‘Tell me about it,’ Sajaki said absently. He wore an ash-grey kimono, damp grass darkening his knees to olive-black. His Komuso’s shakuhachi rested on the stump’s mirror-smooth, elbow-polished surface. He and Volyova were now the only two crewmembers yet to enter reefersleep, two months out from Yellowstone.
‘She’s one of us now,’ Volyova said, kneeling opposite him. ‘The core of her indoctrination is complete.’
‘I welcome this news.’
Across the glade a macaw screeched, then left its perch in a flurry of clashing primary colours. ‘We can introduce her to Captain Brannigan.’
‘No time like the present,’ Sajaki said, smoothing a wrinkle from his kimono. ‘Or do you have second thoughts?’
‘About meeting the Captain?’ She clucked nervously. ‘None at all.’
‘Then it’s deeper than that.’
‘What?’
‘Whatever’s on your mind, Ilia. Come on. Spit it out.’
‘It’s Khouri. I’m no longer willing to risk her suffering the same kind of psychotic episodes as Nagorny.’ She stopped, expecting — hoping, even — for some response from Sajaki. But instead all she got was the white-noise of the waterfall, and a total absence of expression on her crewmate’s face. ‘What I mean,’ she continued — almost stammering with her own uncertainty — ‘is that I’m no longer sure she’s a suitable subject at this stage.’
‘At this stage?’ Sajaki spoke so softly she largely read his lips.
‘I mean, to go into the gunnery immediately after Nagorny. It’s too dangerous, and I think Khouri is too valuable to risk.’ She stopped, swallowed, and drew breath into her lungs for what she knew would be the hardest thing to say. ‘I think we need another recruit — someone less gifted. With an intermediate recruit I can iron out the remaining wrinkles before going ahead with Khouri as primary candidate.’
Sajaki picked up his shakuhachi and sighted along it thoughtfully. There was a little raised burr at the end of the bamboo, perhaps from the time when he had used the stick on Khouri. He rubbed it with his thumb, smoothing it back down.
When he spoke, it was with a calm so total that it was worse than any possible display of anger.
‘You’re suggesting we look for another recruit?’
He made it sound as if what she was proposing was easily the most absurd, deranged thing he had ever heard uttered.
‘Only in the interim,’ she said, aware that she was speaking too quickly, hating herself for it, despising her sudden deference to the man. ‘Just until everything’s stable. Then we can use Khouri.’
Sajaki nodded. ‘Well, that sounds sensible. Goodness knows why we didn’t think of it earlier, but I suppose we had other things on our minds.’ He put down the shakuhachi, although his hand did not stray far from its hollow shaft. ‘But that can’t be helped. What we have to do now is find ourselves another recruit. Shouldn’t be too hard, should it? I mean, we hardly taxed ourselves recruiting Khouri. Admittedly we’re two months into interstellar space and our next port of call is a virtually unheard-of outpost — but I don’t envisage any great problem in finding another subject. I expect we’ll have to turn them away in droves, don’t you?’
‘Be reasonable,’ she said.
‘In what sense am I being anything other than reasonable, Triumvir?’
A moment ago she had been scared; now she was angry. ‘You haven’t been the same, Yuuji-san. Not since…’
‘Not since what?’
‘Not since you and the Captain visited the Jugglers. What happened there, Yuuji? What did the aliens do to your head?’
He looked at her oddly, as if the question were a perfectly valid one which it had never struck him to ask himself. It was, fatefully, a ruse. Sajaki moved quickly with the shakuhachi, so that all Volyova really saw was a teak-coloured blur in the air. The blow was relatively soft — Sajaki must have pulled at the last moment — but, gashing into her side, it was still sufficient to send her sprawling into the grass. For the first instant, it was not the pain or the shock of being attacked by Sajaki that overwhelmed her, but the prickly cold wetness of the grass brushing against her nostrils.
He stepped casually round the stump.
‘You’re always asking too many questions,’ Sajaki said, and then drew something from his kimono that might have been a syringe.
Nekhebet Isthmus, Resurgam, 2566
Sylveste reached anxiously into his pocket, feeling for the vial which he felt sure would be missing.
He touched it; a minor miracle.
Down below, dignitaries were filing into the Amarantin city, moving slowly towards the temple at the city’s heart. Snatches of their conversation reached him with perfect clarity, though never long enough for him to hear more than a few words. He was hundreds of metres above them, on the human-installed balustrade which had been grafted to the black wall of the city-englobing egg.
It was his wedding day.
He had seen the temple in simulations many times, but it had been so long since he had actually visited the place that he had forgotten how overpowering its size could be. That was one of the odd, persistent defects of simulations: no matter how precise they became, the participant remained aware that they were not reality. Sylveste had stood beneath the roof of the Amarantin spire-temple, gazing up to where the angled stone arches intersected hundreds of metres above, and had felt not the slightest hint of vertigo, or fear that the age-old structure would choose that moment to collapse upon him. But now — visiting the buried city for only the second time in person — he felt a withering sense of his own smallness. The egg in which it was encased was itself uncomfortably large, but that at least was the product of a recognisably mature technology — even if the Inundationists elected to ignore the fact. The city which rested within, on the other hand, looked more like the product of some fifteenth-century fever-dream fantasist, not least because of the fabulous winged figure which rested atop the temple spire. And all of it — the more he looked — seemed to exist only to celebrate the return of the Banished Ones.
None of it made sense. But at least it forced his mind off the ceremony ahead.
The more he looked, the more he realised — against his first impression — that the winged thing really was an Amarantin, or, more accurately, a kind of hybrid Amarantin/angel, sculpted by an artist with a deep and scholarly understanding of what the possessing of wings would actually entail. Seen without his eyes’ zoom facility, the statue was cruciform, shockingly so. Enlarged, the cruciform shape became a perched Amarantin with glorious, outspread wings. The wings were metalled in different colours, each small trailing feather sparkling with a slightly different hue. Like the human representation of an angel, the wings did not simply replace the creature’s arms, but were a third pair of limbs in their own right.
But the statue seemed more real than any representation of an angel Sylveste had ever seen in human art. It appeared — the thought seemed absurd — anatomically correct. The sculptor had not just grafted the wings onto the basic Amarantin form, but had subtly re-engineered the creature’s underlying physique. The manipulatory forelimbs had been moved slightly lower down the torso, elongated to compensate. The chest of the torso swelled much wider than the norm, dominated by a yokelike skeletal/ muscular form around the creature’s shoulder area. From this yoke sprouted the wing, forming a roughly triangular shape, kitelike. The creature’s neck was longer than normal, and the head seemed even more streamlined and avian in profile. The eyes still faced forwards — though like all Amarantin, its binocular vision was limited — but were set into deep, grooved bone channels. The creature’s upper mandible nostril parts were flared and rilled, as if to draw the extra air into the lungs required for the beating of the wings. And yet not everything was right. Assuming that the creature’s body was approximately similar in mass to the Amarantin norm, even those wings would have been pitifully inadequate for the task of flying. So what were they — some kind of gross ornamentation? Had the Banished Ones gone in for radical bioengineering, only to burden themselves with wings of ridiculous impracticality?