‘Here’s a reference to the Birdmaker,’ Sylveste said. ‘So chances are good the spire had some bearing on the Burning Wings myth, even though the winged god clearly isn’t a representation of the Birdmaker.’
‘Yes,’ Pascale said. ‘That’s the graphicform for fire, next to the one for wings.’
‘What else do you see?’
Pascale concentrated for a few long moments. ‘There’s some reference here to a renegade flock.’
‘Renegade in what sense?’ He was testing her, and she knew it, but the exercise was valuable in itself, for Pascale’s interpretation would give him some indication of how subjective his own analysis had been.
‘A renegade flock which didn’t agree to the deal with the Birdmaker, or reneged on the deal afterwards.’
‘That’s what I thought. I was worried I might have made an error or two.’
‘Whoever they were, they were called the Banished Ones.’ She read back and forth, testing hypotheses and revising her interpretation as she went. ‘It looks like they were originally part of the flock who agreed to the Birdmaker’s terms, but that they changed their minds sometime later.’
‘Can you make out the name of their leader?’
She began: ‘They were led by an individual called…’ But then Pascale trailed off. ‘No, can’t translate that string; at least not right now. What does all this mean, anyway? Do you think they really existed?’
‘Perhaps. If I had to take a guess, I’d say they were unbelievers who came to realise that the Birdmaker myth was just that — myth. Of course, that wouldn’t have gone down very well with the other fundamentalist flocks.’
‘Which is why they were Banished?’
‘Assuming they ever existed in the first place. But I can’t help thinking, what if they were some kind of technological sect, like an enclave of scientists? Amarantin who were prepared to experiment, to question the nature of their world?’
‘Like mediaeval alchemists?’
‘Yes.’ He liked the analogy immediately. ‘Perhaps they even tried experimenting with flight, the way Leonardo did. Against the backdrop of general Amarantin culture, that would have been like spitting in God’s eye.’
‘Agreed. But assuming they were real — and were Banished — what happened to them? Did they just die out?’
‘I don’t know. But one thing’s clear. The Banished Ones were important — more than just a minor detail in the overall story of the Birdmaker myth. They’re mentioned all over the spire; all over this damned city, in fact — far more frequently than in any other Amarantin relics.’
‘But the city is late,’ Pascale said. ‘Apart from the marker obelisk, it’s the most recent relic we’ve found. Dating from near the Event. Why would the Banished Ones suddenly crop up again, after so long an absence?’
‘Well,’ Sylveste said. ‘Maybe they came back.’
‘After — what? Tens of thousands of years?’
‘Perhaps.’ Sylveste smiled privately. ‘If they did return — after that long away — it might be the kind of thing to inspire statue-building.’
‘Then the statue — do you think it might portray their leader? The one called —’ Pascale took another stab at the graphicform. ‘Well, this is the symbol for the sun, isn’t it?’
‘And the rest?’
‘I’m not sure. Looks like the glyph for the act of… theft — but how can that be?’
‘Put the two together, what have you got?’
He imagined her shrugging, noncommittally. ‘One who steals suns? Sun Stealer? What would that mean?’
Sylveste shrugged himself. ‘That’s what I’ve been asking myself all morning. That and one other thing.’
‘Which would be?’
‘Why I think I’ve heard that name before.’
After the weapons chamber, the three of them rode another elevator further into the ship’s heart. ‘You’re doing well,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘Volyova honestly believes that she’s turned you to her side.’
She had, more or less, been with them the whole time — silently observing Volyova’s guided tour, only occasionally interjecting with remarks or prompts for Khouri’s ears only. This was extremely disquieting: Khouri was never able to free herself of the feeling that Volyova was also privy to these whispered asides.
‘Maybe she’s right,’ Khouri answered, automatically thinking her response. ‘Maybe she’s stronger than you.’
The Mademoiselle scoffed. ‘Did you listen to anything I told you?’
‘As if I had any choice.’
Shutting out the Mademoiselle when she wanted to say something was like trying to silence an insistent refrain playing in her head. There was no respite from her apparitions.
‘Listen,’ the woman said. ‘If my countermeasures were failing, your loyalty to Volyova would force you to tell her of my existence.’
‘I’ve been tempted.’
The Mademoiselle looked at her askance, and Khouri felt a brief frisson of satisfaction. In some respects the Mademoiselle — or rather, her implant-distilled persona — seemed omniscient. But apart from the knowledge which had been instilled in it upon its creation, the implant’s learning was restricted entirely to what it could perceive through Khouri’s own senses. Maybe the implant could hook into data networks even if Khouri herself were not interfaced, but while that might have been possible, it seemed unlikely; there was too much risk of the implant itself being detected by the same systems. And although it could hear her thoughts when Khouri chose to communicate with it, it could not read her state of mind, other than by the most superficial biochemical cues in the neural environment in which it floated. So for the implant, there was a necessary element of doubt concerning the efficacy of its countermeasures.
‘Volyova would kill you. She killed her last recruit, if you haven’t worked that out for yourself.’
‘Maybe she had good reason.’
‘You don’t know anything about her — or any of them. Neither do I. We haven’t even met her Captain yet.’
There was no arguing with that. Captain Brannigan’s name had come up once or twice when Sajaki or one of the others had been indiscreet in Khouri’s presence, but in general they did not speak often of their leader. Clearly they were not Ultras in the usual sense, although they maintained a meticulous front even the Mademoiselle had not seen through. The fiction was so absolute that they went through the motions of trade just like all the other Ultra crews. But what was the reality behind the facade?
Gunnery Officer, Volyova had said. And now Khouri had seen something of the cache of weapons stored within the ship. It was rumoured that many trade vessels carried discreet armaments, for resolving the worst sorts of breakdown in client-customer relations, or for staging acts of blatant piracy against other ships. But these weapons looked far too potent to be used in mere squabbles, and in any case, the ship clearly had an extra layer of conventional weaponry for just those circumstances. So what exactly was the point behind this arsenal? Sajaki must have had some long-term plan in mind, Khouri thought, and that was disturbing enough — but even more worrying was the thought that perhaps there was no plan at all; that Sajaki was carrying the cache around until he found an excuse for using it, like a tooled-up thug stumbling around in search of a fight.
Over the weeks, Khouri had considered and discarded numerous theories, without coming close to anything that sounded plausible. It was not the military side of the ship’s nature that troubled her, of course. She had been born to war; war was her natural environment, and while she was ready to consider the possibility that there were other, more benign states of being, there was nothing about war that felt alien to her. But, she had to admit, the kinds of wars which she had known on Sky’s Edge were hardly comparable to any of the scenarios in which the cache-weapons might be used. Though Sky’s Edge had remained linked to the interstellar trade network, the average technological level of the combatants in the surface battles had been centuries behind the U
ltras who sometimes parked their ships in orbit. A campaign could be won just by one side gaining one item of Ultra weaponry… but those items had always been scarce; sometimes too valuable even to use. Even nukes had been deployed only a few times in the colony’s history, and never in Khouri’s lifetime. She had seen some vile things — things that still haunted her — but she had never seen anything capable of instant, genocidal death. Volyova’s cache-weapons were much worse than that.
And perhaps they had been used, once or twice. Volyova had said as much — pirate operations, perhaps. There were plenty of thinly populated systems, only loosely connected to the trade nets, where it would be entirely possible to exterminate an enemy without anyone ever finding out. And some of those enemies might be as amoral as any of Sajaki’s crew; their pasts littered with acts of random atrocity. So, yes, it was quite likely that parts of the cache had been tested. But Khouri suspected that this would only have ever been a means to an end; self-preservation, or tactical strikes against enemies with resources they needed. The heavier cache-weapons would not have been tested. What they eventually planned to do with the cache — how they planned to discharge the world-wrecking power they possessed — was not yet clear, perhaps not even to Sajaki. And perhaps Sajaki was not the man in whom the ultimate power lay vested. Perhaps, in some way, Sajaki was still serving Captain Brannigan.
Whoever the mysterious Brannigan was.
‘Welcome to the gunnery,’ Volyova said.
They had arrived somewhere near the middle of the ship. Volyova had opened a hole in the ceiling, folded down a telescopic ladder and beckoned Khouri to climb its sharp-edged rungs.
Her head was poking into a large spherical room full of curved, jointed machinery. At the centre of this halo of bluish-silver was a rectilinear hooded black seat, festooned with machinery and a seemingly random tangle of cables. The seat was fixed within a series of elegant gyroscopic axes, arranged so that its motion would be independent of that of the ship. The cables passed into sliding armatures which transmitted power between each concentric shell, before the final thigh-thick clump dove into the machinery-clotted spherical wall of the room. The room reeked of ozone.
There was nothing in the gunnery which looked much newer than a few hundred years old, and plenty that looked as if it had been around for considerably longer. All of it, though, had been scrupulously cared for.
‘This is what it’s all been building up to, isn’t it?’ Khouri pushed herself through the trapdoor into the heart of the chamber, slithering between the curved skeletal shells until she reached the seat. Massive as it was, it seemed to beckon to her with promises of comfort and security. She could not stop herself from sliding into it, letting its cumbersome black bulk softly encase her with a whirr of buried servomechanisms.
‘How does it feel?’
‘Like I’ve been here before,’ she said wonderingly, voice distorted by the bulk of the studded black helmet which had slid over her head.
‘You have,’ Volyova answered. ‘Before you were properly conscious. Besides, the gunnery implant in your head already knows its way around here — that’s where half the sense of familiarity comes from.’
What Volyova said was true. Khouri felt as if the chair were some familiar piece of furniture she had grown up around, its every wrinkle and scratch known to her. She already felt powerfully relaxed and calm, and the urge to actually do something — to use the power that the chair bestowed on her — was building by the second.
‘I can control the cache-weapons from here?’
‘That’s the intention,’ Volyova said. ‘But not just the cache, of course. You’ll also be directing every other major weapon system aboard the Infinity — with as much fluency as if these instruments were simply extensions of your own anatomy. When you’re fully subsumed by the gunnery, that’s how it’ll feel — your own body image swelling out to take in the ship itself.’
Khouri had already begun to feel something similar; the sense at least that her body was blurring into the chair. Tantalising as it was, she had no wish for the sense of subsumption to continue any further. With a conscious effort she eased herself from the chair, its enfolding panels whirring aside to release her.
‘I’m not sure I like this,’ the Mademoiselle said.
SEVEN
En Route to Delta Pavonis, 2546
Never quite forgetting that she was aboard a ship (it was the ever-so-slightly irregular pattern of the induced gravity, caused by tiny imbalances in the thrust stream, which in turn reflected mysterious quantum capriciousness in the bowels of the Conjoiner drives) Volyova entered the green seclusion of the glade alone and hesitated at the top of the rustic staircase which led down to the grass. If Sajaki was aware of her presence, he chose not to show it, kneeling silently and motionlessly next to the gnarled tree stump which was their informal meeting place. But he undoubtedly sensed her. Volyova knew that Sajaki had visited the Pattern Jugglers on the aquatic world Wintersea, accompanying Captain Brannigan, back when Captain Brannigan was capable of leaving the ship. She did not know what the purpose of that trip had been — for either of them — but there had been rumours that the Pattern Jugglers had tampered with his neocortex, embossing neural patterns which configured an unusual degree of spatial awareness: the ability to think in four or five dimensions. The patterns had been the rarest kind of Juggler transform: one that lingered.
Volyova ambled down the staircase and allowed her foot to creak on the lowest tread. Sajaki turned to regard her with no visible hint of surprise.
‘Something up?’ he asked, reading her expression.
‘It concerns the stavlennik,’ she said, momentarily lapsing back into Russish. ‘The protegee, I mean.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Sajaki said absently. He wore an ash-grey kimono, damp grass darkening his knees to olive-black. His Komuso’s shakuhachi rested on the stump’s mirror-smooth, elbow-polished surface. He and Volyova were now the only two crewmembers yet to enter reefersleep, two months out from Yellowstone.
‘She’s one of us now,’ Volyova said, kneeling opposite him. ‘The core of her indoctrination is complete.’
‘I welcome this news.’
Across the glade a macaw screeched, then left its perch in a flurry of clashing primary colours. ‘We can introduce her to Captain Brannigan.’
‘No time like the present,’ Sajaki said, smoothing a wrinkle from his kimono. ‘Or do you have second thoughts?’
‘About meeting the Captain?’ She clucked nervously. ‘None at all.’
‘Then it’s deeper than that.’
‘What?’
‘Whatever’s on your mind, Ilia. Come on. Spit it out.’
‘It’s Khouri. I’m no longer willing to risk her suffering the same kind of pychotic episodes as Nagorny.’ She stopped, expecting — hoping, even — for some response from Sajaki. But instead all she got was the white-noise of the waterfall, and a total absence of expression on her crewmate’s face. ‘What I mean,’ she continued — almost stammering with her own uncertainty — ‘is that I’m no longer sure she’s a suitable subject at this stage.’
‘At this stage?’ Sajaki spoke so softly she largely read his lips.
‘I mean, to go into the gunnery immediately after Nagorny. It’s too dangerous, and I think Khouri is too valuable to risk.’ She stopped, swallowed, and drew breath into her lungs for what she knew would be the hardest thing to say. ‘I think we need another recruit — someone less gifted. With an intermediate recruit I can iron out the remaining wrinkles before going ahead with Khouri as primary candidate.’
Sajaki picked up his shakuhachi and sighted along it thoughtfully. There was a little raised burr at the end of the bamboo, perhaps from the time when he had used the stick on Khouri. He rubbed it with his thumb, smoothing it back down.
When he spoke, it was with a calm so total that it was worse than any possible display of anger. ‘You’re suggesting we look for another recruit?’
He made it s
ound as if what she was proposing was easily the most absurd, deranged thing he had ever heard uttered.
‘Only in the interim,’ she said, aware that she was speaking too quickly, hating herself for it, despising her sudden deference to the man. ‘Just until everything’s stable. Then we can use Khouri.’
Sajaki nodded. ‘Well, that sounds sensible. Goodness knows why we didn’t think of it earlier, but I suppose we had other things on our minds.’ He put down the shakuhachi, although his hand did not stray far from its hollow shaft. ‘But that can’t be helped. What we have to do now is find ourselves another recruit. Shouldn’t be too hard, should it? I mean, we hardly taxed ourselves recruiting Khouri. Admittedly we’re two months into interstellar space and our next port of call is a virtually unheard-of outpost — but I don’t envisage any great problem in finding another subject. I expect we’ll have to turn them away in droves, don’t you?’
‘Be reasonable,’ she said.
‘In what sense am I being anything other than reasonable, Triumvir?’
A moment ago she had been scared; now she was angry. ‘You haven’t been the same, Yuuji-san. Not since…’
‘Not since what?’
‘Not since you and the Captain visited the jugglers. What happened there, Yuuji? What did the aliens do to your head?’
He looked at her oddly, as if the question were a perfectly valid one which it had never struck him to ask himself. It was, fatefully, a ruse, Sajaki moved quickly with the shakuhachi, so that all Volyova really saw was a teak-coloured blur in the air. The blow was relatively soft — Sajaki must have pulled at the last moment — but, gashing into her side, it was still sufficient to send her sprawling into the grass. For the first instant, it was not the pain or the shock of being attacked by Sajaki that overwhelmed her, but the prickly cold wetness of the grass brushing against her nostrils.
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