Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  “You might want to dial down your expectations a little, boss.”

  “I couldn’t do it if I tried,” Dreyfus said phlegmatically. “All right. What’s the news, or lack of it?”

  “Vanessa’s been digging through the ownership chain. But it’s a rat’s nest. Firms owned by firms that are owned by firms that turn out to be owned by the first firm … snakes eating their own tails. It’s all just this side of legal, but it’s very definitely a smokescreen.”

  “Then we’re onto something.”

  “I think the sabotage may have been a clue as well.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You sound less than convinced.”

  “If the sabotage was meant to slow down our investigation, it’s had exactly the opposite effect.”

  “Something made it happen, boss. We saw those robots, and—”

  “Yes,” Dreyfus answered. “And the robots were just a nuisance until you and Thalia showed up. That means someone was waiting for Panoply to take an interest in this place. The robots detected you and by some means your presence was the trigger for the doors to open.”

  “By some means?”

  “It doesn’t mean a person was involved, not directly, just some sort of monitoring routine. A low-level gamma would have been all that was needed. I’ll want to look at the control architecture for this place, Sparver.”

  “Consider it sequestered,” Sparver said.

  There was a service lock at the base of the wall, so there was no need to ascend to the primary one. They went through a short connecting tunnel and then came out into the second partition. Like the first, it was a quilt of light and darkness. But Dreyfus had no difficulty locating the object of interest. It would have been hard to miss under any circumstances.

  The curving floor of the second partition made room for about twenty artificial islands, rising from what would have been a shallow lake occupying most of the rim’s width. The islands were connected by elevated walkways—or what was left of these paths, after the devastation of the flood. One island was larger and taller than the others, hemmed by a wide expanse of filthy, debris-clotted water. Rising from this island was the single, striking structure of Elysium Heights.

  “Do we know what it is yet?” Dreyfus asked.

  “It’s going to take the technical squad more than a few days to work their way through the thing,” Sparver said. “But I’ll tell you what we already know. It’s a kind of clinic. Very high-end. The place is stuffed full of medical equipment, operating theatres, recuperation areas, consultation rooms. What we don’t yet know is what they were treating, or why, or for whom.”

  “Or why they stopped,” Dreyfus said.

  Sparver and Dreyfus climbed a zig-zagging walkway up onto the main level of the island, then went into the base of the trunk via an arched doorway.

  Inside was an atrium, its ceiling six stories above, with banks of elevators in the walls and many reception desks and seating areas. The flood must have washed in and out of the main entrance, because there was a tidemark of filth up to the second level, and the desks and chairs were grimed over with muck and debris. Gleaming power lines snaked across the floor, tangled like squid arms. The Heavy Technical Squad had made temporary arrangements to restore power and lighting to the white tree, enabling lights, doors and elevators to regain some functionality.

  Dreyfus stepped over one of them and found his way to a desk, where he had already spotted Thalia in conversation with a couple of members of the technical squad. The Panoply operatives were bending down over a tangle of froptic connections, hotwired into the guts of the desk.

  Thalia had a compad in the crook of her arm, status code scrolling across it at high speed.

  “Oh,” she began. “Glad you’re here, sir. We’re just trying to—”

  “Save it for the report, Thalia,” Dreyfus said gently. “The one you’re going to submit on your way back to Panoply, before you begin at least fifty-two hours of consecutive rest. The same for Sparver. You’ve laid the groundwork: the drudge teams can brief me on further developments.”

  Thalia looked torn. “The squad’s been really helpful, sir. But this sort of thing is exactly my speciality.”

  “You’re trying to communicate with the desk?”

  She tilted the compad his way, as if it meant anything to him. “So far it’s just scrambled garbage. There might not be anything left worth recovering, but if we don’t try …”

  “All right—an hour or two at most.” Dreyfus looked beyond the desk, to the nearest bank of elevators. A female technician came out of one, pushing a wheeled trolley laden with evidence. “I’ll take a little stroll upstairs, I think.”

  “You want a guide?” Sparver said.

  “No—I want both of you to keep an eye on each other, and make sure you’re both ready to ship out in two hours. No excuses.”

  “That’s us told,” Thalia said.

  Dreyfus walked to the elevator, arriving in time for the technician to come back with an empty trolley. Dreyfus waited for the woman to enter a floor into the crude-looking control box that had been grafted onto the elevator’s walls. “High-level systems aren’t working,” she explained. “And that includes voice recognition. Still, it’s not bad for a building that was under hard vacuum only a day ago. Which floor would you like?”

  “As high as you can go.”

  “All the way up—that’s where I’m headed anyway.”

  Dreyfus settled his hands before him and looked down at his muddied shoes as the elevator worked its way up the trunk. The walls were a plain silver, blank except for a white tree motif stencilled onto the one opposite the doors. The tree was a stark, minimalist representation of the building itself, with the suspended globes resembling hanging fruit. Dreyfus was forcibly reminded of the pattern he had seen on Cassandra Leng’s clothing. There was no doubt in his mind that one was inspired by the other, however deliberately.

  “Sir …” the woman began. “Prefect Dreyfus.”

  He looked up from his shoes. “Yes?”

  “We heard about what happened, sir. About you and Devon Garlin.”

  “Did you?”

  “I just wanted to say … all of us, I think … we think you were right, sir. He had it coming.”

  Dreyfus raised his eyebrows in an approximation of interest.

  “That’s your considered opinion, is it?”

  The woman looked taken aback. “I just meant, sir …”

  “No one has it coming,” Dreyfus said slowly. “Not even Devon Garlin. And my actions were wrong. They were borne of an error of judgement. I regret them, and I’m fortunate that the Supreme Prefect wasn’t harsher in her response. There’s nothing to be applauded here.”

  “I’m … sorry, sir.”

  “Good. In future, restrict your observations to the problem at hand. You’ll be doing us both a favour.”

  At last the elevator reached its destination. The doors opened and the woman pushed the trolley out into a hallway, where two other technicians were gathering and collecting evidence. A corridor stretched away from the hall, mostly dark save for a cluster of lights at the far end.

  “May I help you, Prefect Dreyfus?” asked one of the technicians.

  “I wanted to get a feel for the place. Is it safe for me to go down there?”

  “You should be all right, sir. We’ve restored partial power to that limb, and we’re trying to get some of the clinical systems back up and running for forensic purposes. If there were any nasty surprises, we’d have run into them by now.”

  “I’ll watch my step.”

  Dreyfus walked the length of the corridor, at least a hundred metres beyond the elevator. The flood had never penetrated this part of the structure, so the surroundings showed little sign of disturbance. The trunk was much narrower than this near the top, so he was certain he was moving along one of the high branches. He passed offices and reception areas, finally reaching the lit area. Again, there were power lines and emergency
patches in evidence. Dreyfus carried on. The floor dipped down a little, becoming a ramp, but not so steep that it was difficult to walk. At last he reached what had to be the limit of this branch, for the corridor opened up into a circular hub surrounding a central bank of elevators, all going down into what he knew must be one of the globes, suspended below him. None of the elevators were operational, but there was a spiral staircase threading down the middle of the elevator core and he took that instead, his feet ringing loudly on the clattery metal risers.

  He went down five or six levels, then found his way back out into the globe. A circular corridor enclosed the elevator core, with radial corridors branching out from it. Dreyfus followed one of them a short distance until he reached the curving outer wall of the globe with angled windows looking out along the length of the semi-flooded chamber, all the way back to the vast bulkhead wall. Leading off from the corridor were more reception areas and rooms. Dreyfus tried a few of the tree-stencilled doors, finding them sealed. He could have summoned one of the technicians to force the door, but he had no doubt all would be opened in good time and the squad obviously had enough to keep them busy. He loitered at one of the reception desks, his attention drawn by a plastic anatomical model mounted on a steel pedestal. It was a human head, with the skull removed so the different brain modules could be undone like a three-dimensional jigsaw. He fingered the waxy parts, imagining the model being used as part of an initial interview or consultancy process.

  A flicker of motion showed at the edge of his vision. He turned without panic, noticing an open doorway and a series of readouts playing across a wall. A power line went in through the open doorway. Dreyfus stepped inside, finding himself in a room equipped with desk, chairs, a couch, and what were obviously robotic surgical devices, upright forms parked against a wall and shrouded in chrysalis-like folds of sterile wrap. A trolley sat in the centre of the room, cluttered with equipment, and a fist-thick bundle of froptic cables ran from the trolley to a slot in the wall. Dreyfus picked up a Panoply-issue compad from the trolley, noting that it was displaying the same pattern of readouts as the wall. He remembered what Thalia had said about recovering only garbage, and presumed the same sort of effort was in progress here.

  He set the compad back down and moved around the surgical suite. The robotic devices looked clean and well maintained under their translucent shrouds, but they were obviously several decades old, perhaps explaining why they had been left here. Their multi-jointed manipulators were angled up against their bodies, like the limbs of mantises.

  He moved to the curving windows, looking out again at the dismal floodscape with its dazzle of light and darkness, and tried to put himself in the place of someone waiting in this room, someone submitting to the tender mercies of those machines. Neural services, he thought. Brain modification—something more complex or delicate than the norm. The elimination of rare diseases, or the augmentation of brain faculties outside the usual scope of orthodox medical services. Nothing illegal, perhaps, but certainly nothing commonplace.

  Probably nothing cheap, either.

  “You’re wondering who would come to a place like this. Wondering why anyone would put their mind under the knife—metaphorically or otherwise. Don’t pretend you’re not, Prefect. I can read you like a book. A very simple book containing mostly pictures.”

  He turned again, but this time with a start, because her voice had been the last thing he had been expecting.

  She looked at him from every active display in the room, including the compad he had set down on the trolley. She had not changed any detail of her appearance since their last encounter, but all he could see of her was her face, hair and the backrest of her chair.

  “How are you here?”

  “Oh, don’t pretend it’s any sort of mystery. I followed the noise. I followed you, because in a very narrow sense the things that interest you are also of some remote interest to me.”

  “Were you responsible for nearly killing my deputies and murdering one of my witnesses?”

  She pinched her nose in distaste. “Hardly my style, is it? If I felt like murdering your deputies I’d make quite sure I finished the job. No, that wasn’t my doing—and shame on you for thinking otherwise. But fascinating, isn’t it, nonetheless?”

  “Not the word I’d use.”

  “Whoever was here set up a very deliberate trap. I’ve eavesdropped on your speculation. You’re right—those monitoring robots were definitely part of it. I even found the gamma-level that was task-handling their visual inputs, waiting for Panoply to show up.”

  Despite his anger, confusion—and no small measure of trepidation—Dreyfus tried to keep his voice level, his enquiries pertinent. “You’ve managed to reach that deeply into the architecture?”

  “It’s not hard for me. Not much of a challenge. Certainly nowhere as difficult as breaching Panoply’s sealed archives.”

  “Tell me about the gamma. Who put it there? How long ago?”

  “Questions, questions.” Her tone was playfully scolding, the way a child might address a doll. “Always one way with you, isn’t it. Never much give and take. Never much quid pro quo. How about we redress that, starting now?”

  “You’re an all-powerful machine intelligence. What could I possibly tell you that you don’t already know?”

  “Oh, use a little imagination, Prefect Dreyfus—if it doesn’t strain you overmuch. The Clockmaker taxes my resources. I’ll beat it eventually, but for the moment it’s showing a tiresome resilience, a tiresome ability to outflank my advances. Frankly I’m getting rather bored of our little game of hide and seek, and you really wouldn’t like me when I’m bored. The truth is, though, that I don’t know as much about my enemy as I’d like. But there are secrets in your deep archive—technical files, eyewitness accounts, detailed testimonies. That’s all I’m interested in. As you say—I’m a godlike intelligence. The only thing that concerns me is other godlike intelligences.”

  “And me, now and then.”

  “Don’t get an inflated sense of your self-worth. I speak to you because we have some shared history, and you are the key to something I need. And because I know when a man needs help.”

  “From you?”

  A teasing smile played across her features. “You’ll be surprised how little public information there is to find on this place. They kept their secrets very close to their hearts.”

  “I already know more than I did an hour ago. It’s a clinic. Elysium Heights. People must have come here from all over the Glitter Band for medical procedures.”

  “Yes, well done. That’s very good.” Her fingers came into view, making a sarcastic clapping gesture. “And you suspect a link to your spate of neural deaths. Perhaps the dead were all clients of this facility, is that what you’re thinking?”

  “It’s hardly a leap.”

  “Then a patient list would be very useful to you, wouldn’t it? Especially if that list included the names of people who haven’t yet died, people who are still out there, still walking around, unaware that their heads might explode at any minute. That would be of some small interest to you, wouldn’t it?”

  Dreyfus forced himself to sound calm. “If there’s a list, Thalia will find it.”

  “Provided I don’t find it first. Mm.” She touched a finger to her lower lip. “Provided I haven’t already found it, and taken pains to make sure no one else will be able to read it.” Lowering the finger, she gave a pout of contrition. “Oh dear. I’ve upset you, haven’t I?”

  “I’ve no reason to think a list exists.”

  “I could give you names.”

  “I already know who’s dead; I expect you learned the names from us as well.”

  “I was thinking of the ones who haven’t died yet. I could give you a single name now, but since the neural overloads aren’t following any particularly obvious pattern, we might have rather a long wait before the name is confirmed.”

  “Then give me all the names.”

  F
rown lines notched her forehead. “Why ever would I do that?”

  “Because this’ll end up hurting all of us, you included. A public emergency plays nicely into Devon Garlin’s hands. It proves his point that Panoply can’t offer the security we’ve promised. And that helps the breakaway cause. If the Glitter Band starts fragmenting, you won’t have the fully functioning networks you need to keep one step ahead of the Clockmaker.”

  “A rather tortuous argument, even by your long-winded standards.”

  “Take it or leave it. But a single name doesn’t buy you any favours from me.”

  “Whereas all the names … might?”

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  “It sounded as if you did.” Something mischievous twinkled in her eyes. “An impasse, then. You won’t budge and I won’t budge. But we both want something. Let’s see if we can’t come to an arrangement, shall we? I’ll disclose a partial list of the names.”

  “All or nothing.”

  “Oh, Prefect Dreyfus, do try to learn some patience—it would do you a world of good.” She coughed delicately. “I hadn’t finished speaking. I’ll disclose a partial list, including all the names on the patient file, but stripped down to only a few characters in each name. That’ll be sufficient to confirm that I have the known cases, and you’ll also be able to cross-match the next death against my list. The partial list won’t give you any predictive powers, but it will confirm that I have the full set of names, if and when you decide to come back and ask for them. As a token of my goodwill, too, I’ll be giving you a very significant piece of information: the total number of deaths ahead of you.”

  “You could tell me that now.”

  “But that wouldn’t be fun for either of us. And this is such fun, isn’t it?”

  “Where can I expect this partial list?”

  “You’ll find it. And you know where to find me, if and when you see sense. Think of the power those names could give you. Find those people, bring them in for emergency surgery, and you’ve crushed this public emergency in one stroke. Denied Devon Garlin a hand in the breakup of the thing most dear to you. A year from now, he could be history—along with the memory of this unpleasantness. Isn’t that attractive, Prefect Dreyfus? Isn’t that tempting?”