Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Run the projections again.”

  Next to the face appeared the familiar graph of deaths against time, plotted through with the rising curves of the best-guess mathematical models. Now there were fifty-five data points instead of fifty-four. Aumonier knew the projections off by heart by now, and she was relieved to see the addition of Terzet Friller to the toll of dead did not lead to any significant change in the long-term predictions. Not exactly good news, she thought, but not bad news either.

  “I assume the brain will be too cooked to give us much,” she said. “But Demikhov ought to get a look at it anyway. Do we have any assets close enough to be useful?”

  “Nothing within an hour,” Baudry said, studying a complex, scribble-like plot of operatives, ships, orbits and possible inter-habitat trajectories. “We can have a Heavy Medical Squad on site within three, if they’re tasked and dispatched immediately.”

  “Ng’s already out there, isn’t she?”

  Baudry nodded. “Confirmed on-site at the Shiga-Mintz Spindle as of thirty minutes ago, contact established with local constables, and now making her way to the Bronner residence.”

  Aumonier turned to the Solid Orrery. The Shiga-Mintz Spindle and Carousel Addison-Lovelace were in different orbits of the Glitter Band, but by chance both were presently within the same quadrant, on the far side of Yellowstone from Panoply.

  “Bancal and Ng already have Pangolin clearance—no sense in involving non-cleared prefects when we already have two cleared assets in the field.”

  “We could re-task Ng?” Baudry suggested.

  “No,” Aumonier said carefully, balancing priorities. “Let her collect the widow first, then the victim.” Then she turned back to the analyst, who was just concluding her call with the Detective-Marshal. “Follow up her request, Jirmal. But when I say use your discretion …”

  “You want me to assist her, but not at the expense of diverting resources from Wildfire, ma’am.”

  “You understand me perfectly,” Aumonier said.

  Thalia rubbed her hand along the parapet’s pleasingly rough texture, shooing away a dull-eyed pigeon that was in no hurry to leave. They were walking along a balcony that fronted a long row of sleepy, whitewashed residences, built back into the rising slope of an artificial hillside. On the other side of the parapet the land fell away along the curving geometry of the cylinder-shaped habitat, with towns, lakes and woodland dwindling into blue-green haze.

  “This is the sort of place my father said he’d like to retire to,” Thalia said to Sparver. “He said he wanted somewhere where he could practise his watercolours, and it was no use if the view changed every time someone sneezed. I never really understood what he meant back then.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m starting to get it. Although maybe I’m just getting older.”

  “Word to the wise,” Sparver said in a confiding tone. “Never tell a pig you’re feeling old. You won’t get much in the way of sympathy, given our average life expectancy.”

  “You understand it, though, don’t you? I think we’re all the same, deep down—all of us in Panoply. We like quiet, stillness, stasis over change. The rest of society’s on some sort of headlong rush to explore every possible way of living, and we’re the brakes, the anchors, stopping it from whirling out of control. That’s what my father understood all those years ago.” She kept sliding her hand along the parapet as they walked, feeling its cool integrity under her skin, not even minding the occasional smear of sun-baked pigeon shit. “He’d have liked it here—if he’d ever got the chance to retire.”

  “Maybe it would have suited him,” Sparver said. “But I’ll say this. It’s not the kind of place Dreyfus was hoping to associate with victim fifty-four.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Look at it, Thal. Nice stone houses, nice stone walls, nice parks and lakes, pleasant weather, everything tidy and respectable and a bit tedious and safe for most tastes.”

  “Why would that make a difference?”

  “Dreyfus reckons there’s a strain of risk-taking among the dead. A propensity, he calls it.”

  “And what do you think?”

  Sparver walked on thoughtfully. “I might have believed there was something in it, at least for a while.”

  Instinct had Thalia lowering her voice while they spoke of such a sensitive matter. But they were safe enough in the Shiga-Mintz Spindle, where a stone was just a stone and the walls very definitely did not have ears. It was one of the least surveilled habitats in the Glitter Band.

  “Might have?” she asked.

  “The first case, Cassandra Leng, died while she was playing lava hopscotch in the Colfax Orb. She was a professional gamer; regularly gambled with her own life. Some of the others fit the pattern, too. Not just risk-takers in that sense, but across the field, from con-artists to rash investors, to serial philanderers. The trouble is, where do you draw the line? Breathing’s a risk. And some of the dead don’t fit the pattern at all.”

  “But you think—or thought—that there might have been something in it?”

  “Fifty-four was the nail in the coffin, though. We’ve both seen the background documents, Thal. There’s nothing about Antal Bronner that fits Dreyfus’s theory. And the fact that he chose to live here, of all places …”

  “Not the sort of place to suit a risk-taker, is what you’re saying?”

  “Not unless you have a deep phobia of pigeons.”

  They were nearly at the Bronner dwelling. Thalia was surprised not to see a presence outside the home. Upon docking they had liaised with the local constables at the hub, politely declining the offer of an escort to the housing development. They had been told that constables would meet them at the household, where they were providing Ghiselin Bronner with the additional security she had seemed to think necessary.

  “We’ve got the right address, haven’t we?” she started saying, just as her bracelet chimed. She touched her throat microphone, said “Ng,” and listened through her earpiece to the supernumerary analyst on the other end who was relaying orders directly from the tactical room. She acknowledged the call, then closed the link.

  “Going to let me in on the secret?” Sparver asked.

  “There’s been another death. When we’ve collected Ghiselin Bronner, we’re to make a detour on our way back to Panoply and recover the body.”

  “Body, not just the head?”

  “That’s what they told me.”

  They stopped at the entrance. The front door was set back into a cool-shaded porch, and the door itself was slightly ajar. Thalia straightened the hem of her tunic, ran a hand across her brow to fuss her hair into shape, then knocked on the door. When no one answered after half a minute she knocked again, then waited the same length of time before glancing at Sparver.

  Sparver reached in and pushed at the door. It creaked as it swung wider. When it was halfway open Thalia called into the gloom beyond.

  “Constables? Madame Bronner? This is Prefect Ng. The constables at the hub said we’d be expected.”

  There was still no answer, so Thalia stepped into the dwelling. A vague unease had her hand moving for her whiphound, but she resisted the impulse to unclip the weapon, not wishing to seem jittery in front of Sparver.

  “Ghiselin?” she called out, louder this time, her voice booming back at her from the rounded masonry of the interior. Her eyes were adjusting to the light inside the dwelling, and it was airier than it had seemed only a few minutes earlier. Beyond the reception area where she now stood, arched passageways led off into a series of rounded chambers, cutting back into the hillside.

  The reception area was austere in its furnishings and decoration. The walls were a textured white, set with alcoves and projecting ledges, but there were no pictures and only a few minimalist ornaments. Natural daylight came down through ceiling ducts.

  She touched her microphone. “This is Ng. Prefect Bancal and I have entered the Bronner residence, but there’s no one to welcome
us. Proceeding further.”

  They moved from the reception room into an adjoining chamber. It was a sort of lounge or dining room, with stone chairs around a low stone table. Again there were alcoves, containing skeletal white candelabra. A fluted glass vase had toppled onto the table, flowers hanging limply over the table’s edge, a puddle of water contained from spreading by its own surface tension. Something was off. The rooms were devoid of clutter or careless ornamentation. The person who lived here would not have allowed that untidy mishap to sit unattended for long.

  Thalia directed a wary look at Sparver. Sparver gave a nod, then unclipped his whiphound. He flicked out the filament and spoke softly. “Rapid search mode. Observe and report only.”

  The whiphound nodded its red-eyed head, then slinked through an archway into the next chamber.

  They walked on into the next room, while the whiphound moved further into the residence.

  “Ghiselin?” Thalia called again, the timbre of her own voice shifting now they were deeper into the property. “It’s Panoply. We’ve come to talk to you about Antal.”

  They moved through a parlour, then a bare room with bedrooms and bathrooms branching off it. The whiphound was just coming out of one of these rooms. It raced further into the property, with nothing yet to report. There were no windows, not once they had moved away from the front of the dwelling, but the ceiling ducts maintained the airy ambience of the earlier rooms.

  “There’s been a communications screw-up,” Thalia said. “She must have gone out, and the constables went with her.”

  “She left her front door half-open. Who does that, when they’ve already asked for additional protection?”

  The whiphound came back. It halted, keeping its head level, its red eye sweeping back and forth between them.

  “It wants us to follow,” Sparver said.

  4

  It was a public transmission, distributed by expensive if entirely legal means, broadcast across a thousand media fronts. Within a few seconds—the maximum light-travel time for even the most knotted signal routing within the Glitter Band—it would have been seen and heard in a thousand habitats, maybe more.

  The face loomed large—in interior mental visualisations, on private screens and private walls, in the gene-tweaked flesh of hands, on the backs of lovers, on the soaring display surfaces of civic plazas and recreation spaces, in the curtaining spray of fountains and waterfalls, lasered onto individual droplets of water. Every channel that was available, and not blocked from displaying this paid transmission, now showed the face.

  From the head of curls to the unlined, cherubic features, to the neat vertical nick of a scar under the right eye, it was the face Dreyfus had seen first hand.

  “Good people, good citizens,” the face said. “I won’t take your time—we all have lives to be getting on with. Most of us do, at any rate. You know me by now, and if you don’t yet know me, then I trust we’ll consider ourselves friends before very long. I’m Devon Garlin, and there are things they would rather I didn’t tell you.” The face flashed a smile, vertical lines bracketing either side of Garlin’s mouth. “They don’t trust us, you see. They don’t trust us to trust them and after the mess they made of things two years ago it’s not hard to see why. They’ve been praying they won’t be tested again, knowing full well how lucky they were the first time. But something’s in the air, friends.” He lowered his voice confidingly. “Nothing official yet—and nothing you’ll have seen or heard on any of the public nets. But rumours slip through the mesh. Have you heard anything, lately? That there’s something building, something they can’t stop?”

  Dreyfus watched the transmission as it played across one of the walls near the refectory, displayed as a matter of routine simply because it had been identified as a high-reach broadcast, of natural interest to Panoply.

  He bristled, sweat prickling under his collar. It was hard not to read a mocking glint in the arctic blue of Garlin’s eyes, as if he knew Dreyfus would be listening.

  “People are dying,” Garlin said. “A few dozen so far—a few drops in the ocean. But the numbers are going up and they don’t know what’s causing it. They’re trying very hard not to let this become public knowledge. But word is spreading. Concerned citizens, witnesses, medical personnel; these people won’t be silenced just to suit Panoply. And nor should you. As I said, it’s all just rumour—for now. Perhaps there’s nothing in it, and we can all sleep safely in our beds. But if you hear of a death that happened suddenly, or if you see prefects behaving oddly—going about their business more furtively than usual, if such a thing is possible—then take a moment to ask yourselves this: what’s the point of a security organisation that cannot give us protection when we most have need of it?”

  Dreyfus became aware of a presence at his side. He glanced away from the transmission. It was Jane Aumonier, hands behind her back, chin lifted, absorbing the words with a look of stoic acceptance. The light from Garlin’s face brushed a delicate edge onto her profile. Dreyfus watched her for a few seconds then turned back to the wall. Neither of them spoke as the statement continued.

  “Whatever becomes of this worry they’d rather we didn’t know about, there is another way. Spurn the false assurances of the prefects, shun the promises they can’t keep, the trust they can’t uphold, and find a common security outside the hidebound framework of Panoply. Eight habitats have already thrown aside their shackles and discovered that there is life—and security—beyond the old, moribund institutions. More are poised to follow. Soon it will be a flood. The prefects will tell you we’re damaging the glorious integrity of the Glitter Band, but that isn’t true at all. What the Glitter Band is, and what it could be, are two different things—but to make a better world we first have to take back control of what was always ours.” Garlin extended an open, beckoning hand, and that smile creased his face again. “Good people, good citizens—join us, and turn your faces to the light.”

  The transmission finished, the wall darkening. But Dreyfus could still feel the lingering presence of that face, as if it had imprinted itself on Panoply’s very fabric.

  “Good people, good citizens,” he said, sneering out the words. “I’d like to ram those sentiments down—”

  “It’s an act of provocation,” Aumonier said levelly. “And we won’t allow ourselves to be provoked, will we? We might not like it, but he’s broken no rules by issuing this statement.”

  “What about inciting public unrest?”

  “By saying there are rumours? I’m afraid that’s not presently a crime.”

  Dreyfus pointed a finger at the now-blank wall. “How does he know? How did Devon Garlin get to be so well informed?”

  “I can see where that thought’s leading. You are not going to put him in the frame as the cause of these incidents.”

  Dreyfus waited a moment before answering. “You can’t deny they’re working well for him.”

  “Making him a lucky opportunist, a man who knows when fate’s handed him an advantage. That’s all.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You have a grudge against him—a personal one, after what happened in Stonehollow. Maybe you don’t like the thought of the wealth and privilege that spawned him, either. But it’s no crime to be born into an influential family. Letting him get under your skin is exactly what he wants, exactly what he’s hoping for—prodding us into an over-reaction, making it seem as if he’s got us rattled.”

  Dreyfus forced himself to nod, seeing the truth in her argument even as his blood boiled against her reasoned, sensible tone. “I don’t like demagogues,” he said.

  “So I’ve heard,” Aumonier said.

  Thalia took a careful look at the body. The whiphound had brought them to a fallen constable, slumped on the floor with a stun-truncheon just out of reach of one outstretched hand. The constable was a red-headed woman, wearing mustard-coloured tunic and trousers, only her burgundy armband and equipment belt marking her active assignment to the citizen c
onstabulary.

  “She’s breathing,” Thalia said. Kneeling now, she shifted the woman’s posture into the recovery position, making sure her airway was unobstructed.

  Sparver called from the room next door. “There’s another one here, also out cold.”

  Thalia brushed the woman’s hair from her eyes.

  “Signs of injury?”

  “No bruising, no sign of a struggle.”

  Thalia unclipped her whiphound and deployed its filament. “Maximum alert,” she said, before touching her throat microphone. “Ng again. We’ve found two constables, unconscious but breathing. Looks as if they’ve been knocked out by something, possibly some sort of anaesthetic weapon. Request immediate assistance, including a Light Medical Squad.”

  She listened to the response with a sinking heart. Even with an emergency intervention, no other Panoply unit could be with them for at least two hours, and that was an optimistic estimate.

  “They can’t wait that long,” she replied. “See if you can get through to the constables at the hub, and tell them to mobilise local medical services.”

  “Thal,” Sparver called. “You need to see this.”

  Knowing she had done all she could for the fallen constable, she pushed up from the ground. “What?”

  “You’d better come. You know how I am with faces.”

  Thalia moved towards his voice with trepidation, her whiphound slinking after her. She stepped around the second fallen constable, a shaven-headed neutrois citizen dressed in a yellow gown, with the same belt and burgundy armband as their colleague.

  Sparver had already gone through into the next room, where he was standing with his back to her, arms folded while he inspected the scene before him.

  “It’s Ghiselin Bronner,” Thalia said.

  “What I thought. I wouldn’t get too close, though, until we know she isn’t booby-trapped.”