Lascaille decided not to wait.
Alone, he boarded and stole the SISS contact craft. By the time anyone realised what was happening, it was far too late to stop him. A remote destruct existed, but its use might have been construed by the Shroud as an act of aggression, something no one wanted to risk. The decision was to let fate take its course. No one seriously expected to see Lascaille come back alive. And though he did eventually return, his doubters had in a sense been right, because a large portion of his sanity had not come back with him.
Lascaille had come very close indeed to the Shroud before some force had propelled him back out again — perhaps only a few tens of thousands of kilometres from the surface, although at that range there was no easy way of telling where space ended and the Shroud began. No one doubted that he had come closer than any other human being, or for that matter any living creature.
But the cost had been horrific.
Not all of Philip Lascaille — not even most of him — had come back. Unlike those who had gone before him, his body had not been pulped and shredded by incomprehensible forces near the boundary. But something no less final appeared to have happened to his mind. Nothing remained of his personality, except for a few residual traces which served only to heighten the almost absolute obliteration of everything else. Enough brain function remained for him to keep himself alive without machine assistance, and his motor control seemed completely unimpaired. But there was no intelligence left; no sense that Lascaille perceived his surroundings except in the most simplistic manner; no indication that he had any grasp of what had happened to him, or was even aware of the passage of time; no indication that he retained the ability to memorise new experiences or retrieve those that had happened to him before his trip to the Shroud. He retained the ability to vocalise, but while Lascaille occasionally spoke well-formed words, or even fragments of sentences, nothing he uttered made the slightest sense.
Lascaille — or what remained of Lascaille — was returned to the Yellowstone system, and then to the SISS habitat, where medical experts desperately tried to construct a theory for what might have happened. Eventually — and it was more out of desperation than logic — they decided that the fractal, restructured spacetime around the Shroud had not been able to support the information density of his brain. In passing through it, his mind had been randomised on the quantum level, although the molecular processes of his body had not been noticeably affected. He was like a text which had been transcribed imprecisely — so that much of the meaning was lost — and then retranscribed.
Yet Lascaille was not the last person to attempt such a suicide mission. A cult had grown up around him, its chief rumour being that, despite his exterior signs of dementia, the passage close to the Shroud had bestowed on him something like Nirvana. Once or twice every decade, around the known Shrouds, someone would attempt to follow Lascaille into the boundary, and the results were miserably uniform, and no improvement on what Lascaille himself had achieved. The lucky ones came back with half their minds gone, while the unlucky ones never made it back at all, or did so in ships so mangled that their human remains resembled a salmon-coloured paste.
While Lascaille’s cult bloomed, people soon forgot about the man himself. Perhaps the salivating, mumbling reality of his existence was a touch too uncomfortable.
Sylveste, however, did not forget. More than that, he had become obsessed with teasing a last, vital truth out of the man. His familial connections guaranteed him an audience with Lascaille whenever he wanted — provided he ignored Calvin’s forebodings. And so he had taken to visiting, and waiting in absolute patience while Lascaille attended to his pavement drawings, ever watchful for the one, transient clue which he knew the man would eventually bequeath him.
In the end, it was a lot more than a clue.
It was difficult to remember how long he had waited, on that day when the waiting finally paid off. For all that he intended to focus his mind with absolute attentiveness on what Lascaille was doing, he had been finding it increasingly difficult. It was like staring intently at a long series of abstract paintings — one’s concentration inevitably began to wane, no matter how much one tried to keep it fresh. Lascaille had been halfway through the sixth or seventh hopeless chalk mandala of the day, executing the task with the same fervent dedication he brought to every mark he made.
Then, with no forewarning, he had turned to Sylveste and said, with complete clarity: ‘The Jugglers offer the key, Doctor.’
Sylveste was too shocked to interrupt.
‘It was explained to me,’ Lascaille continued blithely. ‘While I was in Revelation Space.’
Sylveste forced himself to nod, as naturally as possible. Some still-calm part of his mind recognised the phrase which Lascaille had spoken. As far as anyone had ever been able to tell, it was what Lascaille now called the Shroud boundary — ‘space’ in which he had been granted certain ‘revelations’ too abstruse to relate.
Yet now his tongue seemed to have been loosened.
‘There was a time when the Shrouders travelled between the stars,’ Lascaille said. ‘Much as we do now — although they were an ancient species and had been starfaring for many millions of years. They were quite alien, you know.’ He paused to switch a blue chalk for a crimson one, placing it between his toes. With that, he continued his work on the mandala. But with his hand — now free from that task — he began to sketch something on an adjacent patch of ground. The creature he drew was multi-limbed, tentacled, armour-plated, spined, barely symmetrical. It looked less like a member of a starfaring alien culture than something which might have flopped and oozed its way across the bed of a Precambrian ocean. It was utterly monstrous.
‘That’s a Shrouder?’ Sylveste said, with a shiver of anticipation. ‘You actually met one?’
‘No; I never truly entered the Shroud,’ Lascaille said. ‘But they communicated with me. They revealed themselves to my mind; imparted much of their history and nature.’
Sylveste tore his gaze away from the nightmarish creature. ‘Where do the Jugglers come into it?’
‘The Pattern Jugglers have been around for a long time and they’re to be found on many worlds. All starfaring cultures in this part of the galaxy encounter them sooner or later.’ Lascaille tapped his sketch. ‘Just like we did, so did the Shrouders, only very much earlier. Do you understand what I’m saying, Doctor?’
‘Yes…’ He thought he did, anyway. ‘But not the point of it.’
Lascaille smiled. ‘Whoever — or whatever — visits the Jugglers is remembered by them. Remembered absolutely, that is — down to the last cell; the last synaptic connection. That’s what the Jugglers are. A vast biological archiving system.’
This was true enough, Sylveste knew. Humans had gleaned very little of significance concerning the Jugglers, their function or origin. But what had become clear almost from the outset was that the Jugglers were capable of storing human personalities within their oceanic matrix, so that anyone who swam in the Juggler sea — and was dissolved and reconstituted in the process — would have achieved a kind of immortality. Later, those patterns could be realised again; temporarily imprinted in the mind of another human. The process was muddy and biological, so the stored patterns were contaminated by millions of other impressions, each subtly influencing the other. Even in the early days of Juggler exploration it had been obvious that the ocean had stored patterns of alien thought; hints of otherness bleeding into the thoughts of the swimmers — but these impressions had always remained indistinct.