Almost before we had disembarked from the carriage, a reception party emerged from the house. It was a troupe of servitors — humanoid household robots, of the kind anyone would have felt comfortable with in the city proper — but they had been reworked to resemble skeletal ghouls or headless knights. Their mechanisms had been sabotaged so that they limped and creaked, and they had all had their voiceboxes disabled.
‘Had a lot of time on his hands, your uncle,’ I said.
‘You’d have loved Giles, Richard. He was a scream.’
‘I’ll take your word for it, I think.’
The servitors escorted us into the central part of the house, then took us through a maze of chill, dark corridors.
Finally we reached a large room walled in plush red velvet. A holoclavier sat in one corner, with a book of sheet music spread open above the projected keyboard. There was a malachite escritoire, a number of well-stocked bookcases, a single chandelier, three smaller candelabra and two fireplaces of distinctly Gothic appearance, in one of which roared an actual fire. But the room’s central feature was a mahogany table, around which three additional guests were gathered.
‘Sorry to keep everyone waiting,’ Childe said, closing a pair of sturdy wooden doors behind us. ‘Now. Introductions.’
The others looked at us with no more than mild interest.
The only man amongst them wore an elaborately ornamented exoskeleton: a baroque support structure of struts, hinged plates, cables and servo-mechanisms. His face was a skull papered with deathly white skin, shading to black under his bladelike cheekbones. His eyes were concealed behind goggles, his hair a spray of stiff black dreadlocks.
Periodically he inhaled from a glass pipe, connected to a miniature refinery of bubbling apparatus placed before him on the table.
‘Allow me to introduce Captain Forqueray,’ Childe said. ‘Captain — this is Richard Swift and… um, Doctor Trintignant.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, leaning across the table to shake Forqueray’s hand. His grip felt like the cold clasp of a squid.
‘The Captain is an Ultra; the master of the lighthugger Apollyon, currently in orbit around Yellowstone,’ Childe added.
Trintignant refrained from approaching him.
‘Shy, Doctor?’ Forqueray said, his voice simultaneously deep and flawed, like a cracked bell.
‘No, merely cautious. It is a matter of common knowledge that I have enemies amongst the Ultras.’
Trintignant removed his homburg and patted his crown delicately, as if smoothing down errant hairs. Silver waves had been sculpted into his head-mask, so that he resembled a bewigged Regency fop dipped in mercury.
‘You’ve enemies everywhere,’ said Forqueray between gurgling inhalations. ‘But I bear you no personal animosity for your atrocities, and I guarantee that my crew will extend you the same courtesy.’
‘Very gracious of you,’ Trintignant said, before shaking the Ultra’s hand for the minimum time compatible with politeness. ‘But why should your crew concern me?’
‘Never mind that.’ It was one of the two women speaking now. ‘Who is this guy, and why does everyone hate him?’
‘Allow me to introduce Hirz,’ Childe said, indicating the woman who had spoken. She was small enough to have been a child, except that her face was clearly that of an adult woman. She was dressed in austere, tight-fitting black clothes which only emphasised her diminutive build. ‘Hirz is — for want of a better word — a mercenary.’
‘Except I prefer to think of myself as an information retrieval specialist. I specialise in clandestine infiltration for high-level corporate clients in the Glitter Band — physical espionage, some of the time. Mostly, though, I’m what used to be called a hacker. I’m also pretty damned good at my job.’ Hirz paused to swig down some wine. ‘But enough about me. Who’s the silver dude, and what did Forqueray mean about atrocities?’
‘You’re seriously telling me you’re unaware of Trintignant’s reputation?’ I said.
‘Hey, listen. I get myself frozen between assignments. That means I miss a lot of shit that goes down in Chasm City. Get over it.’
I shrugged and — with one eye on the Doctor himself — told Hirz what I knew about Trintignant. I sketched in his early career as an experimental cyberneticist, how his reputation for fearless innovation had eventually brought him to Calvin Sylveste’s attention.
Calvin had recruited Trintignant to his own research team, but the collaboration had not been a happy one. Trintignant’s desire to find the ultimate fusion of flesh and machine had become obsessive; even — some said — perverse. After a scandal involving experimentation on unconsenting subjects, Trintignant had been forced to pursue his work alone, his methods too extreme even for Calvin.
So Trintignant had gone to ground, and continued his gruesome experiments with his only remaining subject.
Himself.
‘So let’s see,’ said the final guest. ‘Who have we got? An obsessive and thwarted cyberneticist with a taste for extreme modification. An intrusion specialist with a talent for breaking into highly protected — and dangerous — environments. A man with a starship at his disposal and the crew to operate it.’
Then she looked at Childe, and while her gaze was averted I admired the fine, faintly familiar profile of her face. Her long hair was the sheer black of interstellar space, pinned back from her face by a jewelled clasp which flickered with a constellation of embedded pastel lights. Who was she? I felt sure we had met once or maybe twice before. Perhaps we had passed each other amongst the shrines in the Monument to the Eighty, visiting the dead.
‘And Childe,’ she continued. ‘A man once known for his love of intricate challenges, but long assumed dead.’ Then she turned her piercing eyes upon me. ‘And, finally, you.’
‘I know you, I think—’ I said, her name on the tip of my tongue.
‘Of course you do.’ Her look, suddenly, was contemptuous. ‘I’m Celestine. You used to be married to me.’
All along, Childe had known she was here.
‘Do you mind if I ask what this is about?’ I said, doing my best to sound as reasonable as possible, rather than someone on the verge of losing their temper in polite company.
Celestine withdrew her hand once I had shaken it. ‘Roland invited me here, Richard. Just the same way he did you, with the same veiled hints about having found something.’
‘But you’re…’
‘Your ex-wife?’ She nodded. ‘Exactly how much do you remember, Richard? I heard the strangest rumours, you know. That you’d had me deleted from your long-term memory.’
‘I had you suppressed, not deleted. There’s a subtle distinction.’
She nodded knowingly. ‘So I gather.’
I looked at the other guests, who were observing us. Even Forqueray was waiting, the pipe of his apparatus poised an inch from his mouth in expectation. They were waiting for me to say something; anything.