Squaring her shoulders she pushed on in, instantly assembling a mental map of the occupants. The air was still full of cloying pink perfume. Even the girl playing the teeconax was making the same nervous moves. Disturbingly liquid sounds emanated from the girl’s cortex, amplified by the instrument and then modulated by the pressure of her fingers on its complex, spectrally coloured touch-sensitive fretboard. Her music toiled up staircase-like ragas, then splintered into nerve-shredding atonal passages which sounded like a pride of lions dragging their foreclaws down sheets of rusty iron. Volyova had heard that you had to have specialised neuro-auditory implants before teeconax music made any sense.
She found a barside stool and ordered a single vodka; a hypo was stashed in her pocket ready to blast her back to sobriety when she needed it. She was resigned to the fact that it might be a very long evening waiting for the recruit to show up. Usually this would have made her impatient but—to her surprise—she felt relaxed and attentive, despite the surroundings. Perhaps the air was spiked with psychotropic chemicals, but she felt better than she had in months, even allowing for the news that the crew were now to journey to Resurgam. Yet it was good to be around humans again, even the specimens who frequented the bar. Whole minutes passed while she watched their animated faces, serenely entranced by conversations she could not hear, imagining for herself the travellers’ tales they were imparting. A girl inhaled from a hookah and blew out a long jetstream of smoke before cracking up as her partner reached the punchline in some outlandish joke. A bald man with a dragon tattoo on his scalp was boasting about how he had flown through a gas giant’s atmosphere with his autopilot dead, his Juggler-configured mind solving atmospheric flow equations like he had been born to it. Another group of Ultras, turned ghostly by the wan blue lighting above their alcove, played a heated card game. One man was having to payoff his debt by losing a lock from his hair. His friends were holding him down while the winner claimed his pleated prize, slicing through the man’s braid with a pocket knife.
What did Khouri look like again?
Volyova fished the card from her jacket, palming it unobtrusively and taking a last look at it. Ana Khouri, the name said, along with a few terse lines of biographical data. There was nothing about this woman that would make her stand out in any normal bar, but here her very ordinariness would have the same effect. Judging by the photograph, she would look slightly more out of place than Volyova herself, if that was possible.
Not that Volyova was complaining. Khouri looked like a remarkably suitable candidate for the vacant position. Volyova had already hacked into the system’s remaining data-networks—those which still functioned after the plague—and drawn up a shortlist of individuals who might suit her needs. Khouri had been among that number; an ex-soldier from Sky’s Edge. But Khouri had been impossible to trace, and eventually Volyova had given up, concentrating on other candidates. None of the others had really been what she was looking for, but she had kept searching anyway, growing steadily more despondent as each candidate failed to fit the bill. More than once Sajaki had suggested they just kidnap someone—as if recruiting someone under false pretences was somehow less of a crime. But kidnapping was too random: it still did not guarantee she would end up with someone she could work with.
Then Khouri had approached them out of the blue. She had heard that Volyova’s crew were looking for someone to join their ship, and she was ready to leave Yellowstone. She had not mentioned her military background, but Volyova already knew about that; doubtless Khouri was just being cautious. The odd thing was, Khouri had not actually approached them until Sajaki—in accordance with the standard protocols of trade—had announced the change of destination.
“Captain Volyova? It’s you, isn’t it?”
Khouri was small, wiry and dourly dressed, and did not subscribe to any recognisable Ultra fashions. Her black hair was cut only an inch longer than Volyova’s; short enough to make it obvious that her skull was not pierced by any clumsy input jacks or nerve-link interfaces. No guarantee that her head was not jam-packed with humming little machines, but it was certainly nothing she flaunted. The woman’s face was a neutral composite of the gene-types which predominated on her homeworld, Sky’s Edge; harmonious without being striking. Her mouth was small, straight and inexpressive, but that blandness was counterbalanced by the woman’s eyes. They were dark, almost colourlessly so, but they glistened with a disarming inner prescience. For a tiny fraction of a moment, Volyova believed that Khouri had already seen through her tawdry skein of lies.
“Yes,” Volyova said. “You must be Ana Khouri.” She kept her voice low, for having reached Khouri, the last thing she wanted was any other hopefuls within earshot trying to barge aboard. “I understand you contacted our trade persona regarding possibilities for crewing with us.”
“I only just reached the carousel. I thought I’d try you first, before I went on to the crews who are advertising now.”
Volyova sniffed at her vodka. “Odd strategy, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Why? The other crews are getting so many applicants they’re only interviewing via sim.” She took a perfunctory sip of her water. “I prefer dealing with humans. It was just a question of going after a different crew.”
“Oh,” Volyova said. “Ours is very different, believe me.”
“But you’re traders, right?”
Volyova nodded enthusiastically. “We’ve almost finished our dealings around Yellowstone. Not too productive, I must say. Economy’s in the doldrums. We’ll probably pop back in a century or two and see if things have picked up, but personally, I wouldn’t mind if I never saw the place again.”
“So if I wanted to sign up for your ship I’d have to make my mind up pretty soon?”
“Of course, we’d have to make our minds up about you first.”
Khouri looked at her closely. “There are other candidates?”
“I’m not really at liberty to discuss that.”
“I imagine there would be. I mean, Sky’s Edge… there must be plenty of people who’d want to hop a lift there, even if they had to crew to pay their way.”
Sky’s Edge? Volyova tried to keep a straight face, marvelling at their luck. The only reason Khouri had come forward was because she still thought they were going to the Edge, rather than Resurgam. Somehow she remained unaware of Sajaki’s announced change of destination.
“There are worse places one could imagine,” Volyova said.
“Well, I’m keen to jump to the head of the line.” A perspex cloud sailed between them, dangling from its ceiling track, wobbling with its cargo of drinks and narcotics. “What exactly is this position you have open?”
“It would be a lot easier if I explained things aboard the ship. You didn’t forget that overnight bag, did you?”
“Of course not. I want this position, you know.”
Volyova smiled. “I’m very glad to hear it.” Cuvier, Resurgam, 2563
Calvin Sylveste was manifesting in his luxurious seigneurial chair at one end of the prison room. “I’ve got something interesting to tell you,” he said, stroking his beard. “Though I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“Make it quick; Pascale will be here shortly.”
Calvin’s permanent look of amusement deepened. “Actually, it’s Pascale I’m talking about. You’re rather fond of her, aren’t you?”
“It’s no concern of yours whether I am or not.” Sylveste sighed; he had known this would lead to difficulties. The biography was nearing completion now and he had been privy to most of it. For all its technical accuracies, for all the myriad ways in which it could be experienced, it remained what Girardieau had always planned: a cunningly engineered weapon of precision propaganda. Through the biography’s subtle filter, there was no way to view any aspect of his past in a light which was not damaging to him; no way to avoid his depiction as an egomaniacal, single-minded tyrant: capacious of intellect, but utterly heartless in the way he used people around
him. In this, Pascale had been undoubtedly clever. If Sylveste had not known the facts himself, he would have accepted the biography’s slant uncritically. It had the stamp of truth.
That was hard enough to accept, but what made it immeasurably harder was how much of this harming portrait had been shaped by the testimonials of people who had known him. And chief among these—the most hurting of all—had been Calvin. Reluctantly, Sylveste had allowed Pascale access to the beta-level simulation. He had done so under duress, but there had been—at the time—what appeared to be compensations.
“I want the obelisk relocated and excavated,” Sylveste said. “Girardieau promised me access to field data if I assisted in destroying my own character. I’ve kept my side of the deal handsomely. How about the government reciprocating?”
“It won’t be easy…” Pascale had begun.
“No; but neither will it be a massive drain on Inundationist resources.”
“I’ll speak to him,” she said, without much in the way of assurance. “Provided you let me talk to Calvin whenever I want.”
It was the devil of all deals; he had known so at the time. But it had seemed worth it, if only to see the obelisk again, and not just the tiny part which had been uncovered before the coup.
Remarkably, Nils Girardieau had kept his word. It had taken four months, but a team had found the abandoned dig and removed the obelisk. It had not been painstakingly done, but Sylveste had not expected otherwise. It was enough that the thing had been unearthed in one piece. Now a holographic representation of it could be called into existence in his room at his whim; any part of the surface enlarged for inspection. The text had been beguiling; difficult to parse. The complicated map of the solar system was still unnervingly accurate to his eyes. Below it—too deep to have been seen before—was what looked like the same map, on a much larger scale, so that it encompassed the entire system out to the cometary halo. Pavonis was actually a wide binary; two stars spaced by ten light hours. The Amarantin seemed to have known that, for they had marked the second star’s orbit conspicuously. For a moment, Sylveste wondered why he had never seen the other star at night: it would be dim, but still much brighter than any of the other stars in the sky. Then he remembered that the other star no longer shone. It was a neutron star; the burnt-out corpse of a star which would once have shone hot and blue. It was so dark that it had not been detected before the first interstellar probes. A cluster of unfamiliar graphicforms attended the neutron star’s orbit.
He had no idea what it meant.
Worse, there were similar maps lower down the obelisk which were at least consistent with other solar systems, although it was nothing he could prove. How could the Amarantin have obtained such data—the other planets, the neutron star, other systems—without a spacefaring capability comparable to humankind’s?
Perhaps the crucial question was the age of the obelisk. The context layer suggested nine hundred and ninety thousand years, placing the burial within a thousand years of the Event—but in terms of validating his theory, he needed a much more precise estimate than that. On her last visit he had asked Pascale to run a TE measurement on the obelisk; he hoped she was going to give him the answer when she arrived.
“She’s been useful to me,” he said to Calvin, who responded with a look of derision. “I don’t expect you to understand that.”
“Perhaps not. I could still tell you what I’ve learned.”
There was no point delaying it. “Well?”
“Her surname isn’t Dubois.” Calvin smiled, drawing out the moment. “It’s Girardieau. She’s his daughter. And you, dear boy, have been had.”
They exited the Juggler and the Shrouder into the carousel’s sweaty impression of planetary night. Outlaw capuchin monkeys were descending from the trees which lined the mall, ready for a session of prehensile pickpocketing. Burundi drums pounded from somewhere around the curve. Neon lightning strobed in serpentlike shapes in the billowing clouds which hung from the rafters. Khouri had heard that it sometimes rained, but so far she had been spared this particular piece of meteorological verisimilitude.
“We’ve a shuttle docked at the hub,” Volyova said. “We’ll just need to take a spoke elevator and clear outbound customs.”
The elevator car they rode in was rattling, unheated, piss-smelling and empty, apart from a helmeted Komuso who sat pensively on a bench, his shakuhachi resting between his knees. Khouri assumed that his presence had made other people decide to wait for the next car in the endless paternoster which rode between the hub and the rim.
The Mademoiselle stood next to the Komuso, hands clasped matronly behind her back, dressed in a floorlength electric-blue gown, black hair pulled into a severe bun.
“You’re much too tense,” she said. “Volyova will suspect you have something to hide.”
“Go away.”
Volyova glanced in her direction. “Did you say something?”
“I said it’s cold in here.”
Volyova seemed to take far too long to digest the statement. “Yes. I suppose it is.”
“You don’t have to speak out loud,” the Mademoiselle replied. “You don’t even have to subvocalise. Just imagine yourself speaking what you wish me to hear. The implant detects the ghost impulses generated in your speech area. Go on; try it.”
“Go away,” Khouri said, or rather imagined herself thinking it. “Get the hell out of my head. This was never in the contract.”
“My dear,” the Mademoiselle said, “there never was any contract, merely a—what shall I say? A gentlewomen’s agreement?” She looked directly at Khouri as if expecting some kind of response. Khouri merely stared, venomously. “Oh, very well,” the woman said. “But I promise you I shall be back before very long.”
She popped out of existence.
“Can’t wait,” Khouri said quietly.
“Pardon?” Volyova asked.
“I said I can’t wait,” Khouri answered. “I mean until we get out of this damn elevator.”
Before very long they reached the hub, cleared customs and boarded the shuttle, a non-atmospheric craft consisting of a sphere with four thruster pods splayed out at right angles. The ship was called the Melancholia of Departure, the kind of ironic name Ultras favoured for their craft. The interior had the ribbed look of a whale’s gut. Volyova told her to go forward through a series of bulkheads and gullet-like crawlspaces until they reached the thing’s bridge. There were a few bucket seats, together with a console displaying reams of avionics gibberish, latticed by delicate entoptics. Volyova thumbed one of the visual readouts, causing a small, traylike device to chug out of a black recess in the side of the console. The tray was gridded with an oldstyle keyboard. Volyova’s fingers danced on the keys, causing a subtle change to sweep through the avionics data.
Khouri realised with a tingling feeling that the woman had no implants; that her fingers were actually one of the ways by which she communicated.
“Buckle in,” Volyova said. “There’s so much garbage floating round Yellowstone we might have to pull some gee-loads.”
Khouri did as she was told. For all the discomfort which ensued, it was her first chance to relax in days. Much had happened since her revival, all of it hectic. In all the time she had been asleep in Chasm City, the Mademoiselle had been waiting for a ship to arrive which was carrying on to Resurgam, and—given Resurgam’s lack of importance in the ever-shifting web of interstellar commerce—the wait had been a long one. That was the trouble with lighthuggers. No individual, no matter how powerful, could ever own one now unless it had already been in their possession for centuries. The Conjoiners were no longer manufacturing drives and people who already owned ships were in no mind to sell them.
Khouri knew that the Mademoiselle had not been searching passively. Nor had Volyova. Volyova—so the Mademoiselle said—had unleashed a search program into Yellowstone’s data network, what she called a bloodhound. A mere human—even a mere computerised monitor—could not have detected
the dog’s elaborate sniffing. But the Mademoiselle was seemingly neither of these things, and she sensed the dog the way a pond-skater feels ripples in the membrane on which it walks.
What she did next was clever.
She whistled to the bloodhound until it came bounding towards her. Then she casually broke the thing’s neck, but not before she had flensed it open and examined its informational innards, working out just what it was that the dog had been sent to find. The gist was that the dog had been sent to retrieve supposedly secret information relating to individuals who had had slaver experience; exactly what one would have expected from a group of Ultras who were searching for a crewperson to fill a vacancy on their ship. But there was something else. Something a tiny bit strange, which pricked the Mademoiselle’s curiosity.
Why were they looking for someone with military activity in their backgrounds?
Perhaps they were disciplinarians: professional traders who were operating one level above the normal state of play of commerce, ruthless experts who used slippery constructs to glean the knowledge they wanted, and who were not averse to travelling to backwater colonies like Resurgam when they saw a chance of some massive reward, perhaps centuries hence. It was probable that their entire organisation was structured along military lines, rather than the quasi-anarchy which existed on most trade craft. So by searching for military experience in the backgrounds of their candidates, what they were doing was ensuring themselves that the candidate would fit into their crew.
That was it, naturally.
Things had gone well so far, even allowing for the strange way in which Volyova had not corrected Khouri when she made obvious her ignorance of the ship’s true destination. Khouri had known all along that the destination was Resurgam, of course—but if the Ultras knew this was where she really wanted to go to, she would have been forced to use one of several cover stories to explain her motivations for visiting the backwater colony. She had been ready to employ one of the stories as soon as Volyova corrected her—except she had failed to do so, seemingly willing to let her recruit keep on thinking they were really travelling to Sky’s Edge.
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