Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  Aumonier took out the still frame of Doctor Julius Mazarin, the one she had already tested on Garlin.

  “You showed clear recognition when I presented this image to you.”

  He shot her a scornful look. “Hard not to recognise my own face.”

  “Then you accept that it’s you?”

  “What are you trying to prove here, Aumonier? Anyone could fake up a picture of me in that place. It proves nothing. Whoever did it didn’t even take the time to get all the details right. Haven’t you noticed the scar under my eye?”

  “I thought it was an affectation, designed to make you look tougher than you really are.”

  “I’ve had it since I was young, you stupid …” He paused, some doubt or troubled recollection showing in his features for an instant. “A boy did it, that’s all. A game that went wrong. I never had it fixed, because why should I?”

  Aumonier withdrew the picture of Julius Mazarin, annoyed at herself for not noticing the absence of that scar, but equally refusing to rush to judgement about the significance of that detail. Perhaps the scar had been removed from the video, or cosmetically concealed when the recording was made. Perhaps Garlin was lying when he said he had possessed the scar since his youth.

  Perhaps many things. But she still had a tingle of doubt.

  She returned to one of the earlier frames. It was the motif of the white tree, on the inside of one of the elevators. She slid it across the table, waiting until his eyes snapped onto it.

  “Forget the face for now. You still knew what this was. It had some prior significance to you.”

  She nodded to Tang, instructing him to increase the power.

  As the trawl took a firmer hold so Garlin tensed and began to have increasing difficulty forming words. “It’s a white … tree.”

  “It’s emblematic of something, Mister Garlin. You based the architecture of your clinic around this motif, didn’t you? The tree has some personal meaning to you, something you can’t hide from the trawl …”

  “Haven’t you … ever seen a … white tree?”

  “That’s more than just a white tree. It’s an idiosyncratic symbol, something of profound personal significance.” She glanced at Tang again, gave a nod.

  Tang whispered: “We’re at the safe limit now, ma’am.”

  “Higher.”

  After a fractional hesitation Tang adjusted the settings. The trawl’s humming escalated in an almost musical fashion. Garlin stiffened, a low strangling sound coming from the base of his throat.

  “Let me make myself plain,” Aumonier said, selecting another image from her portfolio. “I’m at the end of my patience. The Wildfire deaths are coming in at more than one a minute now. In the guise of Julius Mazarin—the face I showed you; your face—you primed their Voi kernels to behave in this way. Now you’re going to tell me how to resolve this emergency. Starting with the significance of this object …”

  She presented an image of Lethe to him.

  He looked at her with a mad bemusement. “It’s a rock. A … fucking … rock.”

  “The death curve steepened after we approached this object, too sharply for me to accept that it was coincidence.” She flicked her attention to Tang, hoping for the tell-tale marker of prior recognition. “Lethe, Mister Garlin. It’s a family asset. What’s there?”

  “I don’t …”

  Tang’s expression had not shifted since he started the trawl, and still there was no private signal to suggest that Garlin had any prior knowledge of Lethe.

  She moved to present another image. But as she was touching the folder, she felt a soft bump pass through the room. She twisted in her seat, anger flaring. She had given express orders that she should not be disturbed while conducting the trawl.

  “Reduce the power,” she mouthed to Tang, rising from her chair, intending to step through into the observation partition and give merry hell to whoever had countermanded that order.

  She had barely left the chair, though, when the connecting door opened from the other side.

  “Pull him out of the trawl,” Dreyfus said, without preamble.

  “I’m in the middle of—”

  “Pull him out. He’s innocent.”

  Aumonier shook her head, denying this truth before its wider implications had time to uncoil themselves. “You’ve been arguing exactly the opposite for months. Even if I had any lingering doubts, the newest wave of deaths has banished them completely.”

  Behind Dreyfus were two other individuals, neither of whom had any authority to be in this part of Panoply. One—she recognised, almost guiltily—was the Detective-Marshal from Chasm City. The other was a thin, ghost-faced man who meant precisely nothing to her.

  “Devon Garlin is a threat to the public order,” Dreyfus said, while Tang waited for an order from Aumonier. “I’m confident we can build a solid case against him, purely on the basis of his public deeds and pronouncements.”

  “And?” she asked.

  “He isn’t responsible for Wildfire. You can trawl him until steam comes out of his ears and you won’t find the link you’re looking for. He had nothing to do with Elysium Heights.”

  Someone was breathing heavily and it took Aumonier a second to realise that it was herself. Her skin tingled. She felt as if she had been slapped hard across both cheeks.

  She looked at Tang. “Power down. Get it off him.” For now, she added, for her own silent benefit.

  “Ma’am,” Tang said, not without a blush of relief. He deactivated the trawl, elevated the hood, and wheeled it back from the chair.

  “Loosen the restraints,” Dreyfus said.

  18

  Julius and Caleb approached the fallen form. The lion was still breathing, but that was only to be expected given Caleb’s refusal to allow any of his animals a quick, clean death. Given where the bolt had gone in, Julius had no doubt the wound would prove fatal. The lion had been shot in the neck, blood emerging in bright, crimson pulses.

  Still, he approached the lion warily, conscious that Caleb was holding back for some reason. Julius glanced at his brother, sensing some deception, some shift in the rules of the game which Caleb had not yet disclosed. The lion could not be physically real, Julius told himself: there wasn’t nearly enough quickmatter in the environs of the Shell House to produce a three-dimensional form as large as a lion. But even if the lion remained an illusion, as it had to be, Julius began to wonder if Caleb had still found a way to make it harmful.

  “You aren’t as bored with this game as you make out,” Julius whispered to himself.

  “Wait,” Caleb said with a sudden urgency.

  Julius halted at the instruction, looking back impatiently. “What now? I shot it, didn’t I? Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Something’s not right. You were meant to shoot the lion. You weren’t meant to shoot—”

  “No,” Julius said, denying what he now saw before his eyes. “No. That’s not real. It was the lion. I shot the lion.” His mouth had turned very dry. “I saw the lion and I shot the lion. I didn’t—”

  “What have you done?” Caleb said, in an awed, horror-struck tone. “My god, Julius. What have you done?”

  The lion had been lying on the ground a moment earlier. Julius was sure of it. But where the lion had been was now their mother, slumped on her side, strangely still, the bolt embedded in her chest, a spreading blood pool already forming a dark, forbidding cordon around her body.

  Julius approached a few paces nearer, then halted. “It’s a trick,” he said, hating his brother for the cruelty of this stunt but relieved he had seen it for the illusion it was. “If you can make me see a lion, then you can put a figment of our mother in its place. You’re sick, Caleb. Twisted. Why would you even—”

  “It’s not a figment,” Caleb said, coming to stand next to Julius. “I swear it. That blood’s soaking into the ground just like real blood.” He drew breath, shuddered. “It’s real. She’s real. You really shot her. And it looks like—”


  Something broke in Julius, overriding all other concerns. He dashed to the fallen form and reached out, fingers slowing as they neared the side of her face, clinging to one last, desperate hope that she would prove a figment, as the panther had been, as every other hunt had been, and that his fingers would scythe through that substanceless surface and find nothing but air beneath it. Then his fingertips touched flesh: colder than he had expected, but real flesh for all that.

  It could still be a trick, he thought. Caleb could have found a way to manipulate his senses that comprehensively, so he felt the figment as a real thing. But as he pressed his fingers against her face, he felt a yielding subsidence of bone and muscle, her body shifting against the pressure. It was his mother, real and present and dying on the ground, where he had shot her.

  “Lurcher!” Caleb called, throwing himself back and bellowing the robot’s name. “Lurcher—it’s an emergency!”

  Julius crouched lower. He wanted to press a hand against the wound, to staunch the blood, but he was afraid of doing more harm than good, of inflicting distress when he meant to provide comfort. He knew nothing of emergency medicine, nothing of first aid. Those scraps of knowledge had no place in the modern world.

  But they were not in the modern world, not just yet. They were in a strange sheltered bubble, where some rules applied but others did not. And his mother was dying.

  Her eyelids fluttered. He had the sense she was on the edge of consciousness. He brought his own face next to hers, as if both of them were staring out at the same odd spectacle, viewing the world sideways on.

  “Please don’t die,” he said.

  She made a sound that could have been “Julius,” a polysyllabic gasp and hiss that he chose to hear as his own name. Then her eyes closed tightly and a more profound and permanent stillness seemed to take hold of her.

  “Lurcher!” Caleb called again. “Quickly, Lurcher!”

  There was a terrible silence. Julius touched his mother’s face again, moving a lock of hair away from her cheek, then turned to look at his brother.

  “You did this,” Julius said.

  “What are you saying, you idiot? You were the one with the crossbow. You were the one who thought you were shooting a lion.”

  Julius was surprised at how calm he sounded. He was outside himself, hearing his own words, impressed by the force of certainty he heard in them. They sounded as if they were coming from some other, more assertive version of himself, a Julius who had crossed the gap between childhood and adulthood in the time it took a crossbow bolt to murder his mother.

  “You made me see a lion,” Julius stated, the mechanics of Caleb’s deception becoming clear to him with the dreadful clarity of hindsight, like a blueprint that had just snapped into focus. “You could edit my visual field. I already knew that, and I should have seen it coming.” He rose up from the ground, content to leave his mother where she was while he addressed Caleb. “You wanted her dead, because you were afraid she’d revoke our powers. But you didn’t have the guts to do it yourself.”

  Caleb took a step backwards. “You’re not thinking straight. I didn’t make this happen. I told you to be careful with that crossbow …”

  “This is why you wanted one last game,” Julius said.

  Caleb must have seen something in his eyes, some new and wild anger. “Brother …”

  Julius still held the crossbow. He glanced at it for a second, wondering why Caleb had not considered this detail. Then he looked back at their mother, and extended a hand to the crossbow bolt. For once, the conjuring command came to mind without effort; indeed, he formed and executed the order so fluidly that it seemed to happen at an almost autonomic level. The bolt wriggled and popped itself out of the wound, a weak, sticky-looking pulse of blood following it. The bolt began to inch its away along the ground with wormlike undulations.

  Too slow. Julius reached for it again and sent another conjuring command. Again, it required little or no conscious will. It was as if, after months of struggle, he had finally broken through into the realm of effortless expertise that his brother seemed to inhabit so naturally. He knew what he wanted the quickmatter to do, and the quickmatter fell into immediate, eager obedience. All the intermediate steps—visualising the state changes, thinking of them in terms of geometry and physics—now felt superfluous and clumsy—beneath him.

  The shock and fury of his mother’s death had opened a door.

  The bolt shattered into a hundred ant-like specks. Julius opened his fist and the specks swarmed through the air, only congealing back into the form of the bolt at the last instant, as his fingers tightened.

  The bolt felt cold, solid, clean.

  He primed the crossbow. He slipped the bolt back into the crossbow.

  “No,” Caleb said. “Put it down, Julius.”

  Julius levelled the crossbow at his brother. “You’re so good with quickmatter, why don’t you make me?”

  Caleb stumbled back, raising a hand. In his own hand Julius felt the crossbow trying to become something other than its present form, a kind of restless shudder passing through the entire object. Julius resisted his brother’s intention, again more by reflexive instinct than the considered, deliberate issuing of a counter-command. Caleb responded in turn, the crossbow squirming and writhing like some distant thing seen in a mirage, Julius just managing to maintain the weapon’s functional integrity. If their earlier games had been as sequential and cerebral as chess, now the struggle felt more like wrestling: a continuous, fluid, bruising engagement.

  Julius surprised himself at how well he resisted Caleb. But the toll was intense and with an instant’s inattention he would lose control. While he was still able to hold the crossbow’s form, he released the bolt in Caleb’s direction.

  Time slowed.

  The crossbow liquefied, sluicing through his fingers like thick black oil. The bolt’s course began to bend, as Caleb tried to shift its aerodynamics. Then he tried to shatter it into a multitude of components, as Julius had done before. But Julius was imposing a reinforcing command on the bolt, compelling it to stay whole.

  It broke into five or six blunt, sluglike components. Deflection wrenched most of them past Caleb’s face. One part struck him under the eye, before spinning away.

  Caleb stood like a statue, shock and amazement on his face, even as blood began to flow from the wound. He reached up, touched his face, stared down in mute astonishment at his bloodied fingertips.

  “You’ve gone mad,” he said, raising his voice as if he expected an audience. “First Mother, then me.”

  Most of the quickmatter had formed a twitching puddle at Julius’s feet. Caleb grasped for it and the puddle began to stretch itself towards him, like an amoeba searching for a food source. Julius snarled and issued a sharp, violent, dispersing command, flinging the constituents of the puddle away in all directions.

  Caleb, as weaponless as Julius, took another stumbling step backwards. The blood scribed a line of red warpaint down one side of his face. He raised his palm at Julius again and Julius’s world exploded with a chrome brightness so vivid that it became hot pain.

  “If you can do that …” Julius said, blinded under the visual overload. “So can I.”

  Even without sight he felt he could see the inside of Caleb’s brain, its layered mysteries as glassy and translucent as a paperweight. He knew where to make Caleb hurt, where to make Caleb scream. It was just a question of reaching inside and doing bad things.

  It was easy for him now. The wonder was that it had ever been difficult.

  Julius could see again. Caleb was still trying to blind him, but Julius was stronger, deflecting his brother’s intentions. Julius mirrored and amplified the same commands and Caleb buckled to his knees, then dropped to the ground, drool loosening from his mouth.

  Julius was the master of his brother now. With each breath he seemed to draw strength from Caleb, even as Caleb became weaker. He knelt as close to Caleb as he had been to his mother, staring into C
aleb’s eyes as they rolled back.

  “I could kill you,” Julius said softly. “You see that now. You were the stronger of us, once. But you released something in me today. And now it’s like swimming. I can’t imagine how there was ever a time when I didn’t have this power.”

  Hearing something, he stood taller. Undergrowth shifted and Lurcher came striding into the scene, silver limbs scissoring as the robot assessed the scene and moved immediately to their mother’s side. Lurcher examined the body with an efficient, meticulous detachment, while the single eye of its domed head swivelled onto Caleb and then Julius, regarding him with an odd, accusatorial intensity.

  More movement. Their father was hard on Lurcher’s heels, already out of breath as he sweated his way through the overgrowth, comprehension breaking on his face as he took into the bloody tableau, Julius the only one still standing.

  “My god …” Marlon Voi began.

  Julius raised a silencing hand. “She’s dead, Father. It’s much too late to do anything for her now. But I didn’t kill her. I’d never have done that. I loved her. I may have shot her, but that’s only because Caleb tricked me.”

  Father almost pushed Lurcher aside in his haste to reach his fallen wife. He touched her on the forehead, shock and grief already making an unfamiliar mask of his face.

  “What have you monsters done to her?”

  “I said it wasn’t me,” Julius persisted. “It was Caleb. That’s why I’ve punished him. He was stronger than me, but only up to a point. When he pushed we found out who was really the stronger of us.” Then, with sudden reasonableness: “Shall I kill him, Father? Once and for all?”

  “Put them to sleep,” Father said, his voice breaking. “Now.”

  It was an order meant for Lurcher. The robot straightened itself up, extending one of its arms, a needle sliding out from a hidden pocket in the robot’s wrist. Lurcher took a bounding stride towards Julius.

  Julius willed the robot to halt. It was as transparent to him as his brother, its levers as easy to pull.

  “I like this,” he said, marvelling at it. He knew he ought to be feeling the same shock and grief that his father was, and to begin with, in the moments after the kill, there had been a little of that. But it had been a weak signal soon drowned by something much stronger, much less ignorable.