‘We didn’t see deep enough to map this,’ Dreyfus said. ‘What do you make of it?’
‘Not much, to be frank.’
‘Judging by the curvature, we could be looking at a ring that goes right around the middle of the rock. We need to find out why it’s here.’
‘And if we get lost?’
Dreyfus used his suit to daub a luminous cross onto the wall next to their exit point. ‘We won’t. If the shaft’s circular, we’ll know when we come back to this point, even if something messes around with our inertial compasses.’
‘That’s me fully reassured, then.’
‘Good. Keep an eye out for anything we can use to squeeze a signal back to Panoply.’
Dreyfus started moving, the brown walls of the shaft drifting past him. His own shadow stalked courageously ahead of him, projected by the light from Sparver’s lamp. He glanced down at the suit’s inertial map, displayed just below his main facepatch overlay.
‘So do you have a theory as to what the Nerval-Lermontov family needs with this place?’ Sparver asked. ‘Because this is beginning to look like a lot more than a simple case of inter-habitat rivalry, at least from where I’m standing.’
‘It’s bigger, definitely. And now I’m wondering if the Sylveste family might have a part in this after all.’
‘We could always pay them a visit when we’re done here.’
‘We wouldn’t get very far. The family’s being run by beta-level caretakers. Calvin Sylveste’s dead, and his son’s out of the system. The last I heard, he’s not due back for at least another ten or fifteen years.’
‘But you still think there’s a Sylveste angle.’
‘I’m all for coincidence, Sparv, and I agree that the family has a lot of tentacles. But as soon as the Eighty popped up in our investigation, I got the feeling there was more to it than chance.’
After a pause, Sparver said, ‘Do you think the Nerval-Lermontovs are still around?’
‘Someone’s been here recently. A place feels different when it’s deserted, when no one’s visited it for a very long time. I’m not getting that feeling here.’
‘I was hoping it was just me,’ Sparver said.
Dreyfus set his jaw determinedly. ‘All the more reason to investigate, then.’
But in truth he felt no compulsion to continue further along the corridor. He also felt Sparver’s unease. There was nothing he would rather have done than return to the corvette and await back-up, however long it took to arrive.
They hadn’t gone more than a couple of hundred metres along the gently curving shaft when Sparver brought them to a halt next to a piece of equipment jutting from the wall. To Dreyfus it looked almost indistinguishable from the countless rust-coloured items of machinery they had already passed, but Sparver was paying it particular attention.
‘Something we can use?’ Dreyfus asked.
Sparver flipped aside a panel, revealing a matrix of tactile input controls and sockets. ‘It’s a tap-in point,’ he said. ‘No promises, but if this is hooked up to any kind of local network, I should be able to find my way to the transmitter and maybe open a two-way channel to Panoply.’
‘How long will it take?’
Sparver’s suit had been conjured with a standard toolkit. He dug into it and retrieved a strand of luminous cabling with a writhing, slug-shaped quickmatter universal adaptor at the end. ‘I should know within a few minutes,’ he said. ‘If it doesn’t work, we’ll move on.’
‘See what you can get out of it. I’ll be back here in five or ten minutes.’
Sparver’s eyes were wide behind his facepatch. ‘We should stay together.’
‘I’m just taking a look a little further along this shaft. We’ll remain in contact the whole time.’
Dreyfus left his deputy attending to the equipment, fiddling with adaptors and spools of differently coloured froptic and electrical cabling. He had no doubt that if there was a way to get a message to Panoply, Sparver would find it. But he could not afford to wait around for that to happen. Elsewhere in the rock, someone might be erasing evidence or preparing to make their escape via a hidden ship or lifepod.
Eventually Dreyfus looked back and saw that Sparver had vanished around the curve of the shaft.
‘How are you doing?’ he asked via the suit-to-suit comms channel.
‘Making slow progress, but I think it’s doable. The protocols are pretty archaic, but nothing I haven’t seen before.’
‘Good. Keep in touch. I’m pressing on.’
Dreyfus passed through a constriction in the cladding of the tunnel, tucking his elbows in to avoid banging them against the narrow flange where the walls pinched tighter. Looking back now, he could not even see the faint glow caused by the light spilling from Sparver’s helmet lamp. Psychologically, it felt as if they were kilometres apart rather than the hundreds of metres that was really the case.
Suddenly there came a bell-like clang, hard and metallic. Dreyfus’s gut tightened. He knew exactly what had happened, even before his conscious mind had processed the information. Where the constriction had been was now a solid wall of metal. A bulkhead door - part of an interior airlock system - had just slammed down between him and Sparver.
He returned to the door and checked the rim for manual controls, but found nothing. An automatic system had sealed the door, and the same automatic system would have to open it again.
‘Sparver?’
His deputy’s voice came through chopped and metallic. ‘Still reading you, but faintly. What just happened?’
‘I tripped a door,’ Dreyfus said, feeling sheepish. ‘It doesn’t want to open again.’
‘Stay where you are. I’ll see if I can work it from my side.’
‘Leave it for now. We made a plan and we’ll stick to it, even if I have to stay here until help arrives. If necessary I should be able to cut through with my whiphound, provided the door doesn’t incorporate any active quickmatter. In the meantime I’ll try circumnavigating and see if I can meet you from the other side.’
‘Try not to trip any more doors on the way.’
‘I will.’
‘You should think about conserving air,’ Sparver said, in a gently reminding tone. ‘These m-suits don’t recirculate, Boss. You’re only good for twenty-six hours.’
‘That’s about twenty-four hours longer than I expect to be here.’
‘Just saying we need to allow for all eventualities. I can make it back to the corvette; you may not be able to.’
‘Point taken,’ Dreyfus said.
The suit was indeed still assuring him that the air surrounding him was breathable. He clearly had little to lose by trusting it. He reached up and unlatched the helmet; the suit had been conjured in one piece, but it obliged by splitting into familiar components.
He sucked in his first lungful of cold, new air. After the initial shock of it hitting his system, he judged that it was tolerable, with little of the mustiness he’d been anticipating.
‘I’m breathing ambient air, Sparv. No ill effects so far.’
‘Good. All I’ve got to do now is kid this system that I’m a valid user, and then we should get ourselves a hotline to Panoply. I’ll be out of touch when I’m calling home - I’ll have to reassign the suit-to-suit channel to make this work.’
‘Whatever you have to do.’
Dreyfus pressed the helmet against his belt until it formed a cusp-like bond. He’d made perhaps another hundred metres of progress when he encountered a junction in the shaft. The main tunnel, the one he’d been following, continued unobstructed ahead, but now it was joined by another route, set at right angles and leading towards the centre of the rock.
‘Sparver,’ he said, ‘slight change of plan. While I’m not using suit air, I’m going to explore a sub-shaft I’ve just run into. It appears to head deeper. My guess is it leads to whatever this place is concealing.’
‘You be careful.’
‘As ever.’
The new shaft tu
rned out to be much shorter than the one they’d descended from the surface, and within thirty metres he detected a widening at the far end. Dreyfus continued his approach, caution vying with curiosity, and emerged into a hemispherical chamber set with heavy glass facets. His helmet lamp played across the bolted and welded partitions between the window elements. Beyond the glass loomed a profound darkness, more absolute than space itself, as if the very heart of the rock had been cored out.
‘It’s hollow, an empty shell,’ he said to himself, as much in wonder as perplexity.
The hemispherical chamber was not just some kind of viewing gallery. One of the facets was covered with a sheet of burnished silver rather than glass, and next to that was a simple control panel set with tactile controls of old-fashioned design. Dreyfus propelled himself to the panel and appraised its contents. The chunky controls were designed to be used by someone wearing a spacesuit with thick gloves, and most of them were labelled in antiquated Canasian script. Most of the abbreviations meant nothing to Dreyfus, but he saw that one of the controls was marked with a stylised representation of a sunburst.
His hand moved to the control. At first it was so stiff that he feared it had seized into place. Then it budged with a resounding clunk, and vast banks of lights began to blaze on beyond the armoured glass.
He’d been wrong, he realised. The hollowed-out interior of the Nerval-Lermontov rock was not empty.
It contained a ship.
‘I’ve found something interesting,’ he told Sparver.
’What I don’t understand,’ Thalia said as the train whisked the entourage across the first window band of House Aubusson, ‘is how this place pays for itself. No offence, but I’ve spoken to most of you by now and I’m puzzled. I assume you’re a representative slice of the citizenry, or you wouldn’t have been selected for the welcoming party. Yet none of you seem to be doing any work that’s marketable outside Aubusson. One of you breeds butterflies. Another designs gardens. Another one of you makes mechanical animals, for fun.’
‘There’s no law against hobbies,’ said Paula Thory, the plump butterfly-keeper.
‘I totally agree. But hobbies won’t pay for the upkeep of a sixty-kilometre-long habitat.’
‘We have a full-scale manufactory complex in the trailing endcap,’ Caillebot said. ‘We used to make ships. Lovely things, too: single-molecule hulls in ruby and emerald. It hasn’t run at anything like full capacity for decades, but smaller habitats occasionally contract us to build components and machines. The big enterprises on Marco’s Eye will always out-compete us when it comes to efficiency and economies of scale, but we don’t have to lift anything out of a gravity well, or pay Glitter Band import duties. That takes care of some of our finances.’
‘Not all of it, though,’ Thalia said. ‘Right?’
‘We vote,’ Thory said.
‘So does everyone,’ Thalia replied. ‘Except for Panoply.’
‘Not everyone votes the way we do. That’s the big difference. There are eight hundred thousand people in this habitat, and each and every one of us takes our voting rights very seriously indeed.’
‘Still won’t put food on your plates.’
‘It will if you vote often enough, and intelligently enough.’ Thory was looking at Thalia quite intently now, as the train whisked through a campus of low-lying buildings, all of which had the softened outlines and pastel coloration of candied marshmallows. ‘You’re Panoply. I presume you’re adequately familiar with the concept of vote weighting?’
‘I recall that the mechanism allows it, under certain circumstances.’
Thory looked surprised. ‘You recall“. Aren’t you supposed to be the expert here, Prefect?’
‘Ask me about security, or about polling core software, and I’ll keep you enthralled for hours. Vote processing is a different area. That’s not my remit.’ Thalia had her hands laced in her lap, with the cylinder between her knees. ‘So tell me how it works for Aubusson.’
‘It’s common knowledge that the apparatus logs every vote ever entered, across the entire Glitter Band,’ Thory said. ‘That’s at least a million transactions every second, going back two hundred years. What people don’t generally realise is that the system occasionally peers back into its own records and looks at voting patterns that shaped a particular outcome. Suppose, for instance, that a critical vote was put to the population of the entire Band, all hundred million of us. A hypothetical threat had been identified, one that could be met with a variety of responses ranging from a pre-emptive attack to the simple decision to do nothing at all. Suppose furthermore that the majority voted for one particular response out of the options available. Suppose also that action was taken based on that vote, and that with hindsight that action turned out to have been the wrong thing to do. The apparatus is intelligent enough to recognise democratic mistakes like that. It’s also intelligent enough to look back into the records and see who voted otherwise. Who, in other words, could be said to have been right, while the majority were wrong.’
Thalia nodded, recalling details she had once learned and then buried under more immediately relevant knowledge. ‘And then, having identified those voters as being of shrewd judgement, it attaches a weighting bias to any future votes they might cast.’
‘In essence, that’s how it works. In practice, it’s infinitely more subtle. The system keeps monitoring those individuals, constantly tuning the appropriate weighting factor. If they keep on voting shrewdly, then their weighting remains, or even increases. If they show a sustained streak of bad judgement, the system weights them back down to the default value.’
‘Why not just remove their voting rights entirely, if they’re that bad?’
‘Because then we wouldn’t be a democracy,’ Thory replied. ‘Everyone deserves a chance to mend their ways.’
‘And how does this work for Aubusson?’
‘It’s how we make our living. The citizenry here possesses a very high number of weighted votes, well above the Glitter Band mean. We’ve all worked hard for that, of course: it isn’t just a statistical fluctuation. I have a weighting index of one point nine, which means that every vote I cast has nearly double its normal efficacy. I’m almost equivalent to two people voting in lockstep on any issue. One point nine is high, but there are fifty-four people out there who have indices nudging three. These are people whom the system has identified as possessing an almost superhuman acumen. Most of us see the landscape of future events as a bewilderingly jumbled terrain, cloaked in a mist of ever-shifting possibilities. The Triples see a shining road, its junctions marked in blazing neon.’ Thory’s voice became reverential. ‘Somewhere out there, Prefect, is a being we call the Quadruple. We know he walks amongst us because the system says he is a citizen of House Aubusson. But the Quad has never revealed himself to any other citizen. Perhaps he fears a public stoning. His own wisdom must be a wonderful and terrifying gift, like the curse of Cassandra. Yet he still only carries four votes, in a population of a hundred million. Pebbles on an infinite beach.’
‘Tell me how you stay ahead of the curve,’ Thalia said.
‘With blood, sweat and toil. All of us take our issues seriously. That’s what citizenship in Aubusson entails. You don’t get to live here unless you can hold a weighted voting average above one point two five. That means we’re all required to think very seriously about the issues we vote on. Not just from a personal perspective, not just from the perspective of House Aubusson, but from the standpoint of the greater good of the entire Glitter Band. And it pays off for us, of course. It’s how we make our living - by trading on our prior shrewdness. Because our votes are disproportionately effective, we are very attractive to lobbyists from other communities. On marginal issues, they pay us to listen to what they have to say, knowing that a block vote from Aubusson may swing the result by a critical factor. That’s where the money comes from.’
‘Political bribes?’
‘Hardly. They buy our attention, our willingness to
listen. That doesn’t guarantee that we will vote according to their wishes. If all we did was follow the money, our collective indices would ramp down to one before you could blink. Then we’d be no use to anyone.’
‘It’s a balancing act,’ put in Caillebot. ‘To remain useful to the lobbyists, we must maintain a degree of independence from them. This is the central paradox of our existence. But it is the paradox that allows me to spend my time designing gardens, and Paula to breed her butterflies.’
Thory leaned forward. ‘Since we’ve been on this train, I’ve already participated in two polling transactions. There’s a third coming up in two minutes. Minor issues, in the scheme of things - the kinds of things most citizens let their predictive routines take care of.’
‘I didn’t notice.’
‘You wouldn’t have. Most of us are so used to the process now that it’s almost autonomic, like blinking. But we take each and every vote as seriously as the last.’ Thory must have seen something amiss in Thalia’s expression, for she leaned forward concernedly. ‘Everything I’ve just described is completely legal, Prefect. Panoply wouldn’t allow it to happen otherwise.’
‘I know it’s legal. I just didn’t think it had become systematized, made the basis for a whole community.’
‘Does that distress you?’
‘No,’ Thalia answered truthfully. ‘If the system allows it, it’s fine by me. But it just reminds me how many surprises the Glitter Band still has in store.’
‘This is the most complex, variegated society in human history,’ Thory said. ’It’s a machine for surprising people.’
Dreyfus studied the spectacle of the ship floating before him, pinned in the vivid blue lights at the core of the Nerval-Lermontov rock. It was a midnight-black form in a pitch-black cavern. He did not so much see the ship as detect the subtle gradation in darkness between its hull and the background surface of the rock’s hollowed-out heart. It was like an exercise in optical trickery, a perceptual mirage that kept slipping out of his cognitive grasp.
But he knew exactly what he was looking at. Though it was smaller than most, the vehicle was clearly a starship. It had the sleek, tapering hull of a lighthugger, and the two swept-back spars that held the complicated nacelles of its twin drives. He remembered the burning wreck of the Accompaniment of Shadows, its own engines snipped off to become prizes for other Ultras. But as soon as its shape stabilised in his imagination, he knew that this was no Ultra starship.