But near this world was a neutrino source. It was weak—almost at the limit of detectability—but nothing she could ignore. Volyova digested this knowledge for a few moments before regurgitating it as a tiny, troublesome cud of certainty. Only a machine could create such a signature.
And that worried her.
“You’ve really been awake all this time?” Khouri asked, shortly after waking herself, as she and Volyova journeyed down to see the Captain.
“Not literally,” Volyova said. “Even my body needs sleep occasionally. I tried dispensing with it once; there are drugs you can take. And implants which can be put into the RAS… that’s the reticular activating system, the region of the brain which mediates sleep—but you still need to clean out those fatigue poisons.” She winced. It was evident to Khouri that Volyova found the topic of implants about as pleasant as toothache.
“Much happen?” Khouri asked.
“Nothing you need concern yourself with,” Volyova said, taking a drag on a cigarette. Khouri assumed that would be the end of it, but then her tutor fixed her with an uneasy expression. “Well, now you mention it, there was something. Two things, in fact, though I’m not sure to which I should attach the greater significance. The first need not concern you immediately. As for the second…”
Khouri searched Volyova’s face for concrete evidence of the seven additional years the woman had aged since their last meeting. There was nothing; not a hint of it, which meant that she had balanced the seven years with infusions of anti-senescence drugs. She looked different, but only because she had permitted her hair to grow out from her usual crop. It was still short, but the extra volume served to ameliorate the sharp lines of her jaw and cheekbones. If anything, Khouri thought, Volyova looked seven years younger, rather than older. Not for the first time, she attempted to assess the woman’s actual physiological age, and failed miserably.
“What was it?”
“There was something unusual about your neural activity while you were in reefersleep. There shouldn’t have been any. But what I saw didn’t even look normal for someone awake. It looked like a small war going on in your head.”
The elevator had arrived at the Captain’s level. “That’s an interesting analogy,” Khouri said, stepping into the chill of the corridor.
“Assuming it is one. I doubted that you’d have been aware of much, of course.”
“I don’t remember anything,” Khouri said.
Volyova was silent until they reached the human nebula which was the Captain. Glittering and uncomfortably mucoid, he less resembled a human being than an angel which had dropped from the sky onto a hard, splattering surface. The antiquated reefer which had until recently cased him was now shattered and fissured. It still functioned, but only barely, and the cold it offered was no longer adequate to stifle the plague’s relentless encroachment. Captain Brannigan had sunk dozens of tendril-like roots into the ship now, roots which Volyova tracked but was powerless to prevent spreading. She could sever them, but what effect would that have on the Captain? For all she knew, the roots were all that was keeping him alive, if she dared dignify his state with the word. Eventually, Volyova said, the roots would permeate the whole vessel, and by then it would probably be unwise to make much of a distinction between the ship and the Captain. Of course, she could arrest that spread if she wished, by the simple expedient of ejecting this portion of the ship; cutting it entirely free from the rest of the vessel, the way an oldtime surgeon might have dealt with a particularly voracious tumour. The volume Brannigan had subsumed was tiny now, and the ship would certainly not miss it. Undoubtedly his transformations would continue, but lacking sustaining material they would be turned incestuously inwards, until entropy drove the life from what he had become.
“You’d consider doing that?” Khouri asked.
“Consider it, yes,” Volyova replied. “But I’m hoping it won’t come to that. All these samples I’ve been taking—I think I’m actually getting somewhere. I’ve found a counteragent—a retrovirus which seems stronger than the plague. It subverts the plague machinery faster than the plague subverts it. Only tested it on tiny pieces so far—and there’s really no way I can do any better than that, because testing it on the Captain would be a medical matter, and I’m not qualified to do that.”
“Of course,” Khouri said hastily. “But if you won’t do that, you’re really trusting all on Sylveste, aren’t you?”
“Maybe, but one shouldn’t underestimate his skills. Or Calvin’s, I should say.”
“And he’ll help you, just like that?”
“No, but he didn’t willingly help us the first time either, and we still found a way.”
“Persuasion, you mean?”
Volyova took a moment to take a scraping from one of the pipelike tendrils, just before it dove into an intestinal mass of ship plumbing. “Sylveste is a man with obsessions,” she said. “And people like that are more easily manipulated than they imagine. They’re so intent on whatever goal it is they have in mind that they don’t always notice that they’re being bent to someone else’s will.”
“Like yours, for instance.”
She took the sliver-thin sample and popped it away for analysis. “Sajaki told you that we brought him aboard during his missing month?”
“Thirty days in the wilderness.”
“Stupid name, that,” Volyova said, gritting her teeth. “Did they have to make it sound so damned Biblical? Wasn’t as if he didn’t already have a messiah complex, if you ask me. Anyway, yes, that was when we brought him aboard. And the interesting thing was, this was fully thirty years before the Resurgam expedition ever left Yellowstone. Now, I’ll let you in on a secret. Until we returned to Yellowstone and recruited you, we didn’t even know of the existence of this expedition. We still expected to find Sylveste on Yellowstone.”
Khouri knew well enough from her own experience with Fazil the kind of difficulty Volyova’s crew must have faced, but she decided a little fake ignorance would seem more plausible.
“Careless of you not to check firsthand.”
“Not at all. In fact we did—it was just that our best information was already decades old before we obtained it. And then by the time we’d acted on it—made the hop to Yellowstone—it was twice as old again.”
“I suppose it wasn’t a bad gamble. The family had always been associated with Yellowstone, so you’d have expected to find the rich young brat still hanging around the old place.”
“Except we were wrong. But the interesting thing is, it looks as if we could have spared ourselves the bother all along. Sylveste may have had the Resurgam expedition in mind when we first brought him aboard. If only we’d listened, we could have gone there directly.”
As they traversed the complicated series of elevators and access tunnels which led from the Captain’s corridor to the glade, Volyova spoke beneath audibility into the bracelet which she never let slip from her wrist. Khouri knew that she must be addressing one of the ship’s many artificial personae, but Volyova gave no hint of what it was she was arranging.