Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  "That's exactly what it is," Parnasse said. "A perfect representation of a physical instant. That's the original Museum of Cybernetics. Then the Civic Planning Committee got it into their heads that what it really needed was a gigantic single stalk rising from the middle, to house the polling core in the sphere on top. Completely ruined the purity of the original concept, needless to say. You can't get a central stalk and a ring of stalks from a single splash, no matter how hard you try."

  "Why did the core need a new housing?"

  "It didn't," Parnasse said, before anyone else had a chance to contribute. "It worked fine the way it used to be, out of sight and out of mind. Then the Civic Planning Committee decided we needed to celebrate our embracing of true Demarchist principles by making the core a visible symbol that could be seen from anywhere in the habitat."

  "Most people like the new arrangement," Caillebot said, with a strained smile.

  Parnasse wasn't having it. "You're only saying that because they had to rip out the old gardens to accommodate the new stalk. The ones put in by your rival. You'd feel differently if you actually had to work there."

  Thalia coughed, deciding it was best not to take sides at this point. Moving a core was hardly routine, but Panoply would have been consulted, and if there had been any technical objection it would not have been permitted. "I need to see it close up, no matter what the controversies," she said.

  "We'll be there in no time at all," Caillebot said, extending a hand back towards the wall where a row of elevator doors stood open. "Would you like some help with that equipment? It'll be heavier on the surface."

  "I'll cope," Thalia said.

  Miracle Bird opened its metal beak and emitted a raucous mechanical chime as it took flight and led the way towards the elevators.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 12

  * * *

  Dreyfus held his breath, still anticipating an attack despite the evidence from the scans. The corvette's sensors had probed the rock's embattled surface and revealed no further evidence of active weaponry, although he considered it likely that there were still guns buried in the other hemisphere. The same scans had pinpointed a likely entry point, what appeared to be an airlock leading to some kind of subsurface excavation. The scans could only hint at the depth and extent of the tunnel system. The corvette now lay with its dorsal lock positioned over the surface entry point, separated by only a couple of metres of clear space.

  "I can do this alone," Dreyfus said, ready to push himself through the suitwall. "We don't both need to go inside."

  "And I'm not babysitting the corvette while you have all the fun," Sparver replied.

  "All right," Dreyfus said. "But understand this: if something happens to one of us down there — whether it's you or me — the other one gets out of there as fast as he can and concentrates on warning Panoply. Whatever we're dealing with here, it's bigger than the life of a single prefect."

  "Message received," Sparver said. "See you on the other side."

  Dreyfus pushed himself through the grey surface of the suitwall. As always, he felt ticklish resistance as the suit formed around him, conjured into being from the very fabric of the suitwall. He turned around in time to observe Sparver's emergence: seeing the edges of the suit blend into the exterior surface of the suitwall and then pucker free. For a moment, the details of Sparver's suit were blurred and ill-defined, then snapped into sharpness.

  The two prefects completed their checks, verifying that their suits were able to talk to each other, and then turned to face the waiting airlock that would allow entry into the rock. Nothing about it surprised Dreyfus, save the fact that it existed in the first place. It was a standard lock, built according to a rugged, inert-matter design. The lock had been hidden before the engagement, tucked away near the base of one of the slug cannons. A concealed shaft must have led down from the surface before the cannons deployed.

  There was no need to invoke the manual operating procedure since the lock was still powered and functional. The outer door opened without hesitation, admitting Dreyfus and Sparver to the lock's air-exchange chamber.

  "There's pressure on the other side," Sparver said, indicating the standard-format read-out set into the opposite door. "There's probably no one inside this thing, but there might be, so we can't just blow it wide open."

  It was a complication Dreyfus could have done without, but he concurred with his deputy. They would need to seal the door behind them before they advanced further.

  "Close the outer door," Dreyfus said.

  The lock finished pressurising. Dreyfus' suit tasted the air and reported that it was cold but breathable, should the need arise.

  He hoped it wouldn't.

  "Stay sharp," he told Sparver. "We're going deeper."

  Dreyfus waited for the inner door to seal itself before moving off. Common lock protocol dictated both inner and outer doors be closed against vacuum unless someone was transitioning through.

  "I can't see a damn thing," he said, knowing that Sparver's vision was at least as poor as his own. "I'm switching on my helmet lamp. We'll see if that's a good idea in about two seconds."

  "I'm holding my breath."

  The helmet revealed that they had arrived in a storage area, a repository for tools and replacement machine parts. Dreyfus made out tunnelling gear, some spare airlock components, a couple of racked spacesuits of PreCalvinist design.

  "Want to take a guess at how long this junk's been here?" Sparver said, activating his own lamp.

  "Could be ten years, could be two hundred," Dreyfus said. "Hard to call."

  "You don't pressurise a place if you're planning to mothball it. Waste of air and power."

  "I agree. See anything here that looks like a transmitter, or that might send a signal?"

  "No joy." Sparver nodded his helmet lamp towards the far wall. "But if I'm not mistaken, that's a doorway. Think we should take a look-see?"

  "We're not exactly overwhelmed with choices, are we?"

  Dreyfus kicked off from the wall and aimed himself at the far doorway, Sparver following just behind. Doubtless the rock's gravity would eventually have tugged him there, but Dreyfus didn't have time to wait for that. He reached the doorway and sailed on through into a narrow shaft furnished only with rails and flexible hand-grabs. When the air began to impede his forward drift, he grabbed the nearest handhold and started yanking himself forward. The shaft stretched on far ahead of him, pushing deeper into the heart of the rock. Maybe the shaft had been there for ever, he thought: sunk deep into the rock by prospecting Skyjacks, and someone had just come along and used it serendipitously. But the tunnelling equipment he'd already seen didn't have the ramshackle, improvised look of Skyjack tools.

  He was just pondering that when he caught sight of the end of the shaft.

  "I'm slowing down. Watch out behind me."

  Dreyfus reached the bottom and spun through one hundred and eighty degrees to bring his soles into contact with the surface at the base of the shaft. Up and down still had little meaning in the rock's minimal gravity, but his instincts forced him to orient himself as if his feet were being tugged toward the middle.

  He assessed his surroundings as Sparver arrived next to him. They'd come to an intersection with a second shaft that appeared to run horizontally in either direction, curving gently away until it was hidden beyond the limit of the illumination provided by their helmet lamps. The rust-brown tunnel wall was clad with segmented panels, thick braids of pipework and plumbing stapled to the sides. Every now and then the cladding was interrupted by a piece of machinery as rust-brown and ancient-looking as the rest of the tunnel.

  "We didn't see deep enough to map this," Dreyfus said. "What do you make of it?"

  "Not much, to be frank."

  "Judging by the curvature, we could be looking at a ring that goes right around the middle of the rock. We need to find out why it's here."

  "And if we get lost?"

  Dreyfus used his suit to daub a
luminous cross onto the wall next to their exit point. "We won't. If the shaft's circular, we'll know when we come back to this point, even if something messes around with our inertial compasses."

  "That's me fully reassured, then."

  "Good. Keep an eye out for anything we can use to squeeze a signal back to Panoply."

  Dreyfus started moving, the brown walls of the shaft drifting past him. His own shadow stalked courageously ahead of him, projected by the light from Sparver's lamp. He glanced down at the suit's inertial map, displayed just below his main face-patch overlay.

  "So do you have a theory as to what the Nerval-Lermontov family needs with this place?" Sparver asked. "Because this is beginning to look like a lot more than a simple case of inter-habitat rivalry, at least from where I'm standing."

  "It's bigger, definitely. And now I'm wondering if the Sylveste family might have a part in this after all."

  "We could always pay them a visit when we're done here."

  "We wouldn't get very far. The family's being run by beta-level caretakers. Calvin Sylveste's dead, and his son's out of the system. The last I heard, he's not due back for at least another ten or fifteen years."

  "But you still think there's a Sylveste angle."

  "I'm all for coincidence, Sparv, and I agree that the family has a lot of tentacles. But as soon as the Eighty popped up in our investigation, I got the feeling there was more to it than chance."

  After a pause, Sparver said, "Do you think the Nerval-Lermontovs are still around?"

  "Someone's been here recently. A place feels different when it's deserted, when no one's visited it for a very long time. I'm not getting that feeling here."

  "I was hoping it was just me," Sparver said.

  Dreyfus set his jaw determinedly. "All the more reason to investigate, then."

  But in truth he felt no compulsion to continue further along the corridor. He also felt Sparver's unease. There was nothing he would rather have done than return to the corvette and await back-up, however long it took to arrive.

  They hadn't gone more than a couple of hundred metres along the gently curving shaft when Sparver brought them to a halt next to a piece of equipment jutting from the wall. To Dreyfus it looked almost indistinguishable from the countless rust-coloured items of machinery they had already passed, but Sparver was paying it particular attention.

  "Something we can use?" Dreyfus asked.

  Sparver flipped aside a panel, revealing a matrix of tactile input controls and sockets. "It's a tap-in point," he said. "No promises, but if this is hooked up to any kind of local network, I should be able to find my way to the transmitter and maybe open a two-way channel to Panoply."

  "How long will it take?"

  Sparver's suit had been conjured with a standard toolkit. He dug into it and retrieved a strand of luminous cabling with a writhing, slug-shaped quickmatter universal adaptor at the end. "I should know within a few minutes," he said. "If it doesn't work, we'll move on."

  "See what you can get out of it. I'll be back here in five or ten minutes."

  Sparver's eyes were wide behind his face-patch. "We should stay together."

  "I'm just taking a look a little further along this shaft. We'll remain in contact the whole time."

  Dreyfus left his deputy attending to the equipment, fiddling with adaptors and spools of differently coloured froptic and electrical cabling. He had no doubt that if there was a way to get a message to Panoply, Sparver would find it. But he could not afford to wait around for that to happen. Elsewhere in the rock, someone might be erasing evidence or preparing to make their escape via a hidden ship or lifepod.

  Eventually Dreyfus looked back and saw that Sparver had vanished around the curve of the shaft.

  "How are you doing?" he asked via the suit-to-suit comms channel.

  "Making slow progress, but I think it's doable. The protocols are pretty archaic, but nothing I haven't seen before."

  "Good. Keep in touch. I'm pressing on."

  Dreyfus passed through a constriction in the cladding of the tunnel, tucking his elbows in to avoid banging them against the narrow flange where the walls pinched tighter. Looking back now, he could not even see the faint glow caused by the light spilling from Sparver's helmet lamp. Psychologically, it felt as if they were kilometres apart rather than the hundreds of metres that was really the case.

  Suddenly there came a bell-like clang, hard and metallic. Dreyfus' gut tightened. He knew exactly what had happened, even before his conscious mind had processed the information. Where the constriction had been was now a solid wall of metal. A bulkhead door — part of an interior airlock system — had just slammed down between him and Sparver.

  He returned to the door and checked the rim for manual controls, but found nothing. An automatic system had sealed the door, and the same automatic system would have to open it again.

  "Sparver?"

  His deputy's voice came through chopped and metallic. "Still reading you, but faintly. What just happened?"

  "I tripped a door," Dreyfus said, feeling sheepish. "It doesn't want to open again."

  "Stay where you are. I'll see if I can work it from my side."

  "Leave it for now. We made a plan and we'll stick to it, even if I have to stay here until help arrives. If necessary I should be able to cut through with my whiphound, provided the door doesn't incorporate any active quickmatter. In the meantime I'll try circumnavigating and see if I can meet you from the other side."

  "Try not to trip any more doors on the way."

  "I will."

  "You should think about conserving air," Sparver said, in a gently reminding tone. "These m-suits don't recirculate, Boss. You're only good for twenty-six hours."

  "That's about twenty-four hours longer than I expect to be here."

  "Just saying we need to allow for all eventualities. I can make it back to the corvette; you may not be able to."

  "Point taken," Dreyfus said.

  The suit was indeed still assuring him that the air surrounding him was breathable. He clearly had little to lose by trusting it. He reached up and unlatched the helmet; the suit had been conjured in one piece, but it obliged by splitting into familiar components.

  He sucked in his first lungful of cold, new air. After the initial shock of it hitting his system, he judged that it was tolerable, with little of the mustiness he'd been anticipating.

  "I'm breathing ambient air, Sparv. No ill effects so far."

  "Good. All I've got to do now is kid this system that I'm a valid user, and then we should get ourselves a hotline to Panoply. I'll be out of touch when I'm calling home — I'll have to reassign the suit-to-suit channel to make this work."

  "Whatever you have to do."

  Dreyfus pressed the helmet against his belt until it formed a cusp-like bond. He'd made perhaps another hundred metres of progress when he encountered a junction in the shaft. The main tunnel, the one he'd been following, continued unobstructed ahead, but now it was joined by another route, set at right angles and leading towards the centre of the rock.

  "Sparver," he said, "slight change of plan. While I'm not using suit air, I'm going to explore a sub-shaft I've just run into. It appears to head deeper. My guess is it leads to whatever this place is concealing."

  "You be careful."

  "As ever."

  The new shaft turned out to be much shorter than the one they'd descended from the surface, and within thirty metres he detected a widening at the far end. Dreyfus continued his approach, caution vying with curiosity, and emerged into a hemispherical chamber set with heavy glass facets. His helmet lamp played across the bolted and welded partitions between the window elements. Beyond the glass loomed a profound darkness, more absolute than space itself, as if the very heart of the rock had been cored out.

  "It's hollow, an empty shell," he said to himself, as much in wonder as perplexity.

  The hemispherical chamber was not just some kind of viewing gallery. One of the facets was co
vered with a sheet of burnished silver rather than glass, and next to that was a simple control panel set with tactile controls of old-fashioned design. Dreyfus propelled himself to the panel and appraised its contents. The chunky controls were designed to be used by someone wearing a spacesuit with thick gloves, and most of them were labelled in antiquated Canasian script. Most of the abbreviations meant nothing to Dreyfus, but he saw that one of the controls was marked with a stylised representation of a sunburst.

  His hand moved to the control. At first it was so stiff that he feared it had seized into place. Then it budged with a resounding clunk, and vast banks of lights began to blaze on beyond the armoured glass.

  He'd been wrong, he realised. The hollowed-out interior of the Nerval-Lermontov rock was not empty.

  It contained a ship.

  "I've found something interesting," he told Sparver.

  * * *

  "What I don't understand," Thalia said as the train whisked the entourage across the first window band of House Aubusson, "is how this place pays for itself. No offence, but I've spoken to most of you by now and I'm puzzled. I assume you're a representative slice of the citizenry, or you wouldn't have been selected for the welcoming party. Yet none of you seem to be doing any work that's marketable outside Aubusson. One of you breeds butterflies. Another designs gardens. Another one of you makes mechanical animals, for fun."

  "There's no law against hobbies," said Paula Thory, the plump butterfly-keeper.

  "I totally agree. But hobbies won't pay for the upkeep of a sixty-kilometre-long habitat."

  "We have a full-scale manufactory complex in the trailing endcap," Caillebot said. "We used to make ships. Lovely things, too: single-molecule hulls in ruby and emerald. It hasn't run at anything like full capacity for decades, but smaller habitats occasionally contract us to build components and machines. The big enterprises on Marco's Eye will always out-compete us when it comes to efficiency and economies of scale, but we don't have to lift anything out of a gravity well, or pay Glitter Band import duties. That takes care of some of our finances."