For the third or fourth time Dreyfus attempted to get up from the cold marble floor, only to have the robot stomp towards him with sudden and menacing intent, flexing its arms and spreading wide its three-clawed hands.
“Do you mean to kill us, Doctor Stasov?” he asked. “I only ask because you might want to get on with it. Both of us will soon be missed by our respective agencies. Enforcement squads will arrive—more than you or that robot are capable of resisting.”
Doctor Stasov leaned in on his stick. Dreyfus and Del Mar had turned to face the robot again, and now the doctor was to their left, carefully avoiding interposing himself between his prisoners and the machine.
“Are you trying to provoke me, Prefect?” he asked.
“He’s just trying to get at your plans for us,” Del Mar said, giving Dreyfus a narrow, warning eye. “You had this robot waiting here to ambush someone. It took you a little while to arrive, though, so I suppose you were somewhere else, waiting for a signal. What did you hope to gain by capturing a police officer?”
“You were never the object of my interest, Detective-Marshal. The truth is I’m disappointed to find you here instead of one of them.”
“Them?” Dreyfus asked.
“The Vois. I hoped one of them would come back eventually, if only to burn this old place down, erasing the last trace of the old falsehood. The robot was theirs, did you know? Lurcher. The family retainer, guardian and grounds-keeper. When it was no longer of use they sold it to a third party. Better that they should have destroyed it, or left it to rust, but no Voi has ever turned down the chance to make a small profit, even at their own eventual cost.”
Del Mar asked: “Were you that third party?”
“No—that would have roused immediate suspicion. The robot passed from hand to hand over a period of years, until I had the means to acquire it. I badly wanted access to Lurcher’s security settings. I was hoping there might be a clue in them … some vital data fragment which hadn’t been properly erased or reset.”
Dreyfus looked into the doctor’s lavishly wrinkled and ancient face, trying to read the sunken, voidlike eyes. “And was there?”
“No, they’d been more thorough than I hoped. But the robot retained some basic knowledge of the estate’s layout and that at least allowed it to serve as my watchdog. I set it here to wait and report. Trespassers came and went, the occasional city official. But it was them I wanted to find.” Spittle ejected from the bloodless gash of his lips. “I confess that lately I placed the robot on a higher degree of alertness, thinking a visit all the more likely. Otherwise it would have concealed itself more effectively, and allowed you to complete your pointless investigation in peace.”
“Julius Devon Garlin Voi still has the deeds to this place,” Dreyfus said. “It’s still his, in a legal sense, even if he downplays the family connection. Why would he allow you to come and go?”
“The place is of no concern to them. They’ve left it to fester. An informational dead zone. The abstraction doesn’t penetrate here, by design. The dome rebuffs it. The family craved their privacy, their insularity. My alert was a simple radio frequency trigger, with just enough power to reach beyond the estate. A risk even in that, but one worth taking.”
“You keep saying them,” Dreyfus said.
“For a reason,” Stasov answered.
“There’s only one living heir. Aliya died, than Marlon. Now there’s just Julius, calling himself Devon Garlin.”
“There were always two sons,” Stasov said. “I have every reason to think they are both still alive.”
“No,” Dreyfus said, shaking his head. “If anyone knows that family inside out it’s me. Julius was an only child. He grew up here with his mother and father, and when Aliya died he set out on his own. There was never a sibling.”
“You’re wrong on two counts,” Stasov told him. “There was a brother. His name was Caleb. They were non-identical twins. I know because I was often called to the household to monitor their progress. The boys were being groomed … shaped for greatness. And they didn’t grow up here.”
“Julius certainly did,” Dreyfus said.
“I assure you he didn’t,” Stasov said. “There’s another one, you see. Another Shell House.”
“I told you he had a story,” Del Mar whispered.
Stasov leaned in as if he had only just caught her words. “Yes, and I came to you with it often enough, didn’t I? I asked only to be given the benefit of the doubt, but even that was too much.”
“You weren’t the most credible witness.”
“And perhaps there was just too much at stake to risk challenging the reputation of a powerful man of the people such as Devon Garlin. Perhaps the sacred name of the Vois couldn’t be allowed to be tarnished—even when a terrible crime had been committed.”
“You mean Aliya’s death?” Dreyfus asked.
“Before that.” He jabbed the stick against the floor for emphasis. “I don’t mean to belittle her death. For all I know, maybe it was an accident after all. Between her and Marlon, she was at least the more cautious one, maybe the only one with a shred of human decency left in her soul. Although they were both implicated in—”
“We looked into his claims,” Del Mar said, allowing her voice to rise defensively. “We’re not so blinkered that we’d dismiss someone with a story about Devon Garlin, even when they had every reason to loathe that family. But the doctor’s accusations couldn’t be verified.”
“Were they disproven?” Dreyfus probed.
“No … but they couldn’t be verified.” She glanced away, almost as if she didn’t wish him to see the guilty look on her face. “We observed due diligence. Would Panoply have acted any differently, if you had a hundred other problems demanding your attention?”
Dreyfus fixed his gaze on Stasov, forcing himself not to blink or flinch from those dead black eyes. “Are you a man of conscience, Doctor?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I want to trust you.”
Doctor Stasov regarded him for several long seconds, judgement and calculation flitting across his ancient and cavernous face like cloud shadows on rock. “I am not a good man,” he said slowly, a strain opening in his voice. “I would never pretend to that. But I always tried to do right by those boys. I thought, for a while, that they had it in them to rise above the circumstances of their origin. I thought they could become better men … good custodians.” A dark tongue licked the pale margin of his mouth. “I was wrong.” Then he turned his eyes to the robot. “Let them stand, Lurcher. They’re not the ones we were waiting for.”
Doctor Stasov reached out a hand to Dreyfus. His fingers were extraordinarily long and thin, and they seemed to have too many knuckles and joints about them. Dreyfus took the hand warily, as if it might break into brittle twiglike shards at the first touch.
He was mistaken. It was stronger than it looked.
“Who’s with him now?” Aumonier asked, while she was being inspected—at her own insistence—for concealed devices. “Saint-Croix and Jaffna?”
“No, ma’am,” answered the fresh-faced duty prefect, newly promoted from Field III, and visibly nervous at having to perform a sweep and pat-down of the Supreme Prefect. “I understand they didn’t get very far. Senior Prefect Baudry’s in there now. Would you like me to tell her you’re ready to take over?”
“That won’t be necessary, Chin. Am I clear?”
The flustered, sweating Chin stepped back from the inspection. “You’re clear, ma’am.”
“That’s a relief to us both. Extend the bridge, and then pull it back when I’m inside. I’ll need about thirty minutes.”
Chin operated the controls that pushed out the pressurised bridge, connecting to a door in the side of the cube. “You’ll be out of contact once the bridge withdraws. Any emergencies, you can always hammer on something. The braces will pick up the acoustic signal.”
“Thank you, Chin. You’ll be astonished to hear that I’ve done th
is once or twice before.”
The bridge completed its extension. Aumonier walked across, mentally preparing herself, running through the things she was prepared to discuss and the things she had decided to withhold, until—if—they proceeded to trawl.
She closed the airtight door behind her, then went through the latticework of secondary doors that led through to the interviewing suite. It was a simple affair, after all the external technicalities. A windowed partition divided the space into two rooms. The partition was fitted with one-way glass, composed of inert material rather than quickmatter. One room was an observation area, so that one or more prefects or citizen observers might witness an interview in progress. On the other side of the glass was a bare room containing a table and three sturdy grey chairs. Power, illumination and life-support was provided by rugged, self-contained systems entirely independent of the rest of Panoply.
Garlin was on one side of the table, Baudry on the other. Aumonier rapped her knuckles on the partition’s connecting door and admitted herself into the interviewing cell.
“Where is my citizen quorum?” demanded Garlin sharply, breaking off from whatever he had been saying. “I have my rights. You can deny me access to my legal representatives, but you can’t deny me my citizen quorum.”
Aumonier eased herself into the vacant seat next to Lillian Baudry. “Under executive clause six-slash-one, sub-paragraph five of the Common Articles,” she explained in a pleasant, obliging tone, “that’s exactly what I can do. We are under emergency conditions, and as such it wasn’t feasible to locate and deputise a standing quorum, each of whom lacked any sort of neural implant.”
“That’s a twisting of the laws to suit your own ends,” Garlin said.
“It isn’t,” Aumonier clarified, still in the same friendly spirit. “The onus is on me to ensure the safety of that citizen quorum, and I couldn’t in all conscience guarantee I’d be able to protect them.”
“Protect them from who?”
Aumonier blinked, feigning surprise. “From you, Mister Garlin. Who else did you think I had in mind?”
“Don’t be absurd. What are you expecting me to do—reach through that glass? Wait. Wait.” He shifted his gaze onto Baudry now, something tightening in his brow. “What she was asking me, about those citizen deaths. The Wildfire rumours … that clinic you kept going on about … are you seriously suggesting I had something to do with all that?”
“Then you admit to your knowledge of Wildfire,” Baudry said, in a smooth, judicial tone.
“She mentioned it!” he said, eyes widening as he looked back at Aumonier. “When she dragged me in. Aumonier was the one who mentioned Wildfire. I’d never heard of it until that moment. You can’t blame me for knowing you had a problem. The rumours have been flying around for months. But that doesn’t mean I knew what it was.”
“The trouble is,” Aumonier said, “you seemed to know rather too much for a man who just happened to have his ear to the ground. Not only about Wildfire, but other things. You seemed to have an almost preternatural ability to anticipate the movements of my operatives …?”
“When a man has a vendetta against you, you get pretty good at guessing his moves,” Garlin said.
“How do you explain the failure of the local lockdown in Fuxin-Nymburk?” Aumonier asked, still keeping her manner ruthlessly civil. “Your gathering couldn’t have broken through into the polling core by force alone. Yet you seemed content to bide your time, knowing that the doors would open.”
“Don’t blame me for your mistakes.”
“It wasn’t a mistake,” Aumonier answered. “It was the unprecedented breakdown of a system that shouldn’t ever go wrong. Unlikely as it seems, I’m forced to one conclusion. Someone was able to reach in and disable the lockdown using channels reserved for high-level security operatives only, yet at the same time leave no trace of their intervention.”
He folded his arms, lifting his chin to her. It was finely stubbled, making him look a little older than his usual public guise. “And have you found this mythical individual?”
“I think I’m looking at him,” Aumonier said.
To his partial credit, he did a good job of looking astonished, flustered and utterly enraged, all in the same quick blizzard of reactions. “What? What? Are you out of your mind …”
“You’re a Voi,” Aumonier said.
“I’ve never made any secret of it.”
“No,” Baudry chipped in. “But you’ve never advertised it either. It doesn’t fit very well with your image as the strong man of the people, does it, being born into one of the oldest, wealthiest families in the entire system? You couldn’t be more part of the establishment if you tried. You’ve had every advantage in life—including access to the deepest secrets of the Voi clan.”
“Your ancestor laid the template for our entire society,” Aumonier said. “Drew up the blueprints for everything we hold dear. Abstraction, polling, transparency … freedom of access to information. The doors of perception, flung gloriously wide. But all of it built around the Voi kernel. It’s uncrackable. Sacrosanct. But if there was a flaw in the Voi kernel—maybe a deliberate one—who’d be in a better place to know about it than a Voi?”
“I didn’t have much faith in Panoply to begin with. Now I think you’re unhinged.”
“I’d hardly credit it myself,” Aumonier replied. “But we have a proven link between the Wildfire victims and your family. We think it happened under the auspices of a clinic, called Elysium Heights, which was run by you under the alias of Doctor Julius Mazarin. Nearly seventy people are now known to be victims of that deliberate action. But there are many more who were programmed to die in the weeks and months ahead.”
Garlin’s face had hardened into a fixed mask of staring dismay. “How much more absurd do you want to get, Aumonier? You can blame me for the economy if you like as well. Or the fact that black’s in this year.”
Baudry bent down to retrieve something between her knees. “I brought images,” she said, laying a cardboard dossier onto the table. “Some of the early dead. Should I show them to him?”
“A few,” Aumonier said. “But we’ll hold back the rest for the trawl.”
Baudry opened the dossier and extracted three shiny images. Rather than display them on a compad, she had taken the precaution of having them embossed directly onto paper by some ingenious chemical means. Each picture showed the face of one of the dead. The first was Cassandra Leng, the earliest victim known to Panoply.
Baudry slid the picture across to Garlin. He kept his eyes level, refusing to glance down.
“Look at it,” Aumonier said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t force me to look at anything.”
“Ah, but I can. It’s fully within the permitted scope of my interrogation methods. It’s not an especially pleasant procedure, though, so I suggest you spare yourself the trouble.”
He kept his eyes fixed on her for several seconds, strain showing in his neck muscles, but some unconscious reflex or twitch soon broke the spell. It was a momentary glance, but perfectly sufficient for her purposes. She watched him carefully, comparing his expression before and after that glance, vigilant for the tiniest betrayal of recognition.
She had to hand it to him. Devon Garlin did a good job of seeming not to know Cassandra Leng.
“One or two more,” Aumonier said.
“Before I accompany you,” Doctor Stasov said, his stick clacking on the hard ground beneath the weeds, “perhaps you’d clarify the terms of our association.”
“What do you think needs clarifying?” Dreyfus asked.
“Is this an arrest?” Stasov asked. “You have the authority, I suppose, and despite appearances Lurcher would not use violent means to prevent my detention.”
“You’ve already interfered in the course of an investigation,” Del Mar said, raising a hand to her volantor, signalling it to begin preparing for departure. “Forcefully, too. That’s grounds enough for me to bring yo
u in, before we start with trespassing.”
“If you can be of service to us,” Dreyfus said, “then I’m minded to set aside any earlier misunderstandings. But you’re going to have to work hard to convince me that we’re not in the Shell House.”
“Of course this is the Shell House,” Stasov said. “Just not the only one. The Vois’ wealth and influence brought great freedoms. They could come and go as they pleased, flying in and out of Yellowstone with nothing but the most cursory of checks. On the rare occasions in later life when they needed to entertain, this is where it happened. This is also where Marlon returned with Julius after Aliya’s death, and where he saw out his grief, playing the role expertly.”
“And the other place?” Dreyfus asked.
“In space, located in another piece of Voi real estate. Spun up to simulate Yellowstone gravity, and rendered exactly, down to the last crack, the last grain of dirt, so that you couldn’t tell one from the other. To begin with, when I first started visiting the boys, I came here. By then Julius and Caleb were eight years old, or so I was informed. They had kept them out of the way until then, but I think Marlon and Aliya were growing nervous. The estate was private enough, but still much too close to Chasm City for their liking. They were worried that something beyond their control might result in the boys being discovered.”
“Why—?” Dreyfus started.
Del Mar touched a hand to his shoulder as she set a foot on the volantor’s boarding steps. “Let him continue.”
“Marlon and Aliya decided to continue with the boys’ development in space, where their privacy could be more easily controlled. But they didn’t want it to be any sort of upheaval. So they created a second Shell House and grounds, and the boys were drugged and shipped there without anyone being the wiser. They went to sleep in one bedroom and woke up in another, and even the boys couldn’t tell the difference. It was the perfect solution. There was just one irritant.”
“You,” Dreyfus said.
“They had grown dependent on my services—as I had grown to need their flow of funds, small as it was. They knew some of my secrets and I knew some of theirs. A mutually beneficial symbiosis. So they elected to continue hiring me. Once every few months I was obliged to visit the boys. But I was not permitted to know the whereabouts of this second Shell House. In fact no mention was ever made that there had been a change. I was to go along with the charade, never questioning it. The only complication was that I, too, was required to be drugged and put to sleep. So I went along with it, across numerous visits. I would come here, and awake there. I guessed soon enough that it had to be in space: there were too many missing hours from my life for it to be anywhere else. But I wasn’t permitted to know the whereabouts.”