‘Obviously,’ Control said, with judicial deliberation, ‘what Cholok has to offer isn’t merely a nugget — or she’d have given it via PE3.’
Vargovic leaned forward. ‘She hasn’t told you what it is?’
‘Only that it could endanger the hanging cities.’
‘You trust her?’
Vargovic felt one of Control’s momentary indiscretions coming on. ‘She may have been sleeping, but she hasn’t been completely valueless. She’s assisted in defections… like the Maunciple job — remember that?’
‘If you’re calling that a success, perhaps it’s time I defected.’
‘Actually, it was Cholok’s information that persuaded us to get Maunciple out via the ocean rather than the front door. If Demarchy security had taken Maunciple alive they’d have learned ten years of tradecraft.’
‘Whereas instead, Maunciple got a harpoon in his back.’
‘So the operation had its flaws.’ Control shrugged. ‘But if you’re thinking all this points to Cholok having been compromised… Naturally, the thought entered our heads. But if Maunciple had acted otherwise it would have been worse.’ Control folded his arms. ‘And of course, he might have made it, in which case even you’d have to admit Cholok’s safe.’
‘Until proven otherwise.’
Control brightened. ‘So you’ll do it?’
‘Like I have a choice.’
‘There’s always a choice, Vargovic.’
Yes, Vargovic thought. There was always a choice, between doing whatever Gilgamesh Isis asked of him and being deprogrammed, cyborgised and sent to work in the sulphur projects around the slopes of Ra Patera. It just wasn’t a particularly good one.
‘One other thing…’
‘Yes?’
‘When I’ve got whatever Cholok has—’
Control half-smiled, the two of them sharing a private joke that did not need illumination. ‘I’m sure the usual will suffice.’
The elevator slowed into immigration.
Demarchy guards hefted big guns, but no one took any interest in him. His story about coming from Mars was accepted; he was subjected to only the usual spectrum of invasive procedures: neural and genetic patterns scanned for pathologies, body bathed in eight forms of exotic radiation. The final formality consisted of drinking a thimble of chocolate. The beverage consisted of billions of medichines which infiltrated his body, searching for concealed drugs, weapons and illegal biomodifications. He knew that they would find nothing, but was still relieved when they reached his bladder and requested to be urinated back into the Demarchy.
The entire procedure lasted six minutes. Outside, Vargovic followed a slitherwalk to the city zoo, and then barged through crowds of schoolchildren until he arrived at the aquarium where Cholok was meant to meet him. The exhibits were devoted to Europan biota, most of which depended on the ecological niches of the hydrothermal vents, carefully reproduced here. There was nothing very exciting to look at, since most Europan predators looked marginally less fierce than hat stands or lampshades. The commonest were called ventlings: large and structurally simple animals whose metabolisms hinged on symbiosis. They were pulpy, funnelled bags planted on a tripod of orange stilts, moving with such torpor that Vargovic almost nodded off before Cholok arrived at his side.
She wore an olive-green coat and tight emerald trousers, projecting a haze of medicinal entoptics. Her clenched jaw accentuated the dourness he had gleaned from the intercept.
They kissed.
‘Good to see you Marius. It’s been — what?’
‘Nine years, thereabouts.’
‘How’s Phobos these days?’
‘Still orbiting Mars.’ He deployed a smile. ‘Still a dive.’
‘You haven’t changed.’
‘Nor you.’
At a loss for words, Vargovic found his gaze returning to the informational read-out accompanying the ventling exhibit. Only half-attentively, he read that the ventlings, motile in their juvenile phase, gradually became sessile in adulthood, stilts thickening with deposited sulphur until they were rooted to the ground like stalagmites. When they died, their soft bodies dispersed into the ocean, but the tripods remained; eerily regular clusters of orange spines concentrated around active vents.
‘Nervous, Marius?’
‘In your hands? Not likely.’
‘That’s the spirit.’
They bought two mugs of mocha from a nearby servitor, then returned to the ventling display, making what sounded like small talk. During indoctrination, Cholok had been taught Phrase-Embedded Three. The code allowed the insertion of secondary information into a primary conversation by means of careful deployment of word order, hesitation and sentence structure.
‘What have you got?’ Vargovic asked.
‘A sample,’ Cholok answered, one of the easy, pre-set words that did not need to be laboriously conveyed. But what followed took nearly five minutes to put over, freighted via a series of rambling reminiscences of the Phobos years. ‘A small shard of hyperdiamond. ’
Vargovic nodded. He knew what hyperdiamond was: a topologically complex interweave of tubular fullerene; structurally similar to cellulose or bulk chitin but thousands of times stronger; its rigidity artificially maintained by some piezoelectric trick that Gilgamesh lacked.
‘Interesting,’ Vargovic said. ‘But unfortunately not interesting enough.’
She ordered another mocha and downed it, replying, ‘Use your imagination. Only the Demarchy knows how to synthesise it.’
‘It’s also useless as a weapon.’
‘Depends. There’s an application you should know about.’
‘What?’
‘Keeping this city afloat — and no, I’m not talking about economic solvency. Do you know about Buckminster Fuller? He lived about four hundred years ago; believed absolute democracy could be achieved through technological means.’
‘The fool.’
‘Maybe. But Fuller also invented the geodesic lattice that determines the structure of the buckyball: the closed allotrope of tubular fullerene. The city owes him on two counts.’
‘Save the lecture. How does the hyperdiamond come into it?’
‘Flotation bubbles,’ she said. ‘Around the outside of the city. Each one is a hundred-metre-wide sphere of hyperdiamond, holding vacuum. A hundred-metre-wide molecule, in fact, since each sphere is composed of one endless strand of tubular fullerene. Think of that, Marius: a molecule you could park a ship inside.’
While he absorbed that, another part of his mind continued to read the ventling caption: how their biochemistry had many similarities with the gutless tube worms that lived around Earth’s ocean vents. The ventlings drank hydrogen sulphide through their funnels, circulating it via a modified form of haemoglobin, passing it through a bacteria-saturated organ in the lower part of their bags. The bacteria split and oxidised the hydrogen sulphide, manufacturing a molecule similar to glucose. The glucose-analogue nourished the ventling, enabling it to keep living and occasionally make slow perambulations to other parts of the vent, or even to swim between vents, until the adult phase rooted it to the ground. Vargovic read this, and then read it again, because he had just remembered something: a puzzling intercept passed to him from cryptanalysis several months earlier; something about Demarchy plans to incorporate ventling biochemistry into a larger animal. For a moment he was tempted to ask Cholok about it directly, but he decided to force the subject from his mind until a more suitable time.
‘Any other propaganda to share with me?’
‘There are two hundred of these spheres. They inflate and deflate like bladders, maintaining C-A’s
