‘You’re saying the Captain was a guinea pig for that bastard’s monstrosities?’
Sajaki shrugged, the movement puppetlike within his swaddling clothes.
‘That was not how Brannigan saw it. As far as the rest of humanity was concerned, he was already a monster before the accident. What Calvin did was merely take the trend further. Consummate it, if you like.’
Volyova nodded, although there was something in her expression which suggested she was not quite at ease with her crewmate. ‘And in any case, this was prior to the Eighty. Calvin’s name was unsullied. And among the more overt extremes of Ultra life, Brannigan’s transformation was only slightly in excess of the norm.’ She said it with tart distaste.
‘Carry on.’
‘Nearly a century passed before his next encounter with the Sylveste clan,’ Sajaki said. ‘By which time he was commanding this ship.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was injured again. Seriously, this time.’ Gingerly, like someone testing himself against a candle flame, he whisked his fingers across the limiting extent of the Captain’s silvery growth. The Captain’s outskirts looked frothy, like the brine left on a rockpool by the retreating tide. Sajaki delicately swabbed his fingers against the front of his jacket, but Khouri could tell that they did not feel clean; that they itched and crawled with subepidermal malignance.
‘Unfortunately,’ Volyova said, ‘Calvin was dead.’
Of course. He had died during the Eighty; had in fact been one of the last to lose his corporeality.
‘All right,’ Khouri said. ‘But he died in the process of having his brain scanned into a computer. Couldn’t you just steal the recording and persuade it to help you?’
‘We would, had that been possible.’ Sajaki’s low voice reverberated from the throated curve of the corridor. ‘His recording, his alpha-level simulation, had vanished. And there were no duplicates — the alphas were copy- protected.’
‘So basically,’ Khouri said, hoping to shatter the morguelike atmosphere of the proceedings, ‘you were up shit creek without a Captain.’
‘Not quite,’ Volyova said. ‘You see, all this took place during a rather interesting period in Yellowstone’s history. Daniel Sylveste had just returned from the Shrouders, and was neither insane nor dead. His companion hadn’t been so lucky, but her death only gave additional poignancy to his heroic return.’ She halted, then asked, with birdlike eagerness: ‘Did you ever hear of his “thirty days in the wilderness”, Khouri?’
‘Maybe once. Remind me.’
‘He vanished for a month a century ago,’ Sajaki said. ‘One minute the toast of Stoner society, the next nowhere to be found. There were rumours that he’d gone out of the city dome; jammed on an exosuit and gone to atone for the sins of his father. Shame it isn’t true; would have been quite touching. Actually,’ Sajaki nodded at the floor, ‘he came here for a month. We took him.’
‘You kidnapped Dan Sylveste?’ Khouri almost laughed at the audaciousness of it all. Then she remembered they were talking about the man she was meant to kill. Her impulse to laugh evaporated quickly.
‘Invited aboard is probably a preferable term,’ Sajaki said. ‘Though I admit he didn’t have a great deal of choice in the matter.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ Khouri said. ‘You kidnapped Cal’s son? What good was that going to do you?’
‘Calvin took a few precautions before he subjected himself to the scanner,’ Sajaki said. ‘The first was simple enough, although it had to be initiated decades before the culmination of the project. Simply put, he arranged to have every subsequent second of his life monitored by recording systems. Every second: waking, sleeping, whatever. Over the years, machines learnt to emulate his behaviour patterns. Given any situation, they could predict his responses with astonishing accuracy.’
‘Beta-level simulation.’
‘Yes, but a beta-level sim orders of magnitude more complex than any previously created.’
‘By some definitions,’ Volyova said, ‘it was already conscious; Calvin had already transmigrated. Calvin may or may not have believed that, but he still kept on refining the sim. It could project an image of Calvin which was so real, so like the actual man, that you had the forceful sense that you were really in his presence. But Calvin took it a step further. There was another mode of insurance available to him.’
‘Which was?’
‘Cloning.’ Sajaki smiled, nodded almost imperceptibly in Volyova’s direction.
‘He cloned himself,’ she said. ‘Using illegal black genetics techniques, calling in favours from some of his shadier clients. Some of them were Ultra, you see — otherwise we wouldn’t know any of this. Cloning was embargoed technology on Yellowstone; young colonies almost always outlaw it in the interests of ensuring maximum genetic diversity. But Calvin was cleverer than the authorities, and wealthier than those he was forced to bribe. That way he was able to pass off the clone as his son.’
‘Dan,’ Khouri said, the monosyllabic word carving its own angular shape in the refrigerated air. ‘You’re telling me Dan is Calvin’s clone?’
‘Not that Dan knows any of this,’ Volyova said. ‘He’d be the last person Calvin wanted to know. No; Sylveste is as much party to the lie as any of the populace ever were. He thinks he’s his own man.’
‘He doesn’t realise he’s a clone?’
‘No, and as time goes by his chances of ever finding out get smaller and smaller. Beyond Calvin’s Ultra allies, almost no one knew, and Calvin set up incentives to keep those that did quiet. There were a few unavoidable weak links — Calvin had no choice but to recruit one of Yellowstone’s top geneticists — and Sylveste picked the same man for the Resurgam expedition, not realising the intimate connection they shared. But I doubt that he’s learnt the truth since, or even come close to guessing it.’
‘But every time he looks in a mirror…’
‘He sees himself, not Calvin.’ Volyova smiled, evidently enjoying the way their revelation was upsetting some of Khouri’s basic certainties. ‘He was a clone, but that didn’t mean he had to resemble Cal down to the last skin pore. The geneticist — Janequin — knew how to induce cosmetic differences between Cal and Dan’s makeup, enough so that people would see only the expected familial traits. Obviously, he also incorporated traits from the woman who was supposed to be Dan’s mother, Rosalyn Soutaine.’
‘The rest was simple,’ Sajaki said. ‘Cal raised his clone in an environment carefully structured to emulate the surroundings he had known as a boy — even down to the same stimuli at certain periods in the boy’s development, because Cal couldn’t be sure which of his own personality traits were due to nature or nurture.’
‘All right,’ Khouri said. ‘Accepting for the moment that all of this is true — what was the point? Cal must have known Dan wouldn’t follow the same developmental path, no matter how closely he manipulated the boy’s life. What about all those decisions that take place in the womb?’ Khouri shook her head. ‘It’s insane. At the very best, all he’d end up with would be a crude approximation to himself.’
‘I think,’ Sajaki said, ‘that that was all that Cal hoped for. Cal cloned himself as a precaution. He knew the scanning process that he and the other members of the Eighty would have to endure would destroy his material body, so he wanted a body to which he could return if life in the machine turned out not to be to his liking.’
‘And did it?’
‘Maybe, but that was beside the point. At the time of the Eighty, the retransfer operation was still beyond the technology of the day. There was no real hurry: Cal could always have the clone put in reefersleep until he needed it, or simply reclone another one from the boy’s cells. He was thinking well ahead.’
‘Assuming the retransfer ever became possible.’
‘Well, Calvin knew it was a long shot. The important thing was that there was a second fall-back option apart from retransfer.’
‘Which was?’
‘The beta-level simulation.’ Sajaki’s voice had become as slow, cold and icy as the breezes in the Captain’s chamber. ‘Although not formally capable of consciousness, it was still an incredibly detailed facsimile of Calvin. Its relative simplicity meant it would be easier to encode its rules into the wetware of Dan’s mind. Much easier than imprinting something as volatile as the alpha.’
‘I know the primary recording — the alpha — disappeared,’ she said. ‘There was no Calvin left to run the show. And I guess Dan began to act a little more independently than Calvin might have wished.’
‘To put it mildly,’ Sajaki said, nodding. ‘The Eighty marked the beginning of the decline of the Sylveste
