Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  The Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass upgrade had gone flawlessly, but then she'd been detained while the locals had her sit in as a guest adjudicator in their impromptu tournament. It had turned out to be both unpleasant and draining, a combination of beauty pageant and gladiatorial combat, with the entrants all radically biomodified, none of them lacking in teeth and claws. She'd been assured that the most bloodied, humiliated or deceased participants would all be stitched back together again, but the entire experience had left her feeling soiled and manipulated.

  Szlumper Oneill had been even worse, but for different reasons. Szlumper Oneill was a Voluntary Tyranny that had turned nasty, and nothing could be done about it.

  Citizens in the Voluntary Tyrannies had no rights at all: no freedoms, no means of expression beyond what they could achieve through the usual voting channels. Their entire lives were under the authoritarian control of whatever regime held sway in their particular habitat. Typically, they'd be guaranteed the basic needs: food, water, heating, minimal medical care, somewhere to sleep, even access to sex and rudimentary forms of entertainment. In return they might have to perform some daily activity, however drudge-like and purposeless the work itself might be. They'd be stripped of identity, forced to dress alike, even — in the most extreme cases — compelled to undergo surgery to eradicate distinguishing features.

  For some people — a small but not entirely insignificant fraction of the Glitter Band citizenry — life in a Voluntary Tyranny was perversely liberating because it allowed them to shut off an entire part of their minds that dealt with the usual anxieties of hierarchy and influence. They were looked after and told what to do. It was like becoming a child again, a regression to a state of dependence on the adult machinery of the state.

  But sometimes the VTs went wrong.

  No one was exactly sure what triggered the shift from benevolent-yet-rigid state to dystopian nightmare, but it had happened enough times that it had begun to look as inevitable as the radioactive decay of an unstable isotope. Something unspeakable would ooze from the social woodwork, a form of corrupting sap. Citizens who tried to resist or leave were rounded up and punished. Panoply could do nothing, since it had no remit to interfere in the government of a state unless the state's citizens were being denied abstraction access and voting rights, or unless there was a majority mandate from the wider citizenry of the ten thousand.

  Szlumper Oneill was an object lesson in how bad things could get. Representatives of the Interior Administration had escorted Thalia to the polling core, and they'd done their best to shield her from the populace. But she'd still seen enough to get the picture. While Thalia had been setting up her equipment at the core, an old man had broken through a cordon and rushed to plead with her. He'd fallen to his knees, clutching her trouser-hems with knotted, arthritic fingers.

  "Prefect," he said, through toothless gums. "You can do something for us. Please do something, before it's too late."

  "I'm sorry," she said, barely able to speak. "I wish I could, but — "

  "Help us. Please."

  The police had arrived. They'd fired electrified barbs into the man and dragged him away, his body still palsied by the stun currents. He couldn't speak, but he'd managed to keep his face directed at Thalia as he receded, his lips still forming a plea. As the cordon closed around him again, Thalia made out a blur of fists and sticks raining down on frail bones.

  She'd completed the upgrade. She did not want to think about what had happened to the old man. She prayed that this next and final upgrade would go smoother, so that she could return to Panoply and wipe the mild taste of complicity from her mouth. She was glad now that she had left House Aubusson till last. It promised to be the simplest of the upgrades; the one that would place the least demands on her concentration.

  The habitat had the form of a hollow cylinder with rounded ends, rotating slowly around its long axis to provide gravity. From a distance, just before she dozed off during transit, Thalia had seen a pale-green sausage banded by many sets of windows, their facets spangling as the habitat's dreamily slow spin caused sunlight to flare off them. At the nearer end ticked the intricate clockwork of de-spun docking assemblies, where huge ships were reduced to microscopic details against the mind-numbing scale of the structure. The sausage was an entire world, sixty kilometres from end to end, more than eight kilometres across.

  Weightlessness prevailed even after Thalia had disembarked from the cutter and passed through a series of rotating transfer locks. Instead of the teeming concourse she had been expecting, she found herself in a diplomatic receiving area. It was a zero-gravity sphere walled in pale-pink marble, inlaid with monochrome friezes depicting the early history of space colonisation: men in bulbous spacesuits covered in what looked like canvas; surface-to-orbit transports that resembled white fireworks lashed together; space stations so ramshackle in appearance that they looked as if they'd fall apart at the first breath of solar wind. Laughable, yes, Thalia thought: undoubtedly so. But without those canvas suits and firework rockets, without those treehouse space stations, Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng would not be floating in the marbled reception bay of a sixty-kilometre-long habitat, one of ten thousand other structures that carried a human freight of one hundred million souls, orbiting an inhabited world that happened to host the most dazzling, bejewelled city in human experience, a world that circled the sun of another solar system entirely, a system that formed the mercantile and cultural nexus of a human civilisation encompassing many such worlds, many stars, bound together by wonderful sleek ships that crossed the interstellar night in mere years of starflight.

  This was the future, she thought. This was what it felt like to be alive in a time of miracles and wonders.

  And she had the nerve to feel tired?

  A servitor, resembling a mechanical owl assembled from sheets of hammered bronze, floated in the middle of the space. It spread its wing primaries and clacked open its hinged beak. It had the piping voice of a steam-age automaton.

  "Greetings, Deputy Field Prefect Ng. I am Miracle Bird. It is a pleasure to welcome you inside House Aubusson. A reception is waiting on the half-gravity landing stage. Please be so kind as to follow me."

  "A reception," Thalia said, gritting her teeth. "That'll be nice."

  The bronze bird led Thalia into an elevator carriage. The carriage's windowless interior was covered in polished teak and dimpled maroon plush, offset with ivory Japan-work. The bird inverted itself and tucked its talons into hooks on what was evidently to become the ceiling. With a whirr of geared mechanics, its head spun around. "We will descend now. Please be so kind as to fold down the seat and secure yourself. Gravity will increase."

  Thalia took the cue and parked herself on the fold-out seat, tucking her equipment cylinder between her knees. She felt a rush of acceleration, blood pooling in the top of her head.

  "We are descending now," the bird informed her. "We have some distance to travel. Would you care to see the view on the way?"

  "If it isn't too much trouble."

  The panel opposite Thalia morphed into transparency. She found herself looking down the length of House Aubusson, all sixty kilometres of it. She had boarded the elevator on the inner surface of one of the endcaps of the sausage-shaped habitat, and was now travelling from the pole of the endcap hemisphere towards the point where it joined the main cylinder of the structure. The elevator's trajectory curved gradually from vertical to horizontal, even though the cabin remained at the same angle. They had been moving for some while already, yet the ground was still the better part of four kilometres below, enough to make even the nearest surface features appear small and toy-like. For now the sloping terrain whizzing past Thalia consisted of featureless white cladding and fused regolith mined from Marco's Eye, interrupted here and there by some huge Art Deco chunk of environmental-regulation machinery.

  Apart from the endcaps, the entire interior surface of the habitat was landscaped. Sixty kilometres away, atmospheric haze dil
uted detail and colour into a twinkling wash of pale blue, indistinguishable from ocean or sky. Nearer — until about halfway along the cylinder — it was still possible to make out the signatures of communities, grids or whorls embossed like thumbprints into clay. There were no huge cities, but there were dozens, even hundreds, of towns, villages and hamlets nestled amidst dense-packed greenery, curving around the shores of artificial seas and lakes and along the banks of man-made rivers and streams. There were hills, valleys, rock faces and waterfalls. There were sprays of mist shot through with rainbows. There were low-lying clouds, seemingly pasted onto the curving landscape. Nearer still, Thalia made out not merely communities, but individual buildings, marinas, plazas, parks, gardens and recreation grounds. Few of the buildings were more than a few hundred metres tall, as if they dared not violate the wide blue emptiness that made up most of the habitat's volume. There was no interior illumination source, but from her descending vantage point Thalia easily made out the bands of windows she had seen before, from outside. Now that she was looking down the length of the interior of the habitat, they became a series of dark concentric rings, Thalia counting a dozen or more of them before perspective and haze made it difficult to separate one from the next. House Aubusson might pass into the shadow of Yellowstone during each ninety-minute orbit around the planet, but it was most unlikely that its citizens would live or work on anything other than the standard twenty-six-hour cycle of Chasm City time. Far above and below the ecliptic plane of the Glitter Band, client mirrors would steer illumination onto those windows even when the habitat was out of direct line of sight of Epsilon Eridani.

  Thalia felt the elevator slowing.

  "We are arriving now," the metal owl said, just as the view outside switched from distant vistas to the interior of a windowed landing stage. The door opened; Thalia disembarked. Her legs felt like springy concertinas in the half-standard gravity. Across the platform, with their backs to the window, stood a motley-looking welcoming committee. There were about a dozen of them, men and women of all ages and appearances, dressed in what appeared to be civilian clothes. Thalia looked around helplessly, wondering who she should be talking at.

  "Hello, Prefect," said a plump woman with apple-red cheeks, stepping forward from the group. There was a nervous catch in her voice, as if she was not accustomed to public speaking. "Welcome to the halfway house. We'd have met you at the hub, but it's been a long time since any of us were in zero-gravity."

  Thalia put down the cylinder. "It's all right. I'm used to making my own way."

  A lanky, stooping man raised his hand. "Did Miracle Bird tell you everything you needed to know?"

  "Does the owl belong to you?"

  "Indeed," the man said, beaming. He raised an arm, bent at the elbow, and the owl flapped out of the elevator, crossed the space between Thalia and the party and made a precision touchdown on the man's sleeve.

  "I'm an excellent bird," the owl said.

  "It's my hobby," he said, stroking the creature under its segmented neck. "Making mechanical animals, using only techniques available to the PreCalvinists. Keeps me off the streets, my wife says."

  "That's nice for you," Thalia commented.

  "They were going to go with one of Bascombe's automata until they remembered what happened the last time one of them malfunctioned. That's when Miracle Bird got bumped to the top of the list."

  "What list?" Thalia looked at the peculiar gathering. There was nothing ragged or untidy about any of the individual members of the group — everyone was well dressed, colourful without being gaudy, well groomed, respectable in demeanour — but the cumulative effect was far from harmonious. Like a circus troupe, she thought, not a civic delegation. "Who are you people?"

  "We're your reception committee," the plump woman said.

  "That's what the owl told me."

  Another individual stepped forward to speak. He was a severe-looking gentleman in an ash-grey skin-tight suit with deep lines on either side of his mouth and a shock of stiff grey-white hair shaved close at the temples, his long-boned hands knitted together. "Perhaps one of us should explain. You are inside one of the most egalitarian states in the Glitter Band." He had a very low, very reassuring voice, one that made Thalia think of dark knotted wood, polished smooth by generations of hands. "Comparatively few states practise true Demarchist principles behind their own doors, in the sense of abolishing all governmental structures, all formalised institutions of social control. Yet that is absolutely the case in House Aubusson. Possibly you were expecting a formal reception, attended by dignitaries of varying rank and pomposity?"

  "I might have been," Thalia allowed.

  "In Aubusson, there are no dignitaries. There is no authority except the transparent government of the collective will. All citizens wield a similar amount of political power, leveraged through the machinery of democratic anarchy. You ask who we are. I'll tell you, beginning with myself. I am Jules Caillebot, a landscape gardener. Most recently I worked on the redevelopment of the botanic gardens in the quarter adjoining the open-air theatre in Valloton, a community between the fifth and sixth windows." He gestured towards the plump woman who had been the first to speak.

  "I'm an utter nobody," she said, with a kind of cheery defiance, her earlier nervousness no longer apparent. "At least some people in Aubusson have heard of Jules, but no one knows me from Adam. I'm Paula Thory. I keep butterflies, and not even very rare or beautiful ones."

  "Hello," Thalia said.

  Paula Thory nudged the man who'd made the owl. "Go on, then," she said. "I know you're itching to tell her."

  "I'm Broderick Cuthbertson. I make mechanical animals. It's my — "

  "Hobby, yes. You said." Thalia smiled nicely.

  "There's an active subculture of automaton builders in Aubusson. I mean real automaton builders, obviously. Strictly PreCalvinist. Otherwise it's just cheating."

  "I can imagine."

  "Meriel Redon," said a young, willowy-looking woman, raising a tentative hand. "I make furniture out of wood."

  "Cyrus Parnasse," another man said, a beefy, red-faced farmer type with a burr to his voice who could have stepped out of the Middle Ages about five minutes ago. "I'm a curator in the Museum of Cybernetics."

  "I thought the Museum of Cybernetics was in House Sylveste."

  "Ours isn't as big," Parnasse said. "Or as flashy or dumbed-down. But we like it."

  One by one the others introduced themselves, until the last of the twelve had spoken. As if obeying some process of collective decision-making that took place too subtly for Thalia to detect, they all turned to look at Jules Caillebot again.

  "We were selected randomly," he explained. "When it was known that an agent of Panoply was to visit, the polling core shuffled the names of all eight hundred thousand citizens and selected the twelve you see standing before you. Actually, there was a bit more to it than that. Our names were presented to the electorate, so that our fitness for the task could be certified by a majority. Most people voted 'no objection', but one of the original twelve was roundly rejected by a percentage of citizens too large for the core to ignore. Something of a philanderer, it seems. He'd made enough enemies that when his one shot at fame arose, he blew it."

  "If you call this fame," Parnasse, the museum curator, said. "In a couple of hours you'll be out of Aubusson, girl, and we'll all have returned to deserved obscurity. It is that kind of visit, isn't it? If this is a lockdown, no one warned us."

  "No one ever warns you," Thalia said dryly, not taking to the grumpy undercurrent she had heard in the man's voice. "But no, this isn't a lockdown, just a routine polling core upgrade. And whether or not you think being part of this reception party is something to be proud of, I am grateful for the welcome." She picked up the cylinder, relishing its lightness before she returned to full gravity. "All I really need is someone to show me to the polling core, although I can locate it myself if you prefer. You can all stick around if you want, but it isn't necessary."


  "Do you want to go straight to the core?" asked Jules Caillebot. "You can if you like. Or we can first take some tea, some refreshments, and then perhaps a leisurely stroll in one of the gardens."

  "No prizes for guessing whose gardens," someone said, with a snigger.

  Thalia raised a calming hand. "It's kind of you to offer, but my bosses won't be too happy if I'm late back at Panoply."

  "We can be at the core in twenty minutes," Jules Caillebot said. "It's just beyond the second window band. You can see it from here, in fact."

  Thalia had been expecting the core to be buried in the skin of the world, like a subcutaneous implant. "We can?"

  "Let me show you. The new housing's rather elegant, even if I say so myself."

  "That's one opinion," Parnasse rumbled, just loud enough for Thalia to hear.

  They led her to the window. The remaining two kilometres of the endcap curved away below her to merge with the level terrain of the main cylinder. Caillebot, the landscape gardener, stood next to her and pointed into the middle distance. "There," he said, whispering. "You see the first and second window bands? Now focus on the white bridge crossing the second band, close to that kidney-shaped lake. Follow the line of the bridge for a couple of kilometres, until you come to a ring of structures grouped around a single tall talk."

  "I've got it," Thalia said. Since it lay directly ahead, the stalk was aligned with her local vertical too closely to be coincidence given the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree curvature of the habitat. She had presumably been directed down the appropriate elevator line for a visit to the polling core.

  "Remind you of anything?" Caillebot asked.

  "I don't know. Maybe. Milk splashing into milk, perhaps. That ring of stalks, with the little spheres on top of each one, and then the tall one in the middle — "