The other thing that was casting a shadow over their talks stemmed from Volyova’s side, which was her nagging insistence on probing the Captain about the visit he and Sajaki had made to the Pattern Jugglers. It was only in the last few years that Volyova had become interested in the details of the visit, for it now seemed to her that Sajaki’s change of personality had occurred around the same time. Of course, having one’s mind altered was the whole point of visiting the Jugglers — but why would Sajaki have allowed the aliens to change him for the worse? He was crueller than he had been before; despotic and single-minded where once he had been a firm but fair leader; a valued member of the Triumvirate. Now she hardly trusted him at all. And yet — instead of casting some light on the change — the Captain deflected her questions aggressively, and left her even more obsessed with what had happened.
She was on her way to speak to him, then, with these things foremost in her mind; wondering how she would deal with the inevitable question about Sylveste, and what new approach she would take when probing the Captain about the Jugglers. And, because she was taking her usual route, she was obliged to pass through the cache-chamber.
And she saw that one of the weapons — one of the most feared, as it happened — appeared to have moved.
‘There have been developments,’ said the Mademoiselle. ‘Both fortuitous and otherwise.’
It was a surprise to be conscious at all; let alone to hear the Mademoiselle. The very last thing Khouri remembered was climbing into a reefersleep casket with Volyova looking down on her, tapping commands into her bracelet. Now she could neither see nor feel anything, not even a sense of cold, yet she knew she was still — somehow — in the reefer, and still by some measure asleep.
‘Where — when — am I?’
‘Still aboard the ship; about halfway to Resurgam. We are moving very quickly now; less than one per cent slower than light. I have raised your neural temperature slightly — enough for conversation.’
‘Won’t Volyova notice?’
‘Her noticing may be the least of our problems, I am afraid. Do you remember the cache, how I found something hiding in the gunnery architecture?’ The Mademoiselle did not wait for an answer. ‘The message that the bloodhounds brought back was not easy to decipher. Over the subsequent three years… their auguries have become clearer, now.’
Khouri had a vision of the Mademoiselle disembowelling her dogs, studying the topology of the outspilled entrails.
‘So is the stowaway real?’
‘Oh yes. And hostile too, though we’ll come to that in a moment.’
‘Any idea what it is?’
‘No,’ she said, though the answer was guarded. ‘But what I have learnt is almost as interesting.’
What the Mademoiselle had to say related to the gunnery’s topology. The gunnery was an enormously complex assemblage of computers: layers accreted over decades of shiptime. It was doubtful that any one mind — even Volyova’s — could have grasped more than the very basics of that topology; how the various layers interpenetrated each other and folded back on themselves. But in one sense the gunnery was easy to visualise, since it was almost totally disconnected from the rest of the ship, which was why most of the higher cache-weapon functions could only be accessed by someone physically present in the gunnery seat. The gunnery was surrounded by a firewall, and data could only pass from the rest of the ship to the gunnery. The reasons for this were tactical; since the gunnery’s weapons (and not just those in the cache) would project outside the ship when they were used, they potentially offered routes for enemy weapons to penetrate the ship by viral means. So the gunnery was isolated: protected from the rest of the ship’s dataspace by a one-way trapdoor. The door only allowed data to enter the gunnery from the rest of the ship; nothing within the gunnery could traverse it.
‘Now,’ said the Mademoiselle, ‘given that we have discovered something in the gunnery, I invite you to draw the logical conclusion.’
‘Whatever it was got there by mistake.’
‘Yes.’ The Mademoiselle sounded pleased, almost as if the thought had not struck her. ‘I suppose we must consider the possibility that the entity found its way into the gunnery via the weapons, but I think it is far more likely it entered via the trapdoor. I also happen to know when the door was last traversed.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Eighteen years ago.’ Before Khouri could interject, the Mademoiselle added, ‘Shiptime, that is. In worldtime, I estimate between eighty and ninety years prior to your recruitment.’
‘Sylveste,’ Khouri said, wonderingly. ‘Sajaki said that the reason Sylveste went missing was because they brought him aboard this ship, to fix Captain Brannigan. Do the dates tie together?’
‘Conclusively, I would say. This would have been 2460 — twenty or so years after Sylveste returned from the Shrouders.’
‘And you think he brought — whatever it is — with him?’
‘All we know is what Sajaki told us, which is that Sylveste accepted the Calvin simulation in order to heal Captain Brannigan. At some point during the operation Sylveste must have been connected to the ship’s dataspace. Perhaps that was how the stowaway gained access. Thereafter — very soon after, I suspect — it entered the gunnery through the one-way door.’
‘And it’s been there ever since?’
‘So it appears.’
This seemed to be a pattern: whenever Khouri felt she had things ordered in her head, or at least approximately so, some new fact would dash her scheme to shreds. She felt like a mediaeval astronomer, creating ever more intricate clockwork cosmologies to incorporate every new observational oddity. Now, in some way she could not begin to guess, Sylveste was related to the gunnery. At least she could take comfort in her ignorance. Even the Mademoiselle was foxed.
‘You mentioned the thing was hostile,’ she said carefully, not really sure she wanted to ask any more questions, in case the answers were too difficult to assimilate.
‘Yes.’ Hesitating now. ‘The dogs were a mistake,’ she said. ‘I was too impetuous. I should have realised that Sun Stealer—’
‘Sun Stealer?’
‘What it calls itself. The stowaway, I mean.’
This was bad. How did she know the thing’s name? Fleetingly, Khouri remembered that Volyova had once asked her if that name meant anything to her. But there was more to it than that. It was as if she had been hearing that name in her dreams for some time now. Khouri opened her mouth to speak, but the Mademoiselle was already talking. ‘It used the dogs to escape, Khouri. Or at least for a part of itself to escape. It used them to get into your head.’
Sylveste had no reliable way of marking the time in his new prison. All he remained certain of was that many days had passed since his capture. He suspected he was being drugged, forced into comalike sleep, barren of dreams. When he did dream, which was rarely, he had sight, but his dreams always revolved around his imminent blindness and the preciousness of the sight he retained. When he awoke he saw only grey, but after some time — days, he guessed — the grey had lost its geometric structure. The pattern had been imposed on his brain for too long; now his brain was simply filtering it out. What remained was a colourless infinity, no longer even recognisably grey, but simply a bright absence of hue.