‘But why the hell do they let you keep them at all?’
‘In what’s meant to be a prison?’ Maxwell queried over his shoulder. ‘As a punishment. I have always been a firm opponent of censorship in any form, unlike dear Joe. Everything I keep here should be available to everyone, and not just those few Councillors foolish enough to think they have superior moral stamina to the common public. So even though Cheng allows me to keep these books, and read them if I choose, I can no more share their contents with anyone outside of his inner circle than I could walk out of here alive. Such things,’ he said, waving to the vast ranks and rows of books, ‘were meant for all of us, along with all the other privileges Cheng has only shared with the Temur Council.’
They arrived at a lounge-area that felt and looked different from anywhere else Luc had seen, and he guessed they were now in Maxwell’s private quarters. He watched as the Tian Di’s second most famous renegade stepped over to a shelf and pulled out yet another book.
‘Tell me,’ asked Maxwell, ‘is Ambassador Sachs the one who installed your lattice?’
‘No. Antonov did, when he captured me on Aeschere.’
Maxwell’s eyebrows shot up. ‘So it wasn’t voluntary?’
Luc described the worm-like mechant Antonov had sent scurrying inside his nostril.
‘I had no idea such a thing was even possible,’ said Maxwell with a shake of the head. ‘But why on Earth would he have done that to you?’
‘To save himself,’ said Luc. ‘He’d already uploaded a partial copy of his own mind to the lattice before he inflicted it on me, and now his memories are invading my own thoughts. Zelia told me it would probably kill me unless she could find some way to stop the lattice’s growth. But now, for all I know, she’s abandoned me altogether . . .’
He thought about how alone he was here on Vanaheim without her help, and how vulnerable, and fought back a black tide of despair.
‘Please, continue,’ said Maxwell, not without a hint of sympathy.
‘Antonov told me to seek out Ambassador Sachs and ask for his help, but when I did talk to the Ambassador, he wasn’t willing to do anything of the kind.’
‘Then you told Sachs you had a lattice like his?’
‘I didn’t need to. He somehow knew as soon as he set eyes on me.’
‘And your lattice already had Winchell’s personality and memories encoded into it when he placed it inside your skull?’ Maxwell nodded, half to himself. ‘A desperate gamble on Winchell’s part, certainly.’
‘What’s in the book that you wanted to show me?’ asked Luc, nodding at the volume still gripped in the old man’s hand.
Maxwell glanced down at it. ‘If you’re ever going to find out who killed Vasili, you need to better understand him, and what drove him in the last days of his life. On his last visit here – the same day I gave him that other book you unfortunately neglected to bring back to me – I persuaded him to let me capture some of his more recent memories for posterity.’
‘Did he talk much about his suspicions over Ariadna Placet’s death?’
‘It would be unlike Sevgeny not to talk about it,’ said Maxwell, settling into a chair across from Luc. He turned the book this way and that in his hands. ‘Tell me, have you ever been to Thorne, where she died?’
‘Only briefly,’ Luc replied.
Maxwell nodded. ‘I believe Zelia took over as Director of Policy after her death. The official verdict recorded that something went wrong with the navigational systems of Ariadna’s flier while she was travelling between biomes. Vasili was heartbroken, hardly surprising given they’d been together longer than anyone else in the Council – literally centuries. He was never the same afterwards, always trying to have the circumstances around her death rein-vestigated.’ Maxwell smiled thinly. ‘And, so I understand, making a terrible nuisance of himself in the process.’
During that one visit to Thorne, Luc had never once stepped outside of a biome. The tiny world orbited just far out enough from its star that temperatures at the equator rarely rose above freezing. There had been some plan to seed Thorne’s wisp-thin atmosphere with CO2-generating bacteria, to create a controlled greenhouse effect that might bump the global mean temperature up in another few decades.
‘Did you ever suspect she had been murdered?’ asked Luc.
‘Look around you,’ said Maxwell. ‘There’s a thousand times more information in just the physical books here than I could assimilate in a dozen lifetimes. I hate to think how many secrets might be hidden all around us, but that I’ll never know about because I don’t know to look for them.’ He shook his head. ‘No, Mr Gabion, I had no reason to have any such suspicion – but someone else did, someone who knew that the trail of evidence leading to the proof Vasili so desperately needed started right here, in this library.’
Winchell, Vasili had said. I was wrong, so very wrong.
The realization hit Luc like a soft punch to the belly.
‘Winchell Antonov?’ asked Luc.
‘Indeed,’ Maxwell confirmed. ‘When Sevgeny first came to me, he told me how Winchell had approached him in secret and, despite their differences, convinced him he could find the answers he needed here. With my help, of course.’
‘And Vasili admitted to you that he’d been dealing with a renegade like Antonov?’
‘As I’m sure you can imagine, I was somewhat taken aback myself. But Sevgeny was deeply distraught when he came to me; so much so that he was willing to ignore the fact that Winchell was not only his polar opposite politically and philosophically, but also an enemy of the Council.’
‘And you agreed to help Vasili, even though he was one of the people responsible for locking you up here for all these years?’
Maxwell regarded him wearily. ‘That doesn’t mean he wasn’t an honourable man in his way, Mr Gabion. Perhaps you don’t understand just how isolated Sevgeny had become following Ariadna’s death. He had been Cheng’s right-hand man at one time, with considerable influence on Tian Di policies, but he was a cold man, not given to emotions except when it came to Ariadna.’
Maxwell shook his head. ‘Outside of her, there was no one in all of the Tian Di, except perhaps Cheng, he could even so much as call a friend. After her death, he demanded access to files and records that, when he was finally given permission to investigate them, proved to have vanished without explanation.’ He gave Luc a crooked smile. ‘Are you surprised to learn this only made him more paranoid? Of course, he came to believe he was the victim of a conspiracy, which led in turn to him being dismissed as a crank by his colleagues in the Eighty-Five.’
‘But he wasn’t a crank, was he? Or paranoid.’
‘No, he wasn’t,’ Maxwell agreed. ‘His gradual isolation from the centre of power had made him . . . receptive, you might say, to influences and ideas he never would have entertained before. Even if they came from someone like Antonov.’
‘But how could the evidence he was looking for wind up here in this library,’ asked Luc, ‘without your knowledge?’
‘Over the years, it came to my attention,’ said Maxwell, ‘that certain of the Eighty-Five were using this Library’s databanks as a repository for what might be deemed highly sensitive or damaging information.’
‘Seems careless. Why not just destroy it altogether?’
‘Because knowledge is power, as they say, and such things can prove useful at a later date – perhaps as leverage, should those individuals ever find themselves suddenly out of Cheng’s favour.’ Maxwell favoured him with a thin smile. ‘An insurance policy, of sorts.’