conscious.’
‘Why not, Nevil? What’s the fundamental difference between perceiving the universe via electrical signals transmitted along nerve tissue, and via fracture patterns moving through a vast block of ice?’
‘I suppose you have a point.’
‘I had to save them, Nevil. Not just the worms, but the network they were a part of. We couldn’t come all this way and just wipe out the first thinking thing we’d ever encountered in the universe, simply because it didn’t fit into our neat little preconceived notions of what alien thought would actually be like.’
‘But saving the worms meant killing everyone else.’
‘You think I didn’t realise that? You think it didn’t agonise me to do what I had to do? I’m a human being, Nevil — not a monster. I knew exactly what I was doing and I knew exactly what it would make me look like to anyone who came here afterwards.’
‘But you still did it.’
‘Put yourself in my shoes. How would you have acted?’
Clavain opened his mouth, expecting an easy answer to spring to mind. But nothing came; not for several seconds. He was thinking about Setterholm’s question, more thoroughly than he had done so far. Until then he had satisfied himself with the quiet, unquestioned assumption that he would not have acted the way Setterholm had done. But could he really be so sure? Setterholm, after all, had truly believed that the network formed a sentient whole; a thinking being. Possessing that knowledge must have made him feel divinely chosen; sanctioned to commit any act to preserve the fabulously rare thing he had found. And he had, after all, been right.
‘You haven’t answered me.’
‘That’s because I thought the question warranted something more than a flippant answer, Setterholm. I like to think I wouldn’t have acted the way you did, but I don’t suppose I can ever be sure of that.’
Clavain stood up, inspecting his suit for damage; relieved that the scuffle had not injured him.
‘You’ll never know.’
‘No. I never will. But one thing’s clear enough. I’ve heard you talk; heard the fire in your words. You believe in your network, and yet you still couldn’t make the others see it. I doubt I’d have been able to do much better, and I doubt that I’d have thought of a better way to preserve what you’d found.’
‘Then you’d have killed everyone, just like I did?’
The realisation of it was like a heavy burden someone had just placed on his shoulders. It was so much easier to feel incapable of such acts. But Clavain had been a soldier. He had killed more people than he could remember, even though those days had been a long time ago. It was really a lot less difficult to do when you had a cause to believe in.
And Setterholm had definitely had a cause.
‘Perhaps,’ Clavain said. ‘Perhaps I might have, yes.’
He heard Setterholm sigh. ‘I’m glad. For a moment there—’
‘For a moment what?’
‘When you showed up with that pick, I thought you were planning to kill me.’ Setterholm hefted the pick, much as Clavain had done earlier. ‘You wouldn’t have done that, would you? I don’t deny that what I did was regrettable, but I had to do it.’
‘I understand.’
‘But what happens to me now? I can stay with you all, can’t I?’
‘We probably won’t be staying on Diadem, I’m afraid. And I don’t think you’d really want to come with us; not if you knew what we’re really like.’
‘You can’t leave me alone here, not again.’
‘Why not? You’ll have your worms. And you can always kill yourself again and see who shows up next.’ Clavain turned to leave.
‘No. You can’t go now.’
‘I’ll leave your rover on the surface. Maybe there are some supplies in it. Just don’t come anywhere near the base again. You won’t find a welcome there.’
‘I’ll die out here,’ Setterholm said.
‘Start getting used to it.’
He heard Setterholm’s feet scuffing across the ice; a walk breaking into a run. Clavain turned around calmly, unsurprised to see Setterholm coming towards him with the pick raised high, as a weapon.
Clavain sighed.
He reached into Setterholm’s skull, addressing the webs of machines that still floated in the man’s head, and instructed them to execute their host in a sudden, painless orgy of neural deconstruction. It was not a trick he could have done an hour ago, but after Galiana had planted the method in his mind, it was easy as sneezing. For a moment he understood what it must feel like to be a god.
And in that same moment Setterholm dropped the ice pick and stumbled, falling forward onto one end of the pick’s blade. It pierced his faceplate, but by then he was dead anyway.
‘What I said was the truth,’ Clavain said. ‘I might have killed them as well, just like I said. I don’t want to think so, but I can’t say it isn’t in me. No; I don’t blame you for that; not at all.’
With his boot he began to kick a dusting of frost over the dead man’s body. It would be too much bother to remove Setterholm from this place, and the machines inside him would sterilise his body, ensuring that none of his cells ever contaminated the glacier. And, as Clavain had told himself only a few days earlier, there were worse places to die than here. Or worse places to be left for dead, anyway.
When he was done, when what remained of Setterholm was just an ice-covered mound in the middle of a cavern, Clavain addressed him one final time.
‘But that doesn’t make it right, either. It was still murder, Setterholm.’ He kicked a final divot of ice over the corpse. ‘Someone had to pay for it.’
A SPY IN EUROPA
Marius Vargovic, agent of Gilgamesh Isis, savoured an instant of free fall before the flitter’s engines kicked in, slamming it away from the
‘Boring, isn’t it.’
Vargovic turned around in his seat, languidly. ‘You’d rather they were shooting at us?’
‘I’d rather they were doing something.’
‘Then you’re a fool,’ Vargovic said, making a tent of his fingers. ‘There’s enough armament buried in that ice to give Jupiter a second red spot. What it would do to us doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘Only trying to make conversation, friend.’
‘Don’t bother — it’s an overrated activity at the best of times.’
‘All right, Marius — I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate one-time pad and wrote a fucking two-hundred-page report on it. Satisfied?’
‘I’m never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn’t in my nature.’
But Mishenka was right: Europa was an encrypted document; complexity masked by a surface of fractured and refrozen ice. Its surface grooves were like the capillaries in a vitrified eyeball; faint as the structure in a raw surveillance image. But once within the airspace boundary of the Europan Demarchy, traffic-management co-opted the flitter, vectoring it into a touchdown corridor. In three days, Mishenka would return, but then he would disable the avionics, kissing the ice for less than ten minutes.
‘Not too late to abort,’ Mishenka said, a long time later.
‘Are you out of your tiny mind?’
The younger man dispensed a frosty Covert Ops smile. ‘We’ve all heard what the Demarchy does to spies, Marius.’
‘Is this a personal grudge or are you just psychotic?’
