‘I’m sure you’ll do your best.’
The man’s fingers skated over his eyes, lightly probing.
‘I always admired your father, you know.’ Another cluck, reminding Sylveste of one of Janequin’s chickens. ‘It’s well known that he fashioned these eyes for you.’
‘His beta-level simulation,’ Sylveste corrected.
‘Of course, of course.’ He could visualise Falkender waving aside this vaporous distinction. ‘And not the alpha, either — we all know that vanished years ago.’
‘I sold it to the Jugglers,’ Sylveste said blankly. After years of holding it in, the truth had popped out of his mouth like a small sour pip.
Falkender made an odd tracheal sound which Sylveste eventually decided might be the man’s mode of chuckling. ‘Of course, of course. You know, I’m surprised no one ever accused you of that. But that’s human cynicism for you.’ A shrill whirring sound filled the air, followed by a nerve-searing vibration. ‘I think you can say goodbye to colour perception,’ Falkender said. ‘Monochrome’s going to be about the best I can manage.’
Khouri had been hoping for some mental breathing-space, some time in which to collect her thoughts, in which to listen quietly for the breathing of the invasive presence in her head. But the Mademoiselle was still speaking.
‘I believe Sun Stealer has already attempted this once before,’ she said. ‘I’m speaking of your predecessor, of course.’
‘You mean the stowaway tried to get into Nagorny’s head?’
‘Exactly that. Except in Nagorny’s case, there would have been no bloodhounds on which to hitch a ride. Sun Stealer must have had to resort to something cruder.’
Khouri considered what she had learnt from Volyova about this whole incident. ‘Crude enough to drive Nagorny mad?’
‘Evidently so,’ her companion nodded. ‘And perhaps Sun Stealer only attempted to impose his will on the man. Escape from the gunnery was impossible, so Sun Stealer merely tried to make Nagorny his puppet. Perhaps it was all done via subconscious suggestion, while he was in the gunnery.’
‘Exactly how much trouble am I in?’
‘Little, for now. There were only a few dogs — not enough for him to do much damage.’
‘What happened to the dogs?’
‘I decrypted them, of course — learnt their messages. But in doing so, I opened myself up to him. To Sun Stealer. The dogs must have limited him somewhat, because his attack on me was far from subtle. Fortunately, because otherwise I might not have deployed my defences in time. He was not particularly hard to defeat, but of course I was only dealing with a tiny part of him.’
‘Then I’m safe?’
‘Well, not quite. I ousted him — but only from the implant in which I reside. Unfortunately my defences do not extend to your other implants, including those Volyova installed in you.’
‘He’s still in my head?’
‘He may not have even needed the dogs,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘He might have entered Volyova’s implants as soon as she placed you in the gunnery for the first time. But he certainly found the dogs advantageous. If he hadn’t tried to invade me with them, I might not have sensed his presence in your other implants.’
‘I feel the same.’
‘Good. It means my countermeasures are effective. You recall how I used countermeasures against Volyova’s loyalty therapies?’
‘Yes,’ Khouri said, gloomily uncertain that those had worked quite as well as the Mademoiselle liked to imagine.
‘Well, these are much the same. The only difference is, I’m using them against those sites in your mind which Sun Stealer has occupied. For the last two years, we’ve been waging a kind of…’ She paused, and then seemed to experience a moment of epiphany. ‘I suppose you could call it a cold war.’
‘It would have to be cold.’
‘And slow,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘The cold robbed us of the energies for anything more. And, of course, we had to be careful that we did not harm you. Your being injured was no use to either myself or Sun Stealer.’
Khouri remembered why this conversation was possible in the first place.
‘But now that I’m warmed…’
‘You understand well. Our campaign has intensified since the warming. I think Volyova may even suspect something. A trawl is reading your brain even now, you see. It may have detected the neural war Sun Stealer and I are waging. I would have relented — but Sun Stealer would have used the moment to overwhelm my countermeasures.’
‘But you can hold him at bay…’
‘I believe so. But should I not succeed in holding Sun Stealer at bay, I felt you needed to know what happened.’
That much was reasonable: better to know that Sun Stealer was in her than to suffer the delusion that she was clean.
‘I also wished to warn you. The bulk of him remains in the gunnery. I’ve no doubt that he will try to enter you fully, or as fully as is possible, when he finds the chance.’
‘You mean, next time I’m in the gunnery?’
‘I admit the options are limited,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘But I thought it best that you knew the entirety of the situation.’
Khouri was, she thought, still a long way from anything that approximated that. But what the ghost said was correct. Better to appreciate the danger than ignore it.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘if Sylveste really was responsible for this thing, killing him won’t pose too many problems for me.’
‘Good. And the news is not unremittingly bad, I assure you. When I sent those dogs into the gunnery I also sent in an avatar of myself. And I know from the reports that the dogs returned that my avatar remained undetected by Volyova, at least during those early days. That was, of course, more than two years ago… but I’ve no reason to suspect that the avatar has been found since.’
‘Assuming it hasn’t been destroyed by Sun Stealer.’
‘A reasonable point,’ she conceded. ‘But if Sun Stealer is as intelligent as I suspect, he won’t do anything that might draw attention to himself. He can’t know for certain that this avatar isn’t something Volyova has sent into the system. She has enough doubts of her own, after all.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘So that, if necessary, I might gain control of the gunnery.’
If Calvin had had any grave, Sylveste thought, then his father would be spinning in it faster than Cerberus spun around the neutron star Hades, aggrieved at the abuse of his own handiwork. Except Calvin had already been dead, or at least non-corporeal, long before his simulation had engineered Sylveste’s vision. Such thought-games held the pain at bay, at least part of the time. And, in truth, there had never really been a time since his capture when he had not been in pain. Falkender was flattering himself if he imagined his surgery was exacerbating Sylveste’s agony to any significant degree.
Eventually — miraculously — it began to abate.
It was like a vacuum opening in his mind, a cold, void-filled ventricle which had not been there before. Taking the pain away was like taking away some inner buttress. He felt himself collapsing, whole eavestones of his psyche grinding loose under their suddenly unsupported weight. It took an effort to restore some of his own internal equilibrium.
And now there were colourless, evanescent ghosts in his vision.
By the second they hardened into distinct shapes. The walls of a room — as bland and unfurnished as he had imagined — and a masked figure crouched low over him. Falkender’s hand was immersed in a kind of chrome glove which ended not in fingers but in a crayfish-like explosion of tiny glistening manipulators. One of the man’s eyes was monocled by a lens system, connected to the glove by a segmented steel cable. His skin had the pallor of a lizard’s underbelly: his one visible eye was unfocused and cyanotic. Dried specks of blood sprinkled his brow. The blood was grey-green, but Sylveste knew well enough what it was.
In fact, now that he noticed, everything was grey-green.
The glove retracted, and Falkender p
ulled it from his wrist with the other hand. A caul of lubricant sheened the hand which had been under the glove.
He began to pack his kit away. ‘Well, I never promised miracles,’ he said. ‘And you shouldn’t have been expecting any.’
When he moved, it was jerkily, and it took moments for Sylveste to grasp that his eyes were only perceiving three of four images a second. The world moved with the stuttering motion of the pencil cartoons children made in the corners of books, flicked into life between thumb and forefinger. Every few seconds there were upsetting inversions of depth, when Falkender would appear to be a man-shaped recess carved into the cell’s wall, and sometimes part of his visual field would jam, not changing for ten or more seconds, even if he looked to another part of the room.
Still, it was vision, or at least vision’s idiot cousin.
‘Thank you,’ Sylveste said. ‘It’s… an improvement.’
‘I think we’d better move,’ said Falkender. ‘We’re five minutes behind schedule as it is.’
Sylveste nodded, and just the action of tipping his head was enough to spark pulsing migraines. Still, they were nothing compared with what he had endured until Falkender’s work.
He helped himself from the couch and stepped towards the door. Maybe it was because he now moved to the door with a purpose — because, for the first time, he actually expected to step through it — but the action suddenly seemed perverse and alien. He felt as if he were casually stepping off a precipice. He now had no balance. It was as if his inner equilibrium had become accustomed to no vision, and was now thrown by its return. The dizziness faded, though, just as two True Path heavies emerged from the outer corridor and took him by the elbows.
Falkender trailed behind. ‘Be careful. There may be perceptual glitches…’
But though Sylveste heard his words, they meant nothing to him. He knew where he was now, and that knowledge was momentarily too overpowering. He was back home, after more than twenty years of exile.
His prison was Mantell, a place he had not seen — and barely even visited in his memory — since the coup.
TEN
Approaching Delta Pavonis, 2564
Volyova sat alone in the huge sphere of the bridge, under the holographic display of the Resurgam system. Her seat, like the other vacant ones around her, was mounted on a long, telescopic, highly articulated arm, so that it could be steered to almost any point in the sphere. Hand under chin, she had been staring into the orrery for hours, like a child transfixed by some glittery toy.
Delta Pavonis was a chip of warm-red ambergris fixed at the middle, the system’s eleven major planets spaced around it on their respective orbits, positioned at their true positions; smears of asteroidal debris and comet-shards following their own ellipses; the whole orrery haloed by a tenuous Kuiper belt of icy flotsam; tugged into slight asymmetry by the presence of the neutron star which was Pavonis’s dark twin. The picture was a simulation, rather than an enlargement of what lay ahead. The ship’s sensors were acute enough to glean data at this range, but the view would have been distorted by relativistic effects, and — worse — would have been a snapshot of the system as it was years earlier, with the relative positions of the planets bearing no resemblance to the present situation. Since the ship’s approach strategy would depend critically on using the system’s larger gas giants for camouflage and gravitational braking, Volyova needed to know where things would be when they got there, not how they had been five years ago. And not only that. Before the ship arrived in the Resurgam system, its advance envoys would already have skimmed by invisibly, and it was just as crucial to arrange their passage at the optimum planetary alignment.
‘Release pebbles,’ she said, satisfied now that she had run enough simulations. Heeding her, Infinity deployed one thousand of the tiny probes, firing them ahead of the decelerating ship in a slowly spreading pattern. Volyova spoke a command into her bracelet and a window opened ahead of her, captured by a camera on the hull. The entire ensemble of pebbles contracted into the distance, apparently tugged away by an invisible force. The cloud diminished as it fell further and further ahead of the ship, until all Volyova could see was a blurred nimbus, diminishing quickly. The pebbles were moving at almost the speed of light, and would reach the Resurgam system months ahead of the ship. The swarm, by then, would be wider than the orbit of Resurgam around the sun. Each tiny probe would align itself towards the planet and catch photons across the electromagnetic spectrum. The data from each pebble would be sent in a tightly focused laser pulse back towards the ship. The resolution of any one unit in the swarm would be tiny, but by combining their results, a very sharp and detailed picture of Resurgam could be assembled. It would not tell Sajaki where Sylveste was, but it would give him an idea of the likely centres of power on the planet, and — more importantly — what kind of defences they were capable of mustering.
That was one thing on which Sajaki and Volyova had been in complete agreement. Even if they found Sylveste, it seemed unlikely that he would agree to come aboard without coercion.
‘Do you know what they did to Pascale?’ Sylveste said.
‘She’s safe,’ said the eye surgeon, as he led Sylveste along tracheal, rock-clad tunnels deep in Mantell. ‘That’s what I’ve heard, at least,’ he added, lessening Sylveste’s ease. ‘But I could be wrong. I don’t think Sluka would have killed her without good reason, but she may have had her frozen.’
‘Frozen?’
‘Until she’s useful. You’ll understand by now that Sluka thinks long-term.’
Continual waves of nausea kept threatening to overwhelm him. His eyes hurt, but, as he kept reminding himself, it was vision. That at least was something. Without it he was powerless, not even capable of effective disobedience. With it, escape might still be impossible, but at least he was spared the stumbling indignity of the blind. What vision he had, though, would have shamed the lowliest invertebrate. Spatial perception was haphazard, and colour existed in his world now only via nuances of grey-greens.
What he knew — what he remembered — was this.
He had not seen Mantell since the night of the coup twenty years earlier. The first coup, he corrected himself. Now that Girardieau had been overthrown, Sylveste had to get used to thinking of his own dethronement in purely historical terms. Girardieau’s regime had not immediately closed the place down, even though its Amarantin-directed research conflicted with their Inundationist agenda. For five or six years after the coup they had kept the place running, but one by one they had moved Sylveste’s best researchers back to Cuvier, replacing them with eco-engineers, botanists and geopower specialists. Finally, Mantell had been reduced to a skeleton-crewed test station, whole portions mothballed or derelict. It should have stayed that way, but trouble was already looming from outside elements. For years it had been rumoured that True Path’s leaders in Cuvier, Resurgam City, or whatever they were calling it now, were under direction from individuals beyond, a clique of one-time Girardieau sympathisers who had fallen out of favour during the machinations of the first coup. Supposedly, these brigands had altered their physiologies to cope with the dusty, oxygen-depleted atmosphere beyond the domes, using biotech purchased from Captain Remilliod.
Stories like that could be expected. But after sporadic attacks against a number of outposts, they began to look far less speculative. Mantell had been abandoned at some point, Sylveste knew, which meant that the current occupants might have been here for much longer than the time since Girardieau’s assassination. Months, or possibly even years.
Certainly they acted as if they owned the place. He knew when they entered a room that it was the one where Gillian Sluka had addressed him upon his arrival, however long ago that was. He failed to recognise it, though: it was entirely possible that during his tenancy in Mantell he had known this room intimately, but there were no longer any points of reference to aid him. The room’s decor and furnishings — such as there were — had been completely replaced. She stood with
her back to him, next to a table, gloved hands knitted primly above her hip. She wore a knee-length fluted jacket with leather shoulder patches, the colour rendered as murky olive by his eyes. Her hair was collected in a braided tail which hung between her shoulder blades. She was not projecting entoptics. On either side of the room, planetary globes orbited on slender, swan-necked plinths. Something approximating daylight slatted down from the ceiling, though his eyes leeched it of any warmth.
‘When we first spoke after your imprisonment,’ she said, in her croak of a voice, ‘I almost had the impression you couldn’t place me.’
‘I’d always assumed you were dead.’
‘That was what Girardieau’s people wished you to think. The story about our crawler being hit by a landslide — all lies. We were attacked — they thought you were aboard, of course.’
‘Why didn’t they kill me later, when they found me at the dig?’
‘They realised you were more useful to them alive than dead, of course. Girardieau was no fool — he always used you profitably.’
‘If you’d stayed with the dig, none of it would have happened. How did you survive, anyway?’
‘Some of us got out of the crawler before Girardieau’s henchmen reached it. We took what equipment we could; made it into the Bird’s Claw canyons and set up bubbletents. That’s all I saw for a year, you know: the inside of a bubbletent. I was hurt quite badly in the attack.’
Sylveste brushed his fingers over the mottled surface of one of Sluka’s pedestal-mounted globes. What they represented, he saw now, was the topography of Resurgam at different epochs during the planned Inundationist terraforming program. ‘Why didn’t you join Girardieau in Cuvier?’ he asked.
‘He considered me too embarrassing to admit back into his fold. He was prepared to let us live, but only because killing us would have attracted too much attention. There were lines of communication, but they broke down.’ She paused. ‘Fortunately we took some of Remilliod’s trinkets with us. The scavenger enzymes were the most useful. The dust doesn’t hurt us.’