Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  The tests, as promised, were simple and painless. For the most part Doctor Stasov worked silently, and even when the boys were alone with him he refused to be drawn into any sort of conversation. Neither Julius nor Caleb were foolish enough to ask him direct questions about what he might have meant during the argument, but they needled around their ignorance with questions about life in Chasm City, what he did when he wasn’t in the Shell House, what sort of clients he also visited, and so on. But Doctor Stasov rewarded none of these enquiries with answers.

  Only Caleb was brave enough to allude to the conversation. “What’s blackmail, Doctor?”

  Stasov twitched up his head from his medical devices. Through his silver fringe his black eyes widened with sudden sharp alarm. “Why do you ask?”

  “I read the word in a story,” Caleb said. “I didn’t know what it meant.”

  “Be glad,” Stasov said.

  He completed the tests soon after that, but not without delivering more than one lingering look at Caleb, and perhaps Julius as well. Then he gathered his things into the bag, closing its clasp with his spindly, branchlike fingers, and took his leave. They heard him downstairs, communicating in low tones with his mother and father. They were not arguing now, but there was still a coldness in the exchanges.

  “You stupid idiot,” Julius said. “Read that in a book. When do you ever bother with books? You’re too busy thinking of things to shoot.”

  “He swallowed it.” Caleb shrugged.

  “I’m not sure he did. You can bluff about a lot of things, Caleb, but you’re not exactly a born scholar.”

  “No, I’d rather leave that to you. It’s about all you’re good for, isn’t it?”

  There was some nasty kernel of truth in that, because if one of them was likely to get caught up in reading it was Julius, not his burlier twin. Julius thought of something he had read the night before, something he had meant to share with Caleb, but now he decided to keep it to himself, at least for now.

  But not without a tease.

  “You think books are worthless, brother. But I know something you don’t.”

  “How to fall down? How to not catch things? How to miss an animal that’s standing five metres away?”

  “I know what we are.”

  Caleb could tolerate many things, but feeling inferior to Julius was not one of them.

  “What?”

  “You heard what Spider-fingers called us. Monsters. And I know what he meant by it, too. Something bad happened, Caleb, a long time ago. We’re the survivors.”

  Caleb hissed his contempt. But there was a splinter of dark curiosity lodged in his eyes. He just couldn’t bear to ask Julius what he meant.

  Over weeks and months the boys gained instruction in the means by which they could shape the flow of information around their world. The Solid Orrery was always at the heart of these lessons, sheathed over in the pearly ghost-light of the shimmer. Sometimes it was Father giving the tuition, sometimes Mother, sometimes (rarely) both of them. Always the boys were made to feel the press of responsibility upon their shoulders, reminded time and again that this was a grave and terrible obligation, something passed to them in solemnity and trust—a thread of duty and honour stretching back to Sandra Voi. And always the boys nodded and made it clear they understood this was as much a stigma as a blessing, because when the moment came, the calling for which they had been prepared, they would have no one to turn to but themselves. “The true test will be when we’re gone,” Father said. “Until then, you won’t ever know the full force of your burden. But we have borne it, and so will you.”

  All they did for the first few weeks was learn how to feel the shimmer’s moods, attuning themselves to its music. They learned how to pull information from the abstraction, accessing channels and feeds that were closed to the average citizen. They could break through layers of privacy and security that were considered inviolable, and again all because of the deliberate features rooted deep in the architecture. Sandra Voi had known it was not sufficient just to be able to influence; the influence itself must be predicated on rich, reliable intelligence. Panoply had its monitoring feeds, its eyes and ears, but these were subject to rigorous oversight and constantly scrutinised terms of use. No such limits applied to the contingency. The boys could project their awareness almost without limit, and for a while the thrill of it was intoxicating. Julius had often wondered about life beyond the Shell House; now he realised there was almost no need to leave. Everything he could ever want was already within reach.

  But again it was emphasised that this omniscient capability was only there to serve a specific good, and must never be abused. Julius accepted this with equanimity. Caleb, though, continued to test the limits—except when their parents were paying close heed.

  Lessons in intervention followed soon after. They began modestly, echoing Father’s initial demonstration. The boys learned to delay individual votes, to suppress them, to change their nature. There was never any danger of upsetting a result since they only ever intervened on uncontroversial ballots.

  Slowly, though, they were taught to magnify their influence.

  If the altering of individual votes was a precise, surgical exercise, then altering hundreds of thousands, or even millions, was more like marshalling the scattered forces of a military campaign, with the details of the engagement much less important than the outcome. Father and Mother watched their progress carefully, rarely showing satisfaction or displeasure. It was not sufficient just to influence the results. The boys also had to show that they had the necessary restraint to achieve their ends with the smallest possible intervention, in a manner that would never have called attention to itself.

  “Just because we can act,” Father explained, “doesn’t mean we do—even if the outcome is one that we agree should be changed. Sometimes the public mood is so clearly aligned in one direction that it cannot be resisted.”

  Julius frowned. “Doesn’t that go against the whole point of the contingency?”

  “What he means,” Caleb said, “is that we can’t go around changing votes if it’s expected to be a landslide result. That would look too suspicious, and before you know it we’d have Panoply digging through the polling architecture.”

  Father nodded. “Caleb’s right. Our interventions must—except in very extreme cases—be limited to marginal ballots, where a one or two per cent shift is all that’s needed.”

  “Doesn’t that mean our hands are tied?” Julius asked.

  “Not if we choose our targets carefully,” Father answered. “Marginal ballots often have a bearing on key petitions, and we can shift the public mood without ever going near the cases where our intervention might be apparent. Bias a dozen marginals, and we can engineer a landslide that gives us exactly the result we always wanted, without tampering with a single vote in the key.”

  Over the weeks Julius had noticed that there had been a gradual shift in the way his father talked about the interventions, from a rare, last-resort thing to an almost commonplace process. If Sandra Voi had meant her power to be used only in constitutional emergencies, when the very foundations of demarchist society were at risk of being undermined from within, then she had clearly underestimated how often those crises came around.

  That was the trouble with having a gift, though—however fairly or unfairly it had been acquired.

  Sooner or later one felt obliged to use it.

  Dreyfus and Jane Aumonier faced each other across the table of the tactical room. They were alone, Dreyfus having taken the unusual step of requesting a private audience immediately after his return from Elysium Heights.

  “Case sixty was confirmed just over thirteen hours ago,” Aumonier said, tapping her nails on the table as she spoke. “We have a high probable on case sixty-one, as of eight hours ago, and our triggers are flagging a possible sixty-second death at this very moment. The curve isn’t just steepening, it’s turning nearly vertical. There’s only one crumb of comfort to be extracted f
rom this latest spate, and that’s being generous. Do you know Elspeth Auriault?”

  Dreyfus rubbed the corner of his eyes, dry after the air on the cutter.

  “I remember her being a satisfactory student.”

  “Auriault was close enough to secure the head on case sixty-one. It’s with Demikhov as we speak, and there’s a chance the implants may be in a slightly better state of preservation than they were with Bronner. A lucky break, if that’s the case.”

  Dreyfus made a mental note to speak to Demikhov.

  “Luck comes in waves. Perhaps we were overdue.”

  “You have something to share, evidently. Something you didn’t think was suitable for the ears of my other seniors.”

  Dreyfus glanced at his lap before answering, knowing there would be no going back once he had voiced his theory.

  “It’s about Garlin.”

  She looked puzzled. “It can’t be. I forbade you to have any further involvement with the man.”

  “Something’s changed. I’m afraid I’ve no choice but to resume my investigations.”

  “Good of you to make that decision for yourself.”

  “I’m only pursuing the course of action you set me on. I was tasked to look into the Wildfire crisis, and now it’s thrown up a link to Devon Garlin.”

  She eyed him silently for a few moments, as if mentally reviewing every success and failure of his career, every instance when she had placed her confidence in him.

  “You’ve been praying for a link from the moment Garlin humiliated you. Imagining something—wanting it desperately—that doesn’t make it so.”

  “It’s why I had to speak to you in private. Clearmountain and the others would have laughed me out of the room as soon as I mentioned Garlin.”

  “They’d have ample reason.” She shook her head, more in sorrow than anger. “This had better be good. No, better than good.”

  “Try this. One of the companies behind the clinic is called Nautilus Holdings.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “There’s no reason you would have. Nautilus Holdings was set up by the Shell House. It was an investment enterprise owned and operated by the Voi family.”

  Aumonier’s interest was unmistakable, even tempered with her natural scepticism.

  “You’d better be certain about this.”

  Dreyfus slid a compad across to Aumonier, documenting the chain of connections that tied Elysium Heights to the birthplace of Julius Devon Garlin Voi. “It’s all here, in verified transactions. Over a period of about ten years a large portion of the Voi estate’s savings was siphoned into Nautilus Holdings, and Nautilus Holdings was the main source of funds for the leasehold and construction of Elysium Heights. No one wanted that to be visible, though.”

  Aumonier’s finger stroked down the ledger of transactions. “That ten-year period started in ’386. Remind me when Aliya Voi had her shuttle accident?”

  “The same year, only few months before the start of these transactions. The money kept being siphoned off until ’395, then the transactions tailed away sharply. The clinic was up and running by then, and entirely self-financing. It continued operating for little more than a decade, closing its books in ’407.”

  “Someone goes to all that trouble to fund and build a huge, well-equipped clinic, then runs it for only twelve years?”

  “Not only that, but they went to a great deal of trouble to hide a link to the Voi estate.”

  There was a long silence. More than once Dreyfus sensed that Aumonier was about to speak before she censored herself, as if she dared not put into words the thoughts they were both sharing.

  “This is … delicate,” she eventually allowed. “I can’t draw a link to Devon Garlin on this basis alone. Rich families sink money into a lot of speculative projects, especially when they’re nervous about the future. For all we know the clinic was just one among a spread of investments.”

  “There’s something else.” Dreyfus kept his voice low, matter-of-fact. “It just came in from the technicians. They’ve recovered a list of patient names. The file was badly corrupted, but there’s enough in it to make a comparison against the known Wildfire dead. The name fragments correlate with our cases.”

  “This is … more than I expected.”

  “What interests me are the names in the list that don’t correlate. There are nearly two thousand of them. I believe they’re citizens who are still alive, still walking around, and who’ll succumb to Wildfire if the pattern continues.”

  Aumonier’s reaction was guarded, caught between concern and a guilty relief that the terms of her emergency might have been clarified. “If it really does limit itself to these two thousand cases … then at least we’re not looking at the end of civilisation.”

  “That was my thinking as well. It’s a disaster for these people … but life goes on. The crisis will burn out of its natural accord. The news will move on, and something else will become our next headache.”

  “But we have a duty to these people, if that list is to be taken at face value.”

  Dreyfus nodded. “We can cross-check each case as it occurs, but we can’t identify the two thousand people still out there. There are just too many possible matches to the fragments. We’d have to reach out to several hundred thousand citizens, very quickly, all the while trying not to ignite mass panic. Even if we had complete cooperation from all local constables and medical functionaries, we couldn’t do it inside a month.”

  “And there’s no chance of obtaining an intact list? If I re-tasked all available personnel, called in our most trusted constables, we might be able to contain and isolate those citizens in a couple of days.”

  “If I knew a way of getting those names, you’d have them,” Dreyfus said.

  With a sigh Aumonier pushed the compad back to his side of the table. “Without that intact list, I’m still powerless. And the rest of your evidence chain remains circumstantial. I trust your instincts, but it’s not as if I can bring Garlin in just because of some tenuous link to his family.”

  “Someone ought to take a closer look at the Shell House,” Dreyfus said.

  “What are you expecting to find?”

  “The coincidence of those dates troubles me. Aliya Voi dies, and the funding for the clinic starts soon after.”

  “Perhaps it’s as simple as Marlon being grief-stricken, and making bad decisions about what was left of the fortune.”

  “Are we certain Aliya’s death was accidental?”

  Aumonier made a long, low nasal sound. “Since I know how your mind works, I also pulled the case file on that accident. Not our jurisdiction, obviously, but the report was widely distributed between the differing agencies.”

  “Leaked, you might say. To help erase any suspicion of complicity where the surviving Vois were concerned.”

  “It was a private shuttle returning to Yellowstone from the Glitter Band. Aliya Voi was the only occupant.”

  “Did anyone see her leave the Shell House?”

  Aumonier frowned. “You think she was somehow murdered at home and then her body put into that shuttle?”

  “It was a small private spacecraft, and with their influence the Vois wouldn’t have been troubled by border inspections. It could have flown all the way from the Shell House, out through Chasm City and into space, with no one ever seeing who was inside it.”

  “To what end?”

  “Someone—say, Marlon or Julius—could have set the autopilot, told it to leave the atmosphere and then come back on a too steep re-entry profile. Made it look like Aliya’s recklessness. Body charred almost beyond recognition—just enough left for a DNA sample, so everyone’s happy to consider the case closed.”

  “Yes, very ingenious. I’ll have Garlin bought in on a presumptive murder charge immediately. There’s just one snag. Aliya’s movements prior to her death are well documented. She visited a number of orbital holdings still linked to the estate—minor asteroids and habitats within the Glitter
Band. Witness testimonies prove beyond doubt that she was alive, and in space, only a few hours before the accident. Those testimonies have been triple-checked and verified. There’s no way she could have returned to Yellowstone, visited the Shell House, been murdered, and her body been shipped back into space.” Her face fell into an almost sympathetic demeanour. “I’m sorry. I’m more than willing to accept that there are skeletons in the Voi family, but her death isn’t one of them.”

  Dreyfus forced himself to accept the obvious facts of the case, realising he had overlooked the significance of the witness testimonies. “I’d still like to kick over a few stones. Can you get me permission to visit the Shell House?”

  “I thought you were done asking special favours of me.”

  “Just this one time.”

  “It’s off our beat, as you well know. I’d need to liaise with the office of the Detective-Marshal in Chasm City.” Something tightened in her face, some awkward recollection. “This might take a few hours.”

  Thalia raised a hand to her brow, shielding her tired eyes from the dusty glare inside House Fuxin-Nymburk. She and Sparver had just disembarked through the docking complex and were now standing on a low-gravity reception platform, staring down the long, tubular length of the cylindrical habitat.

  In the open areas that she could see—the public promenades, gardens, parks and lakesides—mobs were gathering and clashing, with clear lines of division beginning to form, as if a hundred ragged armies were massing for some final, bloody settlement of their various long-held grievances. All public transport systems appeared to be suspended, with no trains or trams moving between their stops, and no aerial craft visible. Warning sirens sounded from near and far, along with pre-recorded statements, rendered unintelligible by echoes and distance. Coloured gases—some kind of pacification measure—wafted ineffectually across trees and rooftops. Fires had broken out in dozens of locations, their smoke trails rising, bending and then curdling in accordance with the habitat’s spin-generated gravity.