Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  Something like astonishment dropped Garlin’s jaw. He held the stance, the cat like some fast liquid stream that had hit glass. The black remains splashed and curdled but did not reform.

  Garlin maintained his stiff-armed posture until there seemed no possibility of the cat reconstituting itself. Then he angled his arm down, flexing and re-flexing his fingers as if he did not quite understand what he had done, or what might yet lie within his capabilities.

  “I … remembered,” he said, with a sort of astonished reverence. “I knew what to do. I just … wished it to stop.”

  Dreyfus took his first breath in at least twenty seconds. “You used to play the same games, Julius. If Caleb can speak to quickmatter, then so can you.”

  Garlin was still working his fingers, curling and uncurling them in a strange and restless fascination, as if some electric power now lay within his grasp, and he could not quite bring himself to stop enjoying the novel, tingling thrill of it. He let out a small quiet gasp.

  “Caleb will have sensed you, I think,” Dreyfus said. “If he didn’t already know you were present. But you have the edge, for now. See if you can do something about that jungle, will you, before any more cats come back?”

  Garlin turned and raised his hand at the now impenetrable wall where the whiphound had tried to excavate a corridor. His eyes narrowed with concentration, his jaw set with determination and a dangerous, self-admiring charisma.

  The jungle puckered in, resisted—like an elastic surface, rebounding after a punch—and then formed a corridor into itself.

  Dreyfus looked at Garlin, glad that they had been spared the cat, but equally certain that something was now loose over which none of them, most especially Devon Garlin, had any sort of sovereignty.

  “Let’s go,” Dreyfus said.

  22

  The man who insisted that he be thought of as Julius Devon Garlin Voi placed a comradely hand on Sparver’s back. “They’re here, my little friend from Panoply. Three of them, one that I know as well as my own shadow. They’ve defeated the cats, by various means. I could send more—create an overpowering force of them—but that would be churlish, after all the trouble they’ve gone to.” He squeezed Sparver’s shoulder, a little too forcefully for the gesture to feel anything but bullying. “We’ll see how strong he really is.” He made a sweeping, theatrical gesture in the direction of the spiralling property. “Let’s take a stroll to the Shell House, shall we?”

  “And if I said no?”

  “I could pull you apart like straw, make you squeal with the best of them. Admit it: you do have some curiosity. You must be asking yourself why I chose those particular Wildfire cases, out of all the hundred million citizens?”

  “If there’s a reason, I’m sure it makes perfect sense to you.”

  Something twitched in the cheek of the man’s broad but familiar face. “A bad thing was done, Prefect—a secret, clandestine crime. It came to a culmination with the birth of my brother and I, but we were not the start of it.”

  They crossed the level, manicured ground before the Shell House, then went up onto the paved terrace fronting the main entrance. Sparver had debated his options for escape or resistance and concluded they were non-existent, given the man’s demonstrable control over every aspect of his environment.

  “If you know about a crime, you should have reported it through the official channels,” Sparver said.

  The man, walking alongside him now, favoured him with a pitying smile. “It would have been damaging for the Voi family, and we couldn’t accept that.”

  “Isn’t that what you’re hoping for now?”

  “Yes, but it’s later now—much later.” The man gave a soft, mocking laugh. “No; it was my justice or none at all.”

  They went in through the main doors, into a cool-shaded lobby, with black and white floor tiles, decorated plasterwork and an impressive staircase at one end.

  “It might help if I knew what sort of crime we were talking about.”

  “There was a … let’s call it a gambling syndicate. A group of citizens dedicated to the art of the wager, staking ever higher bets on increasingly unlikely or speculative outcomes. Their craving was an addiction, an appetite that could be dulled but never satiated.”

  Sparver thought of the linking connection between the Wildfire cases, the propensity for risk, but rather than interject decided it was wiser to let his host keep talking.

  “Their desires demanded an endless supply of new forms of competitive diversion. At first, these could be met through legal means—placing wagers on games and challenges that would not have troubled any of the law enforcement bodies. But in the long run that was insufficient.” They had gone through an arched doorway into a connecting room now, and the man paused at one of the ornamented panels in the wall. It had a pastel backing with scrolling decoration around the borders. He touched a hand to it and the panel slid aside, an operation that struck Sparver as surprisingly cumbersome and mechanical.

  Beyond was a dark, sloping passage, descending into the basement levels of the house.

  “Go on, Prefect,” the man said, giving him an encouraging shove. “I insist you bear witness, if nothing else. It’s that or cease to be of use to me.”

  They walked down the sloping passage. It went down some way, then reversed direction and continued descending, carrying on until they were obviously deep within the bedrock under the domed enclosure.

  “There was a figure within the consortium,” the man went on, his tone of address still affable enough. “A man who shared the acute desires of his fellows for novelty and risk, but who was also in a position to provide them … at least up to a point. He became the consortium’s facilitator. It was he who proposed the final wager—the darkest game of them all. Shall I tell you this man’s name?”

  They had come to a heavy, utilitarian door at the base of the sloping corridor. “Wild guess,” Sparver said. “Marlon Voi?”

  “My father. Our father, I should say. Marlon had the dual benefits of prestige and long habits of secrecy. He came here—to this little rock. He owned it already, so that wasn’t a problem, but he still needed all his resourcefulness to lay the ground for the final wager.” The man unlocked the heavy door. A draught of cold, stale air hit Sparver, and a crack of dim, golden light pushed through as the door opened.

  “And this wager was …?”

  “The settling of an age-old question,” the man said, ushering Sparver through into the chamber beyond. “Are you intimately acquainted with the early history of our settlement, Prefect?”

  “I hear it didn’t end well.”

  Corridors and rooms radiated away from the chamber beyond the door. The man closed the door behind them, and at once it became impossible to tell it was there at all, leaving only a row of grey panels along one wall. Sparver took in his surroundings, conscious that he seemed to have stepped back a few hundred years compared to the elegant furnishings of the Shell House. These corridors and rooms were made of angular, prefabricated components, with grilled vents, caged ceiling lights and snaking lines of cables and pipes stapled to the walls. Now and then there was a window, set within an armoured frame. The environment hummed with the throb of generators and air-circulators. It gave off a steely, antiseptic stench.

  “You would certainly not call it a shining success,” the man said, steering Sparver to one of the windows.

  There was some sort of shutter on the other side of the glass, but the man worked a control and the metal protection whisked aside with a solid clunk. For once, the window was set at a height that easily suited Sparver. Beyond was an alien landscape, stretching impossibly far into the distance.

  “Do you recognise it?”

  “Someone sent me a postcard once. It’s Yellowstone.”

  The man seemed pleased by this observation. “Enough to reinforce the desired impression, which was that the children were present on the surface of that world, in a settlement made by robots. It worked well enough, at le
ast for the first few test generations.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The man worked the control and sealed the window shutter again. “In a short while I’ll ask you to excuse me, Prefect, while I go and greet Caleb and his guests. But we’re not quite done down here. There’s a small favour I’m going to ask of you in a moment—you might almost say it relates to a private wager of my own.” A sudden eager interest showed itself in his face. “Tell me—have you grasped the point of this, of Marlon’s last game?”

  “You mentioned generations.”

  “I did, and for good reason. Boys and girls would be … created, born, and then immediately placed in this simulation. They would know nothing but these walls, no companionship but themselves, no guidance beyond that offered by the robots—the Ursas. The parameters would vary from run to run, the outcome monitored, and those that wagered on a particular result would be rewarded, or penalised.” They walked away from the window, through a connecting bulkhead—heavy as an airlock, and painted with black and yellow stripes—into another part of the complex. “Therapies were applied to make the boys and girls reach maturity more rapidly. A spread of wagers covered all eventualities. Fortunes were banked—egos nailed to the mast of one outcome over another.”

  They were walking through what Sparver decided must be some sort of infirmary, lined as it was with couches, beds and antique-looking items of surgical equipment.

  “And the generations—what happened to these boys and girls?”

  “They were painlessly euthanised at the end of each run, and a new batch prepared.”

  Sparver swallowed his distaste. “But you were one of them. How did you get out?”

  “The problems had been building for some while. Until at last there was a …” The man paused, his throat moving, tension bunching the muscles around his mouth. “A massacre. A psychotic episode, the other children butchered. Just two survivors out of the whole run. Caleb and myself, with knives in our hands, standing amid the blood-spattered bodies of our fellows. Even for the refined tastes of the consortium, that was just a little too much.” The man allowed himself an ironic smile. “It was the end of the wager, the end of the whole enterprise. Everyone bailed, desperate to unsoil their hands of this regrettable episode. Pacts of secrecy, threats of dark recrimination should a word of this escape to the wider world. An agreement that the members of the consortium would seek voluntary amnesiac therapy, to blot out any knowledge of their involvement. It worked, for the most part—they forgot their part in it all. There was just one, lingering snag.”

  “Somehow, you and your brother didn’t die.”

  The man gave an appreciative nod. “Marlon grew a late conscience—he wanted to atone for his part in the spectacle. What better way than to redeem the two boys? So he took us, and with the reluctant consent of Aliya, who had never been more than an unwilling bystander in the wager, it was agreed that we would be raised as their own sons. Which, in a sense, we already were. Marlon and Aliya had contributed genetic information to the project—as had the other participants. We were true-blooded Vois—just not born of our mother’s womb.”

  “But you knew what you were.”

  “Not after we’d been put through a round of the same sort of amnesiac therapy. We were given a second phase of conditioning, reinforced with a second lie. That we had been born in the Shell House, that we were the natural heirs of the old lineage. And for a little while, neither of us ever questioned that story. Not until the bad dreams started haunting our nights …”

  At the far end of the infirmary the man touched a control and another door opened. He beckoned for Sparver to step through into the narrow, red-lit chamber beyond. Sparver did so without resistance, even as he took in the room’s sole occupant, and by a series of mental leaps deduced who that person must be.

  “Marlon,” Sparver said.

  “You’re not slow, Prefect—I’ll give you that. And I’ll credit you for not stating the obvious, which is that Marlon Voi is supposed to be dead.”

  “It doesn’t look much like living to me.”

  “I doubt that he’d disagree with you, in those rare moments when he entertains a lucid thought.”

  Marlon Voi was a husk, a shrivelled grey form propped up on an angled bed, his sightless eyes fixed on the ceiling. A grey blanket covered all but his head and shoulders, with wires and nutrient lines feeding into him from the banks of archaic medical devices positioned around the bed. Other than a door at the other end of the chamber there was nothing in the room not related to the immediate business of life-support. Screens flickered with pulse profiles and neural graphs. Monitors chirped and beeped in a low, lulling chorus. In one machine, centrifuge wheels spun, while in another bellows moved up and down in a slow, huffing rhythm. A transparent mask fitted over the mouth and nose of the skull-like head cased within a cushioned frame. The half-collapsed, leathery tube of his neck seemed incapable of ever supporting the weight of that head.

  “It’s inhuman.”

  “Quite a statement, coming from a hyperpig.”

  The man moved to the bedside and adjusted some of the settings on the monitors. Next to this monitor was a fold-out tray holding a number of sharp surgical instruments, laid out on a green cloth.

  “You know what I meant, Garlin.” Sparver was debating his chances of reaching one of those instruments and doing something useful with it. “Julius, Caleb, whoever you are. Whatever you think he did, you aren’t the one who gets to decide his punishment.”

  The man looked surprised. “I thought that was exactly what I’d been doing all these years. Still, would you agree that he’s suffered enough, all things considered?”

  Seeing his moment, Sparver made a lunge for the tray. But the man was faster. He grabbed Sparver’s arm and twisted it sharply, sending a crunching pain through his shoulder.

  “No, not that easily. But I don’t blame you for trying.” The man released the pressure on his arm, while leaving Sparver in no doubt that his host would always be faster and stronger. “I mentioned that private wager of my own. May I elaborate?”

  “I’m all ears. I’m told they’re hard to miss.”

  “When Marlon designed this place, he took precautions. He arranged that the habitable parts of Lethe could be destroyed very easily, and very quickly, by triggering a generator overload. That way, if anyone got too close, the evidence could be eliminated in one stroke.”

  “And now?”

  “I have arranged for the generators to overload. In thirty minutes, there will be a small but not insignificant fusion event. It will cause quite a lot of damage to Lethe. Marlon will die, and so will I and anyone else unfortunate enough to still be inside this rock. So—my friend—will you, if you are still present.”

  “Unless you’re planning on letting me go, I guess that’s a foregone conclusion.”

  “True, but you have neglected one detail. You have learned of Marlon’s crimes now, and that makes you a witness. There would have been no point my bringing you here unless I intended that you should convey this testimony beyond Lethe. My word would have meant nothing, but yours, the word of a prefect?”

  “Hate to break it to you, Julius, but I doubt that thirty minutes would give me time to get halfway to that elevator, even if it was ready to take me to the docking point.”

  “No, you are right about that. But there’s another way out of here—another of Marlon’s little precautions.” He nodded to the chamber’s end. “Do you see that door? It leads to an escape device. A single-person lifepod, ready to be ejected from Lethe with a centrifugal kick.”

  Sparver thought of the readouts he had seen from the cruiser.

  “We scanned your rock. If there was an escape tunnel, we’d have seen it.”

  “You scanned for density variations. The tunnel is sealed with fine-grained rubble—indistinguishable from the surrounding rock. When the capsule is ready to depart, a pressure seal is blown at the far end. The rubble spills out, and the lifepod
follows a few moments later.”

  “Good,” Sparver said. “Any objections if I get into it right now? I mean, if you’re planning on dying, and he’s going at the same time …”

  “I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple. You’re right that Marlon’s essential fate is sealed. But here’s an interesting ethical dilemma—my private wager, if you like. Under the present arrangements, that door won’t open until Marlon is dead. It’s linked to the life-support systems.”

  “The point of which is …?”

  “You’ll have to kill him to save yourself. Oh, he’ll die anyway—that’s plain. But it’s not quite the same thing, is it? You’d be killing a man many minutes before his allotted moment. If it was years, or even months, we’d have no hesitation in calling it murder. But taking minutes off a life—where does that put you?”

  “In the shit, most likely.”

  “You have a delicate turn of phrase, I’ll give you that. Still, it’s not just your own life at stake. Get out now—soon—and you might be able to do something. Effect some course of action, however futile it’s likely to prove. But you’ll have considered that already. Factored it into your moral calculus.”

  “You’ve obviously mistaken me for a deep thinker. Is it possible you’ve got the wrong pig?”

  The man attended to one of the life-support devices, triggering a subtle but definite shift in the pattern of monitoring noises, like a change from a minor to a major key in a melody.

  “I’m restoring him to consciousness now, Sparver. There wouldn’t be any point in you killing him if he were not capable of understanding his fate. I can’t promise you the most enlightening of conversations—he’s too far gone for that—but you’d be the one doing most of the talking, in any case.”

  “What about you?”

  “Pressing business awaits. I have to go and attend to Caleb, give my brother the welcome he deserves.” The man turned from the figure that he claimed was his father. “Kill him as and when you see fit. I’ve left you ample means to do so. They say that pigs lack the capacity for truly creative thought, but I’m sure you’ll give the lie to that.”