Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  Julius and Caleb regarded the portrait. There were similar ones all around the house. A severe, old-fashioned woman in severe, old-fashioned clothes, standing at a metal-framed window with one hand on the sill under the window, a book in the other, and the curve of a red planet visible beyond a window. Julius struggled to think of anyone having warm feelings towards the regal-looking woman in the picture, with her unsmiling features and a peevish, judgemental look to her eyes.

  “Sandra Voi died too soon,” Father was saying. “But not before her great work was set in progress. Under the ice of Europa, she founded the first of the experimental Demarchist communities. There people explored new modes of participatory democracy, eventually circumventing or dismantling almost all the traditional structures of hierarchy and government. Rule by the people, for the people, with neural implants to facilitate rapid polling and decision-making.”

  The boys took this in with only mild interest. None of it was entirely new to them. They had soaked up enough about Sandra Voi to know her place in history, just as they had more than an inkling of how society worked beyond the environs of the Shell House and its dome.

  Outside were hundreds of millions of people, living on the surface and in orbit, going about their lives, content for the most part, guaranteed a high degree of safety and security. In return all they had to do was vote. Many times a day, questions would appear in their heads—matters both large and trifling—and the people had only to register their opinion. They did it whether they were living in the height of luxury or in the self-inflicted hardship of a Voluntary Tyranny. This was the way human society had worked around Yellowstone for over a hundred and fifty years. There was no central authority, no government; no ministries, no chambers of power. There were only the citizens, participating in democracy at such a seamless level that it almost became an autonomic process, no longer—except in very rare circumstances—requiring conscious intervention.

  Such a system had to be watertight, of course. In many ways, the brilliance of Sandra Voi lay not in her advocacy of real-time democracy—it was hardly a new concept, even in the early days of Europa—but in the envisioning of the neural processing architecture that made it both efficient and inviolable. The implants, the abstraction, the polling cores—these were her true and enduring gifts. Mathematically ingenious methods of voter authentication, vote tallying, relentless error-correction and bias-elimination. It was as beautiful and intricate as watchwork, and it functioned. Flaws had been discovered over the years, certainly, but they were subtle enough that no real harm had been done before they were plugged. That work continued, for no system as complex as Yellowstone’s could ever be said to have reached a state of perfect culmination. What mattered was that Sandra Voi’s foundations were still at the heart of the system, for all it had been embroidered and filigreed. In all significant respects she had achieved her goal.

  “But no idea,” Father said, “can be left to chance, without guardianship and protection. All ideas meet resistance—even those that are demonstrably good and true. And even the strongest ideas need nourishment, cultivation—protection and stewardship in times of crisis, when good men and women may lose confidence in that which has served them so well before. Sandra Voi understood this, and it has been central to the family ever since. Chandler Prentiss Voi understood it, during the early years of Chasm City. No change was made to the abstraction architecture without Chandler’s direct and careful oversight. The changes have been fewer in recent years—the system works so well now that there has been little need for adjustments—but still we Vois recognise our burden of responsibility. A delicate, fragile thing has been entrusted to us, and we are obliged to pass it forward to the generations to come.”

  The boys’ attention was wandering. They knew that being a Voi came with strings; that the price for growing up in a place like the Shell House was that they would have to Do Their Bit when they got older. Neither boy was all that troubled by this coming burden, though. If their parents’ leisured lives were any barometer, Doing Their Bit wasn’t going to prove particularly onerous.

  “You are boys now,” Father said. “But soon you must become citizens. When you are a few years older, you will be free to move beyond the Shell House, into Chasm City and the wider world. Your mother and I have done our best to equip you for that transition. You have learned to shape and conjure the immaterial and the material environments—to don plumage, and command quickmatter. You have learned well, and we are proud of you both. There is more to citizenship, though.” Father looked at Mother, waiting for the merest nod of acknowledgement before continuing. She seemed to withhold it at first, before giving in. “Now you must accept the mental architecture which will permit your full participation in Chasm City democracy—opening your minds to the polling cores.”

  Their father closed his fist, then opened it again, a grey tetrahedron floating in the cup of his palm.

  He offered the tetrahedron to Caleb. “You understand a symbolic exchange,” Father continued. “This will feel no different—to begin with.”

  “What’s going to happen?” Caleb asked, reaching out to accept the tetrahedron, but stilling his hand at the last moment.

  “It will seem like waking,” Father said. “Like knowing the world for the first time, with clear eyes. Like finally being alive.”

  “But it won’t be sudden,” Mother said, striking her usual cautious tone. “Like everything else it takes time.” Under her breath, Julius thought she muttered: “Thank goodness.”

  Caleb took the symbol and closed his own small fist around it. The tetrahedron fizzed into nothingness as his fingers punctured its surface.

  Father closed and re-opened his own fist and offered a second tetrahedron to Julius.

  “Take it, son.”

  “I like it the way it is now,” Julius said, looking at Caleb for support. “We’re not old enough to vote, so can’t we wait until then?”

  “Are you frightened?” Father asked sharply.

  “No,” Julius asserted. “I’m not frightened. The polling system can’t hurt us. Millions of people have this, so there can’t be anything bad about it. It’s just a way of voting.”

  “Among other things,” Mother said.

  “The sooner you get used to it, the better,” Father said. “Look at Caleb, how ready he is. Why can’t you be more like him, Julius, instead of hanging back all the time?”

  “Maybe he’s happy to be a child,” Mother put in darkly. “They went through enough, Marlon—why can’t he have this for a little longer?”

  Father controlled it very well, but there was no missing the anger that flashed across his face, or the fact that it was directed squarely at his wife.

  “They’ve had loving childhoods,” he said, speaking the words as if she were the one who needed persuading. “No two boys have ever been better looked after. No two boys have ever been better equipped to take their places in society. Caleb is willing. Julius must make the same commitment to the life of a Voi.”

  Julius made a lunge for the tetrahedron and squeezed it hard, spiting his father even as he obeyed him. “I said it wasn’t fear. But I don’t understand why there’s this stupid rush to make us ready. First the plumage and the quickmatter, now this.”

  Father stepped back, as if all of a sudden he feared Julius. “These aren’t simple skills.”

  “People come in from space all the time,” Julius said. “On the ships, from other systems. Ultras and their passengers. Sometimes they haven’t got implants at all, and still they adjust and become citizens.”

  “But they aren’t Vois,” Father countered. “They don’t have that name to live up to.”

  “What if I wanted a different name?” Julius asked, with a defiance that made him feel a bit giddy. “What if I wanted to call myself something else? What if I wanted a different life?”

  “You don’t get to make that choice,” his father said.

  Later that day, when the boys were in their bedroom, long
after they should have been asleep, Caleb said: “I was right and you were wrong, Julius. You made it up about Doctor Stasov.”

  “I didn’t,” Julius said softly.

  The lights were out and the house still. Their parents slept in the other wing, the one they were rarely allowed to enter, but the boys had learned to keep their voices low anyway. If they spoke too loudly, especially if they argued, Lurcher would hear them and come up the stairs. The robot would never punish them directly, but it would report back to their parents and there were always consequences.

  “If he was here we’d have seen him, wouldn’t we?” Caleb went on.

  “Maybe he was here,” Julius said. “Something happened to us today, didn’t it? Doctor Stasov’s always here when something changes. But he didn’t necessarily need to show himself, not now there’s all that stuff in our heads. You know he’s got things in that bag that can pick up on what we’re doing, even if he’s in another room.”

  “Now you’re just making things up,” Caleb said, turning over in his bed. “Imagining things that aren’t real, like you always do. Do you want Doctor Stasov to come into our room and take us away, is that it?”

  Julius thought of the ghost-faced doctor stealing into their bedroom while they were asleep, that sweep of hair hiding his eyes as he stood in the doorway, a study in monochrome. Then coming to the side of Julius’s bed and drawing back the bedclothes with his spidery fingers, each of them too long and thin, brittle as a tree branch. He imagined the doctor taking him out of bed while he was still asleep, and stuffing him into the black bowels of his bag. Julius couldn’t be sure a boy would fit into the bag, and he didn’t care to put it to the test.

  “He’d take you, not me,” Julius said.

  “I bet you’d rather he took you. Then you wouldn’t have to face up to those commitments Father was going on about. I could see your face. You looked as if you were about to cry. Poor little Julius.” He made an exaggerated bawling sound.

  “Shut up, Caleb.”

  “Why, don’t you like hearing what you sound like? What if I want a different name? What if I don’t want to be a Voi. Pity Julius, boo hoo hoo!”

  “Shut up!” Julius hissed.

  Somewhere in the silence of the house a door closed. The boys froze instinctively, straining to hear what came next. It was exactly what they feared: the slow, rhythmic plod of Lurcher’s footsteps.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Caleb said, squeezing deeper into his bedclothes.

  But Julius listened more carefully. “He’s not coming this way,” he said, once he was certain of his judgement. “If he was, he’d be on the stairs by now. He’s going along the main hall, to the entrance.”

  Julius slipped out of bed. As quietly as he could he made his way to the bedroom window. Only a year or two earlier he had needed to stand on a box to look out, but now he could easily manage without it. He eased aside the curtains, peering out through the glass to the nocturnal scene below. At night, the dome’s facets turned dark to block out the glow from Chasm City, and the lights high in the dome’s apex threw down a pale silvery cast, just enough to define the edges of the terrace and the start of the gardens, with gravel paths radiating away from the Shell House, forging into increasingly dense greenery.

  All was colourless and still.

  “What?” Caleb asked irritably.

  Julius was about to pull the curtains back together and return to the bed when a moving shadow came into view. It was travelling away from the house, ticking back and forth like a clock’s pendulum. He watched it with an eerie sense of foreboding, until the cause of the shadow came into view. A pale gleam of silver showed. It was Lurcher, walking slowly away from the Shell House. The robot had gained that nickname because of its slow, top-heavy gait, but there was more to it this time. Lurcher was carrying a dark form, stretched limply across two of its arms. Two legs dangled from one end, a hand, a sleeve and a silver flash of hair from the other. Lurcher was also carrying a heavy black medical bag.

  Julius watched the robot recede along one of the paths, soon lost in the darkening gloom of overgrowth.

  He returned to bed, and said nothing to Caleb.

  8

  Aumonier was in the tactical room, accompanied by a small, weary retinue of prefects and analysts, when a chime diverted her attention from the current topic of death forecasts and response projections.

  “One civilian casualty,” she said, reading aloud from the scrolling transcript. “Bancal and Ng both safe, and assistance should be on-site within a few minutes. It seems some safety interlock failed and the entire contents of the reservoir chamber were allowed to spill into the adjoining partition—enough air and water for the entire wheel, all released in one go.”

  Robert Tang scratched under his eyes. “An accident?”

  “Conceivably,” Aumonier said, without much conviction. “These old habitats tend to be bug-ridden, and particularly prone to failures when they’re being gutted for re-occupation. But in view of the timing I’m not minded to view it as anything so innocent.”

  Mildred Dosso fingered a lock of lank hair. “Sabotage, then?”

  Aumonier gazed at her levelly. “That this event should happen just as two of my operatives are inside the wheel … how else should we consider it, Mildred? Bancal and Ng could very well have died—from what I’m reading it’s a miracle they didn’t. As it is, I’m not going to take this lightly. We’ll pick this incident to the bone.”

  Tang and Dosso looked down as further updates scrolled across the table’s display surfaces.

  “Ng is reporting an object of possible interest,” Dosso said.

  “Yes,” Aumonier said, speed-reading ahead of her peers. “A white structure, in the second chamber of the wheel.”

  “Does it mean anything to you?” Tang asked.

  Aumonier reflected. It was a reasonable question and it demanded a considered answer. She studied the single, murky image that Ng had sent via her goggles’ record-and-transmit facility. The light in the chamber was low, lending the white structure the ghostly aspect of a lightning-struck tree standing alone in moonlight, its angular limbs seeming to reach out as if in embrace, or even the offering of some terrible warning against approaching further.

  A parade of shapes and patterns flitted across her mind’s eye as her brain searched for a match against the white structure. No human being could know the Glitter Band in its totality, much less the dazzling range of environments and structures contained within the ten thousand habitats. Even to know it once was to hold only a single, futile instant in a waltz of endless change.

  But Aumonier had learned to trust in the correlative accuracy of her memory, and a faint, familiar intuition told her she not seen this shape before. Perhaps it had meant something to her predecessors, but she had studied the major case files and thought it unlikely.

  No: she was certain. Whatever this thing was, it had managed not to draw Panoply’s interest until now.

  “I want a name, an owner, and a purpose,” she said. “Mildred: feed the image to Vanessa, tell her to start running it through the Search Turbines.”

  Dosso nodded.

  “Ng hasn’t given us the slightest explanation as to why the object is of relevance,” Tang said.

  “She hasn’t,” Aumonier said. “But she’s also had to deal with the small problem of managing not to die. I imagine she’ll enlighten us in her own good time.”

  By the time she met Dreyfus at the vehicle dock, the events in Hospice Idlewild were all over the public networks. He was her friend, and she guessed he had his reasons for what, on the face of it, seemed like a serious professional miscalculation. She still boiled with fury at the thought that Dreyfus had brought this on them all with everything else that was pressing for her attention. It looked bad, Aumonier had to admit. There were no surveillance feeds in Hospice Idlewild—the Mendicants refused it—but Garlin’s bodyguards had filmed the whole spectacle anyway, and it hadn’t taken them long to distribut
e the recording across the public networks.

  Lillian Baudry, next to her in the pressurised area of the dock, said: “Try to look on the bright side, Supreme Prefect. At least he used minimum necessary force.”

  “Is that an attempt to excuse his actions?”

  “Hardly. But everyone has their breaking point. That place is sacrosanct to Dreyfus.”

  She ground her teeth. “I know what it means to him.”

  “And no matter what Garlin might say, it looks like calculated provocation. To show up there, just when Dreyfus is paying a visit to Valery …”

  “He can’t have known,” Aumonier said. “Dreyfus was on Panoply business at the Parking Swarm.”

  “Then you’re saying it was a just a wild coincidence?”

  Beyond armoured glass, the cutter settled into its docking cradle. Connections closed around the hull. Aumonier grimaced, thinking how curious it was that the universe could make any prior situation seem only mildly troublesome, when at the time it had seemed to encompass all conceivable woes. She longed to be sitting back in the tactical room, listening to Sparver, thinking only of exploding heads.

  “I forgot to mention,” Baudry said, pausing as if to judge Aumonier’s mood. “That woman’s been trying to reach you again.”

  “Woman?”

  “Hestia Del Mar. The one from Chasm City. Marshal-Detective, or whatever she calls herself. She called again just now, reminding you about those three fugitives.”

  “I told her we had nothing. We don’t retain records of citizen movements.”

  “She seems persistent.”

  “She’s a fool.” And too much like me for my own tastes, Aumonier added silently. “She doesn’t understand the scope of our operations, or the threats and emergencies we face on a continual basis. I’d kill to have nothing but three fugitives to keep me awake at night.”