‘Maybe, but that was beside the point. At the time of the Eighty, the retransfer operation was still beyond the technology of the day. There was no real hurry: Cal could always have the clone put in reefersleep until he needed it, or simply reclone another one from the boy’s cells. He was thinking well ahead.’
‘Assuming the retransfer ever became possible.’
‘Well, Calvin knew it was a long shot. The important thing was that there was a second fall-back option apart from retransfer.’
‘Which was?’
‘The beta-level simulation.’ Sajaki’s voice had become as slow, cold and icy as the breezes in the Captain’s chamber. ‘Although not formally capable of consciousness, it was still an incredibly detailed facsimile of Calvin. Its relative simplicity meant it would be easier to encode its rules into the wetware of Dan’s mind. Much easier than imprinting something as volatile as the alpha.’
‘I know the primary recording — the alpha — disappeared,’ she said. ‘There was no Calvin left to run the show. And I guess Dan began to act a little more independently than Calvin might have wished.’
‘To put it mildly,’ Sajaki said, nodding. ‘The Eighty marked the beginning of the decline of the Sylveste Institute. Dan soon escaped its shackles, more interested in the Shrouder enigma than cybernetic immortality. He kept possession of the beta-level sim, though he never realised its exact significance. He thought of it more as an heirloom than anything else.’ The Triumvir smiled. ‘I think he would have destroyed it had he realised what it represented, which was his own annihilation.’
Understandable, Khouri thought. The beta-level simulation was like a trapped demon waiting to inhabit a new host body. Not properly conscious, but still dangerously potent, by virtue of the subtle ingenuity with which it mimicked true intelligence.
‘Cal’s precautionary measure was still useful to us,’ Sajaki said. ‘There was enough of Cal’s expertise encoded in the beta to mend the Captain. All we had to do was persuade Dan to let Calvin temporarily inhabit his mind and body.’
‘Dan must have suspected something when it worked so easily.’
‘It was never easy,’ Sajaki admonished. ‘Far from it. The periods when Cal took over were more akin to some kind of violent possession. Motor control was a problem: in order to suppress Dan’s own personality, we had to give him a cocktail of neuro-inhibitors. Which meant that when Cal finally got through, the body he found himself in was already half-paralysed by our drugs. It was like a brilliant surgeon performing an operation by giving orders to a drunk. And — by all accounts — it wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences for Dan. Quite painful, he said.’
‘But it worked.’
‘Just. But that was a century ago, and now it’s time for another visit to the doctor.’
‘Your vials,’ said the Ordinator.
One of the wimpled aides from Pascale’s party stepped forward, brandishing a vial identical in size and shape to the one which Sylveste removed from his pocket. They were not the same colour: the fluid in Pascale’s vial had been tinted red, against the yellow hue of Sylveste’s. Similar darkish fronds of material orbited within. The Ordinator took both vials and held them aloft for a few moments before placing them side by side on the table, in clear view of the audience.
‘We are ready to begin the marriage,’ she said. She then performed the customary duty of asking if there were anyone present who had any bioethical reasons as to why the marriage should not take place.
There was, of course, no objection.
But in that odd, loaded moment of branching possibilities, Sylveste noted a veiled woman in the audience reach into a purse and uncap a dainty, jewel-topped amber perfume jar.
‘Daniel Sylveste,’ said the Ordinator. ‘Do you take this woman to be your wife, under Resurgam law, until such time as this marriage is annulled under this or any prevailing legal system?’
‘I do,’ Sylveste said.
She repeated the question to Pascale.
‘I do,’ Pascale said.
‘Then let the bonding be done.’
Ordinator Massinger took the wedding gun from the mahogany box and snapped it open. She loaded the reddish vial — the one Pascale’s party had delivered — into the breech, then reclosed the instrument. Status entoptics briefly haloed it. Girardieau placed his hand on Sylveste’s upper arm, steadying him as the Ordinator pressed the conic end of the instrument against his temple, just above his eye-level. Sylveste had been right when he told Girardieau that the ceremony was not painful, but neither was it entirely pleasant. What it was was a sudden flowering of intense cold, as if liquid helium were being blasted into his cortex. The discomfort was brief, however, and the thumb-sized bruise on his skin would not last more than a few days. The brain’s immune system was weak by comparison with the body as a whole, and Pascale’s cells — floating as they did in a stew of helper medichines — would soon bond with Sylveste’s own. The volume was tiny — no more than a tenth of one per cent of the brain’s mass — but the transplanted cells carried the indelible impression of their last host: ghost threads of holographically distributed memory and personality.
The Ordinator removed the spent red vial and slotted the yellow one in its place. It was Pascale’s first wedding under the Stoner custom, and her trepidation was not well disguised. Girardieau held her hands as the Ordinator delivered the neural material, Pascale visibly flinching as it happened.
Sylveste had let Girardieau think the implant was permanent, but this was never the case. The neural tissue was tagged with harmless radioisotope trace elements, enabling it to be routed out and destroyed, if necessary, by divorce viruses. So far, Sylveste had never taken that option, and imagined he never would, no matter how many marriages down the line he was. He carried the smoky essences of all his wives — as they carried him — as he would carry Pascale. Indeed, on the faintest level, Pascale herself now carried traces of his previous wives.
That was the Stoner way.
The Ordinator carefully replaced the wedding gun in its box. ‘According to Resurgam law,’ she began, ‘the marriage is now formalised. You may —’
Which was when the perfume hit Janequin’s birds.
The woman who had uncapped the amber jar was gone, her seat glaringly vacant. Fragrant, autumnal, the odour from the jar made Sylveste think of crushed leaves. He wanted to sneeze. Something was wrong.
The room flashed turquoise blue, as if a hundred pastel fans had just opened. Peacocks’ tails, springing open. A million tinted eyes.
The air turned grey.
‘Get down!’ Girardieau screamed. He was scrabbling madly at his neck. There was something hooked in it, something tiny and barbed. Numbly, Sylveste looked at his tunic and saw half a dozen comma-shaped barbs clinging to it. They had not broken the fabric, but he dared not touch them.
‘Assassination tools!’ Girardieau shouted. He slumped under the table, dragging Sylveste and his daughter with him. The auditorium was chaos now, a frenzied mass of agitated people trying to escape.
‘Janequin’s birds were primed!’ Girardieau said, virtually screaming in Sylveste’s ear. ‘Poison darts — in their tails.’
‘You’re hit,’ Pascale said, too stunned for her voice to carry much emotion. Light and smoke burst over their heads. They heard screams. Out of the corner of his eye, Sylveste saw the perfume woman holding a sleekly evil pistol in a two-handed grip. She was dousing the audience with it, its fanged barrel spitting cold pulses of boser energy. The float-cams swept round her, dispassionately recording the carnage. Sylveste had never seen a weapon like the one the woman used. He knew it could not have been manufactured on Resurgam, which left only two possibilities. Either it had arrived from Yellowstone with the original settlement, or it had been sold by Remilliod, the trader who had passed through the system since the coup. Glass — Amarantin glass that had survived ten thousand centuries — broke shrilly above. Like pieces of shattered toffee, it crashed down in jagged shards in
to the audience. Sylveste watched, powerless, as the ruby planes buried themselves in flesh, like frozen lightning. The terrified were already screaming loud enough to drown out the cries of those in pain.
What remained of Girardieau’s security team was mobilising, but terribly slowly. Four of the militia were down, their faces punctured by the barbs. One had reached the seating, struggling with the woman who had the gun. Another was opening fire with his own sidearm, scything through Janequin’s birds.
Girardieau meanwhile was groaning. His eyes were rolling, bloodshot, hands grasping at thin air. ‘We have to get out of here,’ Sylveste said, shouting in Pascale’s ear. She seemed still dazed from the neural transfer, blearily oblivious to what was happening.
‘But my father…’
‘He’s gone.’
Sylveste eased Girardieau’s dead weight onto the cold floor of the temple, careful to keep behind the safety of the table.
‘The barbs were meant to kill, Pascale. There’s nothing we can do for him. If we stay, we’ll just end up following him.’
Girardieau croaked something. It might have been ‘Go’, or it might only have been a final senseless exhalation.
‘We can’t leave him!’ Pascale said.
‘If we don’t, his killers end up winning.’
Tears slashed her face. ‘Where can we go?’
He looked around frantically. Smoke from concussion shells was filling the chamber, probably from Girardieau’s own people. It was settling in lazy pastel spirals, like scarves tossed from a dancer. Just when it was almost too dark to see, the room plunged into total blackness. The lights beyond the temple had obviously been turned off, or destroyed.
Pascale gasped.
His eyes slipped into infrared mode, almost without him having to think about it.
‘I can still see,’ he whispered to her. ‘As long as we stay together, you don’t have to worry about the darkness.’
Praying that the danger from the birds was gone, Sylveste rose slowly to his feet. The temple glowed in grey-green heat. The perfume woman was dead, a fist-sized hot hole in her side. Her amber jar was smashed at her feet. He guessed it had been some kind of hormonal trigger, keyed to receptors Janequin had put in the birds. He had to have been part of it. He looked — but Janequin was dead. A tiny dagger sat in his chest, trailing hot rivulets down his brocade jacket.
Sylveste grabbed Pascale and shoved her along the ground towards the exit, a vaulted archway gilded with Amarantin figurines and bas-relief graphicforms. It seemed that the perfume woman had been the only assassin actually present, if one discounted Janequin. But now her friends were entering, garbed in chameleoflage. They wore closefitting breather masks and infrared goggles.
He pushed Pascale behind a jumble of upturned tables.
‘They’re looking for us: he hissed. ‘But they probably think we’re already dead.’
Girardieau’s surviving security people had fallen back and taken up defensive positions, kneeling within the fan-shaped auditorium. It was no match: the newcomers carried much heavier weapons, heavy boser-rifles. Girardieau’s militia countered with low-yield lasers and projectile weapons, but the enemy were cutting them apart with blithe, impersonal ease. At least half the audience were unconscious or dead; they had caught the brunt of the peacock venom salvo. Hardly the most surgically precise of assassination tools, those birds — but they had been allowed into the auditorium completely unchecked. Sylveste observed that two were still alive, despite what he had at first imagined. Still triggered by trace molecules of the perfume which remained aloft, their tails were flicking open and shut like the fans of nervous courtesans.
‘Did your father carry a weapon?’ Sylveste said, instantly regretting his use of the past tense. ‘I mean, since the coup.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Pascale said.
Of course not; Girardieau would never have confided such a thing to her. Quickly Sylveste felt around the man’s still body, hoping to find the padded hardness of a weapon beneath his ceremonial clothes.
Nothing.
‘We’ll have to do without,’ Sylveste said, as if the stating of this fact would somehow alleviate the problem it encapsulated. ‘They’re going to kill us if we don’t run,’ he said, finally.
‘Into the labyrinth?’
‘They’ll see us,’ Sylveste said.
‘But maybe they won’t think it’s us,’ Pascale said. ‘They might not know you can see in the dark.’ Though she was effectively blind, she managed to look him square in the face. Her mouth was open, an almost circular vacancy of expression or hope. ‘Let me say goodbye to my father first.’
She found his body in the darkness, kissed him for the last time. Sylveste looked to the exit. At that moment the soldier guarding it was hit by a shot from what remained of Girardieau’s militia. The masked figure crumpled, his body heat pooling liquidly into the floor around his body, spreading smoky white maggots of thermal energy into the stonework.
The way was clear, for the moment. Pascale found his hand and together they began to run.
EIGHT
En Route to Delta Pavonis, 2546
‘I take it you’ve heard the news concerning the Captain,’ Khouri said, when the Mademoiselle coughed discreetly from behind her. Other than the Mademoiselle’s illusory presence, she was alone in her quarters, digesting what Volyova and Sajaki had told her of the mission.
The Mademoiselle’s smile was patient. ‘Rather complicates matters, doesn’t it? I’ll admit I considered the possibility that the crew might have some connection with him. It seemed logical, given their intention of travelling to Resurgam. But I never extrapolated anything this convoluted.’
‘I suppose that’s one word for it.’
‘Their relationship is…’ the ghost seemed to take a moment to choose her words, though Khouri knew it was all annoying fakery. ‘Interesting. It may limit our options in the future.’
‘Are you still sure you want him killed?’
‘Absolutely. This news merely heightens the urgency. Now there is the danger that Sajaki will try to bring Sylveste aboard.’
‘Won’t it be easier for me to kill him then?’
‘Certainly, but at that point killing him would not suffice. You would then have to find a way of destroying the ship itself. Whether or not you found a way to save yourself in the process would be your problem.’
Khouri frowned. Perhaps it was her, but very little of this made very much sense. ‘But if I guarantee that Sylveste’s dead…’
‘That would not suffice,’ said the Mademoiselle, with what Khouri sensed was a new candour. ‘Killing him is part of what you must do, but not the entirety. You must be specific in the manner of killing.’
Khouri waited to hear what the woman had to say.
‘You must allow him absolutely no warning; not even seconds. Furthermore, you must kill him in isolation.’
‘That was always part of the plan.’
‘Good — but I mean precisely what I say. If it isn’t possible to ensure solitude at any given moment, you must delay his death until it is. No compromises, Khouri.’
This was the first time they had discussed the manner of his death in any detail. Evidently the Mademoiselle had decided that Khouri was now fit to know slightly more than before, if not the whole picture.
‘What about the weapon?’
‘You may use any which suits you, provided the weapon incorporates no cybernetic components above a certain level of complexity, which I will stipulate at a later date.’ Before Khouri could object she added, ‘A beam weapon would be acceptable, provided the weapon itself was not brought into proximity with the subject at any stage. Projectile and explosive devices would also serve our purpose.’
Given the nature of the lighthugger, Khouri thought, there ought to be enough suitable weapons lying around for her use. When the time came, she should be able to appropriate something moderately lethal and allow herself time to learn its nuances before deploy
ing it against Sylveste.
‘I can probably find something.’
‘I’m not finished. You must not approach him, nor must you kill him when he is in the proximity of cybernetic systems — again, I will stipulate my requirements nearer the time. The more isolated he is, the better. If you can manage to do it when he is alone and far from help, on Resurgam’s surface, you will have accomplished your task to my complete satisfaction.’ She paused. Evidently all this was hugely important to the Mademoiselle, and Khouri was doing her best to remember it, but so far it sounded no more logical than the incantations of a Dark Age prescription against fever.
‘But on no account must he be allowed to leave Resurgam. Understand that, because when a lighthugger arrives around Resurgam — even this lighthugger — Sylveste will try and find a way to get himself aboard. That must not be allowed to happen, under any circumstances.’
‘I get the message,’ Khouri said. ‘Kill him down below. Is that everything?’
‘Not quite.’ The ghost made a smile; a ghoulish one Khouri had never seen before. Maybe, she thought, the Mademoiselle had yet to exhaust her reservoir of expressions, keeping a few in store for moments such as this. ‘Of course I want proof of his death. This implant will record the event, but on your return to Yellowstone I also want physical evidence to corroborate what the implant records. I want remains, and more than just ashes. Preserve what you can in vacuum. Keep the remains sealed and isolated from the ship. Bury them in rock if that suits you, but just bring them back to me. I must have proof.’
‘And then?’
‘Then, Ana Khouri, I will give you your husband.’
Sylveste did not stop to catch his breath until he and Pascale had reached and passed the ebony shell encasing the Amarantin city, taking several hundred footsteps into the tangled maze which wormholed through it. He chose his directions as randomly as was humanly possible, ignoring the signs added by the archaeologists, desperately trying to avoid following a predictable path.
‘Not so quickly,’ Pascale said. ‘I’m worried about getting lost.’