“Consider it a temporary reduction in rank, Bancal,” Aumonier went on, “as a disciplinary action. You’ll report to Ng and assist her in the investigation. You may retain Pangolin clearance.”
“That’s very generous of you,” Sparver said.
“Don’t be flippant, Bancal. I expect your full and unswerving cooperation in this investigation. Is that understood?”
Sparver lowered his head, the severity of her reprimand evidently getting through.
“It’s understood, ma’am. I apologise for my error.”
“Good—please don’t make a second one. I need you ready and able to move on the next death, whenever it happens. In the meantime you can accompany Ng back to the Shiga-Mintz Spindle.”
“To interview the wife?” Thalia asked, giddy at the sudden shift in her rank and responsibilities.
“A little more than that. A short while ago Ghiselin Bronner issued a formal request for protection, over and above the security arrangements of the local constables.”
“Then she knows something,” Dreyfus said, a glimmer of hope cracking through his voice.
Aumonier sounded less hopeful. “Whatever the case, it’s not a request we can afford to ignore. But it has to be handled delicately. We don’t want the constables sensing there’s anything out of the ordinary, or feeling that their capabilities are in question. We’re going to need them on our side in days to come, across the whole Glitter Band, and they mustn’t feel undermined.”
“I think I can handle it, ma’am,” Thalia said. “With Sparver’s assistance, of course.”
“You’d better,” Aumonier said. Then she turned to the small, neat Tang. “Prepare a Pangolin shot for Ng. She can take it immediately so the structures embed as she sleeps. Enjoy your last good night’s rest, Ng. When you open your eyes, you’ll wake up to our world.”
Thalia remembered how it had felt to hold a man’s head. “I’m already in it, ma’am, and I don’t think I like it very much.”
Julius and Caleb were called back to the Shell House in the middle of the morning.
“I know why,” Julius said. “It’s Doctor Stasov.”
“It could be anything,” Caleb said.
“No,” Julius said, asserting himself before his larger, more confident twin. “I know it’s him. After you’d gone off to the white tree I hung around in the house. The door to the private corridor was open and I went down it.”
“And?” Caleb asked.
“I saw Doctor Stasov. He was already here.”
“If this is another one of your stupid stories, like the Ursas …”
“I saw him. I walked past a door and there he was, lying on a bed. He was asleep, on his back, with his clothes on and that bag by the side of the bed.”
“Asleep?”
“I wasn’t going to wake him up, was I? I could hear Lurcher coming and I didn’t want to get caught. But I’m telling you, Spider-fingers is here. How could he be sleeping on a bed if he wasn’t here?”
“You just saw some black clothes crumpled up.”
“You’ll believe me in a minute,” Julius said. “Something’s going to happen to us today, you’ll see. Something to do with the machines he put in us last time.”
The boys crossed the lawn and stood in front of the raised stone terrace which fronted the curved, organic lines of the Shell House. Their mother and father were already standing on the terrace, Father impassive, Mother with that slightly anxious, doubtful look they had been seeing more of lately. Behind them waited Lurcher, a slender tapering silver statue with its four hose-like arms drooping at its side.
Beyond the house, through the green-tinted facets of the dome that enclosed their property, the spires and towers of Chasm City shone like a distant dream.
“The Doctor isn’t here,” Caleb whispered.
“There he is,” Julius said.
Doctor Stasov came through the double doors that opened onto the terrace. He had his bag in one hand. It sagged so heavily it almost skirted the ground as he walked, throwing him off-balance.
Caleb gave Julius a look of grudging acknowledgement.
“Stand up straight, both of you,” said Father. “Show Doctor Stasov how well you’ve been coming along.”
Stasov brushed a swoop of white hair from his dark eyes. They were pink-rimmed, lacking focus.
“I used to have trouble telling them apart,” Doctor Stasov said, his voice faltering. “But not so much now. They’re growing into distinct young men.”
Even Julius had been aware of the growing differences between them. They had never been identical twins, but when they were smaller they had been easily mistaken for each other. Julius was lagging now, though, Caleb was taller and bulkier and broader across the shoulders and chest. Both had grey-blue eyes, but Caleb’s were steelier, and there was something in the set of them that was already more challenging, echoed in the defiant, cocksure set of his jaw.
They wore only shorts. Their knees were smudged, their loose blond hair was dishevelled. Until they were called back to the house by Lurcher they had been scrambling up and down the huge hollow trunk of the white tree, playing games among the mazy warren of its roots and branches.
“Growing too quickly,” Father said. “A little less time horsing around in the garden, a bit more time in the classroom, wouldn’t hurt either of them.”
“They’re boys,” said Mother.
“You have struck a healthy balance between education and development,” Doctor Stasov said, giving a diplomatic nod to both parents. Where Doctor Stasov wore black—offset only by a puffed white collar—Mother and Father were dressed in the stiff finery of Chasm City’s social elite.
“Do you think they’re ready for it?” Father asked.
“I have no doubt, Mister Voi.”
“What about you, Julius and Caleb?” asked Father. “Do you think you’re ready to learn something new?”
The boys answered in a trebly near-unison.
“Yes, Father.”
“Before we begin,” Father said, “show Doctor Stasov how well you have adapted to the first integration. Clad yourselves. Make plumage.”
Julius and Caleb glanced at each other, neither quite able to supress a smile at the trivial nature of this challenge. They closed their eyes for a moment, more out of habit than necessity, signalling concentration. Then each lowered a hand down the length of their own body. Where their hands passed, patterns of colour and texture condensed out of the air, threads and cross-threads thickening into a widening band of fabric which enclosed each boy in a kind of gown. When the gowns had reached just above their knees the boys lifted their hands away and settled them by their sides, as if waiting inspection.
Their gowns glittered in metallic shades: silver for the bigger boy, gold for the slightly smaller. A gentle breeze moved through the surroundings of the Shell House and the gowns rippled as if they were real.
“Impressive,” Doctor Stasov said, his lips hardly moving as he spoke. Like the clothes he wore he was made up of monochrome contrasts. His skin was an ashen white, his mouth a grey-rimmed hole, his eyes black tunnels. His hair was silver, combed low over his eyes. His fingers were long, bony, pale and seemed to have one or two joints too many.
“Their control’s becoming more fluid, both of them,” Father said. “It’s rudimentary as plumage goes, but that will improve with practice.”
“It had better,” Mother said, nodding to the dome wall, the glittering promise of the spires beyond. “There’s a city and a world out there that will expect more of you than parlour tricks. You’re Vois now. With that name comes a burden of responsibility.”
“They have time to learn,” Father said, reaching into his pocket—a deep physical pocket, in a physical garment—to draw out a thick, dark rod about as long as his forearm. He held it out before him with just the one hand, the tendons in his wrist taut as bridge cables.
“What is it?” Julius asked.
“Take it and I’ll explain.”
/>
Still wearing his plumage, Julius stepped onto the edge of the terrace and took it in both hands. It was heavier than it looked.
Caleb watched.
“It’s a malleable staff,” Father said. “A training device, made from solid quickmatter.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?” Julius asked, conscious of Doctor Stasov peering at him through that curtain of hair like a watcher behind a waterfall.
“Quickmatter will respond to gestural commands,” Father said. “But that’s a coarse, unsophisticated way of controlling it. Fine if you want to make a chair, or open a passwall—but you can do better than that. Your will alone is sufficient.”
“I don’t see how,” Julius said.
Father smiled with strained patience. “Concentrate your attention on the malleable staff. Press your thoughts around it, enclose it within them, and imagine the way it might stretch or bend under the pressure of those thoughts.” He made an encouraging gesture. “Go on. See if you can make it flex a little.”
Julius stared at the staff, a frown notching its way into his forehead. He let go with his left hand, holding it near the end with the right, as his father had done, and tried to make it bend. But the staff felt dead and inert in his hand. His thoughts dashed off it like waves against a cliff.
“Think only of the staff, and only of bending it,” Father said, lowering his voice encouragingly. “Doctor Stasov has unlocked the capability in your neural machinery, but you must learn how to direct it.”
Julius stared and stared, but the staff remained obstinately unwilling to change itself.
“Why is it so hard?” he pleaded.
“It won’t be, when you’ve learned,” Father said. “But quickmatter won’t respond to an ill-formed instruction, or a passing whim. It would be far too dangerous if it did.”
“You could do a horrible thing to someone,” Caleb said wonderingly. “Chop them up or something. Squash them. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you, Julius?”
“Shut up, Caleb,” Julius said. “You’re so clever, you make it bend.” He handed—jabbed, rather—the malleable staff into his brother’s hand.
“I told you they weren’t ready,” their mother confided. “We should ask Doctor Stasov to undo the permission, give them more time.”
“You know how awkward it is for the doctor to schedule these appointments,” Father said.
“Julius might need more time,” Caleb said. “I don’t.”
Holding the staff with more confidence than his brother, he stared at it for a few moments, narrowing his eyes but not closing them. The staff stayed as straight as when Father had given it to Julius.
“Could I really hurt someone?” Julius asked, watching his brother’s efforts. “Or get hurt?”
“Not easily,” Father said. “Quickmatter knows not to do us harm. That’s built into it at a very deep level—a kind of morality, like Lurcher’s programming. That’s why it won’t change unless the intention is precisely directed—a skill both of you will have to learn the hard way.”
“Progress, I believe,” Doctor Stasov said.
The change was slight, to begin with, but it was real and could only be the product of Caleb’s shaping will. The staff was assuming a gradual curve, and the angle of the deflection was increasing. Caleb’s hand shook with the effort of maintaining the neural focus, his eyes nearly crossing as he forced his desire onto the quickmatter.
“Good … very good,” Father said. “Better than I expected, for a first try.”
“It’s hard, Father,” Caleb said, the strain making him look older, finding the invisible weaknesses in his face that would eventually turn into folds and wrinkles.
“You’ve done very well. Give the staff back to your brother. Julius—see if you can straighten the staff. It’s sometimes easier to restore something to an earlier state, if you have a clear idea of the desired end.”
Julius took the bent staff and tried to undo Caleb’s work. But the staff was as unresponsive as it had been before.
“I can’t,” he said, offering the staff back.
“You tried, and that’s all we expected for today,” Father said. “I remember my first time—your mother hers. Don’t you, dear?”
Her answer was terse.
“Of course.”
“Days of frustration before the quickmatter moved to our will,” Father went on. “After that, though, I knew all the doors stood open, and the world was mine for the shaping. Here.” He reached out for the staff. “I’m a little out of practice—that’s the price I pay for living here—but I still have the knack, I think.”
He made the staff straighten out. Then the end pinched itself into a knob, and the knob shaped itself into a tiny human head, with eyes and nose and mouth. For a few seconds Father looked as if he was satisfied with that, before holding the staff up so the head was level with his view of their mother, and he began to shape the head’s proportions and features to correspond to hers.
Julius and Caleb looked on, their father’s face set with quiet concentration.
The quickmatter moved like clay under an invisible hand, bulging, clefting, gaining lines and texture here, smoothing over there. Whether or not the end result was a close likeness to their mother was almost beside the point; it was certainly recognisable as a woman and aspects of her strong nose and jaw were undeniably captured.
Father twisted the staff around to show her the result.
“You haven’t lost your touch,” she said, showing a cool indifference to the performance.
Father pinched his lips, perhaps about to say something before thinking better of it, especially in the presence of Doctor Stasov. He passed the staff back to Caleb. “See if you can undo my crude efforts,” he said. “And both of you take an hour a day to learn to shape the staff.”
“We’ll try,” Julius said.
Caleb nodded. “Yes, we’ll do our best.” Then he patted Julius on the shoulder, his hand ghosting through the plumage. “Let’s go back to the tree. We can take the staff out into the gardens, can’t we?”
Doctor Stasov gave a nod, his hair curtaining down to his nose. “No harm will come of it. But return to the house before mid-afternoon. I’d like to run some minor tests before I leave.”
The boys started walking away, Caleb swinging the staff low, so that his mother’s head swished through the grass. It cost a slight but constant mental effort to maintain the plumage, so the boys gladly discarded their gowns when they were beyond the immediate sight of the house.
“Give me the staff,” Julius said. “I want to get better at it.”
“You couldn’t do it at all. How can you get better at something you can’t do?”
“You’re not so good. You were straining so hard I thought your eyes were going to pop out.”
Caleb snorted. “I just put that on for the grown-ups. I sensed the presence of that quickmatter staff long before they brought it out to show us.”
“It’s easy to say that now. I don’t remember you going on about quickmatter until you saw Spider-fingers was here.”
“I knew it was in the house somewhere. I just didn’t think it was worth mentioning. You could tell it was here, couldn’t you?”
“Yes,” Julius said doubtfully, wondering how far he could push a lie. “I knew it was in the house somewhere. But you still found it hard.”
“Not as hard as I made it seem. Look.”
With an easy-going nonchalance, Caleb passed the staff back to Julius. Julius held the staff up before him, looking at the little human head and trying to persuade it to undo itself, to collapse back into the smooth form of the original staff. Then he realised the face had changed. It was an ugly, distortion of their mother’s head, with demonic eyes and a wide, grinning mouth jammed full of sharp teeth.
Julius started, the shock of it nearly making him drop the staff.
“Don’t worry, little brother,” Caleb said. “You’ll get the hang of it eventually.”
 
; By the time Thalia woke, the Pangolin shot had worked its alchemy, modifying neural processing structures that allowed her to read and comprehend material that would normally have been above her classification grade. Pangolin—and the related security protocols—were the closest thing prefects had to neural hardware. But the structures were deliberately self-dissipating, requiring continual booster shots to maintain their functionality. Left to their own devices, the structures would break down under the action of normal body chemistry, their waste products harmlessly absorbed and excreted.
She still woke feeling as if her brain had been through a mangle. The geometry of her apartment felt subtly askew, not quite a mirror of itself, but shifted, and each adjustment was pregnant with vast and ominous meaning. She had been warned about this: one of the side-effects of Pangolin was that ordinary visual structures acquired a heightened semantic weight. Prefects adjusted to it eventually, but the transitional phase could be akin to a religious mania, finding false significance in every wrinkle, every smear of foam in a mug of coffee.
It was the price that had to be paid, though, and at least the security briefings on her compad were now fully legible. She skimmed the executive summaries over coffee and warm buttered bread, then stepped through a clotheswall, the wall forming her uniform around her to her customary preferences, then buckled on her belt and whiphound and set off for the docking bay, where she had been promised her own Medium Enforcement Vehicle.
For a moment she stood at the observation window overlooking the dock. Her hands were tight and sweaty on the handrail below the window. She had been given the promotion she had always counted on, but she had never imagined it happening under these circumstances. And if Sparver’s demotion was a temporary thing, so too—she was certain—was her elevation.
“Do not mess this up,” Thalia said under her breath, calling her father’s image to mind. “For both our sakes.”
Panoply’s main docking and berthing facility was situated in what was nominally the nose of the pumpkin-faced asteroid. The freefall space was a three-dimensional jigsaw of launch racks, berthing cradles and access tubes, with a frequent coming and going of vehicles, passing through a huge double-doored spacelock. The chamber was not normally pressurised, though, so the spacelock doors were both open, with her assigned MEV already slid out onto its launch rack, aimed at the door like a chambered bullet.