“My preferred name is—” and she opened her mouth and emitted a complex, liquid trilling, a rapid sequence of notes and warbles. Genetic engineering had given all Polity citizens a sound-generating organ modelled on the avian syrinx, plus the necessary neural circuitry to generate and decode the sounds produced by that organ. Since it was now part of their genome, the Slashers would retain the capability for rapid communication even if they suffered another Forgetting or technological crash.
Cassandra smiled ruefully. “But I think Cassandra will do for now.”
“Almost certainly,” the chairwoman said, echoing the smile. “First of all, I’d like to thank you on behalf of Antiquities, and the wider authority of the USNE, for taking the time to return to Tanglewood, especially in these difficult circumstances.”
“It’s no hardship,” Cassandra said.
Freed of any need to disguise herself, the woman was now unmistakably a citizen of the Federation of Polities. Her basic appearance was still the same: a small, unassuming girl with a lopsided fringe of dark hair and the pouting expression of someone accustomed to being told off. But now she was attended by a roving cloud of autonomous machines, their ceaseless movement blurring the territory of her body and mind. Like all Slashers, she was infested with countless droves of invisibly small machines: distant relatives of the microscopic furies that still ran amok on the surface of Earth. She wore plain white clothes of an austere cut, but the machines themselves formed a kind of shifting armour around her, a silver-tinged halo that glinted and sparkled at the edges. Doubtless, elements of her entourage had already detached themselves from the main cloud to improve her overview of the room and its occupants. It was entirely possible that some of those machines had even slipped into the bodies of those present, eavesdropping on thoughts.
“At the moment,” the chairwoman said, “you are the only useful witness we have. Perhaps when the boy relearns language—”
“If,” Cassandra corrected. “It’s by no means guaranteed that our techniques will be able to reconstruct that kind of hard-wired neural function.”
“Well, we’ll see,” the chairwoman said. “In the meantime we have you, and we have the film spools recovered from the crawler.”
“And Verity’s testimony,” Cassandra said, fixing Auger with an expressionless stare from within her aura of twinkling machines. “You have that as well.”
“We do. Unfortunately, it rather contradicts your own.”
The girl blinked, then shrugged. “That’s a pity.”
“Yes,” the chairwoman agreed. “Very much so. Auger argues that the Champs-Elysées site appeared to have been secured for human teams. Isn’t that so?”
Auger said, “I believe you’ve read my statement, your honour.”
The chairwoman glanced down at her notes. “Analysis of the processed film reels shows that the excavated site had not been marked as safe for human visitors.”
“The markings are often too faint to read,” Auger said. “The excavators mark them with dye because transponders don’t last, but the dyes don’t last long either.”
“Records confirm that the chamber had never been secured,” the chairwoman repeated.
“Records are often out of date.”
“That’s hardly a good enough reason to go charging underground.”
“With all due respect, no one charged anywhere. It was a cautious investigation that unfortunately ran into trouble.”
“That’s not what Cassandra says.”
“No?” Auger tried to read something in the Slasher’s expression, but failed. It was still difficult to make the mental adjustment to the fact that Cassandra was not a girl but a child-shaped adult, at least as clever and ambitious as Auger and probably more so.
“Cassandra says that the risks were apparent from the word go,” the chairwoman said, “and that you took a calculated decision to ignore them. The in-cabin tapes—what we’ve managed to get from them—seem to back her up. You went down that hole, Auger, even knowing that you had two vulnerable children in your care.”
“Begging your pardon, your honour: one child and one lying little shit. I should have been informed that we had a Slasher with us. The clouds knew, didn’t they? They sniffed her out.”
“Watch your step,” the chairwoman warned. “This may only be a preliminary hearing, but I can still find you in contempt.”
“Go ahead. It might save us all a bit of time.” Auger leaned forward in the stand, resting tight fists on the wooden railing. For a while she had really tried to play it the way Peter had suggested, with honesty and humility. She could see him now, behind the narrow glass screen of the observation gallery, shaking his head and turning away from the proceedings.
“I’ll pretend—on this one occasion—that I didn’t hear that,” the chairwoman said. “However, can I take it as read that you have not changed your position since submitting your written statement?”
“You can take it as read,” Auger replied.
“Very well. We’ll proceed with a full disciplinary hearing in five days from now. I need hardly remind you of the severity of this incident, Auger.”
“No, ma’am. You need hardly remind me.”
The chairwoman banged her gavel. “Hearing adjourned.”
Auger folded the letter to her daughter, then popped the plastic seal on one of the in-bound cylinders. A paper map spilled out and flapped open. She slipped the letter into the empty cylinder, resealed it, then punched in the destination code for Peter’s district of Tanglewood. The cylinder whisked away, speeding into the mind-boggling complexity of the pneumatic network. Depending on routing constraints, it stood a good chance of reaching Paula within a few hours. But when you were already more than week late with a birthday, Auger supposed, another few hours would make little practical difference, even to a nine-year-old.
Something caught her eye.
It was the map from the in-bound cylinder. She pressed it flat, puzzled by a missing detail. Where was the Périphérique? The ring-shaped motorway, with its elevated and underground sections, encircled Paris like a grey moat of prestressed concrete. Even with the city under ice, the Périphérique was still an important landmark. It was where Antiquities had established the high armoured barrier that served the dual purpose of holding back both ice and incursions by furies. Beyond the Périphérique, the mutant machines, in all their myriad forms, held absolute dominion. Field trips outside that boundary were even more hazardous than the one Auger had undertaken.
But there was no Périphérique on this map. At the time of the Nanocaust, the road had already been in place for more than a hundred years; rebuilt, realigned, widened and laid with guidance systems to cope with automated traffic, but still more or less recognisable, hemmed in by buildings and obstacles that prevented it from changing too radically. In the few physical maps that Auger had handled or examined, the Périphérique was always there: as much a part of the landscape of the city as the Seine or the many gardens and cemeteries.
So why wasn’t it on this map?
With a mingled sense of curiosity and suspicion, she turned the map over and looked for details of when it had been printed. At the bottom of the map’s card cover was a small copyright statement and the year 1959. The map had been printed more than a century before the end; even before the Périphérique had been finished. It was more than a little strange that there was no evidence at all of the motorway—not even any incomplete sections or ghostly indications of where they would be constructed—but perhaps the map had been out of date even when it was printed.
Why was someone sending her pointless facsimiles? If it was their intention to remind her of what had happened under the Champs-Elysées, she could think of less oblique ways of doing it.
Examining the map again, her eye picked out something else that wasn’t quite right, another nagging detail that could not quite force itself into consciousness… but she refused to be drawn into someone else’s tedious mind games. She folded the map and slipped it
back into another tube, ready to be punched to a random destination.
“I don’t need this,” she muttered.
There was a knock at the door. Peter? But the knock was too sharp and businesslike to be his. She thought about ignoring the caller, but if it was someone from Antiquities they would, sooner or later, find a way into her home regardless. And if they had news of the tribunal, she would rather hear it now.
She yanked open the door. “What?”
There were two of them: a young man and a young woman. They were dressed in very dark, very formal business suits, offset with a flash of stiff white collar. They both had neat yellow hair gelled back in glistening rows, almost as if they were brother and sister. They gave off a taut energy, like a pair of highly compressed springs. They were dangerous and efficient and they wanted her to feel it.
“Verity Auger?” the woman asked.
“You know exactly who I am.”
The woman flashed a badge in Auger’s face, bright with foils and holographic inlays. Beneath the stars and stripes of the USNE, a picture of the woman’s head and upper body rotated through 360°. “Securities Board. I’m Agent Ringsted. My colleague is Agent Molinella. You’re to come with us.”
“I have another five days before the tribunal,” Auger said.
“You have another five minutes,” Ringsted said. “Is that enough time for you to get ready?”
“Wait,” Auger said, standing her ground. “My tribunal is a matter for Antiquities. I may have screwed up down there—that isn’t an admission, by the way—but even if I did, there’s no way it’s an issue for Securities. I thought your remit was protecting the interests of the entire community. Haven’t you got anything better to do than waste your time making my life even more difficult?”
“Have you heard that Transgressions is on your case?” Ringsted asked. “Word is they want your head. They say procedures are getting too lax. People think they can just waltz around down on Earth as it suits them, without considering the consequences.”
Molinella nodded in agreement. “Transgressions says that a criminal conviction and a robust punishment may be just the signal they need to send.”
“By ‘robust punishment,’ do you mean the kind that ends in the obituary columns?” Augur enquired caustically.
“You get the idea,” Ringsted said. “The point being, at this juncture you may prefer to deal with Securities rather than Transgressions.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be working for the same government?”
“Theoretically,” Ringsted allowed, as if it was a concept that had only just occurred to her.
“This is too surreal. What am I supposed to do?”
“You’re supposed to come with us,” Ringsted said. “We have a ship waiting.”
“One other thing,” Molinella said. “Bring the maps.”
The ship was a blunt, unmarked shuttle of businesslike design. It powered away from the docking port nearest to Auger’s home, cutting through local traffic on the kind of express trajectory that required high-level government authorisation. Soon they were moving through outlying precincts, skimming perilously close to the exclusion zone around Earth. They were obviously taking a short cut to the other side of Tanglewood, rather than going the longer, more fuel-efficient way around.
When Auger was alone—the agents sat up front with the crew, leaving her by herself in the passenger compartment—she took out the one map that she had brought along for the ride. She had stuffed it into her jacket, still rolled inside the tube she had put it in. Some contrary impulse had made her refuse to bring the others after being told to do so, but there was something about this particular map—the last to arrive in the hopper, and the only one that she had examined properly—that tugged at her curiosity. It had felt like a goad before, but now she began to wonder if it served some other function. She examined the map again, to make sure that she had not been mistaken the first time. But there it was: the same subdued colours, the same absence of the Périphérique, the same copyright date of 1959 and the same puzzling sense that something else was not as it should have been. She stared at the map, turning it this way and that, hoping that the thing that was troubling her would become apparent. In the calm of her study, she might have identified the detail after a few minutes’ patient examination. But as the shuttle veered and surged, her thoughts kept being derailed. She was at least as anxious to know where she was being taken as she was to solve the mystery of the map.
Presently the shuttle began what she recognised as a braking and final-approach manoeuvre. Large Tanglewood structures loomed through the narrow little portholes. She saw spoked wheels, partial wheels, spheres and cylinders, all joined together like symbols in some weird alien language. While the basic architecture was not unusual by Tanglewood standards, this was not a district she recognised. The habitats were very dark and very old, crusted with the scar tissue of many layers of enlargement and reorganisation. Only a faint spray of tiny golden windows suggested any kind of human presence at all. Auger tensed: what the place most resembled was some kind of maximum-security prison or psychiatric complex.
In a particularly dark section of one of the spheres a little door clammed open, bracketed by red and white approach lights, and the shuttle aimed itself for this tiny aperture. Auger’s hands were sweaty on the map, the ink beginning to smudge and stain her fingers. She folded it and pushed it back inside her jacket, trying to stop her hands from trembling.
The shuttle docked and the agents escorted her through the airlock into a labyrinth of sterile black corridors, twisting and turning as they wormed their way deeper into the sphere.
“Where are we?” she asked. “What is this place?”
“You’ve heard of Securities,” Molinella said. “Welcome to Contingencies—our older, rather more secretive and manipulative brother.”
“It doesn’t exist.”
“That’s precisely the idea.”
They led her through a series of security checks, one of which featured a large Slasher-manufactured snake robot marked with the crossed-out “A” that meant it was most definitely not Asimov-compliant. Auger’s neck tingled as the robot studied her.
Beyond the security area was a short corridor ending in a door that was open a few centimetres, spilling a fan of orange light across the grilled black decking of the floor. An armed and goggled guard standing in front of the door observed their progress down the corridor. Sounds came through the gap: high-pitched scratching and scraping noises that set her teeth on edge. There was a regularity and structure to the noises that Auger identified as music, although she could not say exactly which kind. She set her jaw against the unpleasant sound, determined not to let it unsettle her, as was undoubtedly the intention.
The guard stood aside, gesturing for her to step through the doorway. She noticed that he had earphones on beneath his helmet. Molinella and Ringsted stood back, letting her enter the room alone.
Auger pushed the door open, getting the full blast of the music, and stepped through. Inside was a windowless room about the size of her entire apartment, but furnished to a much higher degree of opulence. It looked, in fact, rather like a recreation of a drawing room from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, the kind that might have belonged to some ardent scholar of the natural sciences. Behind an enormous desk stood an elderly-looking man who was engaged with fierce concentration in the business of making the music. He had his back to her; he was wearing a purple satin smoking jacket, his silver-white hair combed back from his forehead and falling over the collar. His hands worked the instrument that he held clamped under his chin. The fingers of one hand pressed on the strings, while the other sawed away with a long wooden bow. The man’s entire body moved in sympathy with the sounds he was making.
They were awful. Auger felt a faint but rising tide of nausea, but forced herself to stand her ground. The man reminded her of someone, someone she knew well, but in a completely different context.
Then he
turned around, sensing her presence, and abandoned the music, letting the bow slide to a scraping halt.
It was Thomas Caliskan: the Musician. The head of Antiquities, and the man of whom she had recently made a personal enemy by denying him academic credit on one of her papers.
Caliskan placed his viola on the desk. “Hello, Verity. How good of you to come.”
FIVE
At the entrance to the railway station, a bespectacled young man in a greatcoat tried to push a mimeographed pamphlet into Floyd’s hands.
“Read this, monsieur,” he said, his French accent well educated. “Read this, and if you agree with our aims, join us at the demonstration next weekend. There’s still a chance to do something about Chatelier.”
The kid was eighteen or nineteen, the hairs on his chin as fine as peach fuzz. He might have been a medical student or a trainee lawyer. “Why would I want to do something about Chatelier?” Floyd asked.
“You’re a foreigner. I hear it in your accent.”
“The passport in my pocket says I’m French.”
“Very soon, that won’t count for much.”
“Meaning I should watch my back?”
“All of us should,” the young man said. He forced the pamphlet into Floyd’s hand. Floyd crumpled it and was about to throw it away when some moderating impulse made him push it into his pocket, safely out of sight.
“Thanks for the warning, chief,” he said to the boy.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Kid, when you’ve been around the block as many times as I have…” Floyd shook his head, knowing there was a gulf of understanding here that could never be explained, only experienced.
“It’ll start with the usual hate figures,” the young man said. “But it’ll end with anyone they don’t like the look of.”
“Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.” Floyd flashed him a smile. “It won’t last for ever.”
“Monsieur…” the young man said, his voice trailing off as Floyd turned around and walked further into the station.
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