Ultras, of course, were not the only spacegoing faction spawned by humanity. Skyjacks — at least here — made up a significant portion of the others she saw. They were spacedwellers to be sure, but they did not crew interstellar ships and so their outlook was very different to the wraithlike Ultras, with their dreadlocks and old-fashioned expressions. There were others still. Icecombers were a Skyjack offshoot; psychomodified for the extreme solitude which came from working the Kuiper belt zones, and they kept themselves to themselves with ferocious dedication. Gillies were aquatically modified humans who breathed liquid air; capable of crewing short-range, high-gee ships: they constituted a sizeable fraction of the system’s police force. Some gillies were so incapable of normal respiration and locomotion that they had to move around in huge robotic fishtanks when not on duty.
And then there were Conjoiners: descendants of an experimental clique on Mars who had systematically upgraded their minds, swapping cells for machines, until something sudden and drastic had happened. In one moment, they had escalated to a new mode of consciousness – what they called the Transenlightenment — precipitating a brief but nasty war in the process. Conjoiners were easy to pick out in crowds: recently they had bio-engineered huge and beautiful cranial crests for themselves, veined to dissipate the excess heat produced by the furious machines in their heads. There were fewer of them these days, so they tended to draw attention. Other human factions — like the Demarchists, who had long allied themselves with the Conjoiners — were acutely aware that only Conjoiners knew how to build the engines which powered lighthuggers.
‘Stop here,’ Hegazi said. The rickshaw darted to the streetside, where wizened old men sat at folding tables playing card games and mahjong. Hegazi slapped payment into the driver’s fleshy palm and then followed Volyova onto the streetside. They had arrived at a bar.
‘The Juggler and the Shrouder,’ Volyova said, reading the holographic sign above the door. It showed a naked man emerging from the sea, backdropped by strange, phantasmagoric shapes among the surf. Above him, a black sphere hung in the sky. ‘This doesn’t look right.’
‘It’s where all the Ultras hang out. You’d better get used to it.’
‘All right, point made. I suppose I wouldn’t feel at home in any Ultra bar, come to think of it.’
‘You wouldn’t feel at home in anything that didn’t have a navigational system and a lot of nasty firepower, Ilia.’
‘Sounds like a reasonable definition of common sense to me.’
Youths barged out into the street, plastered in sweat and what Volyova hoped was spilt beer. They had been arm wrestling: one of their number was nursing a prosthetic which had ripped off at the shoulder, another was riffling a wad of notes he must have won inside. They had the regulation sleep-stretch locks and the standard-issue star-effect tattoos, making Volyova feel simultaneously ancient and envious. She doubted that their anxieties extended much beyond the troubling question of where their next drink or bed was coming from. Hegazi gave them a look — he must have seemed intimidating to them, even given their chimeric aspirations, since it was difficult to tell which parts of Hegazi were not mechanical.
‘Come on,’ he said, pushing through the disturbance. ‘Grin and bear it, Ilia.’
It was dark and smoky inside, and with the combined synergistic effects of the noise from the music — pulsing Burundi rhythms overlaid with something that might have been human singing — and the perfumed, mild hallucinogens in the smoke, it took Volyova a few moments to get her bearings. Then Hegazi pointed to a miraculously spare table in the comer and she followed him to it with the minimum of enthusiasm.
‘You’re going to sit down, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t suppose I have much choice. We have to look as if we at least tolerate each other’s company or people will get suspicious.’
Hegazi shook his head, grinning. ‘I must like something about you, Ilia, otherwise I’d have killed you ages ago.’
She sat down.
‘Don’t let Sajaki hear you talking like that. He doesn’t take kindly to threats being made against Triumvir members.’
‘I’m not the one who has a problem with Sajaki, in case you forgot. Now, what are you drinking?’
‘Something my digestive system can process.’
Hegazi ordered some drinks — his physiology allowed that — waiting until the overhead delivery system brought them.
‘You’re still annoyed by that business with Sudjic, aren’t you?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Volyova said, crossing her arms. ‘Sudjic isn’t anything I can’t handle. Besides, I’d be lucky to lay a finger on her before Sajaki finished her off.’
‘He might let you have second pickings.’ The drinks arrived in a little perspex cloud with a flip-top, the cloud suspended from a trolley which ran along rails mounted on the ceiling. ‘You think he’d actually kill her?’
Volyova attacked her drink, glad of something to wash away the dust of the rickshaw ride. ‘I wouldn’t trust Sajaki not to kill any of us, if it came to that.’
‘You used to trust him. What made you change your mind?’
‘Sajaki hasn’t been the same since the Captain fell ill again.’ She looked around nervously, well aware that Sajaki might not be very far from earshot. ‘Before that happened, they both visited the Jugglers, did you know that?’
‘You’re saying the Jugglers did something to Sajaki’s mind?’
She thought back to the naked man stepping from the Juggler ocean. ‘That’s what they do, Hegazi.’
‘Yes, voluntarily. Are you saying Sajaki chose to become crueller?’
‘Not just cruel. Single-minded. This business with the Captain…’ She shook her head. ‘It’s emblematic.’
‘Have you spoken to him recently?’
She read his question. ‘No; I don’t think he’s found who he’s looking for, though doubtless we’ll find out shortly.’
‘And your own quest?’
‘I’m not looking for a specific individual. My only constraint is that whoever I find should be saner than Boris Nagorny. That ought not to pose any great difficulties.’ She let her gaze drift around the drinkers in the bar. Although none of the people looked definitely psychotic, neither was there anyone who exactly looked stable and well-adjusted. ‘At least I hope not.’
Hegazi lit a cigarette and offered Volyova a second. She took it gratefully and smoked it solidly for five minutes, until it resembled a glowing speck of fissile material wrapped in glowing embers. She made a mental note to replenish her supply of cigarettes during this stopover. ‘But my search is only just beginning,’ she said. ‘And I have to handle it delicately.’
‘You mean,’ Hegazi said with a knowing smile, ‘that you’re not actually going to tell people what the job is before you recruit them.’
Volyova smirked. ‘Of course not.’
The sapphire-hulled shuttle he was riding had not come far: only a short inter-orbital hop from the Sylvestes’ familial habitat. Even so, it had been difficult to arrange. Calvin strongly disapproved of his son having any contact with the thing which now resided in the Institute, as if the thing’s state of mind might infect Sylveste by some mysterious process of sympathetic resonance. Yet Sylveste was twenty-one. He chose his own associations now. Calvin could go hang, or burn his neurons to ash in the madness he was about to inflict on himself and his seventy-nine disciples… but he was not going to dictate who Sylveste could see.
He saw SISS looming ahead, and thought, none of this is real; just a narrative strand from his biography. Pascale had given him the rough-cut and asked for his comments. Now he was experiencing it, still walled in his prison in Cuvier, but moving like a ghost through his own past, haunting his younger self. Memories, long buried, were welling up unbidden. The biography, still far from complete, would be capable of being accessed in many ways, from many viewpoints, and with varying degrees of interactivity. It would be an intricately faceted thing, detailed enough that one
could easily spend more than a lifetime exploring only a segment of his past.
SISS looked as real as he remembered. The Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies had its organisational centre in a wheel-shaped structure dating from the Amerikano days, although there was not a single cubic nanometre which had not been reprocessed many times over the intervening centuries. The wheel’s hub sprouted two grey, mushroom-shaped hemispheres, pocked with docking interfaces and the modest defence systems permitted by Demarchist ethics. The wheel’s edge was a hectic accretion of living modules, labs and offices, embedded in a matrix of bulk chitin polymer, linked by a tangle of access tunnels and supply pipes walled in shark-collagen.
‘It’s good.’
‘You think so?’ Pascale’s voice was distant.
‘That’s how it was,’ Sylveste said. ‘How it felt when I visited him.’
‘Thanks, I… well, this was nothing — the easy part. Fully documented. We had blueprints for SISS, and there are even some people in Cuvier who knew your father, like Janequin. The hard part’s what happened afterwards — where we have so little to go on except what you told them on your return.’
‘I’m sure you’ve done an excellent job of it.’
‘Well, you’ll see — sooner rather than later.’
The shuttle coupled with the docking interface. Institute security servitors were waiting beyond the lock, validating his identity.
‘Calvin won’t be thrilled,’ said Gregori, the Institute’s housekeeper. ‘But I suppose it’s too late to send you home now.’
They had been through this ritual two or three times in the last few months, Gregori always washing his hands of the consequences. It was no longer necessary to have someone escort Sylveste through the shark-collagen tunnels to the place where they kept him; the thing.
‘You’ve nothing to worry about, Gregori. If Father gives you any trouble, just tell him I ordered you to show me around.’
Gregori arched his eyebrows, the emotionally attuned entoptics around him registering amusement.
‘Isn’t that just what you’re doing, Dan?’
‘I was trying to keep things amicable.’
‘Utterly futile, dear boy. We’d all be much happier if you just followed your father’s lead. You know where you are with a good totalitarian regime.’
It took twenty minutes to navigate the tunnels, moving radially outwards to the rim, passing through scientific sections where teams of thinkers — human and machine — grappled endlessly with the central enigma of the Shrouds. Although SISS had established monitoring stations around all the Shrouds so far discovered, most of the information-processing and collating took place around Yellowstone. Here elaborate theories were assembled and tested against the facts, which were scant, but unignorable. No theory had lasted more than a few years.
The place where they kept him, the thing Sylveste had come to see, was a guarded annex on the rim; a generously large allocation of volume given the lack of evidence that the thing within was actually capable of appreciating the gift. The thing’s name — his name — was Philip Lascaille.
He did not have many visitors now. There had been lots in the early days, shortly after his return. But interest had dwindled when it became clear that Lascaille could tell his inquisitors nothing, useful or otherwise. But, as Sylveste had quickly appreciated, the fact that no one paid Lascaille much attention these days could actually work to his advantage. Even Sylveste’s relatively infrequent visits — once or twice a month — had been sufficiently far from the norm to enable a kind of rapport to form between the two of them… between himself and the thing Lascaille had become.
Lascaille’s annex contained a garden, under an artificial sky glazed the deep blue of cobalt. A breeze had been created, sufficient to finger the windchimes suspended from the bower of over-arching trees which fringed the garden.
The garden had been landscaped with paths, rockeries, knolls, trellises and goldfish ponds, the effect being of a rustic maze, so that it always took a minute or so to find Lascaille. When Sylveste did find him the man was usually in the same state: naked or half-naked, filthy to some degree, his fingers smeared with the rainbow shades of crayons and chalks. Sylveste would always know he was getting warm when he saw something scrawled on the stone path; either a complex symmetrical pattern, or what looked like an attempt at mimicking Chinese or Sanskrit calligraphy, without actually knowing any real letters. At other times the things which Lascaille marked on the path looked like Boolean algebra or semaphore.
Then — it was always only a question of time — he would round a corner and Lascaille would be there, working on another marking, or carefully erasing one he had worked on previously. His face would be frozen in a rictus of total concentration, and every muscle in his body would be rigid with the exertion of the drawing, and the process would take place in complete silence, except for the stirring of the windchimes, the quiet whisper of the water or the scraping of his crayons and chalks against stone.
Sylveste would often have to wait hours for Lascaille to even register his presence, which would generally amount to nothing more than the man turning his face to him for an instant, before continuing. Yet the same thing always happened in that instant. The rictus would soften, and in its place would be — if only for a moment — a smile; one of pride or amusement or something utterly beyond Sylveste’s fathoming.
And then Lascaille would return to his chalks. And there would be nothing to suggest that this was a man — the only man — the only human being — to ever touch the surface of a Shroud and return alive.
‘Anyway,’ Volyova said, quenching what remained of her thirst, ‘I’m not expecting it to be easy, but I have no doubts that I will find a recruit sooner or later. I’ve begun to advertise, stating our planned destination. As far as the work is concerned, I say only that it requires someone with implants.’
‘But you’re not going to take the first one that comes along,’ Hegazi said. ‘Surely?’
‘Of course not. Though they won’t know it, I’ll be vetting my candidates for some kind of military experience in their backgrounds. I don’t want someone who’s going to crack up at the first hint of trouble, or someone unwilling to submit to discipline.’ She was beginning to relax now, after all her difficulties with Nagorny. A girl was playing on stage, working a gold teeconax through endlessly spiralling ragas. Volyova did not greatly care for music; never had done. But there was something mathematically beguiling about the music which for a moment worked against her prejudices. She said: ‘I’m confident of success. We need only concern ourselves with Sajaki.’
At that moment Hegazi nodded towards the door, where bright daylight forced Volyova to squint. A figure stood there, majestically silhouetted in the glare. The man was garbed in a black anklelength cloak and a vaguely defined helmet, the light making it resemble a halo cast around his head. His profile was split diagonally by a long smooth stick which he gripped two-handedly.
The Komuso stepped into the darkness. What looked like a kendo stick was only his bamboo shakuhachi; a traditional musical instrument. With well-rehearsed rapidity he slid the thing into a sheath concealed behind the folds of his cloak. Then, with imperial slowness, he removed the wicker helmet. The Komuso’s face was difficult to make out. His hair was brilliantined, slickly tied back in a scythe-shaped tail. His eyes were lost behind sleek assassin’s goggles, infrared sensitive facets dully catching the room’s tinted light.
The music had come to an abrupt stop, the girl with the teeconax vanishing magically from the stage.
‘They think it’s a police bust,’ Hegazi breathed, the room quiet enough now that he didn’t need to raise his voice. ‘The local cops send in the basket-cases when they don’t want to bloody their own hands.’
The Komuso swept the room, flylike eyes targeting the table where Hegazi and Volyova sat. His head seemed to move independently of the rest of his body, like some species of owl. With a bustle of his cloak he cruised towards them
, appearing to glide more than locomote. Nonchalantly Hegazi kicked a spare seat out from under the table, simultaneously taking an unimpressed drag on his cigarette.
‘Good to see you, Sajaki.’
He dropped the wicker helmet next to their drinks, ripping the goggles away from his eyes as he did so. He lowered himself into the vacant chair, then turned casually around to the rest of the bar. He made a drinking gesture, imploring the people to get on with their own business while he attended to his. Gradually the conversation rumbled back into life, although everyone was keeping half an eye on the three of them.
‘I wish the circumstances merited a celebratory drink,’ Sajaki said.