The plane would not linger at the delivery point. After Sylveste and Pascale had been let off—with enough provisions to survive in the storm for a few hours at most—the plane would return swiftly to Mantell, evading the few extant radar systems which could have alerted Resurgam City to its trajectory. Sylveste would then contact Volyova and inform her of his location, although, because he would then be broadcasting directly, she would have no difficulty triangulating his position. Thereafter things would be in Volyova’s hands. Sylveste had no real idea how events would proceed, how she would bring him aboard the ship. That was her problem, not his. All he knew was that it was very unlikely that this whole affair was a trap. Although the Ultras wanted access to Calvin, Calvin was essentially useless without Sylveste. They would want to take very good care of him indeed. And if the same logic did not automatically apply to Pascale, Sylveste had taken steps to amend that deficiency.
The aircraft levelled now. It was flying below the average height of the mesas, using their bulk for cover. Every few seconds it would veer, steering through the narrow, canyonlike corridors which spaced the mesas. Visibility was near zero. Sylveste hoped that the terrain map on which the plane was basing its manoeuvres had not been compromised by any recent landfalls, or else the ride would be very much shorter than the six hours Volyova had allocated.
“Where the hell…” Calvin, who had just appeared in the cabin, looked around frantically. He was, as usual, reclining in an enormous, fussily upholstered chair. There was not enough room for its bulk in the fuselage, so its extremities had to vanish awkwardly into the walls. “Where the hell am I? I’m not getting anything! What the hell’s happened? Tell me!”
Sylveste turned to his wife. “The first thing he does, on being woken, is sniff the local cybernetic environment—allows him to get his bearings, establish the time frame, and so on. Trouble is, right now there isn’t a local cybernetic environment, so he’s a bit disorientated.”
“Stop talking about me like I’m not here. Wherever the hell here is!”
“You’re in a plane,” Sylveste said.
“A plane? That’s novel,” Cal nodded, regaining some of his composure. “Very novel indeed. Don’t think I’ve ever been in one of those before. I don’t suppose you’d mind filling your old dad in on a few key facts?”
“That’s exactly why I’ve woken you.” Sylveste paused to cancel the windows; there was no view now and the unchanging pall of dust served only to remind him of what lay ahead once the plane had deposited them. “Don’t for one moment imagine it was because I felt in need of a fireside chat, Cal.”
“You look older, son.”
“Yes, well, some of us have to get on with the business of being alive in the entropic universe.”
“Ouch. That hurts, you know.”
Pascale said, “Stop it, will you? There isn’t time for this bickering.”
“I don’t know,” Sylveste said. “Five hours—seems like more than enough to me. What do you think, Cal?”
“Too right. What does she know anyway?” Cal glared at her. “It’s traditional, dearie. It’s how we—how shall I put it? Touch base. If he showed even the remotest hint of cordiality towards me, then I’d really start worrying. It would mean he wanted some excruciatingly difficult favour.”
“No,” Sylveste said. “For merely excruciatingly difficult favours, I’d just threaten you with erasure. I haven’t needed anything big enough from you to justify being pleasant, and I doubt I ever will.”
Calvin winked at Pascale. “He’s right, of course. Silly me.”
He was manifesting in a high-collared ash-coloured frock coat, its sleeves patterned with inter-locked gold chevrons. One booted foot was resting on the knee of his other leg, and the frock’s tail draped over the raised leg in a long curtain of gently rippling fabric. His beard and moustache had attained some realm beyond the merely fussy, sculpted into a whole of such complexity that it could only have been maintained by the fastidious attention of an army of dedicated grooming-servitors. An amber data-monocle rested in one socket (an affectation, since Calvin had been implanted for direct interfacing since birth), and his hair (long now) extended beyond the back of his skull in an oiled handle, reconnecting with his scalp somewhere above his nape. Sylveste attempted to date the ensemble, but failed. It was possible that the look referred to a particular era from Calvin’s days on Yellowstone. It was equally possible that the simulation had invented it entirely from scratch, to kill the time while all his routines booted.
“So, anyway…”
“The plane’s taking me to meet Volyova,” Sylveste said. “You remember her, of course?”
“How could we forget.” Calvin removed the monocle, polishing it absently against his sleeve. “And just how did all this come about?”
“It’s a long story. She’s put the squeeze on the colony. They had little choice but to hand me over. You too, in fact.”
“She wanted me?”
“Don’t look all surprised about it.”
“I’m not; just disappointed. And of course this is rather a lot to take in all of a sudden.” Calvin popped the monocle back in, one eye glaring magnified behind the amber. “Do you think she wanted us together as a safeguard, or because she has something specific in mind?”
“Probably the latter. Not that she’s been exactly open about her intentions.”
Calvin nodded thoughtfully. “So you’ve been dealing only with Volyova, is that it?”
“Does that strike you as odd?”
“I would have expected our friend Sajaki to show his face at some point.”
“Me too, but she hasn’t made any reference to his absence.” Sylveste shrugged. “Does it really matter? They’re all as bad as each other.”
“Granted, but at least with Sajaki we knew where we were.”
“Shafted, you mean?”
Calvin rocked his head equivocally. “Say what you like about the man, at least he kept his word. And he—or whoever is running things—has at least had the decency not to bother you again until now. How long has it been since we were last aboard that Gothic monstrosity they call Nostalgia for Infinity?”
“About a hundred and thirty years. A lot less for them, of course—only a few decades as far as they were concerned.”
“I suppose we’d better assume the worst.”
“The worst what?” Pascale said.
“That,” Calvin began, with laboured patience, “we have a certain task to perform, in connection with a certain gentleman.” He squinted at Sylveste. “How much does she know, anyway?”
“Rather less than I imagined, I suspect.” Pascale did not look amused.
“I told her the minimum,” Sylveste said, glancing between his wife and the beta-level simulation. “For her own good.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“Of course, I had some doubts of my own…”
“Dan, just what is it these people want with you and your father?”
“Ah, well, that’s another very long story, I’m afraid.”
“You’ve got five hours—you just said so yourself. Assuming, of course, you two can bear to break off from your mutual admiration session.”
Calvin raised one eyebrow. “Never heard it called that before. But maybe she’s got something, eh, son?”
“Yes,” Sylveste said. “What she’s got is a severe misapprehension of the situation.”
“Nonetheless, maybe you should tell her a bit more—keep her in the picture and all that.”
The aircraft executed a particularly abrupt turn, Calvin the only one amongst them impervious to the motion. “All right,” Sylveste said. “Though I still say she’d be better off knowing less rather than more.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” Pascale said.
Calvin smiled. “Start by telling her about dear Captain Brannigan, that’s my advice.”
So Sylveste told her the rest of it. Until then, he had deliberately skirted the issue of wha
t exactly it was that Sajaki’s crew wanted of him. Pascale had always had every right to know, of course… but the subject itself was so unpalatable to Sylveste that he had done his best to avoid it at all times. It was not that he had anything personal against Captain Brannigan, or even any lack of sympathy for what had become of the man. The Captain was a unique individual with a uniquely horrifying affliction. Even if he was not in any sense aware now (to the best of Sylveste’s knowledge), he had been in the past, and could be again in the future, in the admittedly unlikely event that he could be cured. So what if the Captain’s murky past quite possibly contained crimes? Surely the man had atoned for prior sins a thousand times over in his present state. No; anyone would have wished the Captain well, and most people would have been willing to expend some energy in helping him, provided they ran no risk to themselves. Even some small risk might have been accepted.
But what the crew were asking of Sylveste was much more than just the acceptance of personal risk. They would require him to submit to Calvin; to allow Cal to invade his mind and take command of his motor functions. The thought alone was repulsive. It was bad enough dealing with Cal as a beta-level simulation; as bad as being haunted by his father’s ghost. He would have destroyed the beta-level years ago if it had not proven so intermittently useful, but just knowing it existed made him uncomfortable. Cal was too perceptive; too shrewd in his… in its judgements. It knew what he had done with the alpha-level simulation, even if it had never come out and said it. But every time he allowed it into his head, it seemed to sink deeper tendrils into him. It seemed to know him better each time; seemed able to predict his own responses more closely. What did that make him, if what seemed like his own free will was so easily mimicked by a piece of software which had no theoretical consciousness of its own? It was worse than simply the dehumanising aspect of the channelling process, of course. The physical procedure was itself far from pleasant, for his own voluntary motor signals had to be blocked at source, obstructed by a stew of neuro-inhibitory chemicals. He would be paralysed, yet moving—as close to demonic possession as anyone ever came. It had always been a nightmarish experience; never one he was in a hurry to repeat.
No, he thought. The Captain could go to hell, for all he cared. Why should he lose his own humanity to save someone who had lived longer than most people in history? Sympathy be damned. The Captain should have been allowed to die years ago, and the greater crime now was not the Captain’s suffering, but what his crew were prepared to put Sylveste through to alleviate it.
Of course, Calvin saw it differently… less an ordeal, more an opportunity…
“Of course, I was the first,” Calvin said. “Back when I was still corporeal.”
“The first what?”
“First to serve him. He was heavily chimeric even then. Some of the technologies holding him together dated from before the Transenlightenment. God knows how old the flesh parts of him were.” He fingered his beard and moustache, as if needing to remind himself how artful the combination was. “This was before the Eighty, of course. But I was known even then as an experimenter on the fringe of the radical chimeric sciences. I wasn’t just content with renovating the techniques developed before the Transenlightenment. I wanted to go beyond what they’d attained. I wanted to leave them in my dust. I wanted to push the envelope so far it ripped into shreds, and then remake it from the pieces.”
“Yes, enough about you Cal,” Sylveste said. “We were discussing Brannigan, remember?”
“It’s called setting the scene, dear boy.” Calvin blinked. “Anyway, Brannigan was an extreme chimeric, and I was someone prepared to consider extreme measures. When he became sick, his friends had no choice but to hire my services. Of course, this was all strictly below-board—and it was a total diversion, even for me. I was increasingly uninterested in physiological modifications, at the expense of a growing fascination—obsession, if you will—with neural transformations. Specifically, I wanted to find a way of mapping neural activity straight into—” Calvin broke off, biting his lower lip.
“Brannigan used him,” Sylveste continued. “And in return, helped him to establish ties with some of the Chasm City rich; potential clients for the Eighty program. And if he’d done a good job of healing Brannigan, that would have been the end of the story. But he botched the job—did the minimum he could get away with, to get Brannigan’s allies off his back. If he’d taken the trouble to do it properly, we wouldn’t be in this mess now.”
“What he means,” Calvin cut in, “is that my repair of the Captain could not be considered permanent. It was inevitable, given the nature of his chimerism, that some other aspect of his physiology would eventually need our attention. And by then—because of the complexity of the work I’d done on him—there was literally no other person they could turn to.”
“So they came back,” Pascale said.
“This time he was commanding the ship we’re about to board.” Sylveste looked at the simulation. “Cal was dead; the Eighty a publicly staged atrocity. All that remained of him was this beta-level simulation. Needless to say Sajaki—he was with the Captain by then—was not best pleased. But they found a way, all the same.”
“A way?”
“For Calvin to work on the Captain. They found he could work through me. The beta-level sim provided the expertise in chimeric surgery. I provided the meat it needed to move around to get the job done. ‘Channelling’ was what the Ultras called it.”
“Then it needn’t have been you at all,” Pascale said. “Provided they had the beta-level simulation—or a copy of it—couldn’t one of them have acted as the—as you so charmingly put it—meat?”
“No, though they probably would have preferred it that way: it would have freed them of any dependency on me. But channelling only worked when there was a close match between the beta-level sim and the person it was working through. Like a hand fitting into a glove. It worked with me and Calvin because he was my father; there were many points of genetic similarity. Slice open our brains and you’d probably have trouble telling them apart.”
“And now?”
“They’re back.”
“Now if only he’d done a good job last time,” Calvin said, dignifying his remark with a thin smile of self-satisfaction.
“Blame yourself; you were in the driving seat. I just did what you told me.” Sylveste scowled. “In fact for most of it I wasn’t even what you’d term conscious. Not that I didn’t hate every minute of it, all the same.”
“And they’re going to make you do it again,” Pascale said. “Is that all it’s about? Everything that’s happened here? The attack on that settlement? Just to get you to help their Captain?”
Sylveste nodded. “In case it hasn’t escaped your attention, the people we’re about to do business with are not what you’d properly term human. Their priorities and timescales are a little… abstract.”
“I wouldn’t call it business, in that case. I’d call it blackmail.”
“Well,” Sylveste said. “That’s where you’re wrong. You see, this time Volyova made a small miscalculation. She gave me some warning of her arrival.”
Volyova glanced up at the imaged view of Resurgam. At the moment Sylveste’s location on the planet’s surface was completely unknown, like a quantum wave function which had not yet collapsed. Yet in a moment they would have an accurate triangulation fix on his broadcast, and that wave function would shed a myriad unselected possibilities.
“You have him?”
“Signal’s weak,” Hegazi said. “That storm you made is causing a lot of ionospheric interference. I bet you’re really proud, aren’t you?”
“Just a get a fix, svinoi.”
“Patience, patience.”
Volyova had not really doubted that Sylveste would call in on time. Nonetheless, when she heard from him, she could not help but feel relief. It meant that another element in the tricky business of getting him aboard had been achieved. She did not, however, deceive herse
lf that the job was in any way complete. And there had been something arrogant about Sylveste’s demands—the way he seemed to be ordering how things should happen—which left her wondering if her colleagues really did have the upper hand. If Sylveste had set out to sow a seed of doubt in her mind, the man had certainly succeeded. Damn him. She had prepared herself, knowing that Sylveste was adept at mind games, but she had not prepared herself enough. Then she took a mental back step and asked herself how things had so far proceeded. After all, Sylveste was shortly to be in their custody. He could not possibly desire such an outcome, especially as he would know just what it was they wanted from him. If he were in control of his destiny, he would not now be on the verge of being brought aboard.
“Ah,” Hegazi said. “We have a fix. You want to hear what the bastard has to say?”
“Put him on.”
The man’s voice burst in on them again, as it had done six hours previously, but there was a difference now, very obviously. Every word Sylveste spoke was backgrounded—almost drowned out—by the continuous howl of the razorstorm.
“I’m here, where are you? Volyova, are you listening to me? I said are you listening to me? I want an answer! Here are my coordinates relative to Cuvier—you’d better be listening.” And then he recited—several times, for safety—a string of numbers which would pinpoint him to within one hundred metres; redundant information, given the triangulation which had now been performed. “Now get down here! We can’t wait for ever—we’re in the middle of a razorstorm, we’re going to die out here if you don’t hurry.”
“Mmm,” Hegazi said. “I think at some point it might not be a bad idea to answer the poor fellow.”
Volyova took out and lit a cigarette. She savoured a long intake before replying. “Not yet,” she said. “In fact, maybe not for an hour or two. I think I’ll let him get really worried first.” Khouri heard only the faintest of scuffling sounds as the open suit shuffled towards her. She felt its gently insistent pressure against her spine and the backs of her legs, arms and head. In her peripheral vision she observed the wet-looking side-parts of the head fold around her, and then felt the legs and arms of the suit meld around her limbs. The chest cavity sealed, with a sound like someone taking the last slurp from a pudding bowl.
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