It was 2373; only a few decades after Bernsdottir’s discovery of the first Shroud. Whole academic disciplines had sprung up around the central mystery, as well as numerous government and private research agencies. The Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies was only one of dozens of such organisations, but it also happened to be backed by one of the wealthiest — and most powerful — families in the whole human bubble. But when the break came, it was not via the calculated moves of large scientific organisations. It was through one man’s random and dedicated madness.
His name was Philip Lascaille.
He was a SISS scientist working at one of the permanent stations near what was now called Lascaille’s Shroud, in the trans Tau Ceti sector. Lascaille was also one of a team kept on permanent standby should there ever be a need for human delegates to travel to the Shroud, although no one considered that this was very likely. But the delegates existed, with a ship kept in readiness to carry them the remaining five hundred million kilometres to the boundary, should the invitation ever arrive.
Lascaille decided not to wait.
Alone, he boarded and stole the SISS contact craft. By the time anyone realised what was happening, it was far too late to stop him. A remote destruct existed, but its use might have been construed by the Shroud as an act of aggression, something no one wanted to risk. The decision was to let fate take its course. No one seriously expected to see Lascaille come back alive. And though he did eventually return, his doubters had in a sense been right, because a large portion of his sanity had not come back with him.
Lascaille had come very close indeed to the Shroud before some force had propelled him back out again — perhaps only a few tens of thousands of kilometres from the surface, although at that range there was no easy way of telling where space ended and the Shroud began. No one doubted that he had come closer than any other human being, or for that matter any living creature.
But the cost had been horrific.
Not all of Philip Lascaille — not even most of him — had come back. Unlike those who had gone before him, his body had not been pulped and shredded by incomprehensible forces near the boundary. But something no less final appeared to have happened to his mind. Nothing remained of his personality, except for a few residual traces which served only to heighten the almost absolute obliteration of everything else. Enough brain function remained for him to keep himself alive without machine assistance, and his motor control seemed completely unimpaired. But there was no intelligence left; no sense that Lascaille perceived his surroundings except in the most simplistic manner; no indication that he had any grasp of what had happened to him, or was even aware of the passage of time; no indication that he retained the ability to memorise new experiences or retrieve those that had happened to him before his trip to the Shroud. He retained the ability to vocalise, but while Lascaille occasionally spoke well-formed words, or even fragments of sentences, nothing he uttered made the slightest sense.
Lascaille — or what remained of Lascaille — was returned to the Yellowstone system, and then to the SISS habitat, where medical experts desperately tried to construct a theory for what might have happened. Eventually — and it was more out of desperation than logic — they decided that the fractal, restructured spacetime around the Shroud had not been able to support the information density of his brain. In passing through it, his mind had been randomised on the quantum level, although the molecular processes of his body had not been noticeably affected. He was like a text which had been transcribed imprecisely — so that much of the meaning was lost — and then retranscribed.
Yet Lascaille was not the last person to attempt such a suicide mission. A cult had grown up around him, its chief rumour being that, despite his exterior signs of dementia, the passage close to the Shroud had bestowed on him something like Nirvana. Once or twice every decade, around the known Shrouds, someone would attempt to follow Lascaille into the boundary, and the results were miserably uniform, and no improvement on what Lascaille himself had achieved. The lucky ones came back with half their minds gone, while the unlucky ones never made it back at all, or did so in ships so mangled that their human remains resembled a salmon-coloured paste.
While Lascaille’s cult bloomed, people soon forgot about the man himself. Perhaps the salivating, mumbling reality of his existence was a touch too uncomfortable.
Sylveste, however, did not forget. More than that, he had become obsessed with teasing a last, vital truth out of the man. His familial connections guaranteed him an audience with Lascaille whenever he wanted — provided he ignored Calvin’s forebodings. And so he had taken to visiting, and waiting in absolute patience while Lascaille attended to his pavement drawings, ever watchful for the one, transient clue which he knew the man would eventually bequeath him.
In the end, it was a lot more than a clue.
It was difficult to remember how long he had waited, on that day when the waiting finally paid off. For all that he intended to focus his mind with absolute attentiveness on what Lascaille was doing, he had been finding it increasingly difficult. It was like staring intently at a long series of abstract paintings — one’s concentration inevitably began to wane, no matter how much one tried to keep it fresh. Lascaille had been halfway through the sixth or seventh hopeless chalk mandala of the day, executing the task with the same fervent dedication he brought to every mark he made.
Then, with no forewarning, he had turned to Sylveste and said, with complete clarity: ‘The Jugglers offer the key, Doctor.’
Sylveste was too shocked to interrupt.
‘It was explained to me,’ Lascaille continued blithely. ‘While I was in Revelation Space.’
Sylveste forced himself to nod, as naturally as possible. Some still-calm part of his mind recognised the phrase which Lascaille had spoken. As far as anyone had ever been able to tell, it was what Lascaille now called the Shroud boundary — ‘space’ in which he had been granted certain ‘revelations’ too abstruse to relate.
Yet now his tongue seemed to have been loosened.
‘There was a time when the Shrouders travelled between the stars,’ Lascaille said. ‘Much as we do now — although they were an ancient species and had been starfaring for many millions of years. They were quite alien, you know.’ He paused to switch a blue chalk for a crimson one, placing it between his toes. With that, he continued his work on the mandala. But with his hand — now free from that task — he began to sketch something on an adjacent patch of ground. The creature he drew was multi-limbed, tentacled, armour-plated, spined, barely symmetrical. It looked less like a member of a starfaring alien culture than something which might have flopped and oozed its way across the bed of a Precambrian ocean. It was utterly monstrous.
‘That’s a Shrouder?’ Sylveste said, with a shiver of anticipation. ‘You actually met one?’
‘No; I never truly entered the Shroud,’ Lascaille said. ‘But they communicated with me. They revealed themselves to my mind; imparted much of their history and nature.’
Sylveste tore his gaze away from the nightmarish creature. ‘Where do the Jugglers come into it?’
‘The Pattern Jugglers have been around for a long time and they’re to be found on many worlds. All starfaring cultures in this part of the galaxy encounter them sooner or later.’ Lascaille tapped his sketch. ‘Just like we did, so did the Shrouders, only very much earlier. Do you understand what I’m saying, Doctor?’
‘Yes…’ He thought he did, anyway. ‘But not the point of it.’
Lascaille smiled. ‘Whoever — or whatever — visits the Jugglers is remembered by them. Remembered absolutely, that is — down to the last cell; the last synaptic connection. That’s what the Jugglers are. A vast biological archiving system.’
This was true enough, Sylveste knew. Humans had gleaned very little of significance concerning the Jugglers, their function or origin. But what had become clear almost from the outset was that the Jugglers were capable of storing human personalities within t
heir oceanic matrix, so that anyone who swam in the Juggler sea — and was dissolved and reconstituted in the process — would have achieved a kind of immortality. Later, those patterns could be realised again; temporarily imprinted in the mind of another human. The process was muddy and biological, so the stored patterns were contaminated by millions of other impressions, each subtly influencing the other. Even in the early days of Juggler exploration it had been obvious that the ocean had stored patterns of alien thought; hints of otherness bleeding into the thoughts of the swimmers — but these impressions had always remained indistinct.
‘So the Shrouders were remembered by the Jugglers,’ Sylveste said. ‘But how does that help us?’
‘More than you realise. The Shrouders may look alien, but the basic architectures of their minds were not completely dissimilar to our own. Ignore the bodyplan; realise instead that they were social creatures with a verbal language and the same perceptual environment. To some degree, a human could be made to think like a Shrouder, without becoming completely inhuman in the process.’ He looked at Sylveste again. ‘It would be within the capabilities of the Jugglers to instil a Shrouder neural transform within a human neocortex.’
It was a chilling thought: achieve contact not by meeting an alien, but by becoming it. If that was what Lascaille meant. ‘How would that help us?’
‘It would stop the Shroud from killing you.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Understand that the Shroud is a protective structure. What lies within are… not just the Shrouders themselves, but technologies which are simply too powerful to be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Over millions of years, the Shrouders combed the galaxy seeking harmful things left over by extinct cultures — things which I can almost not even begin to describe to you. Things which may once have served good, but which are also capable of being used as weapons of unimaginable horror. Technologies and techniques which may only be deployed by ascended races: means of manipulating spacetime, or of moving faster-than-light… other things which your mind literally can’t encompass.’
Sylveste wondered if that really were the case. ‘Then the Shrouds are — what? Treasure chests, where only the most advanced races get the keys?’
‘More than that. They defend themselves against intruders. A Shroud’s boundary is almost a living thing. It responds to the thought patterns of those who enter it. If the patterns do not resemble those of the Shrouders… it fights back. It alters spacetime locally, creating vicious eddies of curvature. Curvature equals gravitational sheer stress, Doctor. It rips you apart. But the right kinds of mind… the Shroud admits them; guides them closer, protects them in a pocket of quiet space.’
The implications, Sylveste saw, were shattering. Think like a Shrouder and one could slip past those defences… into the glittering heart of the treasure box. So what if humans were not advanced enough by Shrouder reckoning to behold that treasure? If they were clever enough to break open the box, were they not entitled to take what they found? According to Lascaille, the Shrouders had assumed the role of galactic matron when they secreted those harmful technologies… but had anyone asked them to do it? Then another question ghosted into his mind.
‘Why did they let you know this, if what was inside the Shrouds had to be protected at all costs?’
‘I don’t know if it was intentional. The barrier around the Shroud that bears my name must have failed to identify me as alien, if only fleetingly. Perhaps it was damaged, or perhaps my… state of mind… confused it. Once I had begun to penetrate the Shroud, information began to flow between us. That was how I learned these things. What the Shroud contained, and how its defences might be circumvented. It’s not a trick machines can learn, you know.’ The last remark seemed to have come from nowhere; for a moment it hung there before Lascaille continued. ‘But the Shroud must have begun to suspect that I was foreign. It rejected me; flung me back out into space.’
‘Why didn’t it just kill you?’
‘It must not have been completely confident in its judgement.’ He paused. ‘In Revelation Space, I did sense doubt. Vast arguments taking place around me, quicker than thought. In the end, caution must have won the day.’
Now another question; the one he had wanted to ask since the moment Lascaille had opened his mouth.
‘Why have you waited until now to tell us these things?’
‘I apologise for my earlier reticence. But first I had to digest the knowledge that the Shrouders had placed in my mind. It was in their terms, you see — not ours.’ He hesitated, his attention seemingly drawn to a smudge of chalk which was marring the mathematical purity of his mandala. He licked his finger and rubbed it away. ‘That was the easy part. Then I had to remember how humans communicate.’ Lascaille looked at Sylveste, his animal eyes veiled by a Neanderthal tangle of uncombed hair. ‘You’ve been kind to me, not like the others. You had patience with me. I thought this might help you.’
Sylveste sensed that this window of lucidity might soon be closing. ‘How exactly do we persuade the Jugglers to imprint the Shrouder consciousness pattern?’
‘That’s the easy part.’ He nodded at the chalk drawing. ‘Memorise this figure, and hold it in mind when you swim.’
‘That’s all?’
‘It will suffice. The internal representation of this figure in your mind will instruct the Jugglers as to your needs. You’d better take them a gift, of course. They don’t do something of this magnitude for free.’
‘A gift?’
Sylveste was wondering what kind of gift one could possibly offer to an entity which resembled a floating island of seaweed and algae.
‘You’ll think of something. Whatever it is, make sure it’s information-dense. Otherwise you’ll bore them. You wouldn’t want to bore them.’ Sylveste wanted to ask further questions, but Lascaille’s attention had returned to his chalk drawings. ‘That’s all I have to say,’ the man said.
It turned out to be the case.
Lascaille never spoke to Sylveste, or anyone else again. A month later they found him dead, drowned in the fishpond.
‘Hello?’ Khouri said. ‘Is there anyone here?’
She had awoken, that was all she knew. Not from a catnap, either, but from something much deeper, longer and colder. A reefersleep fugue, almost certainly — they were not something you forgot, and she had woken from one before, around Yellowstone. The physiological and neural signs were exactly right. There was no sign of a reefersleep casket — she was lying, fully-clothed, on a couch — but someone could easily have moved her before she was properly conscious. Who, though? And where was she? It seemed as if someone had tossed a grenade into her memory, blowing it into frags. The place where she found herself now was only teasingly familiar.
Someone’s hallway? Wherever it was, it was filled with ugly sculptures. She had either walked past these things a matter of hours ago, or else they were recessive figments from the depths of her childhood; nursery horrors. Their curved, jagged and burnt shapes loomed over her, casting demonlike shadows. Groggily she intuited that these things fitted together in some way, or had once done so, though they were perhaps too warped and torn for that now.
Footsteps padded unsteadily across the hallway.
She twisted her head to view the approaching person. Her neck felt stiffer than cured wood. Years of experience had told her that the rest of her body would be no more supple after the sleep fugue.
The man stopped a few paces from her bed. In the moonlight glow of the chamber it was hard to read his features, but there was a familiarity within the shadowed jowliness that tugged at her memory. Someone she had known, many years ago.
‘It’s me,’ he said, the voice wet and phlegmatic. ‘Manoukhian. The Mademoiselle thought you might appreciate a familiar face when you woke up.’
The names meant something to her, but exactly what, it was hard to say. ‘What happened?’
‘Simple. She made you an offer you couldn’t refuse.’
> ‘How long have I been asleep?’
‘Twenty-two years,’ Manoukhian said, offering her a hand. ‘Now, shall we go and see the Mademoiselle?’
Sylveste woke facing a wall of black which swallowed half the sky — a black so total that it seemed like a nullification of existence itself. He had never noticed it before, but now he saw — or imagined he saw — that the ordinary darkness between the stars was in fact aglow with its own milky luminosity. But there were no stars in the circular pool of emptiness which was Lascaille’s Shroud; no source of any light whatsoever, no photons arriving from any part of the detectable electromagnetic spectrum; no neutrinos of any flavour, no particles, exotic or otherwise. No gravity waves, electrostatic or magnetic fields — not even the slight whisper of Hawking radiation which, according to the few extant theories of Shroud mechanics, ought to be bleeding out of the boundary, reflecting the entropic temperature of the surface.
None of these things happened. The only thing a Shroud did — so far as anyone had ever been able to tell — was to comprehensively obstruct all forms of radiation attempting to pass through it. That, of course, and the other thing: which was to shred any object daring to pass too close to its boundary.
They had woken him from reefersleep, and now he was in the state of sickening disorientation which accompanied the crash revival, yet young enough to weather the effects: his physiological age was only thirty-three, despite the fact that more than sixty years had passed since his birth.
‘Am I… all right?’ he struggled to ask the revival medicos, while all the time his attention was being snared by the nothingness beyond the station window, like someone staring into the black counterpart of a snowstorm.
‘You’re almost clear,’ said the medico next to him, watching neural readouts scroll through midair, digesting their import with quiet taps of a stylus against his lower lip. ‘But Valdez faded. That means Lefevre’s bumped up to primary. Think you can work with her?’
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