Yes, and all that had done was to replace a dozen questions with a thousand more. ‘Nils…’ he began, ‘how are the colony’s resources these days?’
‘In what sense?’
‘I know things have been different since Remilliod came through. Things which would have been unthinkable in my day… could be done now, if the political will was there.’ ‘What kinds of things?’ Girardieau asked dubiously.
Sylveste reached into his jacket again, but this time, instead of the vial, he removed a piece of paper which he spread before Girardieau. The paper was marked with complex circular figures.
‘You recognise these marks? We found them on the obelisk and all over the city. They’re maps of the solar system, made by the Amarantin.’
‘Somehow, having seen this city, I find that easier to believe now than I once did.’
‘Good, then hear me out.’ Sylveste drew his finger along the widest circle. ‘This represents the orbit of the neutron star, Hades.’
‘Hades?’
‘That was the name it was given when they first surveyed the system. There’s a lump of rock orbiting it, too — about the size of a planetary moon. They called it Cerberus.’ Then he brushed his finger across the cluster of graphicforms attending the neutron star/planet double system. ‘Somehow, this was important to the Amarantin. And I think it might have some bearing on the Event.’
Girardieau buried his head in his hands theatrically, then looked back at Sylveste. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Carefully — never allowing his gaze to move from Girardieau’s eyes — he folded away the paper and replaced it in his pocket. ‘We have to explore it, and find out what killed the Amarantin. Before it kills us as well.’
When Sajaki and Volyova came to Khouri’s quarters, they told her to put on something warm. Khouri noticed that they were both wearing heavier than usual shipwear — Volyova in a zipped-up flying jacket, Sajaki in muffled, high-collared thermals, quilted in a mosaic of nova-diamond patches.
‘I’ve screwed up, haven’t I?’ Khouri said. ‘This is where I get the airlock treatment. My scores in the combat simulations haven’t been good enough. You’re going to ditch me.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Sajaki said, only his nose and forehead protruding above the furline of his collar. ‘If we were going to kill you, do you think we’d worry about you catching a chill?’
‘And,’ Volyova said, ‘your indoctrination finished weeks ago. You’re now one of our assets. To kill you now would be a form of treason against ourselves.’ Beneath the bill of her cap only her mouth and chin were visible; she exactly complemented Sajaki, the two of them forming one bland composite face.
‘Nice to know you care.’
Still unsure of her position — the possibility that they might be planning something nasty was still looming large — she dug through what passed for her belongings until she found a thermal jacket. Manufactured by the ship, it was similar to Sajaki’s harlequin job, except that it fell almost to her knees.
An elevator journey took them into an unexplored region of the ship — at least, well away from what Khouri considered known territory. They had to change elevators several times, walking through interconnecting tunnels which Volyova said were necessary because of virus damage taking out large sections of the transit system. The décor and technological level of the walk-through areas was always subtly different, suggesting to Khouri that whole districts of the ship had been left fallow at different stages over the last few centuries. She remained nervous, but something in Sajaki and Volyova’s demeanour told her that what they had in mind was more akin to an initiation ceremony than a cold execution. They reminded her of children embarked on some piece of malicious tomfoolery — Volyova at least, though Sajaki looked and acted a good deal more authoritarian, like a functionary carrying out a grim civic duty.
‘Since you’re part of us now,’ he said, ‘it’s time you learnt a little more about the set-up. You might also appreciate knowing our reason for going to Resurgam.’
‘I assumed it was trade.’
‘That was the cover story, but let’s face it, it was never very convincing. Resurgam doesn’t have much in the way of an economy — the purpose of the colony is pure research — and it certainly lacks the resources to buy much from us. Of course, our data on the colony is necessarily old, and once we’re there we’ll trade what we can, but that could never be the sole reason for our voyage there.’
‘So what is?’
The lift they were in was decelerating. ‘The name Sylveste mean anything to you?’ Sajaki asked.
Khouri did her best to act normally, as if the question were reasonable, and not one which had gone off in her cranium like a magnesium flare.
‘Well, of course. Everyone on Yellowstone knew about Sylveste. Guy was practically a god to them. Or maybe the devil.’ She paused, hoping her reactions sounded normal. ‘Wait though; which Sylveste are we talking about here? The older one, the guy who botched up those immortality experiments? Or his son?’
‘Technically speaking,’ Sajaki said, ‘both.’
The lift thundered to a halt. When the doors opened it was like being slapped in the face with a cold wet cloth. Khouri was glad for the advice about the warm clothes, although she still felt mortally chilled. ‘Thing was,’ she continued, ‘they weren’t all bastards. Lorean was the old guy’s father, and he was still some kind of a folk hero, even after he died, and the old guy — what was his name again?’
‘Calvin.’
‘Right. Even after Calvin killed all those people. Then Calvin’s son came along — Dan, that would have been — and he tried to make amends, in his own way, with the Shrouder thing.’ Khouri shrugged. ‘I wasn’t around then, of course. I only know what people told me.’
Sajaki led them through gloomy grey-green lit corridors, huge and perhaps mutant janitor-rats scrabbling away as their footfalls neared. What he took them into resembled the inside of a choleraic’s trachea — corridors thick and glutinous with dirty carapacial ice; venous with buried tentacular ducts and power lines, slick with something nastily like human phlegm. Ship-slime, Volyova called it — an organic secretion caused by malfunctioning biological recycler systems on an adjacent level.
Mostly, though, it was the cold of which Khouri took heed.
‘Sylveste’s part in things is rather complex,’ Sajaki said. ‘It’ll take a while to explain. First, though, I’d like you to meet the Captain.’
Sylveste walked around himself, checking that nothing was seriously out of place. Satisfied, he cancelled the image and joined Girardieau in the pre-fab’s ante-room. The music reached a crescendo, then settled into a burbling refrain. The pattern of lights altered, voices dropping to a hush.
Together, they stepped into the glare, into the basso sound-field of the organ’s drone. A meandering path led to the central temple, carpeted for the occasion. Chime-trees lined it, cased in protective domes of clear plastic. The chime-trees were spindly, articulated sculptures, their many arms tipped with curved, coloured mirrors. At odd times, the trees would click and reconfigure themselves, moved by what seemed to be million-year-old clockwork buried in pedestals. Current thinking had it that the trees were elements of some city-wide semaphore system.
The organ’s noise magnified as they stepped into the temple. Its egg-shaped dome was permeated by petal-shaped expanses of elaborate stained-glass, miraculously intact despite the slow predations of time and gravity. Filtered through the toplights, the air in the temple seemed suffused with a calming pink radiance. The central portion of the enormous room was taken up by the rising foundation of the spire which rose above the temple; wide and flared like the base of a sequoia. Temporary seating for a hundred top-level Cuvier dignitaries bowed out in a fan-shape from one side of the pillar; easily accommodated by the building, despite its one-quarter scale. Sylveste scanned the racks of watchers, recognising about a third of them. Perhaps a tenth had been his allies before the coup. Most of them wore heavy outer garments, plump with furs. He recognised Janequin amongst them, sagelike with his smoke-white goatee and long silvery hair waterfalling from his bald pate. He looked more simian than ever. Some of his birds were in the hall, released from a dozen bamboo boxes. Sylveste had to admit that they were now strikingly good facsimiles, even down to the bobbed crest and the speckle-shimmer of their turquoise plumage. They had been adapted from chickens by careful manipulation of homeobox genes. The audience, many of whom had not seen the birds before today, applauded. Janequin turned the colour of bloodied snow, and seemed anxious to sink into his brocade overcoat.