The Prefect (40 page)

Dreyfus called Trajanova. She was flustered, not happy to be distracted from the work at hand. She appeared to be squeezed into the shaft of one of her Turbines, suspended in a weightless sling with her back against the curved glass tube that encased the machinery.

‘It's important,' Dreyfus said. ‘I just invoked one of my beta-levels. She crashed on me halfway through the interview.'

Trajanova transferred a tool from one hand to the other, via her mouth. ‘Did you re-invoke?'

‘I tried, but nothing happened. The system said the beta-level image was irrevocably corrupted.'

Trajanova grunted and eased sideways to find a more comfortable position. 'That isn't possible. You got a stable invocation until halfway through your interview?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then the base image can't have been damaged.'

‘My subject appeared to be aware that something was corrupting her. She said she felt as if she was being eaten. It was as if she could feel her core personality being erased segment by segment.'

‘That isn't possible either.' Then a troubling thought made her frown. ‘Unless, of course—'

‘Unless what?'

‘Could someone have introduced some kind of data weapon into your beta-level?'

‘Hypothetically, I suppose so. But when we pulled those recoverables out of Ruskin-Sartorious, they were subjected to all the usual tests and filters we normally run before invocation. They were badly damaged as well. I had Thalia working overtime just to stitch the pieces back together. If there'd been a data weapon - or any kind of self-destruct function - Thalia would've seen it.'

‘And she reported nothing unusual to you?'

‘She told me she'd only been able to get three clean recoveries. That was all.'

‘And we can trust Thalia not to have missed anything?'

‘I'd swear on it.'

‘Then there's only one answer: someone must have got to the beta-level after it entered Panoply. From a technical standpoint, it wouldn't have been all that difficult. All they'd have needed to do was find some data weapon in the archives and embed it in the beta-level. It could have been programmed to start eating the recoverable as soon as you invoked, or maybe it was keyed to a phrase or gesture.'

‘My God,' Dreyfus said. ‘Then the others... I want to talk to them as well.'

‘It could be too dangerous if the same code has been embedded. You'll lose your other two witnesses.'

‘What do you mean, lose? Don't I get a back-up?'

‘There is no back-up, Tom. We lost all duplicate images when the Turb blew.'

‘This was all engineered.'

‘Listen,' Trajanova said, with sudden intensity, ‘I'm going to be stuck in here for a few more hours. I have to get this Turb back up to speed before I do anything else. But as soon as I'm done I'll look at the recoverables. I'll see if I can salvage anything from the one that crashed, and look for a data weapon embedded in the other two. Until then, whatever you do, don't invoke them.'

‘I won't,' Dreyfus said.

‘I'll call you when I'm done.'

It was only when he had finished speaking with Trajanova that Dreyfus paused to examine his state of mind. What he found was both unexpected and shocking. Only a few days ago, he would have regarded the loss of a beta-level witness as akin to the destruction of some potentially incriminating forensic evidence. He would have been irritated, even angered, but his feelings would have arisen solely because an investigation had been hampered. He would have felt no emotional sentimentality concerning the loss of the artefact itself, because an artefact was all that it was.

That wasn't how he felt now. He kept seeing Delphine's face in those final moments, when she had still retained enough sentience to recognise the inevitability of her own death.

But if beta-levels were never alive, how could they ever die?

Gaffney's first thought was that Clepsydra was dead, or at least comatose. He experienced a moment of relief, thinking that he would be spared the burden of another death, before the truth revealed itself. The Conjoiner woman was still breathing; her deathlike composure was merely her natural state of repose when no one was in attendance. Her sharp-boned face was already turning towards him, moving with the smoothness of a missile launcher locking on to a target, her eyes widening from drowsy slits.

‘I was not expecting you to come back so quickly,' she said, ‘but perhaps the timing is fortuitous. I've been thinking about our previous conversation—'

‘Good,' Gaffney said.

There was a measurable pause before she spoke again. ‘I was expecting Dreyfus.'

‘Dreyfus couldn't make it. Otherwise detained.' Gaffney came to rest in the bubble, having judged his momentum with expert precision. ‘That's not a problem, is it?'

He felt Clepsydra's attention pierce the skin of his face, mapping the bones under the skin. His skull itched. He had never felt so intensely
looked at
in all his life.

‘I can guess why you are here,' she said. ‘Before you kill me, though, you should be aware that I know who you are.'

The statement unnerved him. Perhaps it was bluff, perhaps not. If she had truly looked into Panoply's archives, then she might have seen employee records. It didn't matter. She could scream out his name and the world wouldn't hear her.

‘Who said anything about killing?' he asked mildly.

‘Dreyfus came unarmed.'

‘More fool him. I wouldn't enter a room with a Conjoiner inside unless I was carrying a weapon. Or would you have me believe that you couldn't kill me in an eyeblink?'

‘I had no intention of killing you, Prefect. Until now.'

Gaffney spread his arms. ‘Go ahead, then. Or rather, tell me what you were going to tell Dreyfus. Then kill me.'

‘Why do I need to tell you? You know everything.'

‘Well, maybe not everything.' Gaffney unclipped his whiphound and thumbed it to readiness. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to let you leave this place alive and be reunited with your people. Voi knows you deserve it. Voi knows you've earned the right to some reward for the service you've provided. But it just can't happen. Because if I let you out of here, you'd endanger the state of affairs that must now come into being. And if you did that, you'd be indirectly responsible for the terrible things your people dreamed were coming, the terrible things I'm striving to avert.' He thumbed another stud, causing the whiphound to spool out its filament and move to full attack posture. In the weightless sphere of the bubble, the filament swayed back and forth like a tendril stirred by languid sea currents.

‘You have no idea what we saw in Exordium,' Clepsydra said.

‘I don't need to. That's Aurora's business.'

‘Do you know
what
Aurora is, Gaffney?'

He hoped that she did not catch the subliminal hesitation in his response. More than likely she did. Very little was subliminal to Conjoiners. ‘I know everything I need to know.'

‘Aurora is not a human being.'

‘She looked pretty human to me when we met.'

‘In person?'

‘Not exactly,' he admitted.

‘Aurora was a person once upon a time. But that was a long time ago. Now Aurora is something else. She is a life form that has never truly existed before, except fleetingly. Being human is something she remembers the same way you remember sucking your thumb. It's a part of her, a necessary phase in her development, but one now so remote that she can barely comprehend that she was ever that small, that vulnerable, that ineffective. She is the closest thing to a goddess that has ever existed, and she will only get stronger.' Clepsydra flashed him a smile that did not quite belong on her face. ‘And you feel comfortable entrusting the future fate of the Glitter Band to this creature?'

‘Aurora's plan is about the continued existence of the human species around Yellowstone,' Gaffney said dogmatically. ‘Taking the long view, she sees that our little cultural hub is critical to the wider human diaspora. If the hub fails, the wheel will splinter itself apart. Take out Yellowstone and the Ultras lose their most lucrative stopover. Interstellar trade will wither. The other Demarchist colonies will fall like dominoes. It might take decades, centuries, even, but it will happen. That's why we need to think about survival now.'

Clepsydra formed a convincing sneer. ‘Her plan is about her survival, not yours. At the moment she is letting you tag along for the ride. When you are no longer useful - and that
will
come to pass - I would make sure you have a very good escape plan.'

‘Thank you for the advice.' His hand tightened on the whiphound. ‘I'm puzzled, Clepsydra. You know that I can kill you with this thing. I also know that you can influence it, to a degree.'

‘You're wondering why I haven't turned it against you.'

‘Crossed my mind.'

‘Because I know that the gesture would be futile.' She nodded at his wrist. 'Your hand is gloved, for instance. It could be that you wish to avoid forensic contamination of the weapon, but I think there must be more to it than that. The glove extends into your sleeve. I presume it merges with some kind of lightweight armour under your uniform.'

‘Good guess. It's training armour, the kind recruits wear when they're learning to use whiphounds. Hyperdiamond cross-weave, edged on the microscopic scale to blunt and clog the cutting mechanisms on the sharp side of the filament. Even if you could bend the tail around towards me, it wouldn't be able to slice through my arm. Still, I'm surprised you didn't try it anyway.'

‘I was resigned to death the moment I saw that you were not Prefect Dreyfus.'

‘Here's the deal,' he said. ‘I know that Conjoiners can shut off pain when they need to. But I'm willing to bet you'd still choose a quick death over a slow one. Especially here. Especially when you're all alone, far from your friends.'

‘Death is death. And I can die precisely as quickly as I choose, not you.'

‘All the same, I'll make you a proposition. I know you looked deep into our files. Minor confession: I was prepared to let that happen because I knew I was going to have to kill you anyway. I thought you might turn something up that I could use.'

‘I did.'

‘I'm not talking about Aurora. I mean the Clockmaker.'

‘I have no idea what you mean.'

He guessed that she was lying. Even if she'd had no knowledge of the Clockmaker prior to her arrival in Panoply - and the Exordium dreamers hadn't been totally isolated from information concerning events in the outside world - she would surely have found out about it during her uninvited rummage through Panoply's records.

He rolled the whiphound handle in his palm. ‘I'll let you in on a little secret. Officially, it was nuked out of existence when Panoply destroyed the Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation.' He lowered his voice, even though he knew there could be no eavesdroppers. ‘But that's not what really happened. SIAM was only nuked after Panoply had already gone inside to extract intelligence and hardware. They believed that they'd destroyed the Clockmaker, true enough. They found what appeared to be its remains. But they kept the relics, the clocks and musical boxes and all the nasty little booby traps. And one of those relics turned out to be ... well, just as bad as the thing itself. Worse, in some respects. It was the Clockmaker.'

‘No one would have been that stupid,' Clepsydra said.

‘Less a question of stupidity, I think, than of overweening intellectual vanity. Which isn't to say they haven't been clever. Just to have pulled this off, just to have kept it hidden for eleven years... that took some doing, some guile.'

‘Why are you interested in the Clockmaker? Are you so foolish as to think you can use it as well? Or is Aurora the foolish one?'

Gaffney shook his head knowingly. ‘No, Aurora wouldn't make that kind of mistake. But now the Clockmaker is a very real concern to her. Her intelligence networks have determined that it wasn't destroyed. She knows that a cell working inside Panoply kept it under study in the same place for most of the last eleven years. Aurora fears that the Clockmaker could undo all her good work, at the eleventh hour. Therefore it must be located and destroyed, before the cell has a chance to activate it.'

‘Have you already made an attempt to destroy it? Perhaps in the last few days?'

He looked at her wonderingly. ‘Oh, you're good. You're very, very good.'

‘Ruskin-Sartorious,' Clepsydra said, enunciating the syllables with particular care. ‘I saw it in your files. That's where you expected to find the Clockmaker. That's why that habitat had to be destroyed. Except you were too late, weren't you?'

‘I can only guess that Aurora had probed around that secret a little too incautiously, and somebody had got nervous. The question is: where did they move it to?'

‘Why don't you torture someone useful and find out?'

Gaffney smiled at that. ‘Don't think I didn't try. Trouble was the old boy turned out not to know very much after all. I kept my word to him, though: left him with enough of a brain to do some gardening. I'm not a monster, you see.'

‘I cannot help you either.'

‘Oh, but I think you can. Don't be coy, Clepsydra: I know how transparent our archives must have been to you, how childishly ineffective our security measures, how laughable our attempts at obfuscation and misdirection. You only had access to those files for the brief time you were in Mercier's clinic, and you still worked out what happened to Ruskin-Sartorious.'