Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  Instead of grief, what Julius felt was release. Release and possibility and the giddy exhilaration of testing his own limits.

  “She was right about you,” Father said.

  “About both of us? Or just Caleb?” Julius frowned, touching a finger to his lip. “I know she didn’t trust him, but I was never like him, was I? I was always the better brother.”

  Father was sobbing now, bending over the still body of their mother. He dabbed at the wound in her chest, his fingers coming away sticky and red.

  “I should have listened,” he said, as if that admission was meant for the woman on the ground, rather than either of the boys.

  Julius stood watching, a cold spectator to his father’s melodramatics. He was content to give his father a little more time with his dead wife before getting to the matter at hand. Then he coughed gently.

  “This is a bit of a mess, isn’t it? You’ve got a dead wife on your hands. Of course, you could go straight to the authorities, but then you’d have some awkward explaining to do. Us, to start with. Where we’re from. What those dreams of ours are about. The Ursas, the other boys and girls. The knives. Doctor Stasov. The contingency … yes, there’s quite a lot that it might be best to keep out of the public eye, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Father looked at him. Hate welled behind his tear-clotted eyes.

  “What do you propose, you little shit?”

  “I propose,” Julius declared grandly, “that it’s time for me to make my way in the world. I think I’m ready.” He grinned, cocking his head in the direction of the dome and all that stood beyond it. “I think I’m more than ready.”

  Dreyfus reached down and undid the straps himself. It brought their heads close. Garlin turned his face to meet Dreyfus, a sneer lifting the corner of his mouth.

  “It’s a nice try,” he said, still slurred. “But I know a stunt when I see one. You’ve set this up. You’re hoping you’ll get me off my guard.”

  “It’s not a stunt,” Dreyfus said. “There isn’t anyone in Panoply who’s staked more on your guilt than me. I went down to Chasm City to find the final piece of evidence that would tie it all together. Instead I found Doctor Stasov.”

  “Would you mind explaining this man’s involvement?” Aumonier asked. “Or what he’s doing deep inside Panoply?”

  “Might I?” said the woman.

  Aumonier dredged her memory for the woman’s name. “Yes … go ahead, Detective-Marshal Del Mar. I’d be very grateful.”

  “Doctor Stasov has been known to me for some while, Supreme Prefect. He was the family physician to the Vois. He was called into their service when the boys were eight years old—”

  Aumonier made to speak. Dreyfus raised a cautioning hand. “Hear her out, Jane. You won’t be asking anything we haven’t already gone over.”

  “There were two sons,” Del Mar went on. “Two brothers. Julius Devon Garlin Voi and his brother Caleb. You have no record of Caleb, and neither did we. But Doctor Stasov helped with their development, observing the boys as they were initiated into some of the inner secrets of the Vois. You suspect that Julius has access to forbidden layers of the Voi kernel, a way to sift and manipulate abstraction data, reaching into others’ heads, bending the consensual reality field to suit his aims. You’re nearly right. Julius does have unusual capabilities. But he’s closer to an idiot savant, blessed with gifts he barely recognises that he possesses. Caleb, on the other hand …”

  “This brother no one’s heard about until now,” Aumonier said, making no effort to hide her scepticism.

  “He’s real enough,” Doctor Stasov said, speaking for the first time. He had a high, quavering voice, shot through with fractures, like some old piece of pottery that had been broken and reassembled too many times. “I visited that household many times. Caleb was always the faster of the two. The more dominant—the crueller, too, if you want my opinion.”

  “And you’re saying he’s behind all this?”

  “It fits,” Detective-Marshal Del Mar said. “Caleb has the same capabilities as Julius, except in Caleb’s case they’re directed, purposeful. Caleb knows what he’s doing, what he wants, and how to achieve it. His brother’s only ever been an unwilling instrument.”

  “And this … objective?” Aumonier asked, still not willing to surrender her doubts.

  “Punishment,” Dreyfus said. “That’s all. Retribution. Directed at the two thousand Wildfire cases in particular, but the rest of us in general. And if we all go down in flames, if everything burns, Caleb won’t mind at all. He doesn’t want to live. He doesn’t want to make things better for himself. He just wants to destroy.”

  “I don’t have a brother,” Garlin said. “Do you think I’d forget that I had a brother?”

  “Lethe is the river of forgetting,” Dreyfus answered. “I think it’s very likely that you did forget—or were made to. Tell them, Balthasar.”

  Doctor Stasov—Balthasar must have been his first name—said: “The family had the means. The boys had already been put through at least one round of forced amnesia treatment when I entered the household service. Their entire environment was shaped to enforce one narrative: that they were the natural sons and heirs of Marlon and Aliya Voi. But for as long as I worked with them, the boys were troubled by fleeting recollections of an alternate past. They rarely allowed themselves to speak of it, because it was so disturbing to both of them. At best, they tried to pretend it was just a particularly upsetting recurring dream. But it seemed to me that something that powerful, that vivid, must be rooted in an objective reality.”

  “And this troubling past?” Aumonier asked, feeling herself being drawn down a rabbit hole despite her natural reluctance.

  “I tried to find out. The boys—Julius in particular—were drawn to a particular historical episode. It nagged at them in a way that can’t be down to chance. I began to wonder then if this was a hint of their true memories, breaking through the forced amnesia.”

  “What episode would this be?” Dreyfus asked.

  “Something too impossibly remote for it to be true. The Amerikano settlement. The failed colony, the children raised by machines. But that was three hundred years ago …”

  “Could the boys have been kept in hibernation since then?” Aumonier asked, with a direct and level gaze.

  “No one’s ever been frozen for that long,” Doctor Stasov answered. “Besides, when I had my suspicions … I took a liberty. I managed to obtain genetic samples of all four individuals: Marlon, Aliya, Julius and Caleb. The boys are the natural heirs of Marlon and Aliya.”

  “Then that rules out any possible link to the Amerikano era,” Aumonier said.

  “He’s raving about something that makes no sense,” Garlin said. “I also don’t have the faintest idea who this man is.”

  “You don’t know that you know him,” Dreyfus said. “But if we put you back under that trawl, I’m sure we’d pick up a clear memory, suppressed or otherwise.”

  “Go ahead, if you’re so certain.”

  “We wouldn’t have the right,” Dreyfus said, directing his answer as much at Aumonier as the man in the chair. “When it seemed that you were directly responsible for Wildfire, a case could be made. I suppose the citizen quorum gave their assent?”

  “She’d have got them to say whatever she wanted,” Garlin said. “If they even existed in the first place.”

  “Precautions had to be taken,” Aumonier said, instantly detesting the pleading, self-justifying tone she heard in her answer. Grow a spine, she thought, and stop sounding like a child caught stealing cookies. She had only ever acted on the basis of the best intelligence available to her.

  “Sit down with him, Balthasar,” Dreyfus told the doctor. “You were with him until he was sixteen, according to your account. Whatever happened to bury his memories of your involvement, there’ll still be some latent recall. Tell him what you remember about the Shell House—and what you discovered. Hopefully that’ll jog some memories. And Julius?” />
  His hand free, Garlin stroked his swollen lip. “What the hell do you want with me, Dreyfus? Forgiveness?”

  “Not yet,” Dreyfus said bluntly. “But you can start by listening.”

  There was a knock at the partition door. Irritated by yet another interruption, Aumonier opened her mouth to demand an explanation. But the person who had arrived was Senior Prefect Mildred Dosso, not someone to test her patience without good reason.

  “Supreme Prefect—we need you back in the tactical room.”

  “What is it, Mildred?” Aumonier asked.

  Dosso looked around, clearly uncertain how frank she could be in such unusual company.

  “The cruiser, ma’am. The Democratic Circus.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s heading back to Lethe, ma’am.”

  Dreyfus, Aumonier and Detective-Marshal Del Mar arrived at the heavy bronze doors to the tactical room. Doctor Stasov had been left with Garlin, free to speak to him under the close supervision of Robert Tang and Mildred Dosso.

  Aumonier hesitated before opening the doors. “I shouldn’t allow you into this room, Detective-Marshal. Better people than me have lost their positions over lesser security lapses.”

  “But I think we might make an exception here,” Dreyfus said.

  “Yes,” Aumonier said, nodding slowly. “I think we might. I owe you some kind of apology, Hestia. May I call you Hestia? Formalities seem a little … superfluous. I gave you the run-around, when I should have heeded your requests.”

  Detective-Marshal Del Mar appraised this answer and seemed to give some considerable thought to her response.

  “A little more clarity and open-mindedness wouldn’t have hurt … from both of us. You have my word that I’ll respect the confidential nature of anything I see or hear beyond these doors. Now—shall we see what the difficulty is with your ship?”

  Pressing open the double doors, Aumonier said: “Pell is a trusted operative. Bancal’s on that ship as well. He’s … reliable.”

  “I’ve heard that you can be sparing with your praise,” Del Mar said, bending her mouth into half a smile. “From which I take it that you have a very high opinion of the professionalism of that crew.”

  “They were given a clear order to retreat. There’s no reason for them to have disregarded it,” Dreyfus said, following the two women into the darkened hush of the tactical room.

  “A situation might have developed,” Del Mar speculated.

  “Then they’d have notified Panoply after taking action.” Aumonier moved to the table and invited Del Mar to take one of the seats facing her. “I’m afraid the coffee’s cold, but you’re welcome to whatever you can stomach.” She turned her head to Clearmountain. “Did you get any warning, Gaston?”

  “Nothing,” Clearmountain said, hardly raising an eyebrow at the presence of the Chasm City operative. “Pell’s not answering. But our tracer diagnostics show no fault in the comms chain between here and the cruiser.”

  “Where are they now?” Dreyfus asked.

  “Over here, sir,” said Thalia Ng, next to the Solid Orrery.

  Dreyfus moved over to Thalia, overjoyed and conflicted in equal measure. At last he had the proof that she was well, or at least capable of being of service. But the doubts he had nurtured since the Shell House now crystallised into cold, piercing certainty.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “It’s good to see you up and about,” he said, trying to smile away his awkwardness. “I was prepared for … something worse.”

  “I’ll mend, sir. It’s Sparver I’m concerned about. He’s on that ship.”

  Dreyfus forced his mind to the immediate practicalities.

  “So I gather. Are they back inside the anti-collision volume?”

  “Well into it, sir. Current fix has them less than twenty kilometres from Lethe’s centre of mass.”

  “Pell wouldn’t contravene an order,” Dreyfus said, musing aloud—and following a train of thought that could only lead somewhere unpleasant. “So he must still think he’s following orders.”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “Could we get another ship into that area?”

  Thalia conjured some configurations through the Solid Orrery. “Not quickly, sir. Thirty minutes if we re-task one of these assets, longer—”

  He shook his head. “No. It would need to be a ship starting from here, with pre-assigned orders and instructions to disregard any transmissions that come in after they’ve departed.”

  Thalia looked at him oddly. “Are you saying we can’t trust our communications, sir?”

  Dreyfus’s face tightened. “Something like that.”

  “Then we’re stuck. All operable craft are now in-field, other than the cutter you came back with, and that’s being refuelled ready for turnaround.”

  “Hold it for me.”

  “It still won’t get you to Lethe in time to do anything about the Democratic Circus, sir.”

  “We’re not exactly spoilt for choice here, Thalia. I’ll take that ship as soon as it’s ready to move out.”

  Lillian Baudry had joined them next to the Solid Orrery, standing with her arms folded and one hand propping up her chin. She watched the enlargement of Lethe, with its splinter-sized representation of the cruiser. “This will turn out to have a simple explanation, Tom. All our services are under strain at the moment. One shouldn’t read too much into a temporary drop in communications.”

  “That’s a Deep System Cruiser, Lillian. It has the capability to take apart an entire habitat, or turn Lethe into rubble. I can’t say I’m entirely comfortable with the idea of it going rogue.”

  “And I’m equally uncomfortable with throwing another ship into your side-investigation. I hear you’ve had a sudden change of heart concerning Garlin.”

  “He’s the puppet, not the puppet master. I think his brother’s in Lethe.”

  “His brother. Did you just say—?”

  Aumonier raised her voice. “Lillian. Might I have a quick word? With all of you, in fact.” She stood up, her expression reflected back from the shiny surface of the table, ghosted through with the endless scroll of status summaries. She waited a beat, allowing the room to focus its collective attention on her. “Whether or not there’s a brother is something we’ll get to the bottom of. But I have a witness who strikes me as credible, and Detective-Marshal Del Mar will—I think—agree with me in that assessment. Am I right, Hestia?”

  Del Mar seemed reticent. She cleared her throat before speaking, rising only at Aumonier’s invitation.

  “There may be a brother called Caleb, raised under identical circumstances to Julius. But something drove them apart—most likely the death of their mother, Aliya Voi. It’s my belief that Caleb’s been alive all these years, more than likely using his Voi privileges to slip from one assumed identity to another. This clinic you’ve all been interested in—Elysium Heights. Caleb could well have been behind it. He’d have been in exactly the right position to siphon away the family funds and lay the ground for Wildfire.”

  “After all these years?” Baudry asked, making no effort to conceal her disbelief.

  “Yes,” Del Mar affirmed. “Caleb’s patient. He waited for the right time to unleash this emergency—when the public confidence in your organisation was at its lowest ebb; when the Supreme Prefect was already restricted in the range of responses open to her. None of that was accidental.”

  “Sirs,” Thalia said, raising her voice from the Solid Orrery. “I think you should all see this.”

  19

  The forensic packages popped away from the belly dispenser in the Democratic Circus, each one a monkey-sized, spider-shaped probe with autonomous guidance and decision-making capability. They selected a variety of landing sites on Lethe and guided themselves down, springing out capture barbs and tongue-like sticky coils at the last moment. Once locked onto the rock, the packages drilled through the plastic integument and began to use precise seismic mapping tools to
assemble an increasingly detailed picture of Lethe’s interior.

  Sparver was on the flight deck, watching as vague impressions of sub-surface structure hardened into crisp, pink detail. Most of his focus was on the volume around the thermal excess, Sparver barely remembering to breathe as the images grew sharper and more provocative.

  “That’s an awful lot of space to give over to basic housekeeping,” Pell commented. “Seems like someone’s hunch was on the money, Prefect.”

  “Not mine,” Sparver said. “And believe me, I’d take the credit if I could.”

  Grolnick was expert in the interpretation of the forensic package data. Sketching a gloved finger across the images, she lingered over a cystlike void tucked under the same pole where there was a thermal excess. “This is a low-density volume, about three kilometres across. Maybe vacuum, maybe pressurised. But it’s definitely not rock, ice or stabilising plastic. It could be a habitable space, Prefect Bancal.”

  “Do the power requirements add up?” Pell asked.

  “Depends what they’re doing in there,” Grolnick said. “But it’s feasible. In fact, I’d say there’s more than enough capacity to manage an ecosystem about that large.”

  “There’s nothing like this on the official schematics,” Dias said, overlaying everything that Panoply thought it knew about Lethe. “But deviating from official schematics is a civil matter, not a violation of the Common Articles.”

  It was true, Sparver reflected. If Panoply bothered itself with every change in a habitat or rock that wasn’t properly registered and notified, they would have no time for anything else.

  “But this isn’t any old rock,” he said. “It’s Lethe, and we already had grounds to be suspicious of it. Well, Dreyfus did, at least. Can you squeeze anything more out of those packages?”

  “No,” Grolnick said. “We’re at the resolution limit now. It’s like knocking on a door to a sealed room and trying to work out where the furniture is, based on the echo.” She tapped at a faint, spinal trace. “There’s a suggestion of a connecting spur here, running back up to Lethe’s centre of gravity … that would probably be how you got in and out, if you didn’t want to land upside down under a negative gee of down-force.”