The blue shredded figure hesitated, face expressionless, eyes fixed on him. Carl guessed it was trying to calibrate his perceptions of relatedness and event, gleaning it from a million tiny shreds of evidence laid down in the details the dataflow held about him. Was he superstitious, was he religious? What feelings did he have about the role of chance in human affairs? The n-djinn was running his specifications, the way a machine would check the interface topography on a new piece of software.
It took about twenty seconds.
‘There is no systems evidence to indicate a relation between the two events. The revival appears to have been a capsule malfunction.’
‘Were you aware of Merrin once he was awake?’
‘To a limited extent, yes. As I said, it is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data. In a quarantine lockdown, the ship’s secondary systems continue to feed into my cores, though it is impossible for me to actively respond to them in any way. The traffic is one-way, an interrupt protocol prevents feedback. You might consider this similar to the data processed by a human mind during REM sleep.’
‘So you dreamed Merrin.’
‘That is one way of describing it, yes.’
‘And in these dreams, did Merrin talk?’
The confetti streaming figure shifted slightly in the grip of its invisible gale. There was an expression on its face that might have been curiosity. Might equally well have been mild pain, or restrained sexual ecstasy. It hadn’t really got the hang of human features.
‘Talk to whom?’
Carl shrugged, but it felt anything but casual. He was too freighted with the cold memories. ‘To the machines. To the people in the cryocaps. Did he talk to himself? To the stars, maybe? He was out there a long time.’
‘If you consider this talking, then yes. He talked.’
‘Often?’
‘I am not calibrated to judge what would be considered often in human terms. Merrin was silent for eighty-seven point twenty-two per cent of the trajectory, including time spent in sleep. Forty-three point nine per cent of his speech was apparently directed—’
‘All right, never mind. Are you equipped for Yaroshanko intuitive function?’
‘Yaroshanko’s underlying constants are present in my operating systems, yes.’
‘Good, then I’d like to run a Tjaden/Wasson honorific for links between myself and Merrin, making inference along a Yaroshanko curve. No more than two degrees of separation.’
‘What referents do you wish employed for the curve?’
‘Initially, both our footprints in the total dataflow. Or as much of it as they’re letting you have access to. You’re going to get a lot of standard Bacon links; they’re not what I’m after.’ Carl wished suddenly that Matthew was here to handle this for him, to reach quick-silver swift and cool down the wires and engage the machine at something like its own levels of consciousness. Matthew would have been at ease in here – Carl felt clumsy by contrast, the terminology of complexity math tasted awkward on his tongue. ‘Cross reference to everything Merrin said or did while he was aboard Horkan’s Pride. Bring me anything that shows up there.’
The blue shredded figure shifted slightly, rippling in the gale that Carl could not feel.
‘This will take time,’ it said.
Carl looked around at the unending sky-floored desolation of the construct. He shrugged.
‘Better get me a chair then.’
He could, he supposed, have left the virtuality and killed the time somehow in the vaulted neoNordic halls of COLIN’s Jefferson Park complex. He could have talked to Sevgi Ertekin some more, maybe even tried to massage Tom Norton back into a more compliant attitude with some male-on-male platitudes. He could have eaten something – his stomach was a blotched ache from lack of anything but coffee since Florida the previous night; he ignored it with trained stoicism – or just gone for a walk among the jutting riverside terraces of the complex. He had the run of the place, Sevgi said.
Instead, he sat under the rivet-scarred metal sky and watched Merrin walk through the n-djinn’s dreams.
The ’face had left him to his chair – a colliding geometry of comet trail lines and nebula gas upholstery, spun up out of the night sky as if flung at him – and disappeared into the dwindling perspectives of the wind that blew continually through its body. Something else blew back in its place – at first a tiny rectangular panel like an antique holographic postage stamp Carl had once seen in a London museum, fluttering stiff-cornered and growing in size as it approached until it slammed to a silent halt, three metres tall, two broad and angled slightly backward at the base, a handful of paces in front of where he sat. It was a cascade of images like the curtain where he’d seen his own face fall from the djinn’s upheld arm. Silent and discoherent with the n-djinn’s unhuman associative processes.
He saw Merrin wake from the beta capsule in the crew section, groggy from the revival but already moving with a recognisable focused economy. Saw him pacing the dorsal corridor of Horkan’s Pride, face unreadable.
Saw him clean Helena Larsen’s meat from between his teeth with a micro-gauge manual screwdriver from the maintenance lockers.
Saw him request a lateral viewport unshuttered, the ships’ interior lighting killed. Saw him brace his arms either side of the glass and stare out like a sick man into a mirror.
Saw him scream, jaw yawning wide, but silent, silent.
Saw him cut the throat of a limbless body as it revived, splayed palm held to block the arterial spray. Saw him gouge out the eyes, carefully, thoughtfully, one at a time, and smear them off his fingers against the matt-textured metal of a bulkhead.
Saw him talking to someone who wasn’t there.
Saw him turn, once, in the corridor and look up at the camera, as if he knew Carl was watching him. He smiled, then, and Carl felt how it chilled him as his own facial muscles responded.
There was more, a lot more, even in the scant time it took the n-djinn to run the Tjaden/Wasson. The images juddered and flashed and were eaten over by other screen effects. He wasn’t sure why the machine was showing it to him or what criteria it was using to select. It was the same sensation he knew from his time aboard Felipe Souza, the irritable feeling of trying to second-guess a capricious god he’d been assured – no really, it’s true, it’s in the programming – was watching over him. The feeling of sense just out of reach.
Maybe the djinn read something in him he wasn’t aware of letting show, a need he didn’t know he had. Maybe it thought this was what he wanted.
Maybe it was what he wanted. He wasn’t sure.
He wasn’t sure why he stayed there watching. But he was glad when it was over.
The floating, blue shredded figure returned.
‘There is this,’ it told him, and raised one restless, rippling arm like a wing. On the screen beneath, Merrin walked behind the automated gurney as it took Helena Larsen on her short journey from the cryocap chamber to the autosurgeon. The second trip for her – just below the line of her leotard, her right thigh already ended in a neatly bandaged stump. She was mumbling to herself in post revival semi-wakefulness, barely audible, but the n-djinn compensated and dragged in the sound.
‘…not again,’ she pleaded vaguely.
Merrin leaned in to catch the murmur of her voice, but not by much. His hearing would be preternaturally sharp, Carl knew, tuned up by now in the endless smothering stillness aboard the vessel as it fell homeward, honed in the dark aural shadow of the emptiness outside, where the abruptly deepened hum of a power web upping capacity in the walls would be enough to jerk you from sleep, and the sound of a dropped kitchen utensil seemed to clang from one end of the ship to the other. Your footfalls went muffled in spacedeck slippers designed not to scratch or scrape, and after a while you found yourself trying almost superstitiously not to break the hush in other ways as well. Speaking – to yourself, for sanity’s sake, to the sentient and semi-sentient machines that kept you alive, to the dreaming visages behind the cryocap faceplates, to anyone or anything else you thought might be listening – speaking became an act of obscure defiance, a reckless violation of the silence.