The aircraft executed a particularly abrupt turn, Calvin the only one amongst them impervious to the motion. “All right,” Sylveste said. “Though I still say she’d be better off knowing less rather than more.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?” Pascale said.
Calvin smiled. “Start by telling her about dear Captain Brannigan, that’s my advice.”
So Sylveste told her the rest of it. Until then, he had deliberately skirted the issue of what exactly it was that Sajaki’s crew wanted of him. Pascale had always had every right to know, of course… but the subject itself was so unpalatable to Sylveste that he had done his best to avoid it at all times. It was not that he had anything personal against Captain Brannigan, or even any lack of sympathy for what had become of the man. The Captain was a unique individual with a uniquely horrifying affliction. Even if he was not in any sense aware now (to the best of Sylveste’s knowledge), he had been in the past, and could be again in the future, in the admittedly unlikely event that he could be cured. So what if the Captain’s murky past quite possibly contained crimes? Surely the man had atoned for prior sins a thousand times over in his present state. No; anyone would have wished the Captain well, and most people would have been willing to expend some energy in helping him, provided they ran no risk to themselves. Even some small risk might have been accepted.
But what the crew were asking of Sylveste was much more than just the acceptance of personal risk. They would require him to submit to Calvin; to allow Cal to invade his mind and take command of his motor functions. The thought alone was repulsive. It was bad enough dealing with Cal as a beta-level simulation; as bad as being haunted by his father’s ghost. He would have destroyed the beta-level years ago if it had not proven so intermittently useful, but just knowing it existed made him uncomfortable. Cal was too perceptive; too shrewd in his… in its judgements. It knew what he had done with the alpha-level simulation, even if it had never come out and said it. But every time he allowed it into his head, it seemed to sink deeper tendrils into him. It seemed to know him better each time; seemed able to predict his own responses more closely. What did that make him, if what seemed like his own free will was so easily mimicked by a piece of software which had no theoretical consciousness of its own? It was worse than simply the dehumanising aspect of the channelling process, of course. The physical procedure was itself far from pleasant, for his own voluntary motor signals had to be blocked at source, obstructed by a stew of neuro-inhibitory chemicals. He would be paralysed, yet moving—as close to demonic possession as anyone ever came. It had always been a nightmarish experience; never one he was in a hurry to repeat.
No, he thought. The Captain could go to hell, for all he cared. Why should he lose his own humanity to save someone who had lived longer than most people in history? Sympathy be damned. The Captain should have been allowed to die years ago, and the greater crime now was not the Captain’s suffering, but what his crew were prepared to put Sylveste through to alleviate it.
Of course, Calvin saw it differently… less an ordeal, more an opportunity…
“Of course, I was the first,” Calvin said. “Back when I was still corporeal.”
“The first what?”
“First to serve him. He was heavily chimeric even then. Some of the technologies holding him together dated from before the Transenlightenment. God knows how old the flesh parts of him were.” He fingered his beard and moustache, as if needing to remind himself how artful the combination was. “This was before the Eighty, of course. But I was known even then as an experimenter on the fringe of the radical chimeric sciences. I wasn’t just content with renovating the techniques developed before the Transenlightenment. I wanted to go beyond what they’d attained. I wanted to leave them in my dust. I wanted to push the envelope so far it ripped into shreds, and then remake it from the pieces.”
“Yes, enough about you Cal,” Sylveste said. “We were discussing Brannigan, remember?”
“It’s called setting the scene, dear boy.” Calvin blinked. “Anyway, Brannigan was an extreme chimeric, and I was someone prepared to consider extreme measures. When he became sick, his friends had no choice but to hire my services. Of course, this was all strictly below-board—and it was a total diversion, even for me. I was increasingly uninterested in physiological modifications, at the expense of a growing fascination—obsession, if you will—with neural transformations. Specifically, I wanted to find a way of mapping neural activity straight into—” Calvin broke off, biting his lower lip.
“Brannigan used him,” Sylveste continued. “And in return, helped him to establish ties with some of the Chasm City rich; potential clients for the Eighty program. And if he’d done a good job of healing Brannigan, that would have been the end of the story. But he botched the job—did the minimum he could get away with, to get Brannigan’s allies off his back. If he’d taken the trouble to do it properly, we wouldn’t be in this mess now.”
“What he means,” Calvin cut in, “is that my repair of the Captain could not be considered permanent. It was inevitable, given the nature of his chimerism, that some other aspect of his physiology would eventually need our attention. And by then—because of the complexity of the work I’d done on him—there was literally no other person they could turn to.”
“So they came back,” Pascale said.
“This time he was commanding the ship we’re about to board.” Sylveste looked at the simulation. “Cal was dead; the Eighty a publicly staged atrocity. All that remained of him was this beta-level simulation. Needless to say Sajaki—he was with the Captain by then—was not best pleased. But they found a way, all the same.”
“A way?”
“For Calvin to work on the Captain. They found he could work through me. The beta-level sim provided the expertise in chimeric surgery. I provided the meat it needed to move around to get the job done. ‘Channelling’ was what the Ultras called it.”
“Then it needn’t have been you at all,” Pascale said. “Provided they had the beta-level simulation—or a copy of it—couldn’t one of them have acted as the—as you so charmingly put it—meat?”
“No, though they probably would have preferred it that way: it would have freed them of any dependency on me. But channelling only worked when there was a close match between the beta-level sim and the person it was working through. Like a hand fitting into a glove. It worked with me and Calvin because he was my father; there were many points of genetic similarity. Slice open our brains and you’d probably have trouble telling them apart.”
“And now?”
“They’re back.”
“Now if only he’d done a good job last time,” Calvin said, dignifying his remark with a thin smile of self-satisfaction.
“Blame yourself; you were in the driving seat. I just did what you told me.” Sylveste scowled. “In fact for most of it I wasn’t even what you’d term conscious. Not that I didn’t hate every minute of it, all the same.”
“And they’re going to make you do it again,” Pascale said. “Is that all it’s about? Everything that’s happened here? The attack on that settlement? Just to get you to help their Captain?”
Sylveste nodded. “In case it hasn’t escaped your attention, the people we’re about to do business with are not what you’d properly term human. Their priorities and timescales are a little… abstract.”
“I wouldn’t call it business, in that case. I’d call it blackmail.”
“Well,” Sylveste said. “That’s where you’re wrong. You see, this time Volyova made a small miscalculation. She gave me some warning of her arrival.”