‘And how much of that was true?’
‘Perhaps more of it than people wished to believe. There were certainly lies: that he had visited the Jugglers on Spindrift years before they were generally discovered; that the aliens had wrought wondrous transformations on what remained of his mind, or that he had met and communicated with at least two sentient species so far unknown to the rest of humanity.’
‘He did meet the Jugglers eventually,’ Volyova said, in Khouri’s direction. ‘Triumvir Sajaki was with him at the time.’
‘That was much later,’ Sajaki snapped. ‘All that’s germane here is his relationship with Calvin.’
‘How did they cross paths?’
‘No one really knows,’ Volyova said. ‘All that we know for sure is that he became injured, either through an accident or some military operation that went wrong. His life wasn’t in danger, but he needed urgent help, and to go to one of the official groups in the Yellowstone system would have been suicide. He’d made too many enemies to be able to place his life in the hands of any organisation. What he needed were loosely scattered individuals in whom he could place personal trust. Evidently Calvin was one of them.’
‘Calvin was in touch with Ultra elements?’
‘Yes, though he would never have admitted so in public.’ Volyova smiled, a wide toothy crescent opening beneath the bill of her cap. ‘Calvin was young and idealistic then. When this injured man was delivered to him, he saw it as a godsend. Until then he had had no means of exploring his more outlandish ideas. Now he had the perfect subject, the only requirement being total secrecy. Of course, they both gained from it: Calvin was able to try out his radical cybernetic theories on Brannigan, while Brannigan was made well and became something more than he had been before Calvin’s work. You might describe it as the perfect symbiotic relationship.’
‘You’re saying the Captain was a guinea pig for that bastard’s monstrosities?’
Sajaki shrugged, the movement puppetlike within his swaddling clothes.
‘That was not how Brannigan saw it. As far as the rest of humanity was concerned, he was already a monster before the accident. What Calvin did was merely take the trend further. Consummate it, if you like.’
Volyova nodded, although there was something in her expression which suggested she was not quite at ease with her crewmate. ‘And in any case, this was prior to the Eighty. Calvin’s name was unsullied. And among the more overt extremes of Ultra life, Brannigan’s transformation was only slightly in excess of the norm.’ She said it with tart distaste.
‘Carry on.’
‘Nearly a century passed before his next encounter with the Sylveste clan,’ Sajaki said. ‘By which time he was commanding this ship.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was injured again. Seriously, this time.’ Gingerly, like someone testing himself against a candle flame, he whisked his fingers across the limiting extent of the Captain’s silvery growth. The Captain’s outskirts looked frothy, like the brine left on a rockpool by the retreating tide. Sajaki delicately swabbed his fingers against the front of his jacket, but Khouri could tell that they did not feel clean; that they itched and crawled with subepidermal malignance.
‘Unfortunately,’ Volyova said, ‘Calvin was dead.’
Of course. He had died during the Eighty; had in fact been one of the last to lose his corporeality.
‘All right,’ Khouri said. ‘But he died in the process of having his brain scanned into a computer. Couldn’t you just steal the recording and persuade it to help you?’
‘We would, had that been possible.’ Sajaki’s low voice reverberated from the throated curve of the corridor. ‘His recording, his alpha-level simulation, had vanished. And there were no duplicates — the alphas were copy-protected.’
‘So basically,’ Khouri said, hoping to shatter the morguelike atmosphere of the proceedings, ‘you were up shit creek without a Captain.’
‘Not quite,’ Volyova said. ‘You see, all this took place during a rather interesting period in Yellowstone’s history. Daniel Sylveste had just returned from the Shrouders, and was neither insane nor dead. His companion hadn’t been so lucky, but her death only gave additional poignancy to his heroic return.’ She halted, then asked, with birdlike eagerness: ‘Did you ever hear of his “thirty days in the wilderness”, Khouri?’
‘Maybe once. Remind me.’
‘He vanished for a month a century ago,’ Sajaki said. ‘One minute the toast of Stoner society, the next nowhere to be found. There were rumours that he’d gone out of the city dome; jammed on an exosuit and gone to atone for the sins of his father. Shame it isn’t true; would have been quite touching. Actually,’ Sajaki nodded at the floor, ‘he came here for a month. We took him.’
‘You kidnapped Dan Sylveste?’ Khouri almost laughed at the audaciousness of it all. Then she remembered they were talking about the man she was meant to kill. Her impulse to laugh evaporated quickly.
‘Invited aboard is probably a preferable term,’ Sajaki said. ‘Though I admit he didn’t have a great deal of choice in the matter.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ Khouri said. ‘You kidnapped Cal’s son? What good was that going to do you?’
‘Calvin took a few precautions before he subjected himself to the scanner,’ Sajaki said. ‘The first was simple enough, although it had to be initiated decades before the culmination of the project. Simply put, he arranged to have every subsequent second of his life monitored by recording systems. Every second: waking, sleeping, whatever. Over the years, machines learnt to emulate his behaviour patterns. Given any situation, they could predict his responses with astonishing accuracy.’
‘Beta-level simulation.’
‘Yes, but a beta-level sim orders of magnitude more complex than any previously created.’
‘By some definitions,’ Volyova said, ‘it was already conscious; Calvin had already transmigrated. Calvin may or may not have believed that, but he still kept on refining the sim. It could project an image of Calvin which was so real, so like the actual man, that you had the forceful sense that you were really in his presence. But Calvin took it a step further. There was another mode of insurance available to him.’
‘Which was?’
‘Cloning.’ Sajaki smiled, nodded almost imperceptibly in Volyova’s direction.
‘He cloned himself,’ she said. ‘Using illegal black genetics techniques, calling in favours from some of his shadier clients. Some of them were Ultra, you see — otherwise we wouldn’t know any of this. Cloning was embargoed technology on Yellowstone; young colonies almost always outlaw it in the interests of ensuring maximum genetic diversity. But Calvin was cleverer than the authorities, and wealthier than those he was forced to bribe. That way he was able to pass off the clone as his son.’
‘Dan,’ Khouri said, the monosyllabic word carving its own angular shape in the refrigerated air. ‘You’re telling me Dan is Calvin’s clone?’
‘Not that Dan knows any of this,’ Volyova said. ‘He’d be the last person Calvin wanted to know. No; Sylveste is as much party to the lie as any of the populace ever were. He thinks he’s his own man.’
‘He doesn’t realise he’s a clone?’