The Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  Dreyfus glanced at the other lab technicians. He presumed they were fully aware of the situation, or Demikhov wouldn’t be talking so openly. ‘It’s getting ready for something,’ he said.

  ‘That’s my fear.’

  ‘After eleven years: why now?’

  ‘It’s probably reading stress levels.’

  ‘That’s what she told me,’ Dreyfus said, ‘but this isn’t the first crisis we’ve had in the last eleven years.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the first time things have been this bad. It’s self-reinforcing, unfortunately. We can only hope that her elevated hormone level won’t trigger another change.’

  ‘And if it does?’

  ‘We may have to rethink that safety margin of which we’ve always been so protective.’

  ‘You’d make that call?’

  ‘If I felt that thing was about to kill her.’

  ‘And in the meantime?’

  ‘The usual. We’ve altered her therapeutic regime. More drugs. She doesn’t like it, says it dulls her consciousness. She still self-administers. We’re treading a very fine line: we have to take the edge off her nerves, but we mustn’t put her to sleep.’

  ‘I don’t envy you.’

  ‘No one envies us, Tom. We’ve grown used to that by now.’

  ‘There’s something you need to know. Things aren’t going to get any easier for Jane right now. I’m working a case that might stir up some trouble. Jane’s given me the green light to follow my investigation wherever it leads.’

  ‘You’ve a duty to do so.’

  ‘I’m still worried how Jane’ll take things if the crisis worsens.’

  ‘She won’t step down, if that’s what you’re wondering,’ Demikhov said. ‘We’ve been over that a million times.’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect her to resign. Right now the only thing keeping her sane is her job.’

  Dreyfus sat before his low black table, sipping reheated tea. The wall opposite him, where he normally displayed his mosaic of faces, now showed only a single image. It was a picture of the rock sculpture, the one that Sparver and he had found in the incinerated ruin of Ruskin-Sartorious. Forensics had dragged it back to Panoply and scanned it at micron-level resolution. A neon-red contour mesh emphasized the three-dimensional structure that would otherwise have been difficult to make out.

  ‘I’m missing something here,’ Sparver said, sitting next to him at the table. ’We’ve got the killers, no matter what Dravidian might have wanted us to think. We’ve got the motive and the means. Why are we fixating on the art?’

  ‘Something about it’s been bothering me ever since we first saw it,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Don’t you feel the same way?’

  ‘I wouldn’t hang it on my wall. Beyond that, it’s just a face.’

  ‘It’s the face of someone in torment. It’s the face of someone looking into hell and knowing that’s where they’re going. More than that, it’s a face I feel I know.’

  ‘I’m still just seeing a face. Granted, it’s not the happiest face I’ve ever seen, but—’

  ‘What bothers me,’ Dreyfus said, as if Sparver hadn’t spoken, ‘is that we’re clearly looking at the work of a powerful artist, someone in complete control of their craft. But why haven’t I ever heard of Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious before?’

  ‘Maybe you just haven’t been paying attention.’

  ‘That’s what I wondered. But when I searched for priors on Delphine, I only got sparse returns. She’s been contributing pieces to exhibitions for more than twenty years, but with no measurable success for most of that time.’

  ‘And lately?’

  ‘Things have begun to take off for her.’

  ‘Because people caught on to what she was doing, or because she got better at it?’

  ‘Good question,’ Dreyfus said. ‘I’ve looked at some of her older stuff. There are similarities with the unfinished sculpture, but there’s also something missing. She’s always been accomplished from a technical standpoint, but I didn’t get an emotional connection with the older works. I’d have marked her down as another rich postmortal with too much time on her hands, convinced that the world owes her fame in addition to everything else it’s already given her.’

  ‘You said you thought you knew the face.’

  ‘I did. But forensics didn’t make any connection, and when I ran the sculpture through the Search Turbines, nothing came up. Hardly surprising, I suppose, given the stylised manner in which she’s rendered the face.’

  ‘So you’ve drawn a blank.’

  Dreyfus smiled. ‘Not quite. There’s something Vernon told me.’

  ‘Vernon?’ Sparver said.

  ‘Delphine’s suitor, Vernon Tregent, one of the three stable recoverables. He told me the work had been part of her “Lascaille series. The name meant something to me, but I couldn’t quite place it.’

  ‘So run it through the Turbines.’

  ‘I don’t need to. Just sitting here talking to you, I know where I’ve heard that name before.’

  And it was true. Whenever he voiced the word in his mind, he saw a darkness beyond comprehension, a wall of starless black more profound than space itself. He saw darkness, and something falling into that darkness, like a white petal floating down into an ocean of pure black ink.

  ‘Are you going to put me out of my misery?’ Sparver asked.

  ‘Lascaille’s Shroud,’ Dreyfus answered, as if that was all that needed to be said.

  Thalia was reviewing the summary file on Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma when the call came in. She lifted her eyes from her compad and conjured her master’s face into existence before her. Slow-moving habitats, vast and imperious as icebergs, were visible through the slight opacity of the display pane.

  ‘I’m not interrupting anything, am I?’ Dreyfus asked.

  Thalia tried not to sound flustered. ‘Not at all, sir.’

  ‘No one told me you were outside.’

  ‘It all came together quite quickly, sir. I have the patch for the polling bug, the one that allowed Caitlin Perigal to bias the results. I’m going to dry-run it before going live across the whole ten thousand.’

  ‘Good. It’ll be one less headache to deal with. Who’s with you?’

  ‘No one, sir. I’m handling the initial upgrades on my own.’

  Something twitched in the corner of his right eye, the lazy one. ‘How many are you doing?’

  ‘Four, sir, ending with House Aubusson. I told the seniors that I can have the upgrades complete inside sixty hours, but I was being deliberately cautious. If all goes well I should be done a lot quicker than that.’

  ‘I don’t like the idea of you handling this alone, Thalia.’

  ‘I’m quite capable of doing this, sir. Another pair of hands would only slow me down.’

  ‘That isn’t the issue. The issue is one of my deputies going out there without back-up.’

  ‘I’m not going out there to initiate a lockdown, sir. No one’s going to put up a fight.’

  ‘We don’t start being popular just because we aren’t enforcing lockdowns. The citizenry moves from hating and fearing us to guarded tolerance. That’s as good as it gets.’

  ‘I’ve been doing this for five years, sir.’

  ‘But never alone.’

  ‘I was alone in Bezile Solipsist for eight months.’

  ‘But no one noticed you. That’s why they call it Bezile Solipsist.’

  ‘I need to prove that I can handle a difficult assignment on my own, sir. This is my chance. But if you really think I ought to come back to Panoply—’

  ‘Of course I don’t, now that you’re out there. But I’m still cross. You should have cleared this with me first.’

  Thalia cocked her head. ‘Would you have let me go alone?’

  ‘Probably not. I don’t throw assets into risky environments without making damned sure they’re protected.’

  ‘Then now you know why I went out without calling you.’

  She saw something in h
is expression give way, as if he recognised this was a fight he could not hope to win. He had chosen Thalia for her cleverness, her independence of mind. He could hardly be surprised that she was beginning to chafe at the leash.

  ‘Promise me this,’ he said. ‘The instant something happens that you’re not happy about ... you call in, understood?’

  ‘Baudry said they won’t be able to spare a taskforce, sir, if I run into trouble.’

  ‘Never mind Baudry. I’d find a way to move Panoply itself if I knew one of my squad was in trouble.’

  ‘I’ll call in, sir.’

  After a moment, Dreyfus said, ‘In case you were wondering, I didn’t call you to tick you off. I need some technical input.’

  ‘I’m listening, sir.’

  ‘Where House Perigal was concerned, you were able to recover all the communications handled by the core in the last thousand days, correct?’

  ‘Yes,’ Thalia said.

  ‘Suppose we needed something similar for the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble?’

  ‘If the beta-levels didn’t come through intact, I don’t hold out much hope for transmission logs.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. But a message still has to originate from somewhere. That means someone else must have the relevant outgoing transmission somewhere in their logs. And if it travelled more than a few hundred kilometres through the Band, it probably passed through a router or hub, maybe several. Routers and hubs keep records of all data traffic passing through them.’

  ‘Not deep content, though.’

  ‘I’ll settle for a point of origin. Can you help?’

  Thalia thought about it. ‘It’s doable, sir, but I’ll need access to a full version of the Solid Orrery.’

  ‘Can your ship run a copy?’

  ‘Not a light-enforcement vehicle. I’m afraid it’ll have to wait until I return.’

  ‘I’d rather it didn’t.’

  Thalia thought even harder. ‘Then ... you’ll need to turn the Orrery back to around the time of this transmission, if you know it.’

  ‘I think I can narrow it down,’ Dreyfus said.

  ‘You’ll need to pinpoint it to within a few minutes. That’s the kind of timescale on which the router network optimises itself. If you can do that, then you can send me a snapshot of the Orrery. Pull out Ruskin-Sartorious and all routers or hubs within ten thousand kilometres. I’ll see what I can do.’

  Dreyfus looked uncharacteristically pleased. ‘Thank you, Thalia.’

  ‘No promises, sir. This might not work.’

  ‘It’s a lead. Since I’ve nothing else to go on, I’ll take what I’m given.’

  Sparver collected his food from the counter and moved to an empty table near the corner of the refectory. The lights were bright and the low-ceilinged, gently curving space was as busy as it ever got. A group of fields had just returned from duty aboard one of the deep-system vehicles. A hundred or so grey-uniformed cadets were squeezing around three tables near the middle, most of them carrying the dummy whiphounds they’d just been introduced to in basic training. The cadets’ eager, over-earnest faces meant nothing to him. Dreyfus occasionally taught classes, and Sparver sometimes filled in for him, but that happened so infrequently that he never had a chance to commit any of the cadets to memory.

  The one thing he didn’t doubt was that they all knew his name. He could feel their sidelong glances when he looked around the room, taking in the other diners. As the only hyperpig to have made it past Deputy II in twenty years, Sparver was known throughout Panoply. There’d been another promising candidate in the organisation a few years earlier, but he’d died during a bad lockdown. Sparver couldn’t see any hyperpigs amongst the cadets, and it didn’t surprise him. Dreyfus had accepted him unquestioningly, had even pulled strings to get Sparver assigned to his team rather than someone else’s, but for the most part there was still distrust and suspicion against his kind. Baseline humans had made hyperpigs, created them for sinister purposes, and now they had to live with the legacy of that crime. They were resentful of his very existence because it spoke of the dark appetites of their ancestors.

  He began to eat his meal, using the specially shaped cutlery that best fit his hands.

  He felt eyes on the back of his neck.

  He laid his compad before him and called up the results on the search term he had fed into the Turbines just before entering the refectory. Lascaille’s Shroud, Dreyfus had said. But what did Sparver - or Dreyfus, for that matter - know of the Shrouds? No more or less than the average citizen of the Glitter Band.

  The compad jogged his memory.

  The Shrouds were things out in interstellar space, light-years from Yellowstone. They’d been found in all directions: lightless black spheres of unknown composition, wider than stars. Alien constructs, most likely: that was why their hypothetical builders were called the Shrouders. But no one had ever made contact with a Shrouder, or had the least idea what the aliens might be like, if they were not already extinct.

  The difficulty with the Shrouds was that nothing sent towards them ever came back intact. Probes and ships returned to the study stations mangled beyond recognition, if they came back at all. No useful data was ever obtained. The only indisputable fact was that the crewed vehicles returned less mangled, and with more frequency, than the robots. Something about the Shrouds was, if not exactly tolerant of living things, at least slightly less inclined to destroy them utterly. Even so, most of the time the people came back dead, their minds too pulverised even for a post-mortem trawl.

  But occasionally there was an exception.

  Lascaille’s Shroud, the compad informed Sparver, was named for the first man to return alive from its boundary. Philip Lascaille had gone in solo, without the permission of the study station where he’d been based. Against all the odds, he’d returned from the Shroud with his body and mind superficially intact. But that wasn’t to say that Lascaille had not still paid a terrible price. He’d come back mute, either unwilling or incapable of talking about his experiences. His emotional connection with other human beings had become autistically impoverished. A kind of holy fool, he spent his time making intricate chalk drawings on concrete slabs. Shipped back to the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies, Lascaille became a curiosity of gradually dwindling interest.

  That was one mystery solved, but it begged more questions than it answered. Why had Delphine alighted on this subject matter, so many decades after Lascaille’s return? And why had her decision to portray Lascaille resulted in a work of such striking emotional resonance, when her creations had been so affectless before?

  On this, the compad had nothing to say.

  Sparver continued with his meal, wondering how far ahead of him Dreyfus’s enquiries had reached.

  He could still feel the eyes on his neck.

  ’Back from whatever busy errand called you away last time, Prefect Dreyfus?’ asked the beta-level invocation of Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Something came up.’

  ‘Connected with the Bubble?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ His instincts told him that Delphine didn’t need to know all the details concerning Captain Dravidian. ‘But the case isn’t closed just yet. I’d like to talk to you in some detail concerning the way the deal collapsed.’

  Delphine reached up and pushed a stray strand of hair back under the rag-like band she wore around her head. She was dressed in the same clothes she’d been wearing during the last invocation: white smock and trousers, sleeves rolled to the elbow, trousers tucked up to the knee. Once again Dreyfus was struck by the paleness of her eyes and the doll-like simplicity of her features.

  ‘How much did Vernon tell you?’ she asked.

  ‘Enough to know that someone called through and that was enough to remove Dravidian’s offer from consideration. I’d really like to know who that mystery caller was.’

  ‘A representative of some other group of Ultras, intent on undermining Drav
idian. Does it really matter now?’

  ‘Play along with me,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Assume for a minute that Dravidian was set up to make it look as if he intentionally fired on you. What reason might there have been for someone to want to hurt your family?’

  Her face became suspicious. ‘But it was revenge, Prefect. What else could it have been?’

  ‘I’m simply keeping an open mind. Did you or your family have enemies?’

  ‘You’d have to ask someone else.’

  ‘I’m asking you. What about Anthony Theobald? Had he crossed swords with anyone?’

  ‘Anthony Theobald had friends and rivals, like anyone. But actual enemies? I wasn’t aware of any.’

  ‘Did he leave the habitat often?’

  ‘Now and then, to visit another state or go down to Chasm City. But there was never anything sinister about his movements.’

  ‘What about visitors - get many of those?’

  ‘We kept ourselves to ourselves, by and large.’

  ‘So no visitors.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. Yes, of course people came by. We weren’t hermits. Anthony Theobald had his usual guests; I had the occasional fellow artist or critic.’

  ‘None of whom would have had any pressing reason to see you dead?’

  ‘Speaking for myself, no.’

  ‘And Anthony Theobald - what were his guests like?’

  He caught it then: the tiniest flicker of hesitation in her answer. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary, Prefect.’

  Dreyfus nodded, allowing her to think he was content to let the matter stand. He knew he’d touched on something, however peripheral it might prove, but his years of experience had taught him that it would be counterproductive to dig away at it now. Delphine would be conflicted between her blood loyalty to Anthony Theobald and her desire to see justice served, and too much probing from him now might cause her to clam up irrevocably.