by Paul McAuley
‘Stamount was a fine man, and I am sure that his son will grow up into a fine man too,’ Arvam said. ‘Now, if you have no more complaints to lay at my feet, I’ll allow you a glimpse of our prisoner, as I promised.’
‘She hasn’t talked, then.’
‘Oh, she talks. But so far not about anything important. You can discuss everything with the team who are questioning her. As a matter of fact, their chief is waiting for you right now, in the interrogation suite.’
The room where Yuli was being questioned was as bright and sterile as an operating theatre. White walls, white floor, a ceiling that burned with bright and even white light. No shadows anywhere. Everything lit with stark particularity. The girl was encased in a machine like a coffin or an iron lung of the long ago, with only her head showing. An MRI cap clamped over her shaven scalp. Her skin pale and perfect as porcelain. Her eyes large and green. The lids were taped open and a delicate apparatus dripped artificial tears so that her corneas wouldn’t dry out, and her head was secured so that she had to stare at the memo space hanging above her, which was presently showing a slow parade of faces while a lilting voice asked her to identify them. She said nothing. Her jaw was clenched and a muscle jumped and jumped in her cheek. It was the only indication that she was suffering a tremendous white-hot bowel-ripping agony. The machine was playing on her nervous system like a concert pianist, subtle ever-changing variations and arpeggios that ensured that she could not grow accustomed to the pain.
Standing in the adjacent room, watching her through a polarised patch of wall, Captain Doctor Aster Gavilán, the interrogation team’s chief, told Sri that the girl had endured pain induction for more than twenty hours now, yet still showed no sign of cooperation.
‘We began with drugs, of course, but they didn’t work. Her metabolism is different; her nervous system is very different. So now we are using pain, but she has withstood more pain than anyone ever tested in this device. She feels it. I know that she feels it. Elevated levels of histamine in her blood, activity in her nervous and endocrine systems, brain scans . . . She is not blocking the pain at any level. But she hasn’t broken. Amazing.’
‘That isn’t what I’d call it,’ Sri said.
Captain Doctor Gavilán was a dark-complexioned middle-aged woman, plump-breasted as a pigeon. She studied Sri for a moment, her head cocked to one side, then said, ‘If you are disappointed in our progress, I can assure you we have other resources. Mutilation, for instance. People who should know better talk about the separation of the mind and the body. In my experience, subjects who can withstand substantial amounts of pain break as soon as you begin to brand and cut them.’
Sri was sickened by the avid glint in the woman’s gaze. ‘I’m disappointed in your progress, Captain Doctor. And disgusted by your methods.’
‘This girl is living proof of the Outers’ plans to speed up human evolution and push it in unacceptable directions. She has been turned into a monster. A crime against God and Gaia. We came here to put an end to such abominations. It is a holy task, and we must not flinch or hesitate while carrying it out. Think of her as an asset,’ Captain Doctor Gavilán said, her tone sweet as poisoned honey. ‘The key to finding Avernus.’
Sri studied the little girl locked in the gleaming apparatus, watched the muscle in the corner of her jaw jump, jump again. ‘Torture rarely yields useful information,’ she said.
‘The general believes that she will cooperate.’
‘The general is mistaken,’ Sri said.
She phoned Arvam Peixoto, explained what she wanted to do, told him that she could only do it on her terms, without any kind of interference from other parties.
‘That sounds like a demand,’ Arvam said. ‘Be careful.’
‘You need my help. Captain Doctor Gavilán is a fool and a fanatic. And her methods are unsound. She has failed to make any kind of progress because she does not understand the nature of her subject.’
‘Can you guarantee that your methods will yield results?’
‘I can guarantee that I will try my best. If it doesn’t work, I won’t ever ask you for anything else. I’ll walk away, and you can let Captain Doctor Gavilán and her little crew of pain kings do their worst.’
Arvam Peixoto gave Sri seven days. Yuli was moved out of the interrogation centre, installed in a suite of rooms, and subjected to a light routine of vanilla interrogation sessions by a pair of psychologists. Meanwhile, Sri gave the crew who’d been analysing her genome a new project: identify and synthesise a pheromone that, unlike standard hypnotics and truth drugs, would gain traction in the girl’s tweaked metabolism and make her pliable and open to suggestion.
Fortunately, Sri already had a model she could adapt - the mix of subtle chemicals that her elder son secreted from his sweat glands. She and the crew worked up a virtual replica of Yuli’s olfactory receptors and tested a myriad modifications of Alder’s pheromonal perfume against it, substituting a nitrogen atom for a sulphur atom, adding an acetyl tail or deleting a cis-double bond, and so on, and so forth. The most likely candidates were tested on Yuli herself by introducing minute amounts of each one in turn to the air in her suite while she was being interviewed by the psychologists and monitoring changes in her responses to the psychologists’ questions and gross physical reactions such as her pupil dilation, and skin temperature and conductance.
Sri drove the crew hard. They worked around the clock for four days, fueled by protein blends, caffeine and tailored pharmaceuticals, and at last they had a single candidate that, although inducing only small downwards revision in the results of standard tests for aversion and antagonism, and correspondingly small increases in cooperation and friendliness, was the best Sri could do in the impossibly tight time-frame. She slept for six hours and then, after an intense coaching session with the psychologists, entered Yuli’s suite for the first time.
The rooms were small and softly lit, decorated in soothing blues and greens. Flowers growing in pots, lush halflife turf softening the floors, piped birdsong. The little girl sprawled on her tummy on a big bean bag, dressed in clean white coveralls and reading an ancient novel, Moby-Dick, clicking through the page on a slate at a fast and steady rate. She didn’t look up when Sri came in, shrugged when Sri asked if she could sit down.
Sri perched on the lip of a sling chair and folded her hands in her lap. ‘I want to apologise for what happened to you. It was a mistake. They didn’t understand you.’
‘But you do.’
‘Of course not. But I’d like to try.’
‘You want to be my friend because you want to get inside my head. And you want to get inside my head because you want to know my mother’s secrets. I know who you are, Professor Doctor. You collaborated on the Rainbow Bridge biome with my mother. You were on that barge, the day the biome’s lake was supposed to be quickened. You were so anxious and eager to meet her that you were actually trembling. Vibrating. You’re vibrating a little now, aren’t you? Not just because you are frightened of me, although you are, but also because you think I might bring you closer to what you want most in all the worlds.’
Yuli’s tone was light and amused. Her green gaze, almost exactly the shade of chlorophyll a, was still fixed on the slate. Her hair was beginning to grow back, a faint black stubble on her scalp. A plastic collar was locked tight around her neck; it would deliver a crude paralysing blast if she attempted to attack Sri or did anything that the soldiers monitoring her every move deemed inappropriate.
Sri said, ‘ You see other people very clearly, Yuli. Use that perception to examine your own situation. See how I could help you. And your mother, too.’
‘A dead man came walking across the water that day. And that funny little ceremony promptly dissolved into chaos. The veneer of so-called civilised behaviour is very thin and brittle, isn’t it? Here we are now, being polite to each other. What is it that could shatter that, I wonder?’
‘I’m not like the others, Yuli. I’m not part of the military thing
they have here. I’m a scientist, like your mother.’
The girl yawned, showing tiny spaced teeth in clean pink gums. ‘My mother isn’t a scientist. She’s a gene wizard. If you don’t know the difference, there’s no help for you.’
‘Science is one of the tools that she uses. Also imagination, and a way of seeing the world at a slant that’s quite unique. But science is as fundamental to her work as anything else. I admire your mother’s work, Yuli. I want to understand it. I want to understand her.’
‘I’m not like my mother,’ Yuli said. ‘I’m not even a scientist, much less a gene wizard. So I can’t help you. I’m sorry, but there it is. You think I’m lying. You think I am the key to your heart’s desire. Well, I’m not. And nothing you can say will change that. You might as well save your breath and give me back to the military.’
‘You and your mother have at least one thing in common,’ Sri said. ‘I think you see the world at a slant too.’
With shocking abruptness, Yuli rolled onto her back and kicked her legs in the air and knotted her long prehensile toes together. After a moment, she looked over at Sri and said, ‘She’s hiding, isn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘I caught up with her on Titan. But she escaped.’
‘This was during the war.’
‘Yes.’
‘After we escaped from that dreary prison and those silly people.’
‘After she left Dione, yes.’
‘Who was she with?’
‘She was alone when I met her, but I believe that two people helped her reach Titan. Macy Minnot and Newton Jones.’
Yuli’s toes knotted and unknotted. ‘And where were these two heroes when you confronted my mother?’
‘When I arrived, they appeared to be heading away from Titan.’
Sri hesitated. She’d never told anyone, not even Arvam Peixoto, the whole truth. But she felt that she had to be candid now; she was certain that Yuli would know if she attempted to dissemble, and in any case candour was the cornerstone of trust. So she gave a brief account of how her attempt to confront and capture Avernus in one of her gardens had ended in utter humiliation. How her secretary had disobeyed her, and she’d had to kill him. How she had been snared by one of Avernus’s creations.
She said, ‘After your mother got the better of me, I saw an aeroshell land nearby. I think it was carrying Macy Minnot and Newton Jones - they came back to rescue your mother. But she didn’t need rescuing. A small aeroplane took off, and soon afterward the aeroshell left.’
‘My mother was flying the plane.’
‘I think so. I want to find her because I want to help her. Because I think we could create wonderful things together.’
‘Do you have any children?’ Yuli said.
‘Yes. Two sons.’
‘Did you tweak them?’
‘I gave my eldest son a few . . . advantages,’ Sri said.
‘Is he here?’
‘He’s in charge of a research facility in Antarctica.’
‘Pity. Him and me, we have something in common.’
‘My other son, Berry, lives here. It might be possible for you to meet him.’
‘My mother created me,’ Yuli said. ‘She isn’t what you could call a people person. Really, she doesn’t understand people at all. She doesn’t even understand herself most of the time. But when Greater Brazil began to make overtures to the Outer System a decade ago, she believed that for the first time in a hundred years there was a possibility of a real and lasting reconciliation with Earth. And she decided that she wanted to become involved. That she could do some good - like the biome at Rainbow Bridge. And because she didn’t want to be distracted by all the political manoeuvring, she got up a crew of advisers and she made me - made me what I am - to help her explain what people wanted of her and how she could deal with them. But here’s the funny thing. She didn’t listen to me. I would give her advice and she would listen carefully and then completely ignore it. She carried on exactly as she had always carried on. When the so-called joint expedition arrived in the Saturn System and began to behave in a grossly provocative manner, I told her to give up any idea of making peace with Earth. And I told her to keep away from the people who, contrary to all the evidence, believed that war could be averted. But she didn’t listen. No, she made herself into their figurehead and sacrificed her freedom on the altar of their principles. Sacrificed my freedom, too. And when war broke out and we managed to get free, I told her to stay with Macy Minnot, who may not be the brightest of people but is a proven survivor. But again: no. She decided that she knew better, and went off on her own. To sulk, I bet. To lick her wounds and try to figure out where she went wrong.’
‘Very often my advice goes unheeded,’ Sri said. ‘I know how frustrating it can be.’
She was trying to make a connection with the girl by sympathising with her and seeking to underscore similarities, as the two psychologists had advised. But Yuli laughed and said scornfully, ‘Do you really, truly think we’re in any way alike? Oh, maybe you’re like my mother, just a little bit. But you and I have nothing in common. I’ll tell you why, if you like.’
‘Please,’ Sri said, as calmly as she could.
‘I hope for your sake that you didn’t change your son too much, Professor Doctor. I hope you didn’t make him into a true more-than-human monster. The kind of creature that people like your general quite rightly fear. Because if you did make him into a monster, he will destroy you. That’s what monsters do. They aren’t grateful for the so-called gifts they’ve been given. They may love them because they elevate them above the common herd, or they may loathe them for exactly the same reason, but they’ll never, ever be grateful. Why? Because those gifts set them apart from everyone else, including their creators. Yes, the old story, Frankenstein and his monster, the stuff of a billion tawdry serials and sagas. But the reason it has persisted for so long is because it contains a fundamental truth: monsters are always lonely, because they can’t connect with ordinary people in any ordinary way. People fear and persecute monsters because they are different, and monsters despise and torment people because, despite their weakness and inferiority, they possess the one thing that monsters can never possess: the fellowship of the herd. And so monsters grow contemptuous, and contempt turns to hate, and hate to rage, and then the running and the screaming and the killing and the destruction begins. And I should know,’ Yuli said, flexing her back and bouncing to her feet, ‘because I’m very definitely a monster!’
Sri flinched, she couldn’t help it, and then Yuli was on her back, arched and straining, making raw animal noises. After a moment, Sri realised that one of the monitors had activated the collar.
Despite the abrupt end to the session, the psychologists believed that it had gone well. ‘The pheromone had only a small effect, but I think it was significant,’ one said. ‘Yuli was open and friendly towards you. She engaged in conversation, showed curiosity, and was candid about herself. It’s an excellent start.’
‘She was attempting to assert her own identity,’ the other said. ‘She harbours considerable resentment towards her mother, that’s been clear from the outset. And she appears to blame her mother for her present situation. We must find a way of sympathising with that, and using it to build a bridge or two.’
‘I’m not interested in making friends with her,’ Sri said. ‘And she isn’t interested in making friends with me. I thought that was clear enough.’
‘But she was friendly,’ the first psychologist said.
‘Discover what she wants,’ the second psychologist said. ‘Then she may open up and give you what you want.’
‘She wants her freedom,’ Sri said. ‘I can’t give her that. And besides, she’s already refused it when it was offered to her in exchange for information about her mother. Tell me: does she really hate Avernus? If she does, wouldn’t she have betrayed her mother by now?’
‘She’s conflicted,’ the first psych
ologist said. ‘She blames her mother for her situation, but she’s also loyal to her.’
‘And she knows that by blaming her mother she isn’t taking responsibility for herself,’ the second psychologist said. ‘Help her to do that, and you will begin to win her trust.’
It sounded too pat to Sri. Like one of the Just-so stories made up by evolutionary biologists, simplistic attempts to rationalise quirks of human behaviour by suggesting they were hardwired relics of ancient survival strategies. Nevertheless, she allowed the psychologists to coach her through a couple of scenarios and went back to the suite early the next day. She’d been coolly confident before; now she felt a sharp edge of caution.
Yuli was waiting for her, sitting cross-legged on the big cushion, calm and indifferent. Sri had brought a slate with her and showed the girl videos of the garden on Titan where she’d been working: ragged sheets fluttering in currents in a lead of ammonia-rich water under the volcanic dome, the zoo of different microscopic forms expressed by a single suite of genes.
Yuli yawned, said that she didn’t know anything about her mother’s gardens. ‘She made them before I was born. And afterwards, she was too busy to make any more.’
‘I’m sure you visited some of them.’
‘If you want to know why my mother made them, ask a plant why it makes flowers. Ask a bee why it makes honey. She made them because that’s what she does.’ Yuli paused, then added, ‘You’re collecting them, aren’t you?’
‘I’m trying to understand them because I believe it will help me understand how your mother works. How she thinks. And I believe that it will make me better at what I do. Let me show you something else,’ Sri said, and pulled up the list of changes made to Yuli’s genome and highlighted those which had altered her brain structure.
The girl shrugged. ‘You can’t understand someone by cataloguing their genes.’