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.’
Volyova glanced up at the imaged view of Resurgam. At the moment Sylveste’s location on the planet’s surface was completely unknown, like a quantum wave function which had not yet collapsed. Yet in a moment they would have an accurate triangulation fix on his broadcast, and that wave function would shed a myriad unselected possibilities.
‘You have him?’
‘Signal’s weak,’ Hegazi said. ‘That storm you made is causing a lot of ionospheric interference. I bet you’re really proud, aren’t you?’
‘Just a get a fix, svinoi.’
‘Patience, patience.’
Volyova had not really doubted that Sylveste would call in on time. Nonetheless, when she heard from him, she could not help but feel relief. It meant that another element in the tricky business of getting him aboard had been achieved. She did not, however, deceive herself that the job was in any way complete. And there had been something arrogant about Sylveste’s demands — the way he seemed to be ordering how things should happen — which left her wondering if her colleagues really did have the upper hand. If Sylveste had set out to sow a seed of doubt in her mind, the man had certainly succeeded. Damn him. She had prepared herself, knowing that Sylveste was adept at mind games, but she had not prepared herself enough. Then she took a mental back step and asked herself how things had so far proceeded. After all, Sylveste was shortly to be in their custody. He could not possibly desire such an outcome, especially as he would know just what it was they wanted from him. If he were in control of his destiny, he would not now be on the verge of being brought aboard.