When Luis returned with both men, Bezile announced that nothing had been found.
Maltazar immediately began to protest. “You’re crazy! I put it there myself.”
“The bins were searched thoroughly,” Bezile said calmly. “There was no sign of it.”
“Take me down there!” Maltazar insisted. “I’ll find it.”
Bezile gave a weary sigh.
“You’ve got to believe me!” Maltazar insisted. “It’s there! Let me go down!”
Bezile allowed two of the officers to escort Maltazar to the pens. It was worth going through the tedious formalities for the sake of appearances. The other man remained under guard.
While they waited, Luis murmured, “Have you got it?”
“It wasn’t there.”
Plainly he was unsure whether or not to believe her. He was a devoted servant of the Noosphere, but far too highly strung to rest easy in the knowledge that they had indeed acquired the artifact. Besides, there were so many factions these days; one never knew whom one could really trust.
“Then we went through all that for nothing,” he said.
It was half a question. She merely shrugged. Then she instructed him to replace the ten thousand solars in the case.
“Pavel put it in there,” Maltazar’s accomplice assured her. “I was with him.”
She could hear the sheer terror in his voice. She spread her hands. “What can I do? Let us pray it hasn’t been fed to the dogs. For your sake.”
He looked crushed, and she felt the faintest twinge of remorse for using him so. It was something she would have to try to make amends for when she next communed with the Noosphere. Not that she really intended to have them erased. She’d pass them over to the judicators, and they’d probably get off with a short course of corrective psychosurgery and a year’s community drone service in the Swamplands.
When Maltazar was brought back, he was flustered and furious.
“Somebody must have stolen it,” he argued. “I swear it was there!”
Bezile snapped the money case shut.
“I think,” she said to both men, “that concludes our business. Take them away.”
Stridently protesting, both were bundled out. At this point Bezile heard that her rhinocerhorse had been reinstated and that a slayhound she had backed had come in on the last race at fifteen to one.
She gave Luis a generous smile. It really had been a most satisfactory day.
• • •
I was staring at a plate that held a dark brown mash. As if I had suddenly woken from a trance. I had no memory of what had gone before.
“Are you all right?” Nina asked.
She was sitting beside the bed. Her hair was tied back. It made her look … I searched for the word. Custodial.
“I think I blanked out,” I said.
She was holding the spoon, had obviously been feeding me.
“A fugue,” she said.
“A what?”
“Drifting in and out. It happens.”
I felt stupid and helpless. I had the vaguest memory of something, but I couldn’t grasp it.
“Were we talking a moment ago?”
She nodded.
A surge of anger and frustration. “I can’t remember any of it.”
“It wasn’t important.”
“I can’t even remember you bringing this food.”
She didn’t seem surprised. “Try not to get upset about it. It’ll get better.”
“Will it? How the hell do you know it will?”
I couldn’t help the anger: it came unbidden, a generalized fury at my whole condition. It was hard to get my thoughts in order.
“What’s going on?” I demanded. “This is a hospital, right? What happened to me?”
She didn’t reply straight away, then said finally, “Do you remember anything?”
I tried to think. There was nothing.
“It’s a blank.”
“Nothing at all?”
“I told you!” I said fiercely.
She was eager to calm me. “It’s normal. I give you my word. It was the same for me.”
This took me by surprise. I stared at her. “You went through this?”
She nodded.
“Tell me.”
“Everything you’re experiencing—the hot flushes, the mood swings, the memory loss—it happened to me.”
“You’re a patient here, too?”
She put a hand to my forehead. I must have been feverish, because her palm felt cool.
“I’m a little further along the road to recovery than you,” she said.
She appeared perfectly healthy. If she was a patient, why was she feeding me?
“Do we know one another?” I asked.
“Not until now,” she said.
I blinked, and everything shifted again. I was lying flat once more, drowsy, fighting sleep. I knew we had talked further, but whatever time had elapsed had vanished. I heard footsteps receding, the door open and close.
And then only silence.
Four
Shivaun’s flyer was a big octopoid transporter which did the run between the inner planets and the Jovian worlds, ferrying supplies to the settled moons and bringing back ice to Venus. Normally it carried no crew or passengers, but it was fully primed for her when she transferred from the shuttle, announcing that the run to Ganymede was one of its regular trips.
Shivaun settled herself in the cramped skulldeck, placing her bulky luggage in the compartment niche below the arc of the lensport. She put her dutybag on the empty seat beside her, securing it under the restraining web.
The ship gave full flight details while the skulldeck filled with a muted rumbling. In the digestive heart of the craft, organic fission of stored solar hydrogen generated tailfin energy emissions that accelerated the ship at a constant one G to the midpoint of the voyage, reverse thrust being applied thereafter. With no passengers on board, the ships were capable of fifty per cent lightspeed at G-forces that would pulverize ordinary protoplasm; but this was to be a more leisurely flight.
“Excuse me for asking,” the flyer remarked in its brisk female voice, “but who’s the other lifeform on board?”
“My luggage,” Shivaun said curtly.
“Oh?”
“Nothing you need to know about.”
Shivaun asked the seat to go into leanback. She adjusted her webbing, pulled down an optic stalk.
“The New Crusaders is on band fifty-one,” the flyer informed her. “Are you a fan?”
“Not particularly.” It was a popular space opera, one of the many set during the expulsion of the Augmenters from the Settled Worlds generations before. She’d never seen it.
She selected some meditative imagery, monochrome fractals blossoming endlessly. The status optics on the control console told her that the flyer had already broken orbit; the damped yet pervasive roar of biofission filled the cabin as star patterns and the gunmetal snowflake of Veneris Station swam across the lensport.
“It’s rather nice to have a passenger on board,” the flyer informed her.
“Really?”
“Normally I travel alone. It does get rather lonely at times.”
Shivaun said nothing to this. It was just her luck to get a loquacious ship, and one that thought it was fully human. Of course the controlling neural networks were modelled on the brain cortex, and sometimes brain tissue from the truedead was used; but she did not for one moment believe that ships had truly human feelings.
“I’ve been running this route for eight years. Back and forth like a yoyo, whatever that is. Never a single hitch. Not that you’d know it from any thanks I’ve got—”
“Listen.”
“Yes?”
“I’m going to take a nap. Wake me when we’re there. Clear?”
There was a pause, followed by a noise almost like someone clearing their throat.
“Perfectly,” said the flyer, sounding hurt.
Shivaun slept, as she
always did, without dreaming. When the flyer woke her the Jovian system was already in sight, two of its four moons visible in their eco-orbits around their shining bronze parent. Jupiter itself was blotched with light from the photoplasms that swam in its atmosphere, enormous amoeboids that ingested hard radiation and re-emitted it in the visible and infrared to sustain the biospheres of Ganymede, Callisto and Europa. They blazed like miniature polymorphous suns.
Ganymede loomed, its sallow ocean interspersed with green island continents of reedmat. Shivaun had the flyer notify the Prime Arbiter’s office in Lysithea of their arrival. A private shuttle would be sent up for her, customs conveniently bypassed.
She went aft into the narrow gangway, had the flyer put on double-G and did thirty minutes of exercises in pure oxygen to loosen herself up. When she returned to the skulldeck, she was hungry.
“What have you got to eat?” she asked the flyer.
Rather primly, the flyer gave her its menu; it was still sulking from the earlier rebuff. Ships always carried foodstuffs in case of emergency, and Shivaun ordered Mercurian peppers stuffed with spiced sausageplant; it was the hottest meal she had ever eaten, and she swallowed two tubes of iced water before the fires were cooled. A spidery shuttle appeared and began matching orbit with them. She gathered up her luggage and went down to the airvalve.
“I hope you had a pleasant trip,” the flyer said pointedly.
“Very pleasant,” she told it. “You have my compliments.”
“You didn’t even ask me my name.”
“My apologies. Do you have one?”
“I have a technical specification.”
Shivaun withheld a smile. “That’s not the same, is it? Would you like me to name you?”
The flyer made a surprised sound. “That would be most considerate of you. Do you have something in mind?”
Shivaun thought about it, then said: “Pandora.”
The flyer practically purred. “I rather like the sound of it. Wasn’t she an ancient goddess who unlocked a box that released all the wisdom of the world?”
“Not in the version I was taught,” Shivaun replied. “She was a siren who was warned never to speak. Then one day she opened her mouth and all the horrors of creation poured out of it.”
The transfer to the shuttle and the flight down to Ganymede went smoothly. Shivaun was in uniform, and the shuttle’s crew was courteous but noncommittal. Everyone knew what sort of jobs offworld expediters were called in for.
An official from Venzano’s office was waiting for her at the terminus, which sat in the bole of a big gravitree, its flat branchways radiating out from the centre. A wide-footed hopper carried them across the open reedmat towards Lysithea with an effortless series of long arcing leaps. The reedmat was strong enough under Ganymede’s low gravity to support hunters who stalked snakefish with knives and pneumatic spears. The people here were carnivorous, having none of the Inner Planets’ moral qualms about eating dead meat.
The hopper carried them to the shore of Lysithea, finally slumping in the shadowed undergrowth as the gravity fields of the trees on the island continent reached full strength. The trees were massive, their drooping boughs many-branched, hollowed boles providing homes for the city’s people. They carved stairways in the fibrous bark, used the boughs as thoroughfares, built sturdy vine bridges to cross from one arboreal to another. Pollen flour for breadmaking was harvested from blossoms, fruits and nuts were abundant and the heart-shaped leathery leaves could be fashioned into clothing, carpets or wide-brimmed hats to protect against the urine rain of the primeapes who inhabited the uppermost tiers. The apes were also hunted for food.
Shivaun and her escort climbed a spiral stairway. There was a refreshing coolness under the shade of the trees, Jupiter’s brassy light scintillating through layers of foliage. Power lianas snaked along ridged bark, clothes were being aired on silkspinner webs and a noisy family squatted in a doormouth, the children feeding raw fish to an amphibian roaster while their three parents conducted a vehement argument in the local argot, theatrically slapping one another about the arms and head. The roasters, a fixture in almost every home, could cook a whole snakefish in their fiery innards within minutes and regurgitate it ready to eat; at night their constant croaking kept the uninitiated awake. Shivaun had visited Ganymede before, and she knew its inhabitants to be extravagant and libertine, prey to customs which offworlders often found repulsive. As tree dwellers, they had only one pervasive sanction: no fire.
They reached a terminus where a roller was waiting. It wove expertly along a main branchway, dodging local psyclists precariously perched on their eyeless mounts. Their psycles, smaller two-wheeled relatives of rollers, were reputedly steered by sheer force of will, though Shivaun was sure that this was simply a local joke to highlight the fact that road manners were practically nonexistent.
The Prime Arbiter’s treehouse occupied the entire bole of a gravitree that stood alone in a clearing. Its elegant corridors and stairways held elaborate decorations carved from the living wood. Shivaun was taken directly to Venzano’s office, where she found the Arbiter and his staff watching a large optic. As Prime Arbiter, Venzano was the most senior representative of the Noocracy outside the Noosphere itself. He was slumped in a chair, gnawing on his thumb, intent on the display.
It was the Advocates themselves who stood at the centre of the optic, Julius swarthy and intense, Orela a fair-skinned beauty who on this occasion wore her hair in a flame-coloured cascade. Both were dressed in their scarlet and grey robes. They were on a goodwill visit to Tenebra on Nereid, where there had been an outbreak of a mysterious new affliction that had caused over a dozen hitherto ordinary citizens to descend into a frenzied madness, destroying their surroundings or attacking those around them before succumbing to death either by suicide or a seizure. There was no apparent connection between the victims, and similar cases had been reported on Iapetus and Titania. The networks were calling the syndrome the Dementia, and no one had any idea as to its cause.
Julius and Orela were addressing a huge crowd in the centre of the crystalline city. They spoke together, promising that special medicant teams would be assembled to respond swiftly so that sufferers could be sedated before they injured themselves or others. Extra resources would be marshalled to investigate the cause of the ailment and provide a cure.
As ever, the Advocates were quietly dramatic and persuasive, punctuating their words from the diamond balcony with small gestures which managed to be at once intimate and all-encompassing, as if they were addressing not a crowd but every individual who was watching the broadcast. Shivaun studied the sallow Venzano. His expression was thoughtful but guarded. It was rumoured that relations between the Prime Arbiter and the Advocates had been strained in recent years.
As Advocates, Julius and Orela were the exemplars of the Noosphere, the conscience and authority of the whole of humanity, the mouthpieces of its wishes as expressed through public votes or private communion in shrines. No one in the room moved or spoke until the broadcast was complete. It ended with Julius and Orela going down among the crowd to receive their heartfelt gratitude. As the image faded, Venzano turned and acknowledged Shivaun’s presence. He asked the rest of his staff to leave.
“Safe journey?” was the first thing he said to her when they were alone.
Shivaun nodded. “Everything went smoothly, Your Graciousness.”
“You have it with you?”
She nodded again, hefting the bag and placing it on the desk before him.
He opened it and removed the object. For a long time there was silence as he turned it slowly in his hands.
He had her repeat the story of how Bezile had acquired it. She did so fully. Still he continued to inspect the womb, running his fingers along its veins and arteries, placing his hands flat against its surface as if to test its warmth or weight, even putting an ear to it.
At long last he said, “You did well.”
Again she merely nodded. She had
only done her duty.
“My people here will have a good look at it,” he continued. “This will take several days. Then you can carry my answer back to Bezile. In the meantime, I suggest you relax, enjoy some rest and recreation.”
“I have official duties to attend to,” she said. She produced a letter of authorization. “Here, and on Pluto.”
He did not bother to voice the letter. “That was just a pretext so we could get you here with a minimum of fuss.”
“Nevertheless, it would be suitable if I executed them.”
He almost winced. “If you so wish …”
“I understand this entire matter is very sensitive.”
“Indeed it is.”
“My presence here might be remarked upon if I were not to carry out my work.”
“Of course. Of course.” He cleared his throat. “You have an … itinerary?”
“There are two subjects to be dealt with here on Ganymede. The first is believed to be hiding in this very city.”
“Indeed? Then that is convenient at least.”
“I believe the High Arbiter of Aphrodite sent you full notification.”
“Bezile?” He was distracted by the womb. “Oh, yes, no doubt. Well, you have my complete sanction, that goes without saying. Will you need any assistance?”
“Where circumstances permit, I prefer to work alone.”
“Then I’ll leave you to make the arrangements. Perhaps it should be done with more than the usual discretion, given the circumstances. We don’t want to draw unnecessary attention to ourselves, do we?”
She was faintly insulted by the suggestion that she would act otherwise. “Rest assured I shall not prejudice your good offices. Will that be all?”
“What? Oh, yes.” He rang for one of his staff to take her to her quarters, his eyes avidly on the womb.
She showered and changed, using make-up and hydrodermics to elaborate her lithe, muscular body into something far more buxom and voluptuous. A rainbowsheen wig and a waterveil dress completed the transformation.
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