. You’ll have to be very careful, Cal. If the plague touches them…’
‘I’ll be more than careful, believe me.’ From the monolithic enclosure of his seat, Calvin threw back his head and laughed like a drunkard amused by his own drollery. ‘If your eyes go up, even I won’t get a chance to put my affairs in order.’
‘Just so long as you appreciate the risk.’
The servitors lurched forwards, approaching the shattered angel of the Captain. More than ever he looked like something which had not so much crept with glacial slowness from his reefer, but had burst with volcanic ferocity, only to be frozen in a strobe flash. He radiated in every direction parallel to the wall, extending far into the corridor on either side, for dozens of metres. Nearest to him, his growth consisted of trunk-thick cylinders, the colour of quicksilver, but with the texture of jewel-encrusted slurry, constantly shimmering and twinkling, hinting at phenomenally industrious buried activity. Further away, on his periphery, the branches subdivided into a bronchial-like mesh. At its very boundary, the mesh grew microscopically fine and blended seamlessly with the fabric of its substrate: the ship itself. It was glorious with diffraction patterns, like a membrane of oil on water.
The silver machines seemed to dissolve into the silver background of the Captain. They positioned themselves on either side of the wrecked shell of the reefer unit at his heart, no more than a metre from the violated carapace. It was still cold there — if Sylveste had touched any part of the Captain’s reefer, his flesh would have stayed there, soon to be incorporated into the chimeric mass of the plague. When the operation proper began, they would have to warm him just to work. He would quicken then — or rather, the plague would seize the opportunity to increase its rate of transformation — but there was no other way to work on him, for at the temperature he had reached now, all but the crudest of tools would themselves become inoperable.
The machines now extended booms tipped with sensors; magnetic resonance imagers to peer deep into the plague, differentiating between the machine, chimeric and organic strata which had once been a man. Sylveste had the drones pass what they saw to his eyes, appearing as a lilac-tinged overlay superimposed on the Captain. It was only with effort that he could make out the residual outline of the human inside which had become this; it was like a ghostly outline beneath the paint on a recycled canvas. But as the MRI sweep continued, the details grew progressively sharper, the man’s plague-distorted anatomy bleeding into clarity. That was when the horror of it could no longer be ignored. But Sylveste just stared.
‘Where are we — I mean you — going to begin?’ he asked, towards Calvin. ‘Are we healing a man or sterilising a machine?’
‘Neither,’ Calvin said drily. ‘We’re fixing the Captain, and I’m afraid he’s rather transcended both those categories.’
‘You understand magnificently,’ Sajaki said, standing back from the cold tableau to allow the Sylvestes an unimpeded view. ‘It’s no longer a matter of healing, or even repairing. I prefer to think of it as restoration.’
‘Warm him,’ Calvin said.
‘What?’
‘You heard. I want him warmed — just temporarily, I assure you. But long enough to take a few biopsies. I understand Volyova restricted her examinations to the plague periphery. That was diligent of her; she did well, and the samples she obtained are invaluable indices of the growth pattern, and of course she couldn’t have engineered her retrovirus without them. But now we need to reach into the core; to where there’s still living meat.’ He smiled, undoubtedly enjoying the revulsion which flickered across Sajaki’s face. So maybe there was some empathy there after all, Sylveste thought — or at least the atrophied stump of what it had once been. For an instant he felt kinship with the Triumvir.
‘What are you so interested in?’
‘His cells, of course.’ Calvin fingered the curlicued arm of his seat. ‘They say the Melding Plague corrupts our implants, blends them into the flesh, by subverting their replicating machinery. I think it goes beyond that. I think it tries to hybridise — tries to achieve some harmony between the living and the cybernetic. That’s what it’s doing here, after all — nothing more malign than trying to hybridise the Captain with his own cybernetics and the ship. It’s almost benign; almost artistic, almost purposeful.’
‘You wouldn’t be saying that if you were where he is now,’ Sajaki said.
‘Of course not. That’s why I want to help him. And why I need to see into his cells. I want to know if the plague has touched his DNA — whether it’s tried to hijack his own cellular machinery.’
Sajaki extended a hand towards the chill. ‘Go ahead, in that case. You’ve permission to warm him. But only for as long as it takes. Then I want him back under, until it’s time to operate. And I don’t want those samples leaving here.’
Sylveste noticed that the Triumvir’s outstretched hand was shaking.
‘All this has something to do with a war,’ Khouri said in the spider-room. ‘That much I’m clear about. The Dawn War, they called it. It was a long time ago. Millions of years back.’
‘How would you know?’
‘The Mademoiselle gave me a lesson in galactic history, just so I’d appreciate what was at stake. And it worked, too. Can’t you accept that going along with Sylveste is not a good idea?’
‘I was never remotely of the opinion it was.’
Pull the other one, Khouri thought. Volyova was still childishly curious about Cerberus/Hades, even now that she knew it contained something dangerous. More so, in fact. Before, the mystery had consisted of a single anomalous neutrino signature. Now she had seen the alien machinery for herself, via Alicia’s recording. No; in some respects Volyova was as fascinated by the place as Sylveste. The difference was, she could still be reasoned with. Volyova still had a residual core of sanity.
‘Do you think we’d stand a chance of persuading Sajaki of the risks?’
‘Not much. We’ve kept too much from him. He’d kill us just for that. I’m still worried about him trawling you. He mentioned it again just now, you know. I managed to deflect him, but…’ She sighed. ‘In any case, Sylveste is the one pulling the strings now. What Sajaki does or doesn’t want is almost irrelevant.’
‘Then we have to get to Sylveste.’
‘It won’t work, Khouri. No amount of rational argument is going to sway him now — and I’m afraid what you’ve told me doesn’t even qualify as that.’
‘But you believe it.’
Volyova raised a hand. ‘I believe some of it, Khouri — but that isn’t the same thing. I’ve witnessed some of the things you claim to understand, like the incident with the cache-weapon. And we know alien forces are involved on some level, which makes it difficult for me to dismiss your Dawn War story completely. But we still don’t have anything resembling the big picture.’ She paused. ‘Maybe when I’ve finished analysing that splinter…’
‘What splinter?’
‘The one Manoukhian planted on you.’ Volyova told her the rest; how she had found the splinter during the medical examination she had conducted after Khouri’s recruitment. ‘At the time I just assumed it was a piece of shrapnel from your soldiering days. Then I wondered why your own medics hadn’t removed it earlier. I suppose I should have realised there was something strange about it even then… but it clearly wasn’t any kind of functional implant, just a piece of jagged metal.’
&nbs
p; ‘And you haven’t worked out what it is yet?’
‘No, I…’ But that was the truth of it, as Khouri learned. There was a lot more to that little shard than met the eye. The blend of metals was fairly unusual, even for someone who had worked with some very strange alloys indeed. Also, Volyova said, it had what looked like odd manufacturing flaws, but which could just as easily have been stresses worked into the metal long afterwards; bizarre nanoscale fatigue patterns. ‘Still, I’m nearly there,’ she said.
‘Maybe it’ll tell us what we need. But one thing won’t change. I can’t do the one thing which would get us out of this mess, can I? I can’t kill Sylveste.’
‘No. But if the stakes become higher — if it becomes absolutely clear that he must be killed — then I think we have to begin thinking about what would be required.’
It took a moment for the true meaning of what Volyova was saying to sink in.
‘Suicide?’
Volyova nodded dourly. ‘Meanwhile I have to do the best possible job I can of granting Sylveste’s wish, or else I put us all in danger.’
‘That’s what you don’t understand,’ Khouri said. ‘I’m not saying that we’ll all die if the attack against Cerberus isn’t successful, which is what you seem to assume. I’m saying that something terrible is going to happen, even if the attack works. That’s exactly why the Mademoiselle wanted him dead.’
Volyova had sealed her lips and shaken her head slowly, for all the world like a parent admonishing a child.
‘I can’t start a mutiny on the basis of some vague premonition.’
‘Then maybe I’ll have to start it myself.’
‘Be careful, Khouri. Be very careful indeed. Sajaki’s a more dangerous man than you can even begin to imagine. He’s waiting for any excuse to crack your head open and see what’s inside. He might not even wait for one. Sylveste is… I don’t know. I’d think twice about crossing him as well. Especially now that he has the smell of it.’
‘Then we have to get to him indirectly. Through Pascale. Do you understand? I’ll tell her everything, if I think she can get him to see sense.’