“You mean someone wearing a suit got close enough to be killed by the tides?”
“No…” Pascale said carefully. “No; there’s another way into the matrix. A much easier way—or at least it once was.”
“I should still be dead. Nothing can live on a neutron star. Or in it, for that matter.”
“I told you; it isn’t one.” And then she explained how it was possible; how the matrix itself was generating a pocket of tolerable gravity in which she could live; how it was achieved by the circulation deeper in the crust of awesome quantities of degenerate matter; perhaps as a computational by-product; perhaps not. But like a diverging lens, the flow focused gravity away from her, while equally ferocious forces kept the walls from crushing in at only fractionally less than the speed of light.
“What about you?”
“I’m not like you,” Pascale said. “This body I’m wearing—that’s all it is, something to puppet; something in which to meet you. It’s formed from the same nuclear material as the crust. The neutrons are bound together by strange quarks, so I don’t fly apart under my own quantum pressure.” She touched her forehead. “But I’m not doing any thinking. That’s going on all around you, in the matrix itself. You’ll excuse me—and this is going to sound terribly rude—but I’d find it mind-numbingly boring if I was forced into doing nothing except talk to you. As I said, our computational rates are highly divergent. You’re not offended, are you? I mean, it’s nothing personal, I hope you understand.”
“Forget it,” Khouri said. “I’m sure I’d feel the same.”
The corridor widened out now, into what seemed to be a well-appointed scientific study, from any time in the last five or six centuries. The room’s predominant colour was brown, the brown of age: on the wooden shelves which ran along its walls, on the browning spines of the ancient paper books arrayed along those shelves, the lustrous brown of the mahogany desk, and the golden-brown metal of the antique scientific tools placed around the desk’s periphery for effect. Wooden cabinets buttressed the walls which did not carry shelves, and in them hung yellowing bones; alien bones which at first glance might be mistaken for the fossils of dinosaurs or large, extinct flightless birds, provided one did not pay undue attention to the capaciousness of the alien skull, the roominess of the mind it had surely once entrapped.
There were examples of modern apparatus too: scanning devices, advanced cutting instruments, racks of eidetics and holographic storage wafers. A servitor of intermediate modernity waited inertly in one corner, head slightly bowed, like a trusty retainer taking a well-earned snooze while still on his feet.
In one wall, slatted windows overlooked an arid, windswept terrain of mesas and precarious rock formations, bathed in the reddish light of a setting sun, already disappearing behind the chaotic horizon.
And at the desk—rising from it as they entered the room, as if disturbed from concentration—was Sylveste.
She looked into his eyes—human eyes—for the first time, in what passed for the flesh.
For a moment he looked annoyed by their intrusion, but his expression softened until half a smile played across his features. “I’m glad you took the time to visit us,” he said. “And I hope Pascale has explained all that you asked of her.”
“Most of it,” Khouri said, stepping further into the study, marvelling at the fastidiousness of its recreation. It was as good as any simulation she had ever experienced. Yet—and the thought was as impressive as it was frightening—every single object in this room was moulded from nuclear matter, at densities so large that, ordinarily, the smallest paperweight on his desk would have exerted a fatal gravitational pull, even from halfway across the room. “But not all of it. How did you get here?”
“Pascale probably mentioned that there was another way into the matrix.” He offered her the palms of his hands. “I found it, that’s all. Passed through it.”
“And what happened to your…”
“My real self?” The smile had a quality of self-amusement now, as if he were enjoying some private joke too subtle to share. “I doubt that he survived. And frankly, it doesn’t really concern me. I’m the real me now. I’m all that I ever was.”
“What happened in Cerberus?”
“That’s a very long story, Khouri.”
But he told her anyway. How he had travelled into the world; how Sajaki’s suit had turned out to be an empty shell; how that realisation had done nothing but strengthen his resolve to push on further, and what, finally, he had found, in the final chamber. How he had passed into the matrix—at which point, his memories diverged from his other self. But when he told her he was sure that his other self was dead, he did so with such conviction that Khouri wondered if there was not another way of knowing; if some other, less tangible bond had linked them, right until the end.
There were things even Sylveste did not really understand; that much she sensed. He had not achieved godhead—or at least, not for more than an instant, when he bathed in the portal. Had that been a choice he had made subsequently? she wondered. If the matrix was simulating him; and if the matrix was essentially infinite in its computational capacity… what limits had been imposed on him, other than those he had consciously selected?
What she learnt was this: Carine Lefevre had been kept alive by part of the Shroud, but there had been nothing accidental about it.
“It’s as if there were two factions,” Sylveste said, toying with one of the brass microscopes on his desk, angling its little mirror this way and that, as if trying to catch the last rays of the setting sun. “One that wanted to use me to find out if the Inhibitors were still around, still capable of posing a threat to the Shrouders. And the other faction, which I don’t think cared for humanity any more than the first. But they were more cautious. They thought there had to be a better way, other than goading the Inhibitor device to see if it still generated a response.”
“But what happens to us now? Who actually won? Was it Sun Stealer or the Mademoiselle?”
“Neither,” Sylveste said, placing the microscope back down again, its velvet base softly bumping against the desk. “At least, that’s my instinctual feeling. I think we—I—came close to triggering the device, close to giving it the stimulus it needed to alert the remaining devices and begin the war against humanity.” He laughed. “Calling it a war implied it might have been a two-sided thing. But I don’t think it would have been like that at all.”
“But you don’t think it got that far?”
“I hope and I pray, that’s all.” He shrugged. “Of course, I could be wrong. I used to say I was never wrong about anything, but that’s one lesson I have learnt.”
“And what about the Amarantin, the Shrouders?”
“Only time will tell.”
“That’s all?”
“I don’t have all the answers, Khouri.” He looked around the room, as if appraising the volumes on the shelves, reassuring himself that they were still present. “Not even here.”
“It’s time to go,” Pascale said, suddenly. She had appeared at her husband’s side with a glass of something clear; vodka, maybe. She placed it on the desk, next to a polished skull the colour of parchment.
“Where?”
“Back into space, Khouri. Isn’t that what you want? You surely don’t want to spend the rest of eternity here.”
“There’s nowhere to go,” Khouri said. “You should know that, Pascale. The ship was against us; the spider-room destroyed; Ilia killed—”
“She made it, Khouri. She wasn’t killed when the shuttle was destroyed.”
So she had managed to get into a suit—but what good did that do her? Khouri was about to question Pascale further, when she realised that whatever the woman told her was very likely to be true, no matter how unbelievable it seemed—and no matter how useless the truth, no matter how little difference it could possibly make.