‘So why the change of identity?’
‘Because he’s a man with many secrets,’ Maxwell muttered, taking his seat at the table once more and pouring himself a new glass of wine. ‘Assuming a new identity makes it easier to ensure that those secrets stay secret; he picked Cheng because it’s a common name, as is Joe.’ He made a circle with one hand. ‘A man of the people, you see. Father Cheng, because a father always takes care of his children.’
‘But . . . why would Cheng allow you to keep those memories stored here, in this prison? Surely they’d be dangerous to him, if they were found out?’
Maxwell didn’t reply, and Luc glanced at the book where it still lay on the floor, its pages half-folded.
He came to a realization. ‘Cheng doesn’t know these recordings exist, does he? Does anyone else know about them?’
Maxwell regarded him balefully. ‘You know, I could still order these mechants to kill you. It might save me a lot of unnecessary bother.’
Luc glanced towards the mechants and saw that they had still not retracted their weapons. ‘You could,’ he replied slowly, ‘but I think if you were going to, you already would have.’
‘Please don’t make the mistake of making too many assumptions about me,’ Maxwell snapped. ‘For all Zelia knows, you’re lying dead out there in the snow. She might never know you were here.’
‘Then why the hell did you even bother to rescue me at all?’
‘I looked you up while the mechant was escorting you here,’ Maxwell replied. ‘You’re the one who killed Winchell Antonov, my former colleague and, dare I say it, brother-in-arms.’
‘So it’s revenge you want?’
Maxwell laughed. ‘I have no intention of harming you, Mr Gabion. Revenge is for the young, and killing you wouldn’t bring Winchell back. If I’m guilty of anything, it’s simple curiosity.’
‘You said that apart from me, no one outside of the Council or Sandoz has a lattice,’ said Luc, ‘but then you said except. Except who?’
Maxwell didn’t answer.
‘You were going to say Ambassador Sachs, weren’t you?’ Luc hazarded. ‘He’s the only other one outside of either of them with an instantiation lattice.’
Maxwell sighed and took another sip of wine. ‘Nobody should be able to access those memories without my permission,’ he agreed. ‘Not you, not Sachs, not anyone without the appropriate encryption key. And yet the Ambassador’s lattice somehow unlocked the memories automatically, and without effort – as did yours.’
‘Who else has a copy of that key?’
‘Only me,’ Maxwell replied.
Luc glanced around the ranks of books surrounding them, thinking about all those people, Cheng and the members of the Eighty-Five, coming here and browsing their pages, entirely unaware of the sophisticated circuitry contained within them. Surely they must handle these books all the time . . .
‘You’ve been stealing their memories,’ Luc guessed, regarding Maxwell with new eyes. ‘Every time one of the Eighty-Five picks up one of your books, it sieves information out of their lattices without them ever knowing. Am I right?’
Maxwell’s expression became strangely sad. ‘The circuitry in the books is meant to push extra embedded information the other way – from the pages to the reader’s lattice. It took me a while, but I worked out how to reverse the flow of data and keep it hidden.’
‘Why do it?’
‘Because one day, the people of the Tian Di will need to know the truth about their leaders, and they’ll find all the evidence they need right here in this library. Tell me, just how much contact have you had with the members of the Temur Council, apart from Zelia?’
‘More than enough, for this lifetime.’
‘Dreadful people, aren’t they?’ Maxwell said dryly. ‘If I had the means, I would destroy the Council, and Vanaheim along with them.’
Luc stared at him. ‘Why?’
Maxwell put his glass back down, and Luc tried not to flinch when one of the mechants drifted forward to refill it. ‘Because they’re a travesty of what they once were, long sunk into the introspection of old age, and dark perversions you would scarcely believe.’
‘What kind of perversions?’
Maxwell looked at him in disbelief. ‘You’re Zelia’s puppet. Surely you’ve encountered the “experiments” I’ve been hearing so much about? Or has she grown bored with that now?’
Luc shifted uncomfortably, again seeing a hunched figure immolating itself in his mind’s eye.
‘So you have seen them,’ said Maxwell with an expression of dour amusement. ‘It’s a shame you killed Winchell. He was one of the few men left from the old days still worth a damn.’
‘Even knowing of all the atrocities he was responsible for? The assault on Benares, the Battle of Sunderland—’
‘You’ve been taken in by Cheng’s propaganda. I’m well acquainted with the details of the Benarean assault: Cheng came here on several occasions prior to that campaign, so he could describe to me his plan to discredit Black Lotus. He lied to you. All of them did.’
‘Bullshit.’
Maxwell smiled enigmatically. ‘You’ve already worked out, haven’t you, that Vasili paid me a visit not long before his death?’
Luc stiffened. ‘Why would you assume that?’
‘Why else would you have been so afraid of that book you leafed through downstairs, unless you’d encountered a memory-enabled book before? And I can tell you for a fact that Vasili was the only person in possession of a book taken from here. Now tell me,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘That book I gave to him – do you have it with you?’
Luc licked his lips. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t.’
Maxwell sat back, looking deflated. ‘Then tell me what you learned from it.’
‘That he knew someone was coming to kill him,’ Luc replied. ‘He muttered something about how he’d been wrong, and Antonov had been right. But about what, I don’t know.’
‘It’s such a shame you don’t still have that book,’ said Maxwell. ‘It contained some very valuable information indeed.’
‘What information?’
‘The answer to that question,’ Maxwell replied, ‘lies in part inside another book, in another section of the library.’ He pushed his chair back and stood. ‘I’ll take you there now.’
‘Why not just tell me?’
‘Encoded memories, Mr Gabion, offer more fundamental and easily assimilated truths than speech, which is so very vulnerable to interpretation in a way that direct experience is not. To experience the memories of a man is to know certain unassailable truths about him.’
‘But how exactly does Ambassador Sachs tie into all this?’
‘The Ambassador came here on several occasions in order to privately solicit my advice regarding Reunification,’ Maxwell replied, both mechants trailing in his wake as he stepped towards the exit. ‘But before I tell you anything more,’ he said, pausing by the door, ‘I’d like to ask you something. You couldn’t have known the Ambassador was here unless you had already been watching him closely. Were you?’
‘We were tracking him, yes. We discovered he wasn’t where he’d claimed to be at the time of Vasili’s death.’
Maxwell nodded. ‘So that naturally made him a suspect in Sevgeny’s murder, yes? Well, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you that he was here, with me, when Sevgeny died. In that regard, you can rule the Ambassador out.’
Maxwell exited the room, Luc following behind, the sound of his boots echoing from the marble walls as he tried to absorb everything he had just learned.
‘Just how many books are there in this place?’ asked Luc, as Maxwell led him up a metal stairway in the main hall. The mechants kept pace at a discreet distance.
‘At least half a million, if you mean the physical volumes,’ Maxwell replied with a note of pride. ‘There are many, many times that number in data-storage. A few of the physical volumes are particularly fragile, and have to be kept separate from the rest.’