The Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  He would have to earn her trust.

  ‘The point is,’ she went on, ‘I really wasn’t interested in family or Glitter Band politics. I had - have - my art. That was all that interested me.’

  ‘Let’s talk about your art, then. Could someone have been jealous of your success?’

  She looked stunned. ‘Enough to kill nine hundred and sixty people?’

  ‘Crimes aren’t always proportionate to motive.’

  ‘I can’t think of anyone. If I’d been the talk of Stoner society, we wouldn’t have been dealing with a second-rate trader like Dravidian.’

  Dreyfus bit his tongue, keeping his policeman’s poker face fixed firmly in place. ‘All the same, someone wanted you all dead, and I’ll sleep easier when I know the reason.’

  ‘I wish I could help.’

  ‘You still can. I want you to tell me when that call came through.’

  ‘While Dravidian was visiting us.’

  ‘If you could narrow it down, that would help.’

  The beta-level closed her eyes momentarily. ‘The call came in at fourteen hours, twenty-three minutes, fifty-one seconds, Yellowstone Standard Time.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Freeze-’ he began.

  ‘Are we done?’ Delphine asked, cutting him off before he had finished issuing the command.

  ‘For now. If there’s anything else I need from you, you’ll be the first to hear about it.’

  ‘And now you’re going to put me back in the box?’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to talk about art.’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘No, we discussed the possibility of my art being a motivating factor in the crime. We didn’t discuss the art itself.’

  Dreyfus shrugged easily. ‘We can, if you think it’s relevant.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘The art appears to be a peripheral detail, unless you think otherwise. You yourself expressed doubt that jealousy could have been a motivating factor.’ Dreyfus paused and reconsidered. ‘That said, your reputation was building, wasn’t it?’

  Delphine looked at him sourly. ‘You make it sound as if my life story’s already written, down to the last footnote.’

  ‘From where I’m standing ...’ But then Dreyfus remembered what Vernon had told him concerning Delphine’s belief in the validity of beta-level simulation.

  ‘What?’ Delphine said.

  ‘Things will be different. Won’t they?’

  ‘Different. Not necessarily worse. You still don’t believe in me, do you?’

  ‘I’m trying my best,’ Dreyfus replied.

  ‘The last time we spoke, I asked you a question.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I asked you if you’d ever lost a loved one.’

  ‘I answered you.’

  ‘Evasively.’ She fixed him with a long, searching stare. ‘You have lost someone, haven’t you? Not just a colleague or friend. Someone closer than that.’

  ‘We’ve all lost people.’

  ‘Who was it, Prefect Dreyfus? Who did you lose?’

  ‘Tell me why you chose to work on the Lascaille series. Why did you care about what happened to a man you never knew?’

  ‘Those are personal questions for an artist.’

  ‘I’m wondering if you made any enemies when you picked that theme.’

  ‘And I’m wondering why you find it so difficult to acknowledge my conscious existence. This person who died - did something happen that made you turn against beta-levels?’ Her eyes flashed an insistent sea-green, daring him to look away. ‘Who was it, Prefect? Quid pro quo. Answer my question and I’ll answer yours.’

  ‘I’ve got a job to do, Delphine. Empathising with software isn’t part of it.’

  ‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’

  ‘No,’ Dreyfus said, something inside him snapping, ‘you aren’t “sorry. ‘Sorry” would imply the presence of a thinking mind, a sentient will capable of experiencing the emotion called regret“. You’re saying that you are sorry because that’s what the living Delphine would have said under similar circumstances. But it doesn’t mean you feel it.’

  ‘You really don’t think I’m alive, in any sense of the word?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  Delphine nodded coolly. ‘In which case: why are you arguing with me?’

  Dreyfus reached for an automatic answer, but nothing came. The moment dragged, Delphine regarding him with something between amusement and pity. He froze the invocation and stood staring at the empty space where she had been standing.

  Not a she, he told himself. An it.

  ’Hello?’ Thalia called into an echoing, dank darkness. ‘This is Deputy Field Prefect Ng. Is anyone there?’

  There was no answer. Thalia stopped and put down the heavy cylinder she’d been carrying in her left hand. She touched her right hand to the haft of her whiphound, and then chided herself for her unease. Letting go of the weapon, she extracted her glasses, slipped them on and keyed image-amplification. The darkness of the chamber abated, revealing a doorway in one wall. Thalia touched the glasses again, but the entoptic overlay changed nothing. If a habitat citizen had been standing in Thalia’s place with a skullful of sense-modifying implants, they’d still have seen only the same drab walls.

  ‘Moving deeper into the hab,’ Thalia said, reporting back to her cutter. ‘So far I’m not exactly overwhelmed by the welcoming committee.’

  She picked up the equipment cylinder in her left hand. Caution prevailed, and this time she chose to release the whiphound. ‘Proceed ahead of me at defence posture one,’ she instructed, before letting go. Red eye bright, the whiphound nodded its haft once to indicate that it had understood her order and was now in compliance. Then it turned the haft away from her and slunk forward, gliding across the ground on the coiled tip of its filament, like a sketch of a cobra.

  The doorway led to a damp tunnel with cracked flooring. Ahead, the tunnel began to curve around. The whiphound slinked forward, the red light of its scanning eye reflecting back from moist surfaces. Thalia followed it into the tunnel, around a gentle curve, until the tunnel widened out into a gloomily lit plaza. The curvature of the habitat was evident in the continuous gentle up-sweep of the floor, rising ahead of her until it was hidden by the similarly curving ceiling. The only illumination came from sunlight creeping through immense slatted windows on either side, their glass panes tinting the light sepia-brown through a thick caking of dust and mould. Rising high above Thalia, interrupted only by the windows, were multi-levelled tiers of what had once been shops, boutiques and restaurants. Bridges and ramps spanned the space between the two walls, some of them sagging or broken. Glass frontages lay shattered, or were covered with various forms of mould or foliage-like infestation. In some of the shops there was even evidence of unsold merchandise, cobwebbed into obscurity.

  Thalia didn’t like the place at all. She was glad when she found another tunnel leading out of the plaza. The whiphound slinked ahead of her, its coil making a rhythmic hissing sound against the flooring.

  Without warning, it vanished.

  An instant later Thalia heard a sound like two pieces of scrap metal being smashed against each other. Cautiously she rounded the curve and saw the whiphound wrapped around the immobilised form of a robot, which had toppled over onto its side, its rubber-tyred wheels spinning uselessly. Thalia stepped closer, putting down the cylinder. She appraised the fallen machine for weapons, but there was no sign that it was anything other than a general-purpose servitor of antique design.

  ‘Release it,’ she said.

  The whiphound uncoiled itself and pulled back from the robot, while still keeping its eye locked on the machine. Laboriously, the robot extended telescopic limbs to right itself. A slender pillar rose from the wheeled base, with limbs and sensors sprouting at odd, asymmetric angles from the pillar.

  ‘I am Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng, of Panoply,’ she said. ‘Identif
y your origin.’

  The robot’s voice was disconcertingly deep and emphatic. ‘Welcome to Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma, Deputy Field Prefect Ng. I trust your journey was pleasant. I apologise for my lateness. I have been tasked to escort you to the participatory core.’

  ‘I was hoping to talk to Citizen Orson Newkirk.’

  ‘Orson Newkirk is in the participatory core. Shall I assist you with your luggage?’

  ‘I can manage,’ Thalia said, shaking her head.

  ‘Very well, Deputy Field Prefect Ng. Please follow me.’

  ‘Where is everyone? I was expecting a population of one point three million people.’

  ‘The current population is one million, two hundred and seventy-four thousand, six hundred and eighteen people. All are accounted for in the participatory core.’

  ‘You keep saying that - what’s a participatory core“?’

  ‘Please follow me.’

  The robot spun around, tyres hissing against the wet flooring, and began to amble down the corridor, trailing an electrical burning smell in its wake.

  From seven and a half metres away Jane Aumonier smiled tightly. ‘You’re like a dog with a bone, Tom. Not everything in life is a conspiracy. People do sometimes get mad and do stupid and irrational things.’

  ‘Dravidian sounded neither mad nor irrational to me.’

  ‘One of his crew, then.’

  ‘Acting according to plan. Following a script to make the whole attack look like a heat-of-the-moment thing, when in fact it was set up long before Dravidian ever met Delphine.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  Dreyfus had just run the Solid Orrery in his room. He’d backtracked the configuration of the Glitter Band to the time when Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious said the call had come in. The data was now sitting in Thalia’s cutter, waiting for her to get to it when she completed her current upgrade.

  ‘You’ve always trusted my instincts in the past,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Now they’re telling me that there’s so mething going on here that we’re supposed to overlook.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to the betas?’

  ‘They can’t think of anyone who’d do this to the family.’

  ‘So you’ve no hint as to what the motive might have been?’

  ‘No, not yet. But I’ll tell you this. If you just wanted to hurt a family, there are any number of assassination weapons capable of doing the job without leaving a forensic trail.’

  ‘Agreed ...’ Aumonier said, her tone non-committal, letting him know that she was going along with him for the sake of argument alone.

  ‘But whoever did this wanted to take out more than just the family. They killed all the people in that habitat and then they killed the habitat itself.’

  ‘Maybe they didn’t have access to assassination weapons.’

  Dreyfus pulled a sceptical expression. ‘Yet they did have the means to infiltrate an Ultra ship and manipulate its Conjoiner drive?’

  ‘I’m not sure where you’re going with this, Tom.’

  ‘I’m saying that it would have been harder for them to use Dravidian than to get their hands on any number of assassination tools. Which means they really needed that ship. They used it for a reason. Killing the family wasn’t enough. They had to incinerate them, wipe every trace of them out of existence. Short of a foam-phase bomb or a nuke, how else do you do that, except with a Conjoiner drive?’

  ‘It still doesn’t add up to much,’ Aumonier said.

  ‘At least the ship gave them a chance to pin it on the Ultras, rather than making it look like the work of another habitat. But I think Dravidian and his crew were innocent.’

  Aumonier looked wearily at the wall of displays jostling for her attention. Even at a glance, Dreyfus could see that almost all of them referred to her efforts to contain the escalating crisis between the Glitter Band and the Ultras. The screens wrapped the room from pole to pole, the combined pressure of them pushing in from all directions like the impaling spikes of an iron maiden.

  ‘If I did have proof,’ she said, ‘if I could demonstrate that the Ultras were innocent, that would certainly ease matters.’

  ‘I’ve got Thalia Ng helping me to trace the caller who set up Dravidian.’

  She looked at Dreyfus questioningly. ‘I thought Ng was outside on field duty. The update to the polling cores, wasn’t it? Vantrollier asked me to sign off on the pad release.’

  ‘Thalia’s outside,’ Dreyfus confirmed. ‘And she’s helping me as well, between upgrades.’

  Aumonier nodded approvingly. ‘A good deputy.’

  ‘I don’t employ any other kind.’

  ‘And I don’t employ any other kind of field prefect. I want you to understand that you are appreciated, no matter how ... frustrating you must occasionally find your position.’

  ‘I’m perfectly happy with my role in the organisation.’

  ‘I’m glad you feel that way.’

  There was a lull.

  ‘Tell me something, Jane. Now that we’re having this conversation.’

  ‘Go ahead, Tom.’

  ‘I want you to answer truthfully. I’m going to be poking around under some stones. There may be things under them that bite back. I need to be certain that I have your complete confidence when I go out there to do my job.’

  ‘You have it. Unconditionally.’

  ‘Then there’s no reason for me to think that I might have disappointed you, or underperformed, in my line of work?’

  ‘Why would you feel that way?’

  ‘I sense that I have your confidence. You’ve given me Pangolin clearance, which I appreciate. I’m entitled to sit in with the senior prefects. But I’m still a field, after all these years.’

  ‘There’s no shame in that.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘If it wasn’t for this ... thing on my neck, maybe I’d still be out there as well.’

  ‘Not very likely, Jane. You’d have been promoted out of fieldwork whether you liked it or not. They’d have kept you inside Panoply anyway, where you can be of most benefit to the organisation.’

  ‘And if I’d said no?’

  ‘They’d have thanked you for your opinion and ignored you anyway. People get promoted out of field while they’re still at the top of their game. That’s the way it works.’

  ‘And if I told you I thought the best way for you to serve Panoply was to remain a field prefect?’

  ‘I’m getting old and tired, Jane. I’ve started making mistakes.’

  ‘None that have reached my attention.’ She addressed him with sudden urgency, as if she’d been indulging him until then but now it was time to lay down the law. ‘Tom, listen to me. I don’t want to hear any more of this. You’re the best we have. I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t mean it.’

  ‘Then I have your confidence?’

  ‘I’ve said it once already. Go and look under as many stones as you want. I’ll be right behind you.’

  CHAPTER 9

  Ahead, the whiphound was a nervous black squiggle against a brightening red glow. The escort servitor had broken down, but it had given Thalia clear instructions about where she should go. Now she quickened her pace, the cylinder weighing heavily on her wrist, until she emerged into a huge arena-like space. She appeared to be standing on a railed balcony, the opposite wall an easy hundred metres away. The wall was divided into endless boxlike partitions, stacked on many levels, but the blood-red light was too dim for Thalia to see more than that. Above was only inky darkness, with no suggestion of how high the ceiling was.

  Next to her, the whiphound snapped around agitatedly, sizing up the new space in which it found itself.

  ‘Easy,’ she whispered. ‘Maintain defence posture one.’

  That was when a new voice boomed out of nowhere. ‘Welcome, Thalia. This is Orson Newkirk speaking. I’m sorry about your tribulations with the servitor.’

  She raised her own voice in return. ‘I can’t see you, Citizen Newkirk.’

  ‘My a
pologies. It’s spectacularly bad form not to be there to greet your guests, but I haven’t been unplugged in a while and there was a problem with one of my disconnect valves. All fixed now, though. I’m on my way down as I speak. Be with you in a jiffy.’

  ‘On your way down?’ she asked, looking up.

  ‘How much do you know about us, Thalia?’ he asked, his voice cheerfully playful.

  ‘I know that you stay out of trouble with Panoply,’ she said, giving a non-answer that she hoped would mask her ignorance.

  ‘Well, that’s good. At least you haven’t heard anything bad.’

  Thalia was getting a crick in her neck. ‘Should I have?’

  ‘We have our critics. People who think the level of abstraction we practise here is somehow wrong, or immoral.’

  ‘I’m not here to judge. I’m here to install a software patch.’

  She could see something now: a mote of light in the darkness above, descending towards her. As Orson Newkirk came fully into view, Thalia saw that he was contained inside a rectangular glass box, which was being lowered down on a barely visible line. The box wasn’t much larger than a suitcase.

  He was a bust, Thalia thought: a human head, half of the upper torso, and nothing else. Nothing below the ribs. No arms, no shoulders. Just a head and a chest, the base of his torso vanishing into a ring-shaped life-support device. A padded framework rose up behind him, supporting the torso, neck and head.

  ‘They say we’re just heads,’ Newkirk said chattily. ‘They couldn’t be more wrong! Anyone can keep a head alive, but without the hormonal environment of the rest of the body, you don’t get anything remotely resembling the rich texture of human consciousness. We’re creatures of chemistry, not wiring. That’s why we keep as much as possible, while throwing out everything we don’t need. I still have glands, you know. Glands make all the difference. Glands maketh the man.’

  ’All your glands?’ Thalia asked, glancing at the truncated torso.

  ‘Things can be moved around and rerouted, Thalia. Open me up and you’d find a very efficient utilisation of space.’

  The box came to a halt with Newkirk’s head level with Thalia’s.