Yet now more than ever he believed the connection was real and identifiable among these forty-eight betas.
“Dreyfus asked me to summon you,” Cassandra Leng said, addressing the forty-seven other betas, not all of whom were pleased at this unscheduled gathering. “That’s as much as I know, though.” She turned her eyes on Dreyfus, holding his gaze for a private moment before adding: “So whatever reason he has for moving us around like chess pawns, it had better be a good one.”
“Thank you, Cassandra,” he said, nodding at her. “And thank you all, for agreeing to meet here. I know that each and every one of you has a desire to see your death explained, and any guilty parties brought to justice. But along the way you have had to be patient with my questions, and there are times when I simply can’t be as open with you as I’d wish. I understand the frustration—”
“We’ve already been over everything,” said Simon Morago, the eighteenth victim. “Every detail of our past lives, everyone who may or may not have had a grudge against us.”
“Give him a chance,” Cassandra Leng said. “He’s trying hard, trying to treat us as people, not patterns of data. But he only has so much time.”
“Then he’d better hurry up and come up with something good,” Morago said.
“I can’t promise miracles,” Dreyfus said, making eye contact with as many of the dead as he could. “What I can promise is that we won’t leave any stone unturned, especially if it hints at a linking factor, something in your past you all share. Now we think we may have found something.”
Antal Bronner, standing near the front of the gathering, said: “I haven’t been here as long as most of these people, but I still feel as if we’ve been over and over our histories. If there was some secret we all had in common, wouldn’t we have stumbled on it by now?”
“Not necessarily,” Dreyfus said. “My suspicion is that your living instantiations may have had direct dealings with a place, a facility, and that what happened to them there may be connected to Wildfire. Equally, you may have been denied direct knowledge of this link. Your primaries might never have spoken of their involvement with the place, or even taken steps to suppress their own memories. But there may have been bleed-through …”
“Bleed-through,” he heard someone murmur, in a mocking tone.
“You were created to emulate your primaries, to stand for them when they could not be present,” Dreyfus said. “You were also curated. Your primaries got to decide what you did and didn’t know, and they also had the option to shape your responses to certain stimuli. You’re all idealised in one form or another. A blemish removed here, a quick temper there. An unfortunate or embarrassing episode in your primary’s past—why would you ever need to be troubled by that?”
“Is there a point to this?” asked Morago. “If we don’t know, we don’t know.”
Dreyfus searched his memories before answering. “Years ago I interviewed the sequestered beta of a person suspected of involvement in vote doctoring. The primary protested their innocence, as she would. Despite extensive questioning the beta appeared to have no overt knowledge of the crime. But during the sessions the beta kept touching a brooch. The action had no direct significance for the beta; it was merely a learned gesture from the primary, empty of meaning. Later I established that the primary’s brooch contained an illegal device that allowed them to submit multiple fraudulent votes. The beta had picked up on the significance of this brooch without any direct knowledge of the crime itself. That’s bleed-through.”
“And you think it applies to us?” Cassandra Leng asked. “We’re not criminals, Prefect—just law-abiding citizens who happened to die by some unexplained means.”
“I agree,” he said, meeting her eyes again. “But there’s still a possibility that your primaries had knowledge denied to you. Such as the significance of this building.”
“What building?” Simon Morago asked.
Dreyfus smiled. He had been ready for the question.
“The one behind you,” he said.
It had formed while he spoke, shaped to rise from the island in the middle of the lake. They turned, in ones and twos to begin with, then en masse.
It was an accurate representation, reconstructed from the images and scans sent back by the Heavy Technical Squad. A slender, off-white trunk rising high, with angular branches emerging from its upper levels to support a cluster of globe-shaped secondary buildings, suspended from the branches like fruit.
“Its name,” he said, “is Elysium Heights.”
10
They were returning from one of Caleb’s hunting games. It had started well enough, as the games generally did. Soon enough, though, Julius had ended up in a squabble with his brother. Caleb wanted them to have actual weapons, conjured out of quickmatter. Julius had objected, and they had nearly come to blows. Caleb had stalked off in a huff, Julius catching up with him, and now they were walking back to the Shell House in a tense, broody silence.
Something burst in Julius. He stopped Caleb with a hand on his shoulder, feeling hard muscles tense in response.
“What is it?” Caleb asked, turning.
“I had the dream again.”
“No one’s interested. No one cares.”
“When we were little you told me you had the same ones.”
“I was lying. Just saying whatever you wanted me to say, to get you to shut up.” Caleb turned away and kept walking.
“No,” Julius said, calm despite himself. “You weren’t lying. Maybe you don’t have the dreams any more, but you used to, and it was about the same place I keep dreaming about.”
“You mean the place with the Ursas,” Caleb said mockingly, not looking back. “Those stupid robot teddy bears, or whatever they were. What else was it you used to go on about?”
“I know you remember it all, whether you want to or not. The metal corridors, the dormitories, the windows looking out … do you know where it was, Caleb? Not here, not the Shell House. But it has to be on this planet somewhere. It’s Yellowstone outside those windows, but nowhere close to Chasm City. It means we weren’t born here, within the city limits. We were brought up in some other place and they don’t want us to know about it.”
Caleb glanced back, putting on his best scornful face. “You’re an idiot, Julius. If we’d been raised somewhere else, why wouldn’t we remember?”
“We do!” Julius said earnestly. “It means someone didn’t want us to remember, so they tried to scrub away the memory, so we’d grow up here and only ever remember the Shell House. But there’s something else behind it, slowly coming through. We were there together. But Mother and Father aren’t there, just the other boys and girls, and the Ursas, whatever they are.” He walked on for a few paces before delivering his coup de grace. “And something really, really bad happened there.”
“It’s not a real place,” Caleb said, some of his earlier assurance gone.
“But you dream about it as well.”
“Only because you’ve put the idea of it in my head.”
“There’s blood,” Julius said. “A lot of blood. And dead boys, and dead girls. All cut up, all lying on the floor. But we’re still alive. We’re standing up and everyone else is dead.” He swallowed hard. “There’s blood on us, too, but it’s not our own blood. We’re all right. But we’ve got knives in our hands.”
Julius and Caleb had learned to make a point of arriving earlier than any given appointment. There was a chance of catching their parents in the strained end stages of some discussion or argument, one that would have been silenced by the time they were meant to arrive. Often all they picked up was a snatched word or sentence, but over time it was enough to assemble a picture of what their parents would never have shared in their presence.
“He has a temper,” she said now, her voice low.
“So does Julius,” their father answered. “They’re strong-willed boys. After what they went through, would you expect them to be any different?”
“I
t’s worse with Caleb. Julius flares up, but he doesn’t hold onto things. Caleb does. He’s not ready for this, Marlon.”
“If you had a say, he’d never be.”
“I love them both. I want them both to be happy. They already have everything laid at their feet. They can go out into the world and make us proud. They don’t need … this. Not Caleb, and maybe not even Julius.”
“We’ve been building up to this moment for years. Why are you having second thoughts now?”
“Because if we don’t have them now, there’ll never be another chance. You can’t take back the gift of fire, Marlon, and that’s what you’re about to put into their heads.”
“This city needs us. The world needs us. The quiet, guiding hand of a Voi … it’s always been there, barely sensed, barely used, but always ready. Millions have come to trust in our guiding wisdom. We can’t let them down now.”
Mother gave a sigh. “You’ll allow me power of revocation. At least give me that.”
Marlon sounded relieved this was the only concession expected of him. “Yes … of course. Full revocation rights. And I have the same. If either us senses that boys are drifting—”
“Good,” Mother said tersely.
“But we don’t give up on them, even then. We’ll continue their education … bring them back to the point when they can be trusted again. As I know they will be.”
“I wish I shared your optimism.”
“There’s no other choice for us, and no other choice for them. But if we have to revoke it, we will.”
Julius knocked on the doorframe. “We’re here,” he said, feigning breathlessness. “Sorry we’re late.”
“Julius is getting better at conjuring,” Caleb said, effortlessly falling into the same lie. “He wanted to show off what he can do now. I need to look to my laurels: he’s starting to get quite good.”
“But no threat to you yet, Caleb,” Mother said, her words carrying a darker implication given what the brothers had overheard. “Come in, anyway—and try to learn some punctuality, both of you.”
They knew this room well enough, although they had only been allowed in it on a few occasions. It was called Chandler’s Room, after Chandler Prentiss Voi, and most of its windowless space was given over to Chandler’s Solid Orrery.
Julius had found the Solid Orrery fairly impressive the first time he had seen it. Supposedly it had been a gift from the technicians of Panoply, grateful for Chandler Prentiss Voi’s help when its terms of operation were being decided. With the right conjuring commands, any part of the Solid Orrery could be enlarged and inspected, down to an almost insane level of magnification.
Julius had proved that to himself once, by zeroing in on Yellowstone, and then finding the eye-shaped atmospheric smudge that marked the location of Chasm City. He had enlarged the city, making it swell out of the side of the planet like a malignant growth, and he had peeled back the main dome and located the greenish swatch—surprisingly small—that was the open area containing the wooded estates, of which the Voi home was only a small element. The Solid Orrery had only let him go as far as the family dome, though, refusing to let him peel it back to see the Shell House.
All the same, though, he had come to think less of it once his own implants were up and integrated, and he had full access to the consensual information field. Anything made of mere matter looked a little tawdry and limited compared to the sensory riches accessible through direct neural stimulation.
Yet there was something different about it today—a kind of pearly glimmer to its details, an inherent lack of focus, as if he saw it through tear-stained eyes. Fine, glinting threads seemed to bind its elements, as if a spider had been crawling around it overnight, trying to fix a web to its endlessly shifting geometry.
Caleb glanced at him, his look confirming what Julius was seeing.
“Why does it look like that?” Julius asked.
“It’s an abstraction layer,” Father said. “A separate visual overlay, augmenting the quickmatter realisation.”
“We realised that,” Caleb said.
“The purpose is to indicate the flow of abstraction packets,” Father said, looking at the boys in turn. “Trillions of packets flowing from world to world, from core to core, from mind to mind. Abstraction queries, polling results, communications, even the basic instructions underpinning the shaping of quickmatter and the consensual field. The gears that grind behind every human thought, every human whim. The great work of Sandra Voi, laid bare.” He grinned at his sons, while Mother looked on with nothing but apprehension. “Beautiful, isn’t it? I don’t think there’s anything lovelier.”
Julius and Caleb glanced at each other, Julius certain that his brother shared the same thought. It was pretty enough, but if their father expected them to be bowled over by it, he had underestimated both of them.
“I see you need some convincing,” Father said. A soft smile creased his lips. “A ballot is pending in the Glitter Band—some minor matter of inter-habitat relations. The cores are beginning to return the results as each citizen registers their vote. Packets flowing between worlds, from the cores to the hubs and routers, to the central collating systems. All under the supreme and watchful eye of Panoply, ensuring that democracy proceeds without friction or impediment.” Father stretched over, reaching an arm into the Solid Orrery. His fingers tweezed at one of the fine, twinkling threads. He pulled with thumb and forefinger. The thread stretched, as if it were on the point of breaking, and then snapped back to its original configuration.
But something glinted between his fingers. He relaxed back to a normal standing position, still pinching a dancing, silvery spark between thumb and forefinger. He brought it close, studying it with a certain lustful fascination, the way an ogre might regard a fairy.
“This is a packet,” he said, his eyes crossed together and gleaming with the reflected twinkle of the tiny spark. “Or more accurately, a linked bundle of packets, signifying a returning vote. Perfect, integral, self-correcting. But for the moment it’s not going anywhere.”
The boys looked on. All of a sudden Julius had a thousand questions. But one thing was already clear to him. Father was not making some theoretical point about something that could or might happen. This was real; this was now. His father had actually reached into the Solid Orrery and stopped a vote in its tracks.
“No one can do that,” Caleb said.
“He’s right,” Julius put in. “The system’s foolproof. That’s what Sandra Voi gave us.”
“Sandra Voi gave us a little more than that,” Father said.
Julius was beginning to feel quite disturbed by that dancing glint. He wanted Father to put it back, to let it go on its way, to restore the right and proper way of things. He had the feeling Father had unpicked some vital thread from the corner of reality, and if he kept tugging at it the whole thing was in danger of unravelling.
But it was Mother who took up the explanation. “Sandra Voi was a genius, but she was also a pragmatist. Our demarchist system is as perfect as it can ever be. Flawless, instantaneous mass democratic participation. The will of the people, without interference. No government, no hierarchies, no vested interests, no possibility of bias or corruption.”
“But—” Julius said.
Mother raised a gentle, silencing hand, and he let her continue. “But true democracy embodies the possibility of its own dissolution. If a ballot were put to the people to abandon our demarchist principles, and the votes carried the day … what then? You may say that no such vote would ever be cast. But that is to neglect the pressures that may apply during times of crisis, during emergencies and times of economic hardship, or when wild and seductive new ideas run rife. Sandra Voi took the long view. She knew that even the most perfect system must contain a self-protecting contingency.”
“We are that contingency,” Father said.
“Sandra Voi designed a safeguard into her system,” Mother said. “Not a loophole, or a weakness, but a deliberate featur
e. It allowed Sandra to guide the hand of democracy, to keep it from undoing itself—or from making choices it might come to regret. It was a subtlety, built into the neural architecture at a level that would allow it to pass all scrutiny. Each generation of Vois has known of this contingency, and each has borne that knowledge with dignity and restraint. Ours is not to use this power flagrantly, but always to be ready to use it when the moment calls.”
“Please put that vote back,” Julius said.
Father smiled tightly, but obeyed Julius. He reached back into the Solid Orrery and the glint sped from his fingers, losing itself almost instantly in one of the twinkling threads.
“The system will know something went wrong,” Caleb said. “It will sense that that vote was delayed.”
“No,” Father said, not without a swell of pride. “That’s all taken care of. The contingency passes all error-handling routines. Deceives them, you might say. I could have snuffed that vote out of existence, made it never reach the collating systems, and no error would have been detected at any level.”
“This isn’t right,” Julius said. “No one’s meant to interfere with the system—not even us.”
“It’s not interference,” Caleb said, surprising him. “It’s self-preservation. Isn’t that right, Father?”
“It’s a necessary duty—an obligation,” Father said. “One to be treated with the utmost respect. And so it’s been. In the years since the founding of this city, the contingency has been evoked only a handful of times … and on each occasion with a heavy and reluctant heart.” His attention shifted from Caleb to Julius. “Something still troubles you, son.”
Julius swallowed. He was still shocked by what he had seen, but he took it at face value, not for a second doubting that the show of power had been genuine. Now, though, his mind was flashing ahead, evaluating the implications.