Hegazi lit a cigarette and offered Volyova a second. She took it gratefully and smoked it solidly for five minutes, until it resembled a glowing speck of fissile material wrapped in glowing embers. She made a mental note to replenish her supply of cigarettes during this stopover. “But my search is only just beginning,” she said. “And I have to handle it delicately.”
“You mean,” Hegazi said with a knowing smile, “that you’re not actually going to tell people what the job is before you recruit them.”
Volyova smirked. “Of course not.”
The sapphire-hulled shuttle he was riding had not come far: only a short inter-orbital hop from the Sylvestes’ familial habitat. Even so, it had been difficult to arrange. Calvin strongly disapproved of his son having any contact with the thing which now resided in the Institute, as if the thing’s state of mind might infect Sylveste by some mysterious process of sympathetic resonance. Yet Sylveste was twenty-one. He chose his own associations now. Calvin could go hang, or bum his neurons to ash in the madness he was about to inflict on himself and his seventy-nine disciples… but he was not going to dictate who Sylveste could see.
He saw SISS looming ahead, and thought, none of this is real; just a narrative strand from his biography. Pascale had given him the rough-cut and asked for his comments. Now he was experiencing it, still walled in his prison in Cuvier, but moving like a ghost through his own past, haunting his younger self. Memories, long buried, were welling up unbidden. The biography, still far from complete, would be capable of being accessed in many ways, from many viewpoints, and with varying degrees of interactivity. It would be an intricately faceted thing, detailed enough that one could easily spend more than a lifetime exploring only a segment of his past.
SISS looked as real as he remembered. The Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies had its organisational centre in a wheel-shaped structure dating from the Amerikano days, although there was not a single cubic nanometre which had not been reprocessed many times over the intervening centuries. The wheel’s hub sprouted two grey, mushroom-shaped hemispheres, pocked with docking interfaces and the modest defence systems permitted by Demarchist ethics. The wheel’s edge was a hectic accretion of living modules, labs and offices, embedded in a matrix of bulk chitin polymer, linked by a tangle of access tunnels and supply pipes walled in shark-collagen.
“It’s good.”
“You think so?” Pascale’s voice was distant.
“That’s how it was,” Sylveste said. “How it felt when I visited him.”
“Thanks, I… well, this was nothing—the easy part. Fully documented. We had blueprints for SISS, and there are even some people in Cuvier who knew your father, like Janequin. The hard part’s what happened afterwards—where we have so little to go on except what you told them on your return.”
“I’m sure you’ve done an excellent job of it.”
“Well, you’ll see—sooner rather than later.”
The shuttle coupled with the docking interface. Institute security servitors were waiting beyond the lock, validating his identity.
“Calvin won’t be thrilled,” said Gregori, the Institute’s housekeeper. “But I suppose it’s too late to send you home now.”
They had been through this ritual two or three times in the last few months, Gregori always washing his hands of the consequences. It was no longer necessary to have someone escort Sylveste through the shark-collagen tunnels to the place where they kept him; the thing.
“You’ve nothing to worry about, Gregori. If Father gives you any trouble, just tell him I ordered you to show me around.”
Gregori arched his eyebrows, the emotionally attuned entoptics around him registering amusement.
“Isn’t that just what you’re doing, Dan?”
“I was trying to keep things amicable.”
“Utterly futile, dear boy. We’d all be much happier if you just followed your father’s lead. You know where you are with a good totalitarian regime.”
It took twenty minutes to navigate the tunnels, moving radially outwards to the rim, passing through scientific sections where teams of thinkers—human and machine—grappled endlessly with the central enigma of the Shrouds. Although SISS had established monitoring stations around all the Shrouds so far discovered, most of the information-processing and collating took place around Yellowstone. Here elaborate theories were assembled and tested against the facts, which were scant, but unignorable. No theory had lasted more than a few years.
The place where they kept him, the thing Sylveste had come to see, was a guarded annex on the rim; a generously large allocation of volume given the lack of evidence that the thing within was actually capable of appreciating the gift. The thing’s name—his name—was Philip Lascaille.
He did not have many visitors now. There had been lots in the early days, shortly after his return. But interest had dwindled when it became clear that Lascaille could tell his inquisitors nothing, useful or otherwise. But, as Sylveste had quickly appreciated, the fact that no one paid Lascaille much attention these days could actually work to his advantage. Even Sylveste’s relatively infrequent visits—once or twice a month—had been sufficiently far from the norm to enable a kind of rapport to form between the two of them… between himself and the thing Lascaille had become.
Lascaille’s annex contained a garden, under an artificial sky glazed the deep blue of cobalt. A breeze had been created, sufficient to finger the windchimes suspended from the bower of over-arching trees which fringed the garden.
The garden had been landscaped with paths, rockeries, knolls, trellises and goldfish ponds, the effect being of a rustic maze, so that it always took a minute or so to find Lascaille. When Sylveste did find him the man was usually in the same state: naked or half-naked, filthy to some degree, his fingers smeared with the rainbow shades of crayons and chalks. Sylveste would always know he was getting warm when he saw something scrawled on the stone path; either a complex symmetrical pattern, or what looked like an attempt at mimicking Chinese or Sanskrit calligraphy, without actually knowing any real letters. At other times the things which Lascaille marked on the path looked like Boolean algebra or semaphore.
Then—it was always only a question of time—he would round a corner and Lascaille would be there, working on another marking, or carefully erasing one he had worked on previously. His face would be frozen in a rictus of total concentration, and every muscle in his body would be rigid with the exertion of the drawing, and the process would take place in complete silence, except for the stirring of the windchimes, the quiet whisper of the water or the scraping of his crayons and chalks against stone.
Sylveste would often have to wait hours for Lascaille to even register his presence, which would generally amount to nothing more than the man turning his face to him for an instant, before continuing. Yet the same thing always happened in that instant. The rictus would soften, and in its place would be—if only for a moment—a smile; one of pride or amusement or something utterly beyond Sylveste’s fathoming.
And then Lascaille would return to his chalks. And there would be nothing to suggest that this was a man—the only man—the only human being—to ever touch the surface of a Shroud and return alive.
“Anyway,” Volyova said, quenching what remained of her thirst, “I’m not expecting it to be easy, but I have no doubts that I will find a recruit sooner or later. I’ve begun to advertise, stating our planned destination. As far as the work is concerned, I say only that it requires someone with implants.”