‘I doubt it. I’ve never heard of him.’ He glanced at Sybilline, as if seeking her opinion on the matter. She did her best to mask it, but I saw the way she pulled the facial equivalent of a shrug; a momentary widening of the eyes as if to say that she hadn’t heard of Reivich either.
It looked genuine, too.
‘All right,’ Waverly said. ‘I think I can do this nice and cleanly. It helps that there aren’t any other implants in his head to get in the way.’
‘Just do it,’ Sybilline said. ‘We haven’t got all damned night.’
He held the surgical device against the side of my skull, so that I could feel its cold pressure against my skin. I heard a click as he pulled a trigger—
SEVENTEEN
The head of security stood before his prisoner, studying him as a sculptor might study a roughly hewn work in progress; satisfied with the effort that had already taken place, but acutely aware of all the labour that lay ahead. Much remained to be done, but he promised himself that there would be no errors.
Sky Haussmann and the saboteur were almost alone. The torture room was in a distant and largely forgotten annexe of the ship, accessible only by one of the train routes which everyone else assumed was disused. Sky had outfitted the room and its surrounding chambers himself, equipping it with pressure and heat by tapping into the ship’s lymphatic system of supply lines. In principle, a detailed audit of power/air consumption might have revealed the room’s existence, but, as a possible security issue, the matter would only have been referred to Sky himself. It had never happened; he doubted that it ever would.
The prisoner was splayed before him on one wall, anchored there and surrounded by machines. Neural lines plunged into the man’s skull, interfacing with the control implants buried in his brain. Those implants were exceedingly crude, even by Chimeric standards, but they did their job. They were mainly webbed into the regions of the temporal lobe associated with deep religious experience. Epileptics had long reported feelings of divinity when intense electrical activity flickered across those regions; all the implants did was subject the saboteur to mild and controllable versions of the same religious impulses. It was probably how his old masters had controlled him, and how he had been able to give himself up so selflessly to their suicidal cause.
Now Sky controlled him via the same devotional channels.
‘Do you know, no one ever mentions you these days,’ Sky said.
The saboteur offered him bloodshot crescent eyes beneath heavy lids. ‘What?’
‘It’s as if the rest of the ship has decided to quietly forget that you ever existed. How exactly does it feel, to have been erased from the public record?’
‘You remember me.’
‘Yes.’ Sky nodded towards the pale aerodynamic shape which floated at the other end of the room, cased in armoured green glass. ‘And so does he. But that’s not saying much, is it? To be remembered only by your tormentors?’
‘It’s better than nothing.’
‘They suspect, of course.’ He thought of Constanza, the only serious thorn in his side. ‘Or at least they used to, when they gave the matter any thought. After all, you did kill my father. I’d be perfectly within my moral rights to torture you, wouldn’t I?’
‘I didn’t kill…’
‘Oh, but you did.’ Sky smiled. He was standing at the lashed-up control panel which allowed him to talk to the saboteur’s implants, idly fingering the chunky black knobs and glass-panelled analogue dials. He had built the machine himself, scavenging its components from across the ship, and had given it the name God-Box. That was what it was, ultimately: an instrument for placing God inside the killer’s head. In the early days he had used it solely to inflict pain, but — once he had smashed the infiltrator’s personality — he had begun to reconstruct it towards his own ideal, via controlled doses of neural ecstasy. At the moment only the tiniest trace of current was dribbling into the man’s temporal lobe, and in this null state his feelings towards Sky bordered on agnosticism rather than awe.
‘I don’t remember what I did,’ the man said.
‘No, I don’t suppose you do. Shall I remind you?’
The saboteur shook his head. ‘Perhaps I did kill your father. But someone must have given me the means to do so. Someone must have cut my restraints and left that knife by my bed.’
‘It was a scalpel, an infinitely finer thing.’
‘You’d know, of course.’
Sky turned one of the black knobs a couple of notches higher, watching as the analogue dials quivered. ‘Why would I have given you the means to kill my own father? I’d have had to be insane.’
‘He was dying anyway. You hated him for what he had done to you.’
‘And how would you know?’
‘You told me, Sky.’
That, of course, was entirely possible. It was amusing to push the man to the desperate, bowel-loosening edge of total fear, and to then relent. He could do that with the machine if he wished, or just by unwrapping some surgical tools and showing them to the prisoner.
‘He didn’t do anything to me to make me hate him.’
‘No? That’s not what you said before. You were the son of immortals, after all. If Titus hadn’t meddled — hadn’t stolen you from them — you’d still be sleeping with the other passengers.’ In his subtly archaic accent he continued, ‘Instead you’ll spend years of your life in this miserable place, growing older, risking death each day, never knowing for sure if you’ll make it to Journey’s End. What if Titus was wrong, too? What if you aren’t immortal? It’ll be years before you can be certain.’
Sky turned the knob higher. ‘Do you think I look my age?’
‘No…’ He watched the saboteur’s lower lip tremble with the first unmistakable signs of ecstasy. ‘But that could just be good genes.’
‘I’ll take my chances.’ He pushed the current higher. ‘I could have tortured you, you know.’
‘Ahh… I know. Oh God, I know.’
‘But I chose not to. Are you feeling a reasonably intense religious experience now?’
‘Yes. I feel I’m in the presence of something… something… ahhh. Jesus. I can’t talk now.’ The man’s face rippled in an inhuman manner. There were twenty additional facial muscles anchored to his skull, capable of dramatically altering his appearance when the need arose. Sky assumed that he had transformed his face to slip aboard the ship in place of the man who should have had his sleeper berth. Now he mirrored Sky, the artificial muscles twitching involuntarily to this new configuration. ‘It’s too beautiful.’
‘Are you seeing bright lights yet?’
‘I can’t talk.’
Sky turned the knob up another few notches, until it was near the end of its range. The analogue dials were nearly all full-over. But not quite, and because they were logarithmically calibrated, that last twitch could mean the difference between a feeling of intense spirituality and a full-on vision of heaven and hell. He had never taken the prisoner to that plateau yet, and he was not entirely sure he wanted to risk it.
He stepped away from the machine and approached the saboteur. Behind him Sleek quivered in his tank, waves of anticipation running up and down the dolphin’s body. The man was drooling, losing basic muscular control. His face had melted now, the muscles sagging hopelessly. Sky took the man’s head in his hands and forced him to look at his own face. He could almost feel a tingling in his fingers from the current worming into the man’s skull. For a moment they locked eyes, pupil to pupil, but it was too much for the saboteur. It must be like seeing God, he thought; not necessarily the most pleasant of experiences even if it was drenched in awe.
‘Listen to me,’ he whispered. ‘No; don’t try to speak. Just listen. I could have killed you, but I didn’t. I chose to spare you. I chose to show mercy. Do you know what that makes me? Merciful. I want you to remember that, but I also want you to remember something else. I can be jealous as well, and vengeful.’
Just then Sky’s bracelet chimed. It was the one he had inherited from his father upon assuming command of
