Volyova sniffed at her vodka. “Odd strategy, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Why? The other crews are getting so many applicants they’re only interviewing via sim.” She took a perfunctory sip of her water. “I prefer dealing with humans. It was just a question of going after a different crew.”
“Oh,” Volyova said. “Ours is very different, believe me.”
“But you’re traders, right?”
Volyova nodded enthusiastically. “We’ve almost finished our dealings around Yellowstone. Not too productive, I must say. Economy’s in the doldrums. We’ll probably pop back in a century or two and see if things have picked up, but personally, I wouldn’t mind if I never saw the place again.”
“So if I wanted to sign up for your ship I’d have to make my mind up pretty soon?”
“Of course, we’d have to make our minds up about you first.”
Khouri looked at her closely. “There are other candidates?”
“I’m not really at liberty to discuss that.”
“I imagine there would be. I mean, Sky’s Edge… there must be plenty of people who’d want to hop a lift there, even if they had to crew to pay their way.”
Sky’s Edge? Volyova tried to keep a straight face, marvelling at their luck. The only reason Khouri had come forward was because she still thought they were going to the Edge, rather than Resurgam. Somehow she remained unaware of Sajaki’s announced change of destination.
“There are worse places one could imagine,” Volyova said.
“Well, I’m keen to jump to the head of the line.” A perspex cloud sailed between them, dangling from its ceiling track, wobbling with its cargo of drinks and narcotics. “What exactly is this position you have open?”
“It would be a lot easier if I explained things aboard the ship. You didn’t forget that overnight bag, did you?”
“Of course not. I want this position, you know.”
Volyova smiled. “I’m very glad to hear it.” Cuvier, Resurgam, 2563
Calvin Sylveste was manifesting in his luxurious seigneurial chair at one end of the prison room. “I’ve got something interesting to tell you,” he said, stroking his beard. “Though I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“Make it quick; Pascale will be here shortly.”
Calvin’s permanent look of amusement deepened. “Actually, it’s Pascale I’m talking about. You’re rather fond of her, aren’t you?”
“It’s no concern of yours whether I am or not.” Sylveste sighed; he had known this would lead to difficulties. The biography was nearing completion now and he had been privy to most of it. For all its technical accuracies, for all the myriad ways in which it could be experienced, it remained what Girardieau had always planned: a cunningly engineered weapon of precision propaganda. Through the biography’s subtle filter, there was no way to view any aspect of his past in a light which was not damaging to him; no way to avoid his depiction as an egomaniacal, single-minded tyrant: capacious of intellect, but utterly heartless in the way he used people around him. In this, Pascale had been undoubtedly clever. If Sylveste had not known the facts himself, he would have accepted the biography’s slant uncritically. It had the stamp of truth.
That was hard enough to accept, but what made it immeasurably harder was how much of this harming portrait had been shaped by the testimonials of people who had known him. And chief among these—the most hurting of all—had been Calvin. Reluctantly, Sylveste had allowed Pascale access to the beta-level simulation. He had done so under duress, but there had been—at the time—what appeared to be compensations.
“I want the obelisk relocated and excavated,” Sylveste said. “Girardieau promised me access to field data if I assisted in destroying my own character. I’ve kept my side of the deal handsomely. How about the government reciprocating?”
“It won’t be easy…” Pascale had begun.
“No; but neither will it be a massive drain on Inundationist resources.”
“I’ll speak to him,” she said, without much in the way of assurance. “Provided you let me talk to Calvin whenever I want.”
It was the devil of all deals; he had known so at the time. But it had seemed worth it, if only to see the obelisk again, and not just the tiny part which had been uncovered before the coup.
Remarkably, Nils Girardieau had kept his word. It had taken four months, but a team had found the abandoned dig and removed the obelisk. It had not been painstakingly done, but Sylveste had not expected otherwise. It was enough that the thing had been unearthed in one piece. Now a holographic representation of it could be called into existence in his room at his whim; any part of the surface enlarged for inspection. The text had been beguiling; difficult to parse. The complicated map of the solar system was still unnervingly accurate to his eyes. Below it—too deep to have been seen before—was what looked like the same map, on a much larger scale, so that it encompassed the entire system out to the cometary halo. Pavonis was actually a wide binary; two stars spaced by ten light hours. The Amarantin seemed to have known that, for they had marked the second star’s orbit conspicuously. For a moment, Sylveste wondered why he had never seen the other star at night: it would be dim, but still much brighter than any of the other stars in the sky. Then he remembered that the other star no longer shone. It was a neutron star; the burnt-out corpse of a star which would once have shone hot and blue. It was so dark that it had not been detected before the first interstellar probes. A cluster of unfamiliar graphicforms attended the neutron star’s orbit.
He had no idea what it meant.
Worse, there were similar maps lower down the obelisk which were at least consistent with other solar systems, although it was nothing he could prove. How could the Amarantin have obtained such data—the other planets, the neutron star, other systems—without a spacefaring capability comparable to humankind’s?
Perhaps the crucial question was the age of the obelisk. The context layer suggested nine hundred and ninety thousand years, placing the burial within a thousand years of the Event—but in terms of validating his theory, he needed a much more precise estimate than that. On her last visit he had asked Pascale to run a TE measurement on the obelisk; he hoped she was going to give him the answer when she arrived.
“She’s been useful to me,” he said to Calvin, who responded with a look of derision. “I don’t expect you to understand that.”
“Perhaps not. I could still tell you what I’ve learned.”
There was no point delaying it. “Well?”
“Her surname isn’t Dubois.” Calvin smiled, drawing out the moment. “It’s Girardieau. She’s his daughter. And you, dear boy, have been had.”
They exited the Juggler and the Shrouder into the carousel’s sweaty impression of planetary night. Outlaw capuchin monkeys were descending from the trees which lined the mall, ready for a session of prehensile pickpocketing. Burundi drums pounded from somewhere around the curve. Neon lightning strobed in serpentlike shapes in the billowing clouds which hung from the rafters. Khouri had heard that it sometimes rained, but so far she had been spared this particular piece of meteorological verisimilitude.
“We’ve a shuttle docked at the hub,” Volyova said. “We’ll just need to take a spoke elevator and clear outbound customs.”
The elevator car they rode in was rattling, unheated, piss-smelling and empty, apart from a helmeted Komuso who sat pensively on a bench, his shakuhachi resting between his knees. Khouri assumed that his presence had made other people decide to wait for the next car in the endless paternoster which rode between the hub and the rim.
The Mademoiselle stood next to the Komuso, hands clasped matronly behind her back, dressed in a floorlength electric-blue gown, black hair pulled into a severe bun.