Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

"I'm quite capable of doing this, sir. Another pair of hands would only slow me down."

  "That isn't the issue. The issue is one of my deputies going out there without back-up."

  "I'm not going out there to initiate a lockdown, sir. No one's going to put up a fight."

  "We don't start being popular just because we aren't enforcing lockdowns. The citizenry moves from hating and fearing us to guarded tolerance. That's as good as it gets."

  "I've been doing this for five years, sir."

  "But never alone."

  "I was alone in Bezile Solipsist for eight months."

  "But no one noticed you. That's why they call it Bezile Solipsist."

  "I need to prove that I can handle a difficult assignment on my own, sir. This is my chance. But if you really think I ought to come back to Panoply — "

  "Of course I don't, now that you're out there. But I'm still cross. You should have cleared this with me first."

  Thalia cocked her head. "Would you have let me go alone?"

  "Probably not. I don't throw assets into risky environments without making damned sure they're protected."

  "Then now you know why I went out without calling you."

  She saw something in his expression give way, as if he recognised this was a fight he could not hope to win. He had chosen Thalia for her cleverness, her independence of mind. He could hardly be surprised that she was beginning to chafe at the leash.

  "Promise me this," he said. "The instant something happens that you're not happy about ... you call in, understood?"

  "Baudry said they won't be able to spare a taskforce, sir, if I run into trouble."

  "Never mind Baudry. I'd find a way to move Panoply itself if I knew one of my squad was in trouble."

  "I'll call in, sir."

  After a moment, Dreyfus said, "In case you were wondering, I didn't call you to tick you off. I need some technical input."

  "I'm listening, sir."

  "Where House Perigal was concerned, you were able to recover all the communications handled by the core in the last thousand days, correct?"

  "Yes," Thalia said.

  "Suppose we needed something similar for the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble?"

  "If the beta-levels didn't come through intact, I don't hold out much hope for transmission logs."

  "That's what I thought. But a message still has to originate from somewhere. That means someone else must have the relevant outgoing transmission somewhere in their logs. And if it travelled more than a few hundred kilometres through the Band, it probably passed through a router or hub, maybe several. Routers and hubs keep records of all data traffic passing through them."

  "Not deep content, though."

  "I'll settle for a point of origin. Can you help?"

  Thalia thought about it. "It's doable, sir, but I'll need access to a full version of the Solid Orrery."

  "Can your ship run a copy?"

  "Not a light-enforcement vehicle. I'm afraid it'll have to wait until I return."

  "I'd rather it didn't."

  Thalia thought even harder. "Then ... you'll need to turn the Orrery back to around the time of this transmission, if you know it."

  "I think I can narrow it down," Dreyfus said.

  "You'll need to pinpoint it to within a few minutes. That's the kind of timescale on which the router network optimises itself. If you can do that, then you can send me a snapshot of the Orrery. Pull out Ruskin-Sartorious and all routers or hubs within ten thousand kilometres. I'll see what I can do."

  Dreyfus looked uncharacteristically pleased. "Thank you, Thalia."

  "No promises, sir. This might not work."

  "It's a lead. Since I've nothing else to go on, I'll take what I'm given."

  * * *

  Sparver collected his food from the counter and moved to an empty table near the corner of the refectory. The lights were bright and the low-ceilinged, gently curving space was as busy as it ever got. A group of fields had just returned from duty aboard one of the deep-system vehicles. A hundred or so grey-uniformed cadets were squeezing around three tables near the middle, most of them carrying the dummy whiphounds they'd just been introduced to in basic training. The cadets' eager, over-earnest faces meant nothing to him. Dreyfus occasionally taught classes, and Sparver sometimes filled in for him, but that happened so infrequently that he never had a chance to commit any of the cadets to memory.

  The one thing he didn't doubt was that they all knew his name. He could feel their sidelong glances when he looked around the room, taking in the other diners. As the only hyperpig to have made it past Deputy II in twenty years, Sparver was known throughout Panoply. There'd been another promising candidate in the organisation a few years earlier, but he'd died during a bad lock-down. Sparver couldn't see any hyperpigs amongst the cadets, and it didn't surprise him. Dreyfus had accepted him unquestioningly, had even pulled strings to get Sparver assigned to his team rather than someone else's, but for the most part there was still distrust and suspicion against his kind. Baseline humans had made hyperpigs, created them for sinister purposes, and now they had to live with the legacy of that crime. They were resentful of his very existence because it spoke of the dark appetites of their ancestors.

  He began to eat his meal, using the specially shaped cutlery that best fit his hands.

  He felt eyes on the back of his neck.

  He laid his compad before him and called up the results on the search term he had fed into the Turbines just before entering the refectory. Lascaille's Shroud, Dreyfus had said. But what did Sparver — or Dreyfus, for that matter — know of the Shrouds? No more or less than the average citizen of the Glitter Band.

  The compad jogged his memory.

  The Shrouds were things out in interstellar space, light-years from Yellowstone. They'd been found in all directions: lightless black spheres of unknown composition, wider than stars. Alien constructs, most likely: that was why their hypothetical builders were called the Shrouders. But no one had ever made contact with a Shrouder, or had the least idea what the aliens might be like, if they were not already extinct.

  The difficulty with the Shrouds was that nothing sent towards them ever came back intact. Probes and ships returned to the study stations mangled beyond recognition, if they came back at all. No useful data was ever obtained. The only indisputable fact was that the crewed vehicles returned less mangled, and with more frequency, than the robots. Something about the Shrouds was, if not exactly tolerant of living things, at least slightly less inclined to destroy them utterly. Even so, most of the time the people came back dead, their minds too pulverised even for a post-mortem trawl.

  But occasionally there was an exception.

  Lascaille's Shroud, the compad informed Sparver, was named for the first man to return alive from its boundary. Philip Lascaille had gone in solo, without the permission of the study station where he'd been based. Against all the odds, he'd returned from the Shroud with his body and mind superficially intact. But that wasn't to say that Lascaille had not still paid a terrible price. He'd come back mute, either unwilling or incapable of talking about his experiences. His emotional connection with other human beings had become autistically impoverished. A kind of holy fool, he spent his time making intricate chalk drawings on concrete slabs. Shipped back to the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies, Lascaille became a curiosity of gradually dwindling interest.

  That was one mystery solved, but it begged more questions than it answered. Why had Delphine alighted on this subject matter, so many decades after Lascaille's return? And why had her decision to portray Lascaille resulted in a work of such striking emotional resonance, when her creations had been so affectless before?

  On this, the compad had nothing to say.

  Sparver continued with his meal, wondering how far ahead of him Dreyfus' enquiries had reached.

  He could still feel the eyes on his neck.

  * * *

  "Back from whatever busy errand called you away last time,
Prefect Dreyfus?" asked the beta-level invocation of Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious.

  "I'm sorry about that," Dreyfus said. "Something came up."

  "Connected with the Bubble?"

  "I suppose so." His instincts told him that Delphine didn't need to know all the details concerning Captain Dravidian. "But the case isn't closed just yet. I'd like to talk to you in some detail concerning the way the deal collapsed."

  Delphine reached up and pushed a stray strand of hair back under the rag-like band she wore around her head. She was dressed in the same clothes she'd been wearing during the last invocation: white smock and trousers, sleeves rolled to the elbow, trousers tucked up to the knee. Once again Dreyfus was struck by the paleness of her eyes and the doll-like simplicity of her features.

  "How much did Vernon tell you?" she asked.

  "Enough to know that someone called through and that was enough to remove Dravidian's offer from consideration. I'd really like to know who that mystery caller was."

  "A representative of some other group of Ultras, intent on undermining Dravidian. Does it really matter now?"

  "Play along with me," Dreyfus said. "Assume for a minute that Dravidian was set up to make it look as if he intentionally fired on you. What reason might there have been for someone to want to hurt your family?"

  Her face became suspicious. "But it was revenge, Prefect. What else could it have been?"

  "I'm simply keeping an open mind. Did you or your family have enemies?"

  "You'd have to ask someone else."

  "I'm asking you. What about Anthony Theobald? Had he crossed swords with anyone?"

  "Anthony Theobald had friends and rivals, like anyone. But actual enemies? I wasn't aware of any."

  "Did he leave the habitat often?"

  "Now and then, to visit another state or go down to Chasm City. But there was never anything sinister about his movements."

  "What about visitors — get many of those?"

  "We kept ourselves to ourselves, by and large."

  "So no visitors."

  "I didn't say that. Yes, of course people came by. We weren't hermits. Anthony Theobald had his usual guests; I had the occasional fellow artist or critic."

  "None of whom would have had any pressing reason to see you dead?"

  "Speaking for myself, no."

  "And Anthony Theobald — what were his guests like?"

  He caught it then: the tiniest flicker of hesitation in her answer. "Nothing out of the ordinary, Prefect."

  Dreyfus nodded, allowing her to think he was content to let the matter stand. He knew he'd touched on something, however peripheral it might prove, but his years of experience had taught him that it would be counterproductive to dig away at it now. Delphine would be conflicted between her blood loyalty to Anthony Theobald and her desire to see justice served, and too much probing from him now might cause her to clam up irrevocably.

  He would have to earn her trust.

  "The point is," she went on, "I really wasn't interested in family or Glitter Band politics. I had — have — my art. That was all that interested me."

  "Let's talk about your art, then. Could someone have been jealous of your success?"

  She looked stunned. "Enough to kill nine hundred and sixty people?"

  "Crimes aren't always proportionate to motive."

  "I can't think of anyone. If I'd been the talk of Stoner society, we wouldn't have been dealing with a second-rate trader like Dravidian."

  Dreyfus bit his tongue, keeping his policeman's poker face fixed firmly in place. "All the same, someone wanted you all dead, and I'll sleep easier when I know the reason."

  "I wish I could help."

  "You still can. I want you to tell me when that call came through."

  "While Dravidian was visiting us."

  "If you could narrow it down, that would help."

  The beta-level closed her eyes momentarily. "The call came in at fourteen hours, twenty-three minutes, fifty-one seconds, Yellowstone Standard Time."

  "Thank you," Dreyfus said. "Freeze — " he began.

  "Are we done?" Delphine asked, cutting him off before he had finished issuing the command.

  "For now. If there's anything else I need from you, you'll be the first to hear about it."

  "And now you're going to put me back in the box?"

  "That's the idea."

  "I thought you wanted to talk about art."

  "We did."

  "No, we discussed the possibility of my art being a motivating factor in the crime. We didn't discuss the art itself."

  Dreyfus shrugged easily. "We can, if you think it's relevant."

  "You don't?"

  "The art appears to be a peripheral detail, unless you think otherwise. You yourself expressed doubt that jealousy could have been a motivating factor." Dreyfus paused and reconsidered. "That said, your reputation was building, wasn't it?"

  Delphine looked at him sourly. "You make it sound as if my life story's already written, down to the last footnote."

  "From where I'm standing ... " But then Dreyfus remembered what Vernon had told him concerning Delphine's belief in the validity of beta-level simulation.

  "What?" Delphine said.

  "Things will be different. Won't they?"

  "Different. Not necessarily worse. You still don't believe in me, do you?"

  "I'm trying my best," Dreyfus replied.

  "The last time we spoke, I asked you a question."

  "Did you?"

  "I asked you if you'd ever lost a loved one."

  "I answered you."

  "Evasively." She fixed him with a long, searching stare. "You have lost someone, haven't you? Not just a colleague or friend. Someone closer than that."

  "We've all lost people."

  "Who was it, Prefect Dreyfus? Who did you lose?"

  "Tell me why you chose to work on the Lascaille series. Why did you care about what happened to a man you never knew?"

  "Those are personal questions for an artist."

  "I'm wondering if you made any enemies when you picked that theme."

  "And I'm wondering why you find it so difficult to acknowledge my conscious existence. This person who died — did something happen that made you turn against beta-levels?" Her eyes flashed an insistent sea-green, daring him to look away. "Who was it, Prefect? Quid pro quo. Answer my question and I'll answer yours."

  "I've got a job to do, Delphine. Empathising with software isn't part of it."

  "I'm sorry you feel that way."

  "No," Dreyfus said, something inside him snapping, "you aren't 'sorry'. 'Sorry' would imply the presence of a thinking mind, a sentient will capable of experiencing the emotion called 'regret'. You're saying that you are sorry because that's what the living Delphine would have said under similar circumstances. But it doesn't mean you feel it."

  "You really don't think I'm alive, in any sense of the word?"

  "I'm afraid not."

  Delphine nodded coolly. "In which case: why are you arguing with me?"

  Dreyfus reached for an automatic answer, but nothing came. The moment dragged, Delphine regarding him with something between amusement and pity. He froze the invocation and stood staring at the empty space where she had been standing.

  Not a she, he told himself. An it.

  * * *

  "Hello?" Thalia called into an echoing, dank darkness. "This is Deputy Field Prefect Ng. Is anyone there?"

  There was no answer. Thalia stopped and put down the heavy cylinder she'd been carrying in her left hand. She touched her right hand to the haft of her whiphound, and then chided herself for her unease. Letting go of the weapon, she extracted her glasses, slipped them on and keyed image-amplification. The darkness of the chamber abated, revealing a doorway in one wall. Thalia touched the glasses again, but the entoptic overlay changed nothing. If a habitat citizen had been standing in Thalia's place with a skullful of sense-modifying implants, they'd still have seen only the same drab walls.

>   "Moving deeper into the hab," Thalia said, reporting back to her cutter. "So far I'm not exactly overwhelmed by the welcoming committee."

  She picked up the equipment cylinder in her left hand. Caution prevailed, and this time she chose to release the whiphound. "Proceed ahead of me at defence posture one," she instructed, before letting go. Red eye bright, the whiphound nodded its haft once to indicate that it had understood her order and was now in compliance. Then it turned the haft away from her and slunk forward, gliding across the ground on the coiled tip of its filament, like a sketch of a cobra.

  The doorway led to a damp tunnel with cracked flooring. Ahead, the tunnel began to curve around. The whiphound slinked forward, the red light of its scanning eye reflecting back from moist surfaces. Thalia followed it into the tunnel, around a gentle curve, until the tunnel widened out into a gloomily lit plaza. The curvature of the habitat was evident in the continuous gentle upsweep of the floor, rising ahead of her until it was hidden by the similarly curving ceiling. The only illumination came from sunlight creeping through immense slatted windows on either side, their glass panes tinting the light sepia-brown through a thick caking of dust and mould. Rising high above Thalia, interrupted only by the windows, were multi-levelled tiers of what had once been shops, boutiques and restaurants. Bridges and ramps spanned the space between the two walls, some of them sagging or broken. Glass frontages lay shattered, or were covered with various forms of mould or foliage-like infestation. In some of the shops there was even evidence of unsold merchandise, cobwebbed into obscurity.

  Thalia didn't like the place at all. She was glad when she found another tunnel leading out of the plaza. The whiphound slinked ahead of her, its coil making a rhythmic hissing sound against the flooring.

  Without warning, it vanished.

  An instant later Thalia heard a sound like two pieces of scrap metal being smashed against each other. Cautiously she rounded the curve and saw the whiphound wrapped around the immobilised form of a robot, which had toppled over onto its side, its rubber-tyred wheels spinning uselessly. Thalia stepped closer, putting down the cylinder. She appraised the fallen machine for weapons, but there was no sign that it was anything other than a general-purpose servitor of antique design.