“Be reasonable,” she said.
“In what sense am I being anything other than reasonable, Triumvir?”
A moment ago she had been scared; now she was angry. “You haven’t been the same, Yuuji-san. Not since…”
“Not since what?”
“Not since you and the Captain visited the jugglers. What happened there, Yuuji? What did the aliens do to your head?”
He looked at her oddly, as if the question were a perfectly valid one which it had never struck him to ask himself. It was, fatefully, a ruse, Sajaki moved quickly with the shakuhachi, so that all Volyova really saw was a teak-coloured blur in the air. The blow was relatively soft—Sajaki must have pulled at the last moment—but, gashing into her side, it was still sufficient to send her sprawling into the grass. For the first instant, it was not the pain or the shock of being attacked by Sajaki that overwhelmed her, but the prickly cold wetness of the grass brushing against her nostrils.
He stepped casually round the stump.
“You’re always asking too many questions,” Sajaki said, and then drew something from his kimono that might have been a syringe.
Sylveste reached anxiously into his pocket, feeling for the vial which he felt sure would be missing.
He touched it; a minor miracle.
Down below, dignitaries were filing into the Amarantin city, moving slowly towards the temple at the city’s heart. Snatches of their conversation reached him with perfect clarity, though never long enough for him to hear more than a few words. He was hundreds of metres above them, on the human-installed balustrade which had been grafted to the black wall of the city-englobing egg.
It was his wedding day.
He had seen the temple in simulations many times, but it had been so long since he had actually visited the place that he had forgotten how overpowering its size could be. That was one of the odd, persistent defects of simulations: no matter how precise they became, the participant remained aware that they were not reality. Sylveste had stood beneath the roof of the Amarantin spire-temple, gazing up to where the angled stone arches intersected hundreds of metres above, and had felt not the slightest hint of vertigo, or fear that the age-old structure would choose that moment to collapse upon him. But now—visiting the buried city for only the second time in person—he felt a withering sense of his own smallness. The egg in which it was encased was itself uncomfortably large, but that at least was the product of a recognisably mature technology—even if the Inundationists elected to ignore the fact. The city which rested within, on the other hand, looked more like the product of some fifteenth-century fever-dream fantasist, not least because of the fabulous winged figure which rested atop the temple spire. And all of it—the more he looked—seemed to exist only to celebrate the return of the Banished Ones.
None of it made sense. But at least it forced his mind off the ceremony ahead.
The more he looked, the more he realised—against his first impression—that the winged thing really was an Amarantin, or, more accurately, a kind of hybrid Amarantin/angel, sculpted by an artist with a deep and scholarly understanding of what the possessing of wings would actually entail. Seen without his eyes’ zoom facility, the statue was cruciform, shockingly so. Enlarged, the cruciform shape became a perched Amarantin with glorious, outspread wings. The wings were metalled in different colours, each small trailing feather sparkling with a slightly different hue. Like the human representation of an angel, the wings did not simply replace the creature’s arms, but were a third pair of limbs in their own right.
But the statue seemed more real than any representation of an angel Sylveste had ever seen in human art. It appeared—the thought seemed absurd—anatomically correct. The sculptor had not just grafted the wings onto the basic Amarantin form, but had subtly re-engineered the creature’s underlying physique. The manipulatory forelimbs had been moved slightly lower down the torso, elongated to compensate. The chest of the torso swelled much wider than the norm, dominated by a yokelike skeletal/muscular form around the creature’s shoulder area. From this yoke sprouted the wing, forming a roughly triangular shape, kitelike. The creature’s neck was longer than normal, and the head seemed even more streamlined and avian in profile. The eyes still faced forwards—though like all Amarantin, its binocular vision was limited—but were set into deep, grooved bone channels. The creature’s upper mandible nostril parts were flared and rilled, as if to draw the extra air into the lungs required for the beating of the wings. And yet not everything was right. Assuming that the creature’s body was approximately similar in mass to the Amarantin norm, even those wings would have been pitifully inadequate for the task of flying. So what were they—some kind of gross ornamentation? Had the Banished Ones gone in for radical bio-engineering, only to burden themselves with wings of ridiculous impracticality?
Or had there been another purpose?
“Second thoughts?”
Sylveste was jolted suddenly from his contemplation.
“You still don’t think this is a good idea, do you?”
He turned around from the balustrade which looked across the city.
“It’s a little late to voice my objections, I think.”
“On your wedding day?” Girardieau smiled. “Well, you’re not home and dry yet, Dan. You could always back out.”
“How would you take that?”
“Very badly indeed, I suspect.”
Girardieau was dressed in starched city finery, cheeks lightly rouged for the attendant swarms of float-cams. He took Sylveste by the forearm and led him away from the edge.
“How long have we been friends, Dan?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it friendship; more a kind of mutual parasitism.”
“Oh come on,” Girardieau said, looking disappointed. “Have I made your life any more of a misery these last twenty years than was strictly necessary? Do you think I took any great pleasure in locking you away?”
“Let’s say you approached the task with no little enthusiasm.”
“Only because I had your best interests at heart.” They stepped off the balcony into one of the low tunnels which threaded the black shell around the city. Cushioned flooring absorbed their footsteps. “Besides,” Girardieau continued, “if it wasn’t transparently obvious, Dan, there was something of a feeding frenzy at the time. If I hadn’t put you in custody, some mob would eventually have taken out their anger on you.”
Sylveste listened without speaking. He knew much of what Girardieau said was true on a theoretical level, but that there was no guarantee that it reflected the man’s actual motives at the time.
“The political situation at the time was much simpler. Back then we didn’t have True Path making trouble.” They reached an elevator shaft and entered the carriage, its interior antiseptically clean and new. Prints hung on the wall, showing various Resurgam vistas before and after the Inundationist transformations. There was even one of Mantell. The mesa in which the research outpost was embedded was draped in foliage, a waterfall running off the top, blue, cloud-streaked skies beyond it. In Cuvier, there was a whole sub-industry devoted to creating images and simulations of the future Resurgam, ranging from water-colour artists to skilled sensorium designers.
“And on the other hand,” Girardieau said, “there are radical scientific elements coming out of the woodwork. Only last week, one of True Path’s representatives was shot dead in Mantell, and believe me, it wasn’t one of our agents who did it.”