needed practical types first — biologists, geologists, that kind of thing. By the time they’d filled the most essential slots, there simply wasn’t any room for abstract dreamers like myself.’
‘And the fact that you’d pissed off House Sylveste had nothing whatsoever to do with it? Come off it, Richard.’
We descended a series of steps down into the lower level of the Monument. The atrium’s ceiling was a cloudy mass of jagged sculptures: interlocked metal birds. A party of visitors was arriving, attended by servitors and a swarm of bright, marble-sized float-cams. Childe breezed through the group, drawing annoyed frowns but no actual recognition, although one or two of the people in the party were vague acquaintances of mine.
‘What is this about?’ I asked, once we were outside.
‘Concern for an old friend. I’ve had my tabs on you, and it was pretty obvious that not being selected for that expedition was a crushing disappointment. You’d thrown your life into contemplation of the alien. One marriage down the drain because of your self-absorption. What was her name again?’
I’d had her memory buried so deeply that it took a real effort of will to recall any exact details about my marriage.
‘Celestine. I think.’
‘Since when you’ve had a few relationships, but nothing lasting more than a decade. A decade’s a mere fling in this town, Richard.’
‘My private life’s my own business,’ I responded sullenly. ‘Hey. Where’s my volantor? I parked it here.’
‘I sent it away. We’ll take mine instead.’
Where my volantor had been was a larger, blood-red model. It was as baroquely ornamented as a funeral barge. At a gesture from Childe it clammed open, revealing a plush gold interior with four seats, one of which was occupied by a dark, slouched figure.
‘What’s going on, Roland?’
‘I’ve found something. Something astonishing that I want you to be a part of; a challenge that makes every game you and I ever played in our youth pale in comparison.’
‘A challenge?’
‘The ultimate one, I think.’
He had pricked my curiosity, but I hoped it was not too obvious. ‘The city’s vigilant. It’ll be a matter of public record that I came to the Monument, and we’ll have been recorded together by those float-cams.’
‘Exactly,’ Childe said, nodding enthusiastically. ‘So you risk nothing by getting in the volantor.’
‘And should I at any point weary of your company?’
‘You have my word that I’ll let you leave.’
I decided to play along with him for the time being. Childe and I took the volantor’s front pair of seats. Once ensconced, I turned around to acquaint myself with the other passenger, and then flinched as I saw him properly.
He wore a high-necked leather coat which concealed much of the lower half of his face. The upper part was shadowed under the generous rim of a homburg, tipped down to shade his brow. Yet what remained visible was sufficient to shock me. There was only a blandly handsome silver mask; sculpted into an expression of quiet serenity. The eyes were blank silver surfaces, what I could see of his mouth a thin, slightly smiling slot.
‘Doctor Trintignant,’ I said.
He reached forward with a gloved hand, allowing me to shake it as one would the hand of a woman. Beneath the black velvet of the glove I felt armatures of hard metal. Metal that could crush diamond.
‘The pleasure is entirely mine,’ he said.
Airborne, the volantor’s baroque ornamentation melted away to mirror-smoothness. Childe pushed ivory- handled control sticks forward, gaining altitude and speed. We seemed to be moving faster than the city ordinances allowed, avoiding the usual traffic corridors. I thought of the way he had followed me, researched my past and had my own volantor desert me. It would also have taken considerable resourcefulness to locate the reclusive Trintignant and persuade him to emerge from hiding.
Clearly Childe’s influence in the city exceeded my own, even though he had been absent for so long.
‘The old place hasn’t changed much,’ Childe said, swooping us through a dense conglomeration of golden buildings, as extravagantly tiered as the dream pagodas of a fever-racked Emperor.
‘Then you’ve really been away? When you told me you’d faked your death, I wondered if you’d just gone into hiding.’
He answered with a trace of hesitation, ‘I’ve been away, but not as far as you’d think. A family matter came up that was best dealt with confidentially, and I really couldn’t be bothered explaining to everyone why I needed some peace and quiet on my own.’
‘And faking your death was the best way to go about it?’
‘Like I said, I couldn’t have planned the Eighty if I’d tried. I had to bribe a lot of minor players in the project, of course, and I’ll spare you the details of how we provided a corpse… but it all worked swimmingly, didn’t it?’
‘I never had any doubts that you’d died along with the rest of them.’
‘I didn’t like deceiving my friends. But I couldn’t go to all that trouble and then ruin my plan with a few indiscretions.’
‘You were friends, then?’ solicited Trintignant.
‘Yes, Doctor,’ Childe said, glancing back at him. ‘Way back when. Richard and I were rich kids — relatively rich, anyway — with not enough to do. Neither of us were interested in the stock market or the social whirl. We were only interested in games.’
‘Oh. How charming. What kinds of game, might I ask?’
‘We’d build simulations to test each other — extraordinarily elaborate worlds filled with subtle dangers and temptations. Mazes and labyrinths; secret passages; trapdoors; dungeons and dragons. We’d spend months inside them, driving each other crazy. Then we’d go away and make them even harder.’
‘But in due course you grew apart,’ the Doctor said. His synthesised voice had a curious piping quality.
‘Yeah,’ Childe said. ‘But we never stopped being friends. It was just that Richard had spent so much time devising increasingly alien scenarios that he’d become more interested in the implied psychologies behind the tests. And I’d become interested only in the playing of the games; not their construction. Unfortunately Richard was no longer there to provide challenges for me.’
‘You were always much better than me at playing them,’ I said. ‘In the end it got too hard to come up with something you’d find difficult. You knew the way my mind worked too well.’
‘He’s convinced that he’s a failure,’ Childe said, turning round to smile at the Doctor.
‘As are we all,’ Trintignant answered. ‘And with some justification, it must be said. I have never been allowed to pursue my admittedly controversial interests to their logical ends. You, Mister Swift, were shunned by those who you felt should have recognised your worth in the field of speculative alien psychology. And you, Mister Childe, have never discovered a challenge worthy of your undoubted talents.’
‘I didn’t think you’d paid me any attention, Doctor.’
‘Nor had I. I have surmised this much since our meeting.’
The volantor dropped below ground level, descending into a brightly lit commercial plaza lined with shops and boutiques. With insouciant ease, Childe skimmed us between aerial walkways and then nosed the car into a dark side-tunnel. He gunned the machine faster, our speed indicated only by the passing of red lights set into the tunnel sides. Now and then another vehicle passed us, but once the tunnel had branched and rebranched half a dozen times, no further traffic appeared. The tunnel lights were gone now and when the volantor’s headlights grazed the walls they revealed ugly cracks and huge, scarred absences of cladding. These old sub-surface ducts dated back to the city’s earliest days, before the domes were thrown across the crater.
Even if I had recognised the part of the city where we had entered the tunnel system, I would have been hopelessly lost by now.
‘Do you think Childe has brought us together to taunt us about our lack of respective failures, Doctor?’ I asked, beginning to feel uneasy again despite my earlier attempts at reassurance.
‘I would consider that a distinct possibility, were Childe himself not conspicuously tainted by the same lack of success.’
‘Then there must be another reason.’
