“When we first spoke after your imprisonment,” she said, in her croak of a voice, “I almost had the impression you couldn’t place me.”
“I’d always assumed you were dead.”
“That was what Girardieau’s people wished you to think. The story about our crawler being hit by a landslide—all lies. We were attacked—they thought you were aboard, of course.”
“Why didn’t they kill me later, when they found me at the dig?”
“They realised you were more useful to them alive than dead, of course. Girardieau was no fool—he always used you profitably.”
“If you’d stayed with the dig, none of it would have happened. How did you survive, anyway?”
“Some of us got out of the crawler before Girardieau’s henchmen reached it. We took what equipment we could; made it into the Bird’s Claw canyons and set up bubbletents. That’s all I saw for a year, you know: the inside of a bubbletent. I was hurt quite badly in the attack.”
Sylveste brushed his fingers over the mottled surface of one of Sluka’s pedestal-mounted globes. What they represented, he saw now, was the topography of Resurgam at different epochs during the planned Inundationist terraforming program. “Why didn’t you join Girardieau in Cuvier?” he asked.
“He considered me too embarrassing to admit back into his fold. He was prepared to let us live, but only because killing us would have attracted too much attention. There were lines of communication, but they broke down.” She paused. “Fortunately we took some of Remilliod’s trinkets with us. The scavenger enzymes were the most useful. The dust doesn’t hurt us.”
He studied the globes again. With his impaired vision, he could only guess at the colours of the planetscapes, but he assumed that the spheres represented a steady march towards blue-green verdure. What were now merely upraised plateaux would become landmasses limned by ocean. Forests would fester across steppes. He looked to the furthest globes, which represented some remote version of Resurgam several centuries hence. Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit. How would that delicate future vision fare, he wondered, if Resurgam’s sun again erupted, as it had done nine hundred and ninety thousand years ago, just when Amarantin civilisation was approaching a human level of sophistication?
Not, he ventured, terribly well.
“Apart from the biotech,” he said, “what else did Remilliod give you? You appreciate I’m curious.”
She seemed ready to humour him.
“You haven’t asked me about Cuvier. That surprises me.” She added: “Or your wife.”
“Falkender told me Pascale was safe.”
“She is. Perhaps I’ll allow you to join her at some point. For now, I wish your attention. We haven’t secured the capital. The rest of Resurgam is ours, but Girardieau’s people still hold Cuvier.”
“The city’s still intact?”
“No,” she said. “We…” she looked over his shoulder, directly at Falkender. “Fetch Delaunay, will you? And have him bring one of Remilliod’s gifts.”
Falkender left, leaving them alone.
“I understand there was some agreement between you and Nils,” Sluka said. “Although the rumours I’ve heard are too contradictory to make much sense. Do you mind enlightening me?”
“There was never anything formal,” Sylveste said. “No matter what you may have heard.”
“I understand his daughter was brought in to paint you in an unflattering light.”
“It made sense,” Sylveste said wearily. “There’d be a certain cachet in having the biography scripted by a member of the family who was holding me prisoner. And Pascale was young, but not so young that it wasn’t time for her to make her mark. There were no losers: Pascale could hardly fail, though in fairness she applied herself to the task excellently.” He winced inwardly, remembering how close she had come to exposing the truth about Calvin’s alpha-level simulation. More than ever he was convinced that she had correctly guessed the facts, but had held back from committing them to the biography. Now, of course, she knew much more: what had happened around Lascaille’s Shroud, and how Carine Lefevre’s death was not the clear-cut thing he had made it seem upon his return to Yellowstone. But he had not spoken to her since that announcement. “As for Girardieau,” he said, “he had the satisfaction of seeing his daughter associated with a genuinely important project. Not to mention the fact that I was opened to the world for closer scrutiny. I was the prize butterfly in his collection, you see—but until the biography, he’d had no easy means of showing me off.”
“I’ve experienced the biography,” Sluka said. “I’m not entirely sure Girardieau got what he wanted.”
“All the same, he promised to keep his word.” His eyes faltered, and for a moment the woman he was addressing seemed to be a woman-shaped hole cut in the fabric of the room’s volume, a hole through which infinities lay.
The odd moment passed. He continued, “I wanted access to Cerberus/Hades. I think—towards the end—Nils was almost ready to give it to me, provided the colony had the means.”
“You think there’s something out there?”
“If you’re acquainted with my ideas,” Sylveste said, “then you must bow to their logic.”
“I find them intriguing—like any delusional construct.”
As she spoke, the door opened and a man Sylveste had not seen before entered, shadowed by Falkender. The new man—whom he assumed to be Delaunay—was bulldog-stocky. His wore several days’ growth of beard, a purple beret resting on his scalp. There were red weals around his eyes and a pair of dust goggles around his neck. His chest was crossed by webbing and his feet vanished into ochre mukluks.
“Show the nasty little thing to our guest,” Sluka said.
Delaunay was carrying an obviously heavy black cylinder in one hand, gripped in a thick handle.
“Take it,” Sluka told Sylveste.
He did; it was as heavy as he had expected. The handle was attached to the top of the cylinder; beneath it was a single green key. Sylveste put the cylinder down on the table; it was too heavy to hold comfortably for any length of time.
“Open it,” Sluka said.
He pressed the key—it was the obvious thing to do—and the cylinder split open like a Russian doll, the top half rising on four metal supports which surrounded a slightly smaller cylinder hidden until now. Then the inner cylinder split open similarly, revealing another nested layer, and the process continued until six or seven shells had been revealed.
Inside was a thin silver column. There was a tiny window set into the column’s side, showing an illuminated cavity. Cradled in the cavity was what looked like a bulbous-headed pin.
“I assume by now you understand what this is,” Sluka said.
“I can guess it wasn’t manufactured here,” Sylveste said. “And I know nothing like this was brought with us from Yellowstone. Which leaves our excellent benefactor Remilliod. He sold this to you?”
“This and nine others,” she said. “Eight now, since we used the tenth against Cuvier.”
“It’s a weapon?”
“Remilliod’s people called it hot-dust,” she said. “Antimatter. The pinhead contains only a twentieth of a gramme of antilithium, but that’s more than sufficient for our purposes.”
“I didn’t realise such a weapon was possible,” he said. “Something so small, I mean.”
“That’s understandable. The technology’s been outlawed for so long almost nobody remembers how to actually make one.”
“What yield does this have?”
“About two kilotonnes. Enough to put a hole in Cuvier.”