Trintignant removed his homburg and patted his crown delicately, as if smoothing down errant hairs. Silver waves had been sculpted into his head-mask, so that he resembled a bewigged Regency fop dipped in mercury.
‘You’ve enemies everywhere,’ said Forqueray between gurgling inhalations. ‘But I bear you no personal animosity for your atrocities, and I guarantee that my crew will extend you the same courtesy.’
‘Very gracious of you,’ Trintignant said, before shaking the Ultra’s hand for the minimum time compatible with politeness. ‘But why should your crew concern me?’
‘Never mind that.’ It was one of the two women speaking now. ‘Who is this guy, and why does everyone hate him?’
‘Allow me to introduce Hirz,’ Childe said, indicating the woman who had spoken. She was small enough to have been a child, except that her face was clearly that of an adult woman. She was dressed in austere, tight-fitting black clothes which only emphasised her diminutive build. ‘Hirz is — for want of a better word — a mercenary.’
‘Except I prefer to think of myself as an information retrieval specialist. I specialise in clandestine infiltration for high-level corporate clients in the Glitter Band — physical espionage, some of the time. Mostly, though, I’m what used to be called a hacker. I’m also pretty damned good at my job.’ Hirz paused to swig down some wine. ‘But enough about me. Who’s the silver dude, and what did Forqueray mean about atrocities?’
‘You’re seriously telling me you’re unaware of Trintignant’s reputation?’ I said.
‘Hey, listen. I get myself frozen between assignments. That means I miss a lot of shit that goes down in Chasm City. Get over it.’
I shrugged and — with one eye on the Doctor himself — told Hirz what I knew about Trintignant. I sketched in his early career as an experimental cyberneticist, how his reputation for fearless innovation had eventually brought him to Calvin Sylveste’s attention.
Calvin had recruited Trintignant to his own research team, but the collaboration had not been a happy one. Trintignant’s desire to find the ultimate fusion of flesh and machine had become obsessive; even — some said — perverse. After a scandal involving experimentation on unconsenting subjects, Trintignant had been forced to pursue his work alone, his methods too extreme even for Calvin.
So Trintignant had gone to ground, and continued his gruesome experiments with his only remaining subject.
Himself.
‘So let’s see,’ said the final guest. ‘Who have we got? An obsessive and thwarted cyberneticist with a taste for extreme modification. An intrusion specialist with a talent for breaking into highly protected — and dangerous — environments. A man with a starship at his disposal and the crew to operate it.’
Then she looked at Childe, and while her gaze was averted I admired the fine, faintly familiar profile of her face. Her long hair was the sheer black of interstellar space, pinned back from her face by a jewelled clasp which flickered with a constellation of embedded pastel lights. Who was she? I felt sure we had met once or maybe twice before. Perhaps we had passed each other amongst the shrines in the Monument to the Eighty, visiting the dead.
‘And Childe,’ she continued. ‘A man once known for his love of intricate challenges, but long assumed dead.’ Then she turned her piercing eyes upon me. ‘And, finally, you.’
‘I know you, I think—’ I said, her name on the tip of my tongue.
‘Of course you do.’ Her look, suddenly, was contemptuous. ‘I’m Celestine. You used to be married to me.’
All along, Childe had known she was here.
‘Do you mind if I ask what this is about?’ I said, doing my best to sound as reasonable as possible, rather than someone on the verge of losing their temper in polite company.
Celestine withdrew her hand once I had shaken it. ‘Roland invited me here, Richard. Just the same way he did you, with the same veiled hints about having found something.’
‘But you’re…’
‘Your ex-wife?’ She nodded. ‘Exactly how much do you remember, Richard? I heard the strangest rumours, you know. That you’d had me deleted from your long-term memory.’
‘I had you suppressed, not deleted. There’s a subtle distinction.’
She nodded knowingly. ‘So I gather.’
I looked at the other guests, who were observing us. Even Forqueray was waiting, the pipe of his apparatus poised an inch from his mouth in expectation. They were waiting for me to say something; anything.
‘Why exactly are you here, Celestine?’
‘You don’t remember, do you?’
‘Remember what?’
‘What it was I used to do, Richard, when we were married.’
‘I confess I don’t, no.’
Childe coughed. ‘Your wife, Richard, was as fascinated by the alien as you were. She was one of the city’s foremost specialists on the Pattern Jugglers, although she’d be entirely too modest to admit it herself.’ He paused, apparently seeking Celestine’s permission to continue. ‘She visited them, long before you met, spending several years of her life at the study station on Spindrift. You swam with the Jugglers, didn’t you, Celestine?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘And allowed them to reshape your mind, transforming its neural pathways into something deeply — albeit usually temporarily — alien.’
‘It wasn’t that big a deal,’ Celestine said.
‘Not if you’d been fortunate enough to have it happen to you, no. But for someone like Richard — who craved knowledge of the alien with every fibre of his existence — it would have been anything but mundane.’ He turned to me. ‘Isn’t that true?’
‘I admit I’d have done a great deal to experience communion with the Jugglers,’ I said, knowing that it was pointless to deny it. ‘But it just wasn’t possible. My family lacked the resources to send me to one of the Juggler worlds, and the bodies that might ordinarily have funded that kind of trip — the Sylveste Institute, for instance — had turned their attentions elsewhere.’
‘In which case Celestine was deeply fortunate, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I don’t think anyone would deny that,’ I said. ‘To speculate about the shape of alien consciousness is one thing; but to drink it; to bathe in the full flood of it — to know it intimately, like a lover…’ I trailed off for a moment. ‘Wait a minute. Shouldn’t you be on Resurgam, Celestine? There isn’t time for the expedition to have gone there and come back.’
She eyed me with raptorial intent before answering, ‘I never went.’
Childe leaned over and refreshed my glass. ‘She was turned down at the last minute, Richard. Sylveste had a grudge against anyone who’d visited the Jugglers; he suddenly decided they were all unstable and couldn’t be trusted.’
I looked at Celestine wonderingly. ‘Then all this time… ?’
‘I’ve been here, in Chasm City. Oh, don’t look so crushed, Richard. By the time I learned I’d been turned down, you’d already decided to flush me out of your past. It was better for both of us this way.’
‘But the deception…’
Childe put one hand on my shoulder, calmingly. ‘There wasn’t any. She just didn’t make contact again. No lies; no deception; nothing to hold a grudge about.’
I looked at him, angrily. ‘Then why the hell is she here?’ ‘Because I happen to have use for someone with the skills that the Jugglers gave to Celestine.’
‘Which included?’ I said.
‘Extreme mathematical prowess.’
‘And why would that have been useful?’
Childe turned to the Ultra, indicating that the man should remove his bubbling apparatus.
‘I’m about to show you.’
The table housed an antique holo-projection system. Childe handed out viewers which resembled lorgnette
