head, almost lost in shadow itself, and knew that I was standing behind Reivich.
I remembered when I thought I had seen him, near the immortal fish in Chasm City. How quickly I had reacted, slipping out my gun and chasing around the fish tank to confront and kill him. I was sure that I would have done so if Voronoff had not been a second faster than I.
Now I didn’t feel any pressing need to kill him.
A voice, like sandpaper rasping against sandpaper, said, ‘Turn me around so that I may face my guests, please.’ The statement itself was a laboured thing, punctuated by wheezes and words less spoken than whispered.
One of the servitors stepped forward, treading with the inhuman silence of their kind, and swivelled Reivich around.
What faced us was not what I was expecting.
It was not possible…
Reivich looked like a corpse: a cadaver briefly animated by the application of electrical puppetry. He did not look like anything living. He did not look like anything which had a right to speak, or to be able to curve his mouth in the semblance of a smile.
He reminded me of a less healthy version of Marco Ferris. We could see only his head and the tips of his fingers. The rest of him was lost beneath a thick quilted blanket, from which trailed medical feedlines, curving around into a compact life-support module clamped to one arm of the chair, a smaller version of the cuirass which I had used to keep Gitta ‘alive’ while I returned her body to the Reptile House. His head was little more than a skull around which skin had been draped; skin which was mottled black where it wasn’t already a shade of bruised purple. His eyesockets had been enucleated; fine cables trailed from the darkness between his lids, running into the same life-support module. There were only a few wisps of hair left on his crown, like the few trees which will always remain standing directly under an airblast. His jaw hung slackly open, his tongue a black slug filling his mouth.
He raised a hand. Apart from a few liver spots, it was that of a much younger man.
‘I see you’re disturbed,’ Reivich said.
I realised now that the voice didn’t come from him at all, but from the life-support module. It still sounded feeble. Presumably even the act of subvocalising was an effort to him.
‘You did it,’ Quirrenbach said, stepping closer to the man he still worked for. ‘You took the scan.’
‘Either that or I didn’t get enough sleep last night,’ Reivich said, his voice like wind. ‘On balance I’m inclined to think the former.’
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘What went wrong?’
‘Nothing went wrong.’
‘You shouldn’t look like this,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘You look like a man on the edge of death.’
‘Perhaps because I am.’
‘The scan failed?’ Zebra said.
‘No, Taryn, it didn’t. The scan was a complete success, I’m told. My neural structure was acquired flawlessly.’
‘You did it too soon,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘That’s right, isn’t it? You couldn’t wait for all the medical checks. And this is what it did to you.’
Reivich’s head approximated a nod. ‘People like myself, and Tanner — and yourself,’ he said, directing his gaze at me, ‘lack medichines. Almost no one on Sky’s Edge has it in their cells, except for the very few who were able to afford the services of the Ultras. And even those that could often chose some other kind of longevity procedure.’
‘We had other things to concern us,’ I said.
‘Of course we did. Which is why we dispensed with such luxuries. The trouble was, I’d need medichines to protect my cells against the effect of the scan.’
‘The old style? Hard and fast?’ I said.
‘The best, if you listen to the theorists. Everything else is a compromise. The simple fact is that if you want to get your soul into the machine — and not just some blurred impression — you have to die in the process. Or at least suffer what would ordinarily be lethal injury.’
‘So why didn’t you protect yourself with medichines?’ Quirrenbach said.
‘There wasn’t time to do it properly. Medichines have to be carefully matched to the user, and introduced into the body slowly. Otherwise the effect is massive toxic shock. You die before the medichines can aid you.’
‘If you used Sylveste’s equipment,’ I said carefully, remembering what I’d been told of those experiments, ‘you shouldn’t even be breathing.’
‘It was an updated process, based on Sylveste’s original work. But you’re right — even allowing for technical refinements, I should be quite dead. As it happens, I was administered with enough broad-spectrum medichinery to survive the scan — at least temporarily.’ He waved his hand at the life-support module and the three attendant servitors. ‘Refuge supplies these machines. They’re trying to stabilise the cellular damage and introduce more refined variants of medichines, but I suspect they’re only doing it out of obligation.’
‘You think you’re going to die?’ I said.
‘I feel it in my bones.’
I tried to imagine what it would have been like for him; that agonising instant of neural capture, like being caught in the glare of the brightest flare imaginable; a radiance which shone beneath the skin, into the marrow itself, turning him into a smoky glass sculpture of himself, for that piercing instant.
The rapid analytic beams of the scan, focused down to cellular-resolution, would have swept through his brain at a speed only fractionally faster than the speed of synaptic impulses, keeping slightly ahead of the cortical messages proclaiming the havoc spreading through his mind. By the time the scan reached his brain-stem, no information would have yet reached that part regarding the disruption being suffered by the layers of his mind situated above. Because of that slight edge, the overall snapshot of his brain would have been completely normal, apart from the slight blurring caused by the finite spatio-temporal resolution of the process. The scan would have been finished before Reivich had recognised that it had begun — and by the time his mind began to keel over under the shock of the procedure, whole neural routines crashing into coma, it would not matter at all.
He would have been captured.
And even the damage should not have mattered; should not have been anything which the medichines could not have repaired, almost as swiftly as the injuries took place. Like shelling a building, dislodging bricks, but with a team of fanatical builders inside, putting right the harm before the next shell arrived…
But Reivich had never taken that path.
Reivich had opted to die; had opted to suffer assault on every cell in his brain and surrounding tissue, but knowing that, no matter what the consequences for his physical body, his essence would remain, captured for eternity and — at last — recorded in a form which could not be erased by anything as trivial as assassination or war.
Part of him had made it.
But not the part we were looking at.
‘If you’re going to die,’ I said, ‘if you accept that it’s inevitable — and that you must have known this would happen before the scan — why didn’t you just die in the scan?’
‘I did,’ Reivich said. ‘By at least a dozen medical criteria which would satisfy courts of law in other systems. But I also knew that Refuge’s machines could bring me back to life, albeit transiently.’
‘You could have waited,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘Another few days, and they could have matched your medichine requirements perfectly. ’
Reivich’s bony shoulders moved beneath the quilt; a shrug. ‘But then I would have been forced to accept a less accurate scan, in order to give the medichines a chance to function. It wouldn’t have been me.’
‘I don’t suppose Tanner’s arrival had anything to do with it?’ I asked.
Reivich seemed to find that amusing; the curve of his smile increasing minutely. Soon, I thought, we would all see the real smile beneath his face; the one written in bone. He could not have very long left now.
‘Tanner made my choice rather easier,’ Reivich said. ‘I won’t dignify him with any influence on my circumstances beyond that.’
‘Where is he?’ Chanterelle asked.
