Thorn believed that the Triumvir’s ship was still in the system; he also believed that the government knew where it was and how to reach it. His movement claimed that the government had two functioning shuttles with the capability to make repeated flights between Resurgam and Nostalgia for Infinity.
Thorn’s plan, therefore, was simple enough. He would first locate the shuttles, something he claimed he was close to doing. Then he would bring down the government, or at least enough of it to enable the shuttles to be seized. Then it would be up to the people to make their way to the agreed exodus point, where the shuttles would make round trips between surface and orbit. The last part would presumably involve the complete overthrow of the existing regime, but Thorn repeatedly stated that he wished his goal to be achieved as bloodlessly as possible.
Very little of that desire came through in the government-sanctioned article. Thorn’s goal was glossed over, the idea of a threat to Resurgam made to seem faintly ludicrous. Thorn was portrayed as deranged and egotistical, while the numbers of civilian deaths associated with his activities were greatly exaggerated.
The Inquisitor studied the portrait. She had never met Thorn, though she knew a great deal about him. The picture bore only a very vague likeness to the real man, but Internal Threats had accepted its plausibility all the same. She was pleased with that.
‘I wouldn’t waste your time with that rubbish,’ the driver said, when she had just nodded off properly. ‘The sod’s dead.’
She blinked awake. ‘What?’
‘Thorn.’ He poked a thick finger into the paper spread across her lap. ‘The one in the picture.’
She wondered if the driver had deliberately kept silent until she was asleep, whether this was a little game he played with his passengers to amuse himself through the journey. ‘I don’t know that Thorn’s dead,’ she answered. ‘I mean, I haven’t read anything in the papers or heard anything on the news that says so…’
‘The government shot him. He didn’t call himself Thorn for nothing, you know.’
‘How could they have shot him if they don’t even know where he is?’
‘They do, though. That’s the point. They just don’t want us to know that he’s dead yet.’
‘“They”?’
‘The government, love. Keep up.’
He was toying with her, she suspected. He might have guessed that she was from the government, but he might also have guessed that she had no time to report minor instances of wayward thought.
‘So if they’ve shot him,’ she said, ‘why don’t they announce the fact? Thousands of people think Thorn’s going to lead them into the Promised Land.’
‘Yes, but the only thing worse than a martyr is a dead martyr. There’d be a lot more trouble if word got around that he was really dead.’
She shrugged and folded the paper. ‘Well, I’m not really sure that he ever existed. Maybe it suited the government to create a fictitious hope figure, just so that they could clamp down on the population even more effectively. You don’t really believe all the stories, do you?’
‘About him finding a way to lead us off Resurgam? No. Nice if it happened, I suppose. Get rid of all the whiners, for a start.’
‘Is that really your attitude? That the only people who want to leave Resurgam are whiners?’
‘Sorry, love. I can tell which side of the fence you’d come down on. But some of us actually like it on this planet. No offence.’
‘None taken.’ Then she leant back in the seat and placed the folded paper across her eyes, so that it served as a mask. If that message failed to get through to the driver, she decided, there was really no hope for him.
Fortunately it did.
This time when she nodded off it was into deep sleep. She dreamed about the past, memories flashing back now that the voice of Operative Four had unlocked them. It was not that she had been able to stop thinking about Four completely, but in all that time she had managed to avoid thinking of Four as a person. It was too painful. To remember Four was to think about how she had arrived on Resurgam, and that in turn meant thinking about her other life, the one that, compared with the bleak reality of the present, seemed like a distant and improbable fiction.
But Four’s voice had been like a trapdoor into the past. There were now certain things that could not be ignored.
Why the hell had Four called her now?
She woke when the motion of the vehicle changed. The driver was backing them into an unloading bay.
‘Are we there yet?’
‘Solnhofen it is. Not exactly bright lights, big city, but this is where you wanted to go.’
Through a gap in the slats of the depot wall she could see a sky the colour of anaemic blood. Dawn, or near enough.
‘We’re a bit on the late side,’ she commented.
‘We arrived in Solnhofen a quarter of an hour ago, love. You were sleeping like a log. I didn’t want to wake you.’
‘Of course you didn’t.’ Grudgingly, she handed over the rest of the driver’s fee.
Remontoire watched the last few members of the Closed Council take their seats around the tiered inner surface of the privy chamber. A number of the very old were still able to make their own way to their seats, but the majority were aided by servitors, exoskeletons or black clouds of thumb-sized drones. A few were so near the end of physical life that they had nearly abandoned the flesh entirely. They came in as heads, hooked up to spiderlike mobility prostheses. One or two were massively swollen brains so full of machinery that they could no longer be housed in skulls. The brains rode inside transparent fluid-filled domes dense with throbbing support machinery. They were the most extreme Conjoined, and by this stage most of their conscious activity would have devolved into the distributed web of greater Conjoiner thought. Each retained their brain like a family unwilling to demolish a crumbling mansion even though they hardly ever lived in it.
Remontoire tasted the thoughts of each newcomer. There were people in this room he had long assumed dead, individuals who had never attended any of the Closed Council sessions in which he had participated.
It was the matter of Clavain. He brought everyone out of retirement.
Remontoire felt the sudden presence of Skade as she entered the privy chamber. She had emerged on a ring-shaped balcony halfway up the side of the spherical room. The chamber was opaque to all neural transmissions; those within it could communicate freely, but they were totally isolated from the other minds in the Mother Nest. It enabled the Closed Council to meet in session and communicate more freely than through the usual restricted neural channels.
Remontoire shaped a thought and assigned it high priority, so that it immediately cut across the general wash of gossip and gained everyone’s attention. Does Clavain know about this meeting?
Skade snapped around to address him. [Why should he know about it, Remontoire?]
Remontoire shrugged. Isn’t it him we’ve come to talk about, behind his back?
Skade smiled sweetly. [If Clavain consented to join us, there’d be no need to talk about him behind his back, would there? The problem’s his, not mine.]
Remontoire stood up, now that everyone was looking at him or directing some sort of sensory apparatus in his direction. Who said anything about a problem, Skade? What I’m objecting to is the hidden agenda behind this meeting.
[Hidden agenda? We only want what’s best for Clavain, Remontoire. As his friend I would have imagined that you’d have grasped that.]