‘You said this was a billion years ago,’ Pascale said. ‘And yet we’ve come all that way since then — from single-celled creatures right up to Homo sapiens. Are you saying we slipped through the net?’
‘Exactly that,’ Volyova said. ‘Because the net was falling apart.’
Khouri nodded. ‘The Inhibitors seeded the galaxy with machines, designed to detect the emergence of life and then suppress it. For a long time it looked like they worked as planned — that’s why the galaxy isn’t teeming today, although all the preconditions look favourable.’ She shook her head. ‘I sound like I actually know this stuff.’
‘Maybe you do,’ Pascale said. ‘In any case, I want to hear what you have to say. All of it.’
‘All right, all right.’ Khouri fidgeted in her acceleration couch, doubtless trying to do what Volyova had been doing for the last hour: avoiding putting pressure on the bruises she had already gained. ‘Their machines worked fine for a few hundred million years,’ she said. ‘But then stuff started to go wrong. They started failing; not working as efficiently as intended. Intelligent cultures began to emerge which would have previously been suppressed at birth.’
There was a look on Pascale’s face which showed that she had just made a connection. ‘Like the Amarantin…’
‘Just like the Amarantin. They weren’t the only culture to slip through the net, but they did happen to lie close to us in the galaxy, which is why what happened to them has had such an… impact on us.’ Volyova was doing the talking now. ‘Maybe there should have been an Inhibition device keeping a close watch on Resurgam, but that one either never existed or stopped working long before they emerged to intelligence. So they ascended to civilisation, and later budded off a starfaring sub-species — all without attracting the attention of the Inhibitors.’
‘Sun Stealer.’
‘Yes. He took the Banished with him into space — changed them biologically and mentally, until they had little but their ancestry and language in common with the Amarantin who had stayed at home. And of course they explored, reaching out into their solar system, and later to its periphery.’
‘Where they found…’ Pascale nodded at the image of Hades and Cerberus. ‘This. Is that what you’re saying?’
Khouri nodded in agreement, and then began to explain the rest; what little there was to relate.
Sylveste fell and fell, and in his falling he hardly bothered to note the passing of time. Finally there came a point where more than two hundred kilometres of the shaft reached above his head; barely a few kilometres lay below his feet. Twinkling lights shone below, arranged into constellation-like patterns, and for an instant he entertained the idea that he had travelled much further than seemed possible, and these lights were actually stars, and that he was on the point of leaving Cerberus completely. But the thought died as soon as it had come to mind. There was something just a little too regular about the way the lights were aligned, just a little too purposeful; a little too pregnant with intelligent design.
He dropped out of the shaft into emptiness as, much earlier, he had passed out of the bridgehead. As then, he found himself falling through a tremendous unoccupied volume, but this chamber seemed very much larger than the one immediately below the crust. No gnarled tree-trunks rose up from a crystal floor to support the ceiling over his head, and he doubted that any lay beyond the immediate curvature of the horizon. Yet there was a floor below him, and it must have been that the ceiling was unsupported, thrown around the entire volume of the world-within-a-world below, suspended only by the preposterous counter-balancing of its own gravitational infall, or something beyond Sylveste’s imagination. Whatever; he was dropping now towards the starred floor tens of kilometres below.
It was not difficult, finding Sajaki’s suit; not once Sylveste had begun that lonely descent. His own still-functioning suit did all that was required, locking onto the signature of its fallen companion (something of which must therefore have survived) and then directing Sylveste’s fall towards it, bringing him down only tens of metres from the spot where Sajaki had fallen. The Triumvir had hit fast; that much was obvious. But then there were few other options if one had to accept an uncontrolled fall from two hundred kilometres up. He appeared to have partially buried himself in the metallic floor, before undergoing a bounce which had resulted in his final resting position being face down.
Sylveste had not been expecting to find Sajaki alive, but the mangled contours of his suit were still shocking; rather as if it were a china doll which had been subjected to some terrible temper tantrum by a malevolent child. The suit was gashed and scarred and discoloured, damage which had probably happened during the battle and Sajaki’s subsequent grazing fall, as the Coriolis force knocked him repeatedly against the shaft walls.
Sylveste moved him onto his back, using his own suit’s amplification to ease the process. He knew that what he would be confronted with would not be pleasant, but that it was nonetheless something he had to endure so he could press on; the closing of a mental chapter. He had seldom felt anything but antipathy towards Sajaki, alleviated by a forced respect for the man’s cleverness and the sheer bloody-minded stubbornness with which he had sought Sylveste across all the decades. It was nothing remotely resembling friendship; merely the craftsmanlike appreciation for a piece of equipment which did its job exceptionally well. That was Sajaki, Sylveste thought: a well-honed tool; shaped admirably towards one end and one end only.
The suit’s faceplate was riven by a thumb-wide crack. Something drew Sylveste forward, kneeling until his own head was next to that of the dead Triumvir.
‘I’m sorry it had to end like this,’ he said. ‘I can’t say we were ever friends, Yuuji — but I suppose in the end I wanted you to see what lay ahead as much as I did. I think you’d have appreciated it.’
And then he saw that the suit was empty; that all it had ever been was a shell.
This was what Khouri knew.
The Banished had reached the edge of the solar system, thousands of years after their exile from mainstream Amarantin culture. It was in the nature of things that they progressed slowly, since it was not simply technological limits against which they were pushing. They were also ramming against the constraints of their own psychology, barriers no less impervious.
The Banished, at first, still retained the flock instincts of their brethren. They had evolved into a society highly dependent on visual modes of communication; highly organised into large collectives, where the individual was of less importance than the whole. Displaced from its position in a flock, a single Amarantin underwent a kind of psychosis; the equivalent of massive sensory deprivation. Even small groupings were not enough to assuage that terror, which meant that Amarantin culture was extremely stable; extremely resilient against internal plots and treason. But it also meant that the Banished were, by their very isolation, consigned to a kind of insanity.
So they accepted this, and worked with it. They changed themselves; cultured sociopathy. In only a few hundred generations the Banished had stopped being a flock at all, but had fragmented into dozens of specialised clades, each tuned to a particular strain of madness. Or what would have been seen as madness by those who had stayed at home…