“How do you knowingly manifest?”
“I knowingly manifest in one incarnation only, the biological form now speaking.”
“And you affirm that you are not wittingly manifested via alpha-level or other Turing-capable simulacra, in this or any other solar system?”
“None of which I am aware.”
Massinger made small annotations in the book using a pressure stylus. She had asked Girardieau precisely the same questions: standard parts of the Stoner ceremony. Ever since the Eighty, Stoners had been intensely suspicious of simulations in general, particularly those that purported to contain the essence or soul of an individual. One thing they especially disliked was the idea of one manifestation of an individual—biological or otherwise—making contracts to which the other manifestations were not bound, such as marriage.
“These details are in order,” Massinger said. “The bride may step forward.”
Pascale moved into the roseate light. She was accompanied by two women wearing ash-coloured wimples, a squad of float-cams and personal security wasps and a semi-transparent entourage of entoptics: nymphs, seraphim, flying-fish and hummingbirds, star-glitter dewdrops and butterflies, in slow cascade around her wedding dress. The most exclusive entoptic designers in Cuvier had created them.
Girardieau raised his thick, hauserlike arms and bid his daughter forward.
“You look beautiful,” he murmured.
What Sylveste saw was beauty reduced to digital perfection. He knew that Girardieau saw something incomparably softer and more human, like the difference between a swan and a hard glass sculpture of a swan.
“Place your hand on the book,” the Ordinator said.
An imprint of moisture from Sylveste’s hand was still visible, like a wider shoreline around Pascale’s island of pale flesh. The Ordinator asked her to verify her identity, in the same manner as she had asked Girardieau and Sylveste. Pascale’s task was simple enough: not only had she been born on Resurgam, but she had never left the planet. Ordinator Massinger delved deeper into the mahogany box. While she did so, Sylveste’s eyes worked the audience. He saw Janequin, looking paler than ever, fidgety. Deep within the box, polished to a bluish antiseptic lustre, lay a device like a cross between an old-style pistol and a veterinarian’s hypodermic.
“Behold the wedding gun,” the Ordinator said, holding the box aloft.
Bone-splinteringly cold as it was, Khouri soon stopped noticing the temperature except as an abstract quality of the air. The story that her two crewmates was relating was far too strange for that.
They were standing near the Captain. His name, she now knew, was John Armstrong Brannigan. He was old, inconceivably so. Depending on the system one adopted in measuring his age, he was anywhere between two hundred and half a thousand years old. The details of his birth were unclear now, hopelessly tangled in the countertruths of political history. Mars, some said, was the place where he had been born, yet it was equally possible that he had been born on Earth, Earth’s city-jammed moon or in any one of the several hundred habitats which drifted through cislunar space in those days.
“He was already over a century old before he ever left Sol system,” Sajaki said. “He waited until it was possible to do so, then was among the first thousand to leave, when the Conjoiners launched the first ship from Phobos.”
“At least, someone called John Brannigan was on that ship,” Volyova said.
“No,” Sajaki said. “There’s no doubt. I know it was him. Afterwards… it becomes less easy to place him, of course. He may have deliberately blurred his own past, to avoid being tracked down by all the enemies he must have made in that time. There are many sightings, in many different systems, decades apart… but nothing definite.”
“How did he come to be your Captain?”
“He turned up centuries later—after several landfalls elsewhere, and dozens of unconfirmed apparitions—on the fringe of the Yellowstone system. He was ageing slowly, due to the relativistic effects of starflight, but he was still getting older, and longevity techniques were not as well developed as in our time.” Sajaki paused. “Much of his body was now prosthetic. They said that John Brannigan no longer needed a spacesuit when he left his ship; that he breathed vacuum, basked in intolerable heat and quenching cold, and that his sensory range encompassed every spectrum imaginable. They said that little remained of the brain with which he had been born; that his head was merely a dense loom of intermeshed cybernetics, a stew of tiny thinking machines and precious little organic material.”
“And how much of that was true?”
“Perhaps more of it than people wished to believe. There were certainly lies: that he had visited the Jugglers on Spindrift years before they were generally discovered; that the aliens had wrought wondrous transformations on what remained of his mind, or that he had met and communicated with at least two sentient species so far unknown to the rest of humanity.”
“He did meet the Jugglers eventually,” Volyova said, in Khouri’s direction. “Triumvir Sajaki was with him at the time.”
“That was much later,” Sajaki snapped. “All that’s germane here is his relationship with Calvin.”
“How did they cross paths?”
“No one really knows,” Volyova said. “All that we know for sure is that he became injured, either through an accident or some military operation that went wrong. His life wasn’t in danger, but he needed urgent help, and to go to one of the official groups in the Yellowstone system would have been suicide. He’d made too many enemies to be able to place his life in the hands of any organisation. What he needed were loosely scattered individuals in whom he could place personal trust. Evidently Calvin was one of them.”
“Calvin was in touch with Ultra elements?”
“Yes, though he would never have admitted so in public.” Volyova smiled, a wide toothy crescent opening beneath the bib of her cap. “Calvin was young and idealistic then. When this injured man was delivered to him, he saw it as a godsend. Until then he had had no means of exploring his more outlandish ideas. Now he had the perfect subject, the only requirement being total secrecy. Of course, they both gained from it: Calvin was able to try out his radical cybernetic theories on Brannigan, while Brannigan was made well and became something more than he had been before Calvin’s work. You might describe it as the perfect symbiotic relationship.”
“You’re saying the Captain was a guinea pig for that bastard’s monstrosities?”
Sajaki shrugged, the movement puppetlike within his swaddling clothes.
“That was not how Brannigan saw it. As far as the rest of humanity was concerned, he was already a monster before the accident. What Calvin did was merely take the trend further. Consummate it, if you like.”
Volyova nodded, although there was something in her expression which suggested she was not quite at ease with her crewmate. “And in any case, this was prior to the Eighty. Calvin’s name was unsullied. And among the more overt extremes of Ultra life, Brannigan’s transformation was only slightly in excess of the norm.” She said it with tart distaste.
“Carry on.”
“Nearly a century passed before his next encounter with the Sylveste clan,” Sajaki said. “By which time he was commanding this ship.”
“What happened?”