“Since you’re part of us now,” he said, “it’s time you learnt a little more about the set-up. You might also appreciate knowing our reason for going to Resurgam.”
“I assumed it was trade.”
“That was the cover story, but let’s face it, it was never very convincing. Resurgam doesn’t have much in the way of an economy—the purpose of the colony is pure research—and it certainly lacks the resources to buy much from us. Of course, our data on the colony is necessarily old, and once we’re there we’ll trade what we can, but that could never be the sole reason for our voyage there.”
“So what is?”
The lift they were in was decelerating. “The name Sylveste mean anything to you?” Sajaki asked.
Khouri did her best to act normally, as if the question were reasonable, and not one which had gone off in her cranium like a magnesium flare.
“Well, of course. Everyone on Yellowstone knew about Sylveste. Guy was practically a god to them. Or maybe the devil.” She paused, hoping her reactions sounded normal. “Wait though; which Sylveste are we talking about here? The older one, the guy who botched up those immortality experiments? Or his son?”
“Technically speaking,” Sajaki said, “both.”
The lift thundered to a halt. When the doors opened it was like being slapped in the face with a cold wet cloth. Khouri was glad for the advice about the warm clothes, although she still felt mortally chilled. “Thing was,” she continued, “they weren’t all bastards. Lorean was the old guy’s father, and he was still some kind of a folk hero, even after he died, and the old guy—what was his name again?”
“Calvin.”
“Right. Even after Calvin killed all those people. Then Calvin’s son came along—Dan, that would have been—and he tried to make amends, in his own way, with the Shrouder thing.” Khouri shrugged. “I wasn’t around then, of course. I only know what people told me.”
Sajaki led them through gloomy grey-green lit corridors, huge and perhaps mutant janitor-rats scrabbling away as their footfalls neared. What he took them into resembled the inside of a choleraic’s trachea—corridors thick and glutinous with dirty carapacial ice; venous with buried tentacular ducts and power lines, slick with something nastily like human phlegm. Ship-slime, Volyova called it—an organic secretion caused by malfunctioning biological recycler systems on an adjacent level.
Mostly, though, it was the cold of which Khouri took heed.
“Sylveste’s part in things is rather complex,” Sajaki said. “It’ll take a while to explain. First, though, I’d like you to meet the Captain.”
Sylveste walked around himself, checking that nothing was seriously out of place. Satisfied, he cancelled the image and joined Girardieau in the pre-fab’s ante-room. The music reached a crescendo, then settled into a burbling refrain. The pattern of lights altered, voices dropping to a hush.
Together, they stepped into the glare, into the basso sound-field of the organ’s drone. A meandering path led to the central temple, carpeted for the occasion. Chime-trees lined it, cased in protective domes of clear plastic. The chime-trees were spindly, articulated sculptures, their many arms tipped with curved, coloured mirrors. At odd times, the trees would click and reconfigure themselves, moved by what seemed to be million-year-old clockwork buried in pedestals. Current thinking had it that the trees were elements of some city-wide semaphore system.
The organ’s noise magnified as they stepped into the temple. Its egg-shaped dome was permeated by petal-shaped expanses of elaborate stained-glass, miraculously intact despite the slow predations of time and gravity. Filtered through the toplights, the air in the temple seemed suffused with a calming pink radiance. The central portion of the enormous room was taken up by the rising foundation of the spire which rose above the temple; wide and flared like the base of a sequoia. Temporary seating for a hundred top-level Cuvier dignitaries bowed out in a fan-shape from one side of the pillar; easily accommodated by the building, despite its one-quarter scale. Sylveste scanned the racks of watchers, recognising about a third of them. Perhaps a tenth had been his allies before the coup. Most of them wore heavy outer garments, plump with furs. He recognised Janequin amongst them, sagelike with his smoke-white goatee and long silvery hair waterfalling from his bald pate. He looked more simian than ever. Some of his birds were in the hall, released from a dozen bamboo boxes. Sylveste had to admit that they were now strikingly good facsimiles, even down to the bobbed crest and the speckle-shimmer of their turquoise plumage. They had been adapted from chickens by careful manipulation of homeobox genes. The audience, many of whom had not seen the birds before today, applauded. Janequin turned the colour of bloodied snow, and seemed anxious to sink into his brocade overcoat.
Girardieau and Sylveste reached a sturdy table at the focus of the audience. The table was ancient: its woodwork eagle and Latinate inscriptions dated back to the Amerikano settlers on Yellowstone. Its corners were chipped. A varnished mahogany box sat on the table, sealed by delicate gold clasps.
A woman of serious demeanour stood behind the table, dressed in an electric-white gown. The gown’s clasp was a complex dual sigil, combining the Resurgam City/Inundationist governmental seal with the emblem of the Mixmasters: two hands holding a cat’s cradle of DNA. She was, Sylveste knew, not a true Mixmaster. The Mixmasters were a cliquish guild of Stoner bioengineers and geneticists, and none of their sanctum had journeyed to Resurgam. Yet their symbol—which had travelled—denoted general expertise in life-sciences: genesculpting, surgery or medicine.
Her unsmiling face was sallow in the stained light, hair collected in a bun, pierced by two syringes.
The music quietened.
“I am Ordinator Massinger,” she said, voice ringing out across the chamber. “I am empowered by the Resurgam expeditionary council to marry individuals of this settlement, unless such union conflicts with the genetic fitness of the colony.”
The Ordinator opened the mahogany box. Just below the lid lay a leather-bound object the size of a Bible. She removed it and placed it on the table, then folded it open with a creak of leather. The exposed surfaces were matt grey, like wet slate, glistening with microscopic machinery.
“Place one hand each on the page nearest you, gentlemen.”
They placed their palms on the surface. There was a fluorescent sweep as the book took their palm-prints, followed by a brief tingle as biopsies were taken. When they were done, Massinger took the book and pressed her own hand against the surface.
Massinger then asked Nils Girardieau to state his identity to the gathered. Sylveste watched faint smiles ghost the audience. There was something absurd about it, after all, though Girardieau made no show of this himself.
Then she asked the same of Sylveste.
“I am Daniel Calvin Lorean Soutaine-Sylveste,” he said, using the form of his name so rarely employed that it almost took an effort of memory to bring it to mind. He went on, “The only biological son of Rosalyn Soutaine and Calvin Sylveste, both of Chasm City, Yellowstone. I was born on the seventeenth of January, in the hundred and twenty-first standard year after the resettlement of Yellowstone. My calendrical age is two hundred and twenty-three. Allowing for medichine programs, I have a physiological age of sixty, on the Sharavi scale.”