‘I can guess why you are here,’ she said. ‘Before you kill me, though, you should be aware that I know who you are.’
The statement unnerved him. Perhaps it was bluff, perhaps not. If she had truly looked into Panoply’s archives, then she might have seen employee records. It didn’t matter. She could scream out his name and the world wouldn’t hear her.
‘Who said anything about killing?’ he asked mildly.
‘Dreyfus came unarmed.’
‘More fool him. I wouldn’t enter a room with a Conjoiner inside unless I was carrying a weapon. Or would you have me believe that you couldn’t kill me in an eyeblink?’
‘I had no intention of killing you, Prefect. Until now.’
Gaffney spread his arms. ‘Go ahead, then. Or rather, tell me what you were going to tell Dreyfus. Then kill me.’
‘Why do I need to tell you? You know everything.’
‘Well, maybe not everything.’ Gaffney unclipped his whiphound and thumbed it to readiness. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to let you leave this place alive and be reunited with your people. Voi knows you deserve it. Voi knows you’ve earned the right to some reward for the service you’ve provided. But it just can’t happen. Because if I let you out of here, you’d endanger the state of affairs that must now come into being. And if you did that, you’d be indirectly responsible for the terrible things your people dreamed were coming, the terrible things I’m striving to avert.’ He thumbed another stud, causing the whiphound to spool out its filament and move to full attack posture. In the weightless sphere of the bubble, the filament swayed back and forth like a tendril stirred by languid sea currents.
‘You have no idea what we saw in Exordium,’ Clepsydra said.
‘I don’t need to. That’s Aurora’s business.’
‘Do you know what Aurora is, Gaffney?’
He hoped that she did not catch the subliminal hesitation in his response. More than likely she did. Very little was subliminal to Conjoiners. ‘I know everything I need to know.’
‘Aurora is not a human being.’
‘She looked pretty human to me when we met.’
‘In person?’
‘Not exactly,’ he admitted.
‘Aurora was a person once upon a time. But that was a long time ago. Now Aurora is something else. She is a life form that has never truly existed before, except fleetingly. Being human is something she remembers the same way you remember sucking your thumb. It’s a part of her, a necessary phase in her development, but one now so remote that she can barely comprehend that she was ever that small, that vulnerable, that ineffective. She is the closest thing to a goddess that has ever existed, and she will only get stronger.’ Clepsydra flashed him a smile that did not quite belong on her face. ‘And you feel comfortable entrusting the future fate of the Glitter Band to this creature?’
‘Aurora’s plan is about the continued existence of the human species around Yellowstone,’ Gaffney said dogmatically. ‘Taking the long view, she sees that our little cultural hub is critical to the wider human diaspora. If the hub fails, the wheel will splinter itself apart. Take out Yellowstone and the Ultras lose their most lucrative stopover. Interstellar trade will wither. The other Demarchist colonies will fall like dominoes. It might take decades, centuries, even, but it will happen. That’s why we need to think about survival now.’
Clepsydra formed a convincing sneer. ‘Her plan is about her survival, not yours. At the moment she is letting you tag along for the ride. When you are no longer useful — and that will come to pass — I would make sure you have a very good escape plan.’
‘Thank you for the advice.’ His hand tightened on the whiphound. ‘I’m puzzled, Clepsydra. You know that I can kill you with this thing. I also know that you can influence it, to a degree.’
‘You’re wondering why I haven’t turned it against you.’
‘Crossed my mind.’
‘Because I know that the gesture would be futile.’ She nodded at his wrist. ‘Your hand is gloved, for instance. It could be that you wish to avoid forensic contamination of the weapon, but I think there must be more to it than that. The glove extends into your sleeve. I presume it merges with some kind of lightweight armour under your uniform.’
‘Good guess. It’s training armour, the kind recruits wear when they’re learning to use whiphounds. Hyperdiamond cross-weave, edged on the microscopic scale to blunt and clog the cutting mechanisms on the sharp side of the filament. Even if you could bend the tail around towards me, it wouldn’t be able to slice through my arm. Still, I’m surprised you didn’t try it anyway.’
‘I was resigned to death the moment I saw that you were not Prefect Dreyfus.’
‘Here’s the deal,’ he said. ‘I know that Conjoiners can shut off pain when they need to. But I’m willing to bet you’d still choose a quick death over a slow one. Especially here. Especially when you’re all alone, far from your friends.’
‘Death is death. And I can die precisely as quickly as I choose, not you.’
‘All the same, I’ll make you a proposition. I know you looked deep into our files. Minor confession: I was prepared to let that happen because I knew I was going to have to kill you anyway. I thought you might turn something up that I could use.’
‘I did.’
‘I’m not talking about Aurora. I mean the Clockmaker.’
‘I have no idea what you mean.’
He guessed that she was lying. Even if she’d had no knowledge of the Clockmaker prior to her arrival in Panoply — and the Exordium dreamers hadn’t been totally isolated from information concerning events in the outside world — she would surely have found out about it during her uninvited rummage through Panoply’s records.
He rolled the whiphound handle in his palm. ‘I’ll let you in on a little secret. Officially, it was nuked out of existence when Panoply destroyed the Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation.’ He lowered his voice, even though he knew there could be no eaves-droppers. ‘But that’s not what really happened. SIAM was only nuked after Panoply had already gone inside to extract intelligence and hardware. They believed that they’d destroyed the Clockmaker, true enough. They found what appeared to be its remains. But they kept the relics, the clocks and musical boxes and all the nasty little booby traps. And one of those relics turned out to be… well, just as bad as the thing itself. Worse, in some respects. It was the Clockmaker.’
‘No one would have been that stupid,’ Clepsydra said.
‘Less a question of stupidity, I think, than of overweening intellectual vanity. Which isn’t to say they haven’t been clever. Just to have pulled this off, just to have kept it hidden for eleven years… that took some doing, some guile.’
‘Why are you interested in the Clockmaker? Are you so foolish as to think you can use it as well? Or is Aurora the foolish one?’
Gaffney shook his head knowingly. ‘No, Aurora wouldn’t make that kind of mistake. But now the Clockmaker is a very real concern to her. Her intelligence networks have determined that it wasn’t destroyed. She knows that a cell working inside Panoply kept it under study in the same place for most of the last eleven years. Aurora fears that the Clockmaker could undo all her good work, at the eleventh hour. Therefore it must be located and destroyed, before the cell has a chance to activate it.’
‘Have you already made an attempt to destroy it? Perhaps in the last few days?’
He looked at her wonderingly. ‘Oh, you’re good. You’re very, very good.’
‘Ruskin-Sartorious,’ Clepsydra said, enunciating the syllables with particular care. ‘I saw it in your files. That’s where you expected to find the Clockmaker. That’s why that habitat had to be destroyed. Except you were too late, weren’t you?’