He tried again to engage Maxwell in conversation, but the old man’s only response was to tap the edge of a dish with a fork and shake his head.
When he was finished, Maxwell took a last sip of wine, regarding Luc from across the table. ‘One of my mechants was observing you,’ he said, ‘when you woke up. I watched you picking through the books in that room I left you in.’
Luc hesitated, then carefully put down his knife and fork. ‘What about it?’
Maxwell pushed his chair back and stood, then crossed over to a nearby shelf, trailing his fingers along a line of volumes before selecting one in particular and pulling it out.
‘Perhaps you’d indulge me in a little experiment,’ he said, bringing the book around the table and placing it next to Luc.
Luc cleared his throat nervously. ‘What kind of experiment?’
Maxwell flipped the book open, then slid it closer to Luc’s right hand. ‘I want you to place your hand flat on these pages.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘Then my mechants will find a way to make you, Mr Gabion.’
‘What is the book, exactly?’
‘An account of the fall of Earth, by a man named Saul Dumont. Ever heard of him?’
Saul Dumont. ‘Of course I have. He was the last man on Earth.’
‘The last man to escape Earth, would be a more precise way of putting it.’
Luc shook his head. ‘There’s no such book. If there was, I’d have heard of it – we’d all have.’
Maxwell regarded him with an expression of tolerant pity. ‘The book is called Final Days. He wrote it during his decades on Novaya Zvezda, back when it was still called Galileo. It’s an eye-opener, let me tell you – it most certainly does not correlate with the sanctioned histories of the Tian Di, and is all the more fascinating because of that. Now,’ Maxwell continued, ‘do as I say: press your hand and fingers flat and firmly on the pages.’
Luc hesitated, and one of the mechants drifted towards him, weapons slithering from out of its belly.
‘Just a minute,’ said Luc, sweating now. ‘How could this book possibly exist—’
‘Unless it had been deliberately redacted on the orders of Cheng and his faithful Eighty-Five?’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘I could say much the same for many of the books I keep here. If this prison had a name, Mr Gabion, it would be called the Library of the Damned.’
Luc reached out hesitantly, his hand hovering over the pages. Maxwell made an impatient sound and pushed Luc’s hand flat against the smooth, metallic paper.
He stood at the entrance to a room as small and undecorated as a monk’s cell, the scent of ocean water mixed with the stink of rotting seaweed.
He stepped inside and past a heavy iron door to see a man seated by a desk, its surface bright with icons floating above it. Words formed in the air as the man murmured quietly to himself. The desk was an antique, manufactured on Earth prior to the Abandonment.
The man – Saul Dumont – had dark chocolate skin and close-cropped hair, and wore a heavy coat over a zipped-up jerkin to keep out the cold. He had undergone his second instantiation within the last several years, and so looked young despite being well into his second century.
Dumont glanced over his shoulder at him, favouring him with a weary smile.
‘What took you so long, Javier?’ he asked.
Javier glanced to the side as a woman in late middle-age entered the room beside him. She was similar enough in appearance to Dumont that one might easily assume them to be mother and son.
‘Dad?’ Her voice quavered slightly as she spoke to Dumont. ‘We need to get going. Johnson’s got the boat ready. We need to evacuate. Now.’
Dumont gripped the edge of the desk with one hand, then pushed so that his chair slid back from it.
‘There’s still time,’ said Dumont, addressing his daughter. ‘We can still negotiate with Hsiu-Chuan—’
‘Cheng,’ she replied. ‘Please remember, Dad.’
Dumont waved a hand in irritation. ‘Whatever the hell he calls himself these days, Hsiu-Chuan’s no fool. He must know we’d blow the rigs before we’d let the Tian Di Hui install their puppet government here. We—’
‘Warships set out from Ocean Harbour more than a day ago. Please,’ she said, stepping closer to him. ‘We know how hard you fought for autonomy. We all do, but you have to accept that the fight is over.’
‘No, it’s not.’ Dumont’s voice rose, and he slammed a fist against the desk, making the icons ripple. ‘Ettrick and Litewski still have some say on Franklin,’ he continued, a plaintive edge creeping into his voice. ‘We can run our own damn affairs.’
‘Ettrick and Litewski have already agreed to the transfer of power,’ his daughter replied. ‘They didn’t have any choice. They’ve already arrived back through the transfer gate.’
Dumont stared back at her in horror.
‘She’s right,’ said Javier. ‘We need to retreat and regroup.’
‘For God’s sake, Javier,’ said Dumont, ‘I know Hsiu-Chuan – he’s a monster. Whatever he’s got in mind for us, he can’t possibly—’
Luc gasped as his fingers slipped from the page. Maxwell stared down at him, tight-lipped.
‘Impossible,’ Maxwell muttered under his breath.
‘How does it work?’ Luc managed to croak. ‘It’s like I was actually there, out in the middle of the ocean somewhere. Saul Dumont was there—’ He stared at Maxwell in shock. ‘You were there. I was seeing everything through your eyes.’
‘The memories are encrypted,’ said Maxwell, shaking his head. ‘How could you possibly access them without an encryption key? In fact, how could you even have a lattice? No one outside of the Council or Sandoz has one, except . . .’
He stopped abruptly, his mouth trembling slightly.
Luc nodded at the shelves around them. ‘Can all of these books do the same?’
Maxwell shrugged, looking defeated. ‘A few, but not all.’
‘And what I saw and heard . . . That was all real?’
Maxwell nodded. ‘Quite real. You just experienced my own memories, from about a century after the Abandonment.’
‘You were on Novaya Zvezda, with Dumont?’
Maxwell sighed as he sat back down. ‘I grew up there, long ago enough that I can remember when the first transfer gate was destroyed, years before the Abandonment even took place. I remember the clamour when Dumont was first brought down from orbit.’
‘What happened to Dumont? Didn’t he disappear?’
‘No, he simply decided he preferred life in the Coalition to the rule of the Council, some time before the Schism. If he’s still alive, he’s to be found there now.’
Luc recalled his history. Before escaping on board a starship carrying a new transfer gate to Galileo, Dumont had shut down the entire wormhole network to ensure the survival of the colonies. By the time the ship arrived at Galileo, the Earth had been sterilized by some unknown, alien force.
‘Dumont said something about Cheng – that it wasn’t always his name.’
Maxwell nodded. ‘His name back in those days was Shih Hsiu-Chuan.’