Bone-splinteringly cold as it was, Khouri soon stopped noticing the temperature except as an abstract quality of the air. The story that her two crewmates was relating was far too strange for that.
They were standing near the Captain. His name, she now knew, was John Armstrong Brannigan. He was old, inconceivably so. Depending on the system one adopted in measuring his age, he was anywhere between two hundred and half a thousand years old. The details of his birth were unclear now, hopelessly tangled in the countertruths of political history. Mars, some said, was the place where he had been born, yet it was equally possible that he had been born on Earth, Earth’s city-jammed moon or in any one of the several hundred habitats which drifted through cislunar space in those days.
‘He was already over a century old before he ever left Sol system,’ Sajaki said. ‘He waited until it was possible to do so, then was among the first thousand to leave, when the Conjoiners launched the first ship from Phobos.’
‘At least, someone called John Brannigan was on that ship,’ Volyova said.
‘No,’ Sajaki said. ‘There’s no doubt. I know it was him. Afterwards . . . it becomes less easy to place him, of course. He may have deliberately blurred his own past, to avoid being tracked down by all the enemies he must have made in that time. There are many sightings, in many different systems, decades apart . . . but nothing definite.’
‘How did he come to be your Captain?’
‘He turned up centuries later - after several landfalls elsewhere, and dozens of unconfirmed apparitions - on the fringe of the Yellowstone system. He was ageing slowly, due to the relativistic effects of starflight, but he was still getting older, and longevity techniques were not as well developed as in our time.’ Sajaki paused. ‘Much of his body was now prosthetic. They said that John Brannigan no longer needed a spacesuit when he left his ship; that he breathed vacuum, basked in intolerable heat and quenching cold, and that his sensory range encompassed every spectrum imaginable. They said that little remained of the brain with which he had been born; that his head was merely a dense loom of intermeshed cybernetics, a stew of tiny thinking machines and precious little organic material.’
‘And how much of that was true?’
‘Perhaps more of it than people wished to believe. There were certainly lies: that he had visited the Jugglers on Spindrift years before they were generally discovered; that the aliens had wrought wondrous transformations on what remained of his mind, or that he had met and communicated with at least two sentient species so far unknown to the rest of humanity.’
‘He did meet the Jugglers eventually,’ Volyova said, in Khouri’s direction. ‘Triumvir Sajaki was with him at the time.’
‘That was much later,’ Sajaki snapped. ‘All that’s germane here is his relationship with Calvin.’
‘How did they cross paths?’
‘No one really knows,’ Volyova said. ‘All that we know for sure is that he became injured, either through an accident or some military operation that went wrong. His life wasn’t in danger, but he needed urgent help, and to go to one of the official groups in the Yellowstone system would have been suicide. He’d made too many enemies to be able to place his life in the hands of any organisation. What he needed were loosely scattered individuals in whom he could place personal trust. Evidently Calvin was one of them.’
‘Calvin was in touch with Ultra elements?’
‘Yes, though he would never have admitted so in public.’ Volyova smiled, a wide toothy crescent opening beneath the bill of her cap. ‘Calvin was young and idealistic then. When this injured man was delivered to him, he saw it as a godsend. Until then he had had no means of exploring his more outlandish ideas. Now he had the perfect subject, the only requirement being total secrecy. Of course, they both gained from it: Calvin was able to try out his radical cybernetic theories on Brannigan, while Brannigan was made well and became something more than he had been before Calvin’s work. You might describe it as the perfect symbiotic relationship.’
‘You’re saying the Captain was a guinea pig for that bastard’s monstrosities?’
Sajaki shrugged, the movement puppetlike within his swaddling clothes.
‘That was not how Brannigan saw it. As far as the rest of humanity was concerned, he was already a monster before the accident. What Calvin did was merely take the trend further. Consummate it, if you like.’
Volyova nodded, although there was something in her expression which suggested she was not quite at ease with her crewmate. ‘And in any case, this was prior to the Eighty. Calvin’s name was unsullied. And among the more overt extremes of Ultra life, Brannigan’s transformation was only slightly in excess of the norm.’ She said it with tart distaste.
‘Carry on.’
‘Nearly a century passed before his next encounter with the Sylveste clan,’ Sajaki said. ‘By which time he was commanding this ship.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was injured again. Seriously, this time.’ Gingerly, like someone testing himself against a candle flame, he whisked his fingers across the limiting extent of the Captain’s silvery growth. The Captain’s outskirts looked frothy, like the brine left on a rockpool by the retreating tide. Sajaki delicately swabbed his fingers against the front of his jacket, but Khouri could tell that they did not feel clean; that they itched and crawled with subepidermal malignance.
‘Unfortunately,’ Volyova said, ‘Calvin was dead.’
Of course. He had died during the Eighty; had in fact been one of the last to lose his corporeality.
‘All right,’ Khouri said. ‘But he died in the process of having his brain scanned into a computer. Couldn’t you just steal the recording and persuade it to help you?’
‘We would, had that been possible.’ Sajaki’s low voice reverberated from the throated curve of the corridor. ‘His recording, his alpha-level simulation, had vanished. And there were no duplicates - the alphas were copy-protected.’
‘So basically,’ Khouri said, hoping to shatter the morguelike atmosphere of the proceedings, ‘you were up shit creek without a Captain.’
‘Not quite,’ Volyova said. ‘You see, all this took place during a rather interesting period in Yellowstone’s history. Daniel Sylveste had just returned from the Shrouders, and was neither insane nor dead. His companion hadn’t been so lucky, but her death only gave additional poignancy to his heroic return.’ She halted, then asked, with birdlike eagerness: ‘Did you ever hear of his “thirty days in the wilderness”, Khouri?’
‘Maybe once. Remind me.’
‘He vanished for a month a century ago,’ Sajaki said. ‘One minute the toast of Stoner society, the next nowhere to be found. There were rumours that he’d gone out of the city dome; jammed on an exosuit and gone to atone for the sins of his father. Shame it isn’t true; would have been quite touching. Actually,’ Sajaki nodded at the floor, ‘he came here for a month. We took him.’
‘You kidnapped Dan Sylveste?’ Khouri almost laughed at the audaciousness of it all. Then she remembered they were talking about the man she was meant to kill. Her impulse to laugh evaporated quickly.
‘Invited aboard is probably a preferable term,’ Sajaki said. ‘Though I admit he didn’t have a great deal of choice in the matter.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ Khouri said. ‘You kidnapped Cal’s son? What good was that going to do you?’
‘Calvin took a few precautions before he subjected himself to the scanner,’ Sajaki said. ‘The first was simple enough, although it had to be initiated decades before the culmination of the project. Simply put, he arranged to have every subsequent second of his life monitored by recording systems. Every second: waking, sleeping, whatever. Over the years, machines learnt to emulate his behaviour patterns. Given any situation, they could predict his responses with astonishing accuracy.’
‘Beta-level simulation.’
‘Yes, but a beta-level sim orders of magnitude more complex than any previously created.’
&n
bsp; ‘By some definitions,’ Volyova said, ‘it was already conscious; Calvin had already transmigrated. Calvin may or may not have believed that, but he still kept on refining the sim. It could project an image of Calvin which was so real, so like the actual man, that you had the forceful sense that you were really in his presence. But Calvin took it a step further. There was another mode of insurance available to him.’
‘Which was?’
‘Cloning.’ Sajaki smiled, nodded almost imperceptibly in Volyova’s direction.
‘He cloned himself,’ she said. ‘Using illegal black genetics techniques, calling in favours from some of his shadier clients. Some of them were Ultra, you see - otherwise we wouldn’t know any of this. Cloning was embargoed technology on Yellowstone; young colonies almost always outlaw it in the interests of ensuring maximum genetic diversity. But Calvin was cleverer than the authorities, and wealthier than those he was forced to bribe. That way he was able to pass off the clone as his son.’
‘Dan,’ Khouri said, the monosyllabic word carving its own angular shape in the refrigerated air. ‘You’re telling me Dan is Calvin’s clone?’
‘Not that Dan knows any of this,’ Volyova said. ‘He’d be the last person Calvin wanted to know. No; Sylveste is as much party to the lie as any of the populace ever were. He thinks he’s his own man.’
‘He doesn’t realise he’s a clone?’
‘No, and as time goes by his chances of ever finding out get smaller and smaller. Beyond Calvin’s Ultra allies, almost no one knew, and Calvin set up incentives to keep those that did quiet. There were a few unavoidable weak links - Calvin had no choice but to recruit one of Yellowstone’s top geneticists - and Sylveste picked the same man for the Resurgam expedition, not realising the intimate connection they shared. But I doubt that he’s learnt the truth since, or even come close to guessing it.’
‘But every time he looks in a mirror . . .’
‘He sees himself, not Calvin.’ Volyova smiled, evidently enjoying the way their revelation was upsetting some of Khouri’s basic certainties. ‘He was a clone, but that didn’t mean he had to resemble Cal down to the last skin pore. The geneticist - Janequin - knew how to induce cosmetic differences between Cal and Dan’s makeup, enough so that people would see only the expected familial traits. Obviously, he also incorporated traits from the woman who was supposed to be Dan’s mother, Rosalyn Soutaine.’
‘The rest was simple,’ Sajaki said. ‘Cal raised his clone in an environment carefully structured to emulate the surroundings he had known as a boy - even down to the same stimuli at certain periods in the boy’s development, because Cal couldn’t be sure which of his own personality traits were due to nature or nurture.’
‘All right,’ Khouri said. ‘Accepting for the moment that all of this is true - what was the point? Cal must have known Dan wouldn’t follow the same developmental path, no matter how closely he manipulated the boy’s life. What about all those decisions that take place in the womb?’ Khouri shook her head. ‘It’s insane. At the very best, all he’d end up with would be a crude approximation to himself.’
‘I think,’ Sajaki said, ‘that that was all that Cal hoped for. Cal cloned himself as a precaution. He knew the scanning process that he and the other members of the Eighty would have to endure would destroy his material body, so he wanted a body to which he could return if life in the machine turned out not to be to his liking.’
‘And did it?’
‘Maybe, but that was beside the point. At the time of the Eighty, the retransfer operation was still beyond the technology of the day. There was no real hurry: Cal could always have the clone put in reefersleep until he needed it, or simply reclone another one from the boy’s cells. He was thinking well ahead.’
‘Assuming the retransfer ever became possible.’
‘Well, Calvin knew it was a long shot. The important thing was that there was a second fall-back option apart from retransfer.’
‘Which was?’
‘The beta-level simulation.’ Sajaki’s voice had become as slow, cold and icy as the breezes in the Captain’s chamber. ‘Although not formally capable of consciousness, it was still an incredibly detailed facsimile of Calvin. Its relative simplicity meant it would be easier to encode its rules into the wetware of Dan’s mind. Much easier than imprinting something as volatile as the alpha.’
‘I know the primary recording - the alpha - disappeared,’ she said. ‘There was no Calvin left to run the show. And I guess Dan began to act a little more independently than Calvin might have wished.’
‘To put it mildly,’ Sajaki said, nodding. ‘The Eighty marked the beginning of the decline of the Sylveste Institute. Dan soon escaped its shackles, more interested in the Shrouder enigma than cybernetic immortality. He kept possession of the beta-level sim, though he never realised its exact significance. He thought of it more as an heirloom than anything else.’ The Triumvir smiled. ‘I think he would have destroyed it had he realised what it represented, which was his own annihilation.’
Understandable, Khouri thought. The beta-level simulation was like a trapped demon waiting to inhabit a new host body. Not properly conscious, but still dangerously potent, by virtue of the subtle ingenuity with which it mimicked true intelligence.
‘Cal’s precautionary measure was still useful to us,’ Sajaki said. ‘There was enough of Cal’s expertise encoded in the beta to mend the Captain. All we had to do was persuade Dan to let Calvin temporarily inhabit his mind and body.’
‘Dan must have suspected something when it worked so easily.’
‘It was never easy,’ Sajaki admonished. ‘Far from it. The periods when Cal took over were more akin to some kind of violent possession. Motor control was a problem: in order to suppress Dan’s own personality, we had to give him a cocktail of neuro-inhibitors. Which meant that when Cal finally got through, the body he found himself in was already half-paralysed by our drugs. It was like a brilliant surgeon performing an operation by giving orders to a drunk. And - by all accounts - it wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences for Dan. Quite painful, he said.’
‘But it worked.’
‘Just. But that was a century ago, and now it’s time for another visit to the doctor.’
‘Your vials,’ said the Ordinator.
One of the wimpled aides from Pascale’s party stepped forward, brandishing a vial identical in size and shape to the one which Sylveste removed from his pocket. They were not the same colour: the fluid in Pascale’s vial had been tinted red, against the yellow hue of Sylveste’s. Similar darkish fronds of material orbited within. The Ordinator took both vials and held them aloft for a few moments before placing them side by side on the table, in clear view of the audience.
‘We are ready to begin the marriage,’ she said. She then performed the customary duty of asking if there were anyone present who had any bioethical reasons as to why the marriage should not take place.
There was, of course, no objection.
But in that odd, loaded moment of branching possibilities, Sylveste noted a veiled woman in the audience reach into a purse and uncap a dainty, jewel-topped amber perfume jar.
‘Daniel Sylveste,’ said the Ordinator. ‘Do you take this woman to be your wife, under Resurgam law, until such time as this marriage is annulled under this or any prevailing legal system?’
‘I do,’ Sylveste said.
She repeated the question to Pascale.
‘I do,’ Pascale said.
‘Then let the bonding be done.’
Ordinator Massinger took the wedding gun from the mahogany box and snapped it open. She loaded the reddish vial - the one Pascale’s party had delivered - into the breech, then reclosed the instrument. Status entoptics briefly haloed it. Girardieau placed his hand on Sylveste’s upper arm, steadying him as the Ordinator pressed the conic end of the instrument against his temple, just above his eye-level. Sylveste had been right when he told Girardieau that the ceremony was not painful, but neither was it
entirely pleasant. What it was was a sudden flowering of intense cold, as if liquid helium were being blasted into his cortex. The discomfort was brief, however, and the thumb-sized bruise on his skin would not last more than a few days. The brain’s immune system was weak by comparison with the body as a whole, and Pascale’s cells - floating as they did in a stew of helper medichines - would soon bond with Sylveste’s own. The volume was tiny - no more than a tenth of one per cent of the brain’s mass - but the transplanted cells carried the indelible impression of their last host: ghost threads of holographically distributed memory and personality.
The Ordinator removed the spent red vial and slotted the yellow one in its place. It was Pascale’s first wedding under the Stoner custom, and her trepidation was not well disguised. Girardieau held her hands as the Ordinator delivered the neural material, Pascale visibly flinching as it happened.
Sylveste had let Girardieau think the implant was permanent, but this was never the case. The neural tissue was tagged with harmless radioisotope trace elements, enabling it to be routed out and destroyed, if necessary, by divorce viruses. So far, Sylveste had never taken that option, and imagined he never would, no matter how many marriages down the line he was. He carried the smoky essences of all his wives - as they carried him - as he would carry Pascale. Indeed, on the faintest level, Pascale herself now carried traces of his previous wives.
That was the Stoner way.
The Ordinator carefully replaced the wedding gun in its box. ‘According to Resurgam law,’ she began, ‘the marriage is now formalised. You may—’
Which was when the perfume hit Janequin’s birds.
The woman who had uncapped the amber jar was gone, her seat glaringly vacant. Fragrant, autumnal, the odour from the jar made Sylveste think of crushed leaves. He wanted to sneeze.
Something was wrong.
The room flashed turquoise blue, as if a hundred pastel fans had just opened. Peacocks’ tails, springing open. A million tinted eyes.
The air turned grey.
‘Get down!’ Girardieau screamed. He was scrabbling madly at his neck. There was something hooked in it, something tiny and barbed. Numbly, Sylveste looked at his tunic and saw half a dozen comma-shaped barbs clinging to it. They had not broken the fabric, but he dared not touch them.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 22