“Just so that you can kill them?”
“They’d be able to kill us as well. Or hurt us, at least. More fun that way.”
“Your idea of fun, maybe. Anyway, you won’t have time for anything like that. Neither will I. We’ll have responsibilities. The contingency—”
“You really are soft, Julius. You’ll do anything they tell you, won’t you? Anything to make them pat you on the head and say you’re being a good Voi.”
Julius stood up from the dying panther, disgusted by his own feelings of pity towards the mindless figment.
“I don’t hear you rebelling—at least not when Mother and Father are nearby.”
“I know my mind. I’ll play along with their ideas for a bit. But why should I waste my life doing something no one will ever know or care about?”
“Because that’s what we’ve always done. Are we finished here?”
Caleb shaped a hand in the direction of the panther, narrowed his eyes in mock concentration, and made it give out one last ragged breath before dying.
“Happy now?”
There was a spot at the edge of the dome where Lurcher had been doing some repairs, replacing a damaged panel. The area had been burned clear of overgrowth, allowing the boys to get as close to the dome as they liked. The new glass panel was the only one not filmed over in a fine coating of mossy discoloration.
Through it the spires and towers of Chasm City twinkled with an unnatural clarity, so close that Julius felt his heart hammer in anticipation of the bright, teeming life that awaited them beyond the Shell House. He watched the tiny glinting specks of moving air vehicles slipping between those fabulous structures, thinking of the power and the glamour of their invisible occupants.
He could not say he had ever been discontented with his upbringing within the domed estate, especially if he discounted these last few months, filled as they were with revelations both exciting and troubling. The boys had been given enormous freedoms as they grew up, as well as more room for sport and games than the children in those towers could ever hope for. Their lessons had seldom been burdensome, Mother and Father rarely too strict with their discipline. Even Lurcher tolerated the boys’ boisterous excesses most of the time.
But this was not the real world. The real world lapped at its borders, but it did not penetrate them. The Solid Orrery offered the boys a glimpse of what it was to swim in a sea of total information, how they might shape and manipulate the flow of data through that sea, but they would not know the full, immersive experience of abstraction until they were beyond the Shell House. Caleb was right about quickmatter, too. Beyond the dome it was commonplace, not even worth mentioning. And yet Julius trusted that their shaping faculties were already far in advance of the average citizen. He yearned to put that skill to its test, beyond the restricted arena of the estate. He imagined admiring eyes on him, people who neither knew nor cared that Caleb had a slight advantage over his brother. They would need to moderate their talents, of course—Father and Mother had made that perfectly plain. But they could still be just as skilled as anyone else, and that would be no small thing.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Caleb said quietly, appearing to be just as transfixed by the view as his brother.
Julius had learned to be sceptical of such overtures. “Oh?”
“I’ll think of a different game for us soon. One that doesn’t involve hunting things. To be honest, it isn’t as much fun as it used to be. This place is just too small.”
“We’ll be free of it before long.”
“Will you come back, do you think?”
Julius was confounded. It had never even crossed his mind not to come back. He had taken it as a stone certainty that the Shell House would always be here, a part of his life to which he was anchored.
“Of course. Won’t you?”
“Oh, I expect so,” Caleb said, kicking a stone lodged near the window’s base. “But there’s a lot of the world I want to see first. Not just Chasm City, but everything beyond it. The Glitter Band, to begin with, all those pretty little worlds. But I’m not sure I’d want to stop there. We’re still fairly rich, aren’t we? I’d like to go on one of those ships, travel to another system—see more of the universe. So what if it takes decades?”
“People don’t live for ever,” Julius said.
“I’d say goodbye properly,” Caleb replied. “And tell them I’d look after the place when I get back. Lurcher will still be around. Robots don’t wear out half as quickly as people.”
“You said something about a deal?”
“All right. I’ll come up with another game—something more to your taste. Hide and seek or something silly like that. But you’ll do something for me, too. I don’t want to hear another word about that place you keep going on about. Nothing more about Amerikanos or Ursas or other boys and girls, or us with knives. It’s over, Julius—done. A bad dream you can forget about. It never happened, anyway.”
“How can you be so certain?”
“I’m not a fool. I picked up that book of yours when you weren’t looking. All that stuff happened three hundred years ago.”
“Maybe they froze us. Or cloned us and gave us the memories of some dead boys.”
“Or maybe it’s just something you read in a book that got into your dreams.”
“And yours,” Julius said softly. “And into yours.”
“Do you want this deal or not?”
Julius weighed the things that mattered to him. “Yes. I suppose.”
“Then we’ll say no more of it. We’ve both got more important things ahead of us, haven’t we? You’ve heard Mother and Father.” He nodded out to the lights of Chasm City. “There’s a whole world depending on us.”
Back at the Shell House Mother and Father were waiting for them, coldly furious. There was some sharp new tension between the two of them, too, as if they had only recently been arguing. Julius and Caleb exchanged glances, each trying to read the other. They had stretched the hunting game out too long, that was true, but it was hardly the first time they had committed such an infraction.
“What is it?” Caleb demanded, always the first to speak up.
“Come inside,” Father said.
Just for a moment Julius flirted with the idea of outright disobedience. What was to stop them turning around and going back into the grounds? But a neck-prickle alerted him to the fact that Lurcher was coming back to the house, trudging along one of the paths with a wheelbarrow. Was it coincidence that the robot was at their backs now, gently discouraging any thoughts of rebellion?
“We’d better go in,” Julius murmured.
“I almost miss Spider-fingers,” Caleb said back in the same low voice. “At least they usually kept up a united front when he was around.”
“Until the end,” Julius said, thinking back to the three-way row between his parents and Doctor Stasov, before the abrupt termination of his visits.
They stepped onto the terrace and followed their parents through the main entrance into the Shell House, and then across the clacking tiles of the marble-floored lobby, on to the drawing room where their lessons often took place. It was the one with the solid holoclavier. Insolently, Caleb lifted the lid on its keys and played a painful, discordant triad.
Their mother slammed the lid down, giving Caleb just enough time to snatch his fingers out.
“Have we done something wrong?” Julius asked, Caleb joining him, the two brothers standing with their hands behind their backs.
“No,” Mother said. “We have. It’s been too much, too soon. Your father and I have come to a decision. There’ll be a hiatus in your development, while we give you some time to reflect on what’s already happened.”
“A hiatus?” Julius asked, thinking that such a thing did not sound too bad.
“Your mother feels …” Father began, before drawing an admonishing look from his wife. “We both feel … that you could benefit from a little more maturity, before proceeding with your … education.??
?
“Maturity?” Caleb questioned. “We’re old enough, aren’t we? If we were in Chasm City, we’d have almost all the rights of any adult citizen by now.”
“It’s not about rights,” Mother said. “It’s about wisdom. You don’t have it yet. Certainly not enough. One day … maybe. But it’s too soon now.”
Caleb frowned so hard a dark trench appeared in his forehead. “What do you mean, ‘one day’?”
“I mean that nothing’s promised,” Mother answered. “This is too great and powerful a gift to be bestowed thoughtlessly.”
“There’s been nothing thoughtless about it,” Father said. His face was so strained it looked like it might crack into shards at any moment. “We acted as we saw fit. You are our natural heirs, and this responsibility will be yours, in the fullness of time.”
“If they prove themselves,” Mother said. “With balance, restraint, empathy, foresightedness. Kindness and fairness. Altruistic instincts. Maybe they will have that in time. Perhaps one of them does, at least. The glimmerings of it. But it’s not proven.”
“It’s just a question of slowing down,” Father said. “Of more instruction, more study.”
“Then there won’t be a revocation?” Caleb asked.
Julius grew cold. The word had never been uttered in their direct presence, only when the boys had overheard it in a supposedly private exchange between Mother and Father. But they both knew exactly what it meant.
He tried to salvage the situation. “I don’t even know what that means. Revoke what?”
“Oh, don’t be naïve,” Caleb chided. “The thing that they’ve given us. The contingency. It was put in our heads, it can be taken out again just as easily.”
“There’ll be no need for revocation,” Father said.
“I’d be the judge of that,” Mother answered, directing a fierce glance at her husband. “Yes, we have that power. It could be done. You’d still be Vois, still able to go out into the world with all the advantages of that name. But you wouldn’t have the means to correct the world when it’s in danger of harming itself.”
“Then who would?” Julius asked.
“We’d continue to,” Father said. “As we have done. We’re not ready for the grave just yet. Many good decades ahead of us, aren’t there, Aliya?”
“Oh yes,” she answered, with grim resignation.
“You’d still be the inheritors of this responsibility … this prize,” Father went on. “Even revocation wouldn’t have to be permanent. It would just allow all of us time to ensure that things are done properly. Wouldn’t it?”
“Anything’s possible,” she said, clearly not the answer their father had been hoping for, judging by the continued strain on his features.
“I suppose if it’s just temporary,” Caleb said, “it wouldn’t be too bad.” He looked to his brother for support. “We understand the responsibility, don’t we, Julius? It’s a big thing. If it takes a little more time, it’ll still be worth it in the end.”
“You’ll continue as you are,” Father said. “For now. We’ll be watching, considering. But I have faith in both of you. It’s time to show us that you have the moral stature required of you. I know you do … as does your mother. But we need to see it.”
Caleb swallowed hard, looked to his brother with a sudden false humility, as if on the point of tears.
Julius saw through it in an instant. But he said nothing.
“We’ll show you,” Caleb said.
Aumonier invited Doctor Demikhov to take a seat opposite her, in the position around the tactical room table that Thalia Ng occasionally occupied. A smattering of seniors and analysts were already present, but the pressures of recent days had begun to take a toll on the usual shift patterns, leading to vacant seats, slumped postures and expressions of near-exhaustion.
“I won’t detain you unduly, Doctor Demikhov,” she said, settling her hands together before her, and trying to look and sound unflappably composed. “You have something for us, I believe.”
“Where is Garlin now?”
“Being prepared for soft questioning. Is there a particular line of enquiry you felt we should pursue?”
Doctor Demikhov was still wearing surgical gloves. “Dreyfus told me he thinks someone may have breached the Voi kernel. I was inclined to dismiss any such possibility, given how secure that architecture has proven itself over the years.”
“Just as well, given that it’s inside the heads of around one hundred million citizens.” Aumonier glanced at her fellow prefects, calibrating their various states of fatigue and sharpness. “I’ll remind us all that Auriault brought back a head in an unusually good state of preservation. It’s been our best shot so far. What has it given us, Doctor?”
“I can’t see what’s been done to the kernel. That’s lost for good—too much thermal randomisation. But there’s a solid state update register. Until now, we’ve never had a clean look at it in any of the victims.”
“And in the case of this man”—Aumonier had to snatch a look at the Wildfire list to bring back the relevant name—“Nicholas D’Arcy Moon?”
“Many updates. But a major change logged in ’399. Someone went deep into his implants—maybe as deep as the Voi kernel.”
“That fits within the period of full operation of the clinic—’395 to ’407. But we don’t know where it was done.”
“We do—or at least, we can be very sure. The neural updates were unusual, but they were performed using proprietary medical devices. There are commercial fingerprints … subtle, but traceable. They match the surgical equipment already logged and extracted from Elysium Heights.” Doctor Demikhov began to pick at his gloved fingertips. “There’s next to no doubt. Moon was a client of Doctor Julius Mazarin.”
“And you believe he was set up as a victim of Wildfire from that very moment?”
“It’s hard to say. Wildfire could be an intrinsic process, with a pre-set clock. Or it may still require an external trigger, something transmitted to the implants. In that case, the clinical procedure would have primed the implants into a receptive state, but there’d still need to be an external stimulus.”
“There were no verified cases prior to Cassandra Leng,” Aumonier reminded her gathering. “What we have is a slowly rising pattern of deaths beginning about four hundred days ago, which happens to be of indirect benefit to Devon Garlin. I don’t see that as consistent with an intrinsic clock. Much more likely to me is that Garlin has begun hatching eggs he set in place twenty-eight or more years ago, knowing as he does that now is the ideal time to push his separatist agenda. He’s been biding his time all this while, waiting for us to be at our weakest.”
Lillian Baudry, the most senior person present besides Aumonier herself, said: “We’ll push for a confession using all available means. But in the meantime we should ensure he won’t trigger any more cases.”
“There’s an easy way,” Demikhov said. “Remove his implants. You have reasonable grounds, don’t you?”
“Reasonable grounds,” Aumonier replied. “But not the moral authority.”
“We could petition for it,” Baudry said.
“But not without clarifying the reason for our proposed action. Then we’d definitely have a panic on our hands.”
“What if we make it clear that we’re only anticipating two thousand deaths across the whole Glitter Band?” asked Ingvar Tench. “If the citizens are reasonable, they’ll understand that there’s no reason for mass panic.”
“Until we have a solid patient list that figure is speculative,” Aumonier replied.
Baudry looked nonplussed. “Call in a citizen quorum, then, if you won’t petition.”
“I’ve already initiated one. But not to give me consent to open up his head. I just want the questioning and trawling to be completely transparent and accountable.” Aumonier paused, tiredness hitting her like a slow rolling fog bank. “We’re not out of legal options. Isolate Garlin. Nobody with an implant speaks to him, nobody with a
n implant goes near him. No communications equipment, no whiphounds—nothing that he might be able to reach. If we’re right, we should see a flattening in the death curve.”
“Then we’ll have him,” Baudry said, with a sharp, retributional gleam in her eye.
Aumonier gave the woman a dutiful nod. She wondered how evident her own feelings on the matter were. It would be good to have him.
Rather good indeed.
After an hour chasing sleep, Sparver had surrendered to the inevitable—washing, dressing in full uniform and making his way to the refectory to shovel some food into his system, even though he had no appetite. A dozen or so other prefects were scattered through the room, most of them engaged in low, weary conversation. He took his tray to a vacant table near the wall, neither inviting nor disdaining company, but glad enough to be alone with his thoughts.
Inevitably it was Thalia Ng who swam most readily to mind, and the complications the last few days had brought to their professional relationship. Deep down he recognised that he had blamed her for his demotion, even though he had never really doubted his reduction in rank was a temporary affair. And when Thalia had tried to make friendly amends for the reversal in their status, he had given her short shrift. He regretted that now, just as he regretted the error in judgement that had left her to handle the Garlin detention alone. Not that Aumonier appeared to blame him for anything that had happened in Fuxin-Nymburk, recognising perhaps that the dice had already been loaded from the moment she sent in just two of her operatives. He was back to a full Field now, his demotion no more than a brief aberration that would not even enter his formal service record. He doubted very much that it would hamper his chances of advancement through the higher grades of Field, and on to the hallowed rank of Senior, presuming he lived that long.
But there would always be a shadow between him and Thalia. They could carry on working together, they could agree never to mention the demotion, they could act as if it had never happened, but it would always be there between them.
Sparver felt disappointed in himself. The one consolation lay in knowing how much worse he would be feeling if she had died in Fuxin-Nymburk.