Then Khouri had approached them out of the blue. She had heard that Volyova’s crew were looking for someone to join their ship, and she was ready to leave Yellowstone. She had not mentioned her military background, but Volyova already knew about that; doubtless Khouri was just being cautious. The odd thing was, Khouri had not actually approached them until Sajaki — in accordance with the standard protocols of trade — had announced the change of destination.
‘Captain Volyova? It’s you, isn’t it?’
Khouri was small, wiry and dourly dressed, and did not subscribe to any recognisable Ultra fashions. Her black hair was cut only an inch longer than Volyova’s; short enough to make it obvious that her skull was not pierced by any clumsy input jacks or nerve-link interfaces. No guarantee that her head was not jam-packed with humming little machines, but it was certainly nothing she flaunted. The woman’s face was a neutral composite of the gene-types which predominated on her homeworld, Sky’s Edge; harmonious without being striking. Her mouth was small, straight and inexpressive, but that blandness was counterbalanced by the woman’s eyes. They were dark, almost colourlessly so, but they glistened with a disarming inner prescience. For a tiny fraction of a moment, Volyova believed that Khouri had already seen through her tawdry skein of lies.
‘Yes,’ Volyova said. ‘You must be Ana Khouri.’ She kept her voice low, for having reached Khouri, the last thing she wanted was any other hopefuls within earshot trying to barge aboard. ‘I understand you contacted our trade persona regarding possibilities for crewing with us.’
‘I only just reached the carousel. I thought I’d try you first, before I went on to the crews who are advertising now.’
Volyova sniffed at her vodka. ‘Odd strategy, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
‘Why? The other crews are getting so many applicants they’re only interviewing via sim.’ She took a perfunctory sip of her water. ‘I prefer dealing with humans. It was just a question of going after a different crew.’
‘Oh,’ Volyova said. ‘Ours is very different, believe me.’
‘But you’re traders, right?’
Volyova nodded enthusiastically. ‘We’ve almost finished our dealings around Yellowstone. Not too productive, I must say. Economy’s in the doldrums. We’ll probably pop back in a century or two and see if things have picked up, but personally, I wouldn’t mind if I never saw the place again.’
‘So if I wanted to sign up for your ship I’d have to make my mind up pretty soon?’
‘Of course, we’d have to make our minds up about you first.’
Khouri looked at her closely. ‘There are other candidates?’
‘I’m not really at liberty to discuss that.’
‘I imagine there would be. I mean, Sky’s Edge… there must be plenty of people who’d want to hop a lift there, even if they had to crew to pay their way.’
Sky’s Edge? Volyova tried to keep a straight face, marvelling at their luck. The only reason Khouri had come forward was because she still thought they were going to the Edge, rather than Resurgam. Somehow she remained unaware of Sajaki’s announced change of destination.
‘There are worse places one could imagine,’ Volyova said.
‘Well, I’m keen to jump to the head of the line.’ A perspex cloud sailed between them, dangling from its ceiling track, wobbling with its cargo of drinks and narcotics. ‘What exactly is this position you have open?’
‘It would be a lot easier if I explained things aboard the ship. You didn’t forget that overnight bag, did you?’
‘Of course not. I want this position, you know.’
Volyova smiled. ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’
Cuvier, Resurgam, 2563
Calvin Sylveste was manifesting in his luxurious seigneurial chair at one end of the prison room. ‘I’ve got something interesting to tell you,’ he said, stroking his beard. ‘Though I don’t think you’re going to like it.’
‘Make it quick; Pascale will be here shortly.’
Calvin’s permanent look of amusement deepened. ‘Actually, it’s Pascale I’m talking about. You’re rather fond of her, aren’t you?’
‘It’s no concern of yours whether I am or not.’ Sylveste sighed; he had known this would lead to difficulties. The biography was nearing completion now and he had been privy to most of it. For all its technical accuracies, for all the myriad ways in which it could be experienced, it remained what Girardieau had always planned: a cunningly engineered weapon of precision propaganda. Through the biography’s subtle filter, there was no way to view any aspect of his past in a light which was not damaging to him; no way to avoid his depiction as an egomaniacal, single-minded tyrant: capacious of intellect, but utterly heartless in the way he used people around him. In this, Pascale had been undoubtedly clever. If Sylveste had not known the facts himself, he would have accepted the biography’s slant uncritically. It had the stamp of truth.
That was hard enough to accept, but what made it immeasurably harder was how much of this harming portrait had been shaped by the testimonials of people who had known him. And chief among these — the most hurting of all — had been Calvin. Reluctantly, Sylveste had allowed Pascale access to the beta-level simulation. He had done so under duress, but there had been — at the time — what appeared to be compensations.
‘I want the obelisk relocated and excavated,’ Sylveste said. ‘Girardieau promised me access to field data if I assisted in destroying my own character. I’ve kept my side of the deal handsomely. How about the government reciprocating?’
‘It won’t be easy…’ Pascale had begun.
‘No; but neither will it be a massive drain on Inundationist resources.’
‘I’ll speak to him,’ she said, without much in the way of assurance. ‘Provided you let me talk to Calvin whenever I want.’
It was the devil of all deals; he had known so at the time. But it had seemed worth it, if only to see the obelisk again, and not just the tiny part which had been uncovered before the coup.
Remarkably, Nils Girardieau had kept his word. It had taken four months, but a team had found the abandoned dig and removed the obelisk. It had not been painstakingly done, but Sylveste had not expected otherwise. It was enough that the thing had been unearthed in one piece. Now a holographic representation of it could be called into existence in his room at his whim; any part of the surface enlarged for inspection. The text had been beguiling; difficult to parse. The complicated map of the solar system was still unnervingly accurate to his eyes. Below it — too deep to have been seen before — was what looked like the same map, on a much larger scale, so that it encompassed the entire system out to the cometary halo. Pavonis was actually a wide binary; two stars spaced by ten light-hours. The Amarantin seemed to have known that, for they had marked the second star’s orbit conspicuously. For a moment, Sylveste wondered why he had never seen the other star at night: it would be dim, but still much brighter than any of the other stars in the sky. Then he remembered that the other star no longer shone. It was a neutron star; the burnt-out corpse of a star which would once have shone hot and blue. It was so dark that it had not been detected before the first interstellar probes. A cluster of unfamiliar graphicforms attended the neutron star’s orbit.