rather he had become the dead stone bust he had always resembled.
They would all be like that, Thalia realised. All one million, two hundred and seventy four thousand, six hundred and eighteen people inside Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma would now be in a state of limbo, severed from the realm of abstract reality that for them was the entire meaningful world. Just from looking at Newkirk, she knew that there was no consciousness going on inside his skull. If his mind could be said to exist at all, it was somewhere else, locked out, knocking on a door that would remain resolutely shut for another five minutes.
Thalia was utterly alone in a room containing more than a million other people.
‘Give me an update,’ she queried.
‘Rebuild is proceeding on schedule. Estimated time to resumption of abstraction is now two hundred and ninety seconds.’
Thalia clenched her fists. It was going to be the longest three minutes of her life.
‘Sorry to bother you again,’ Dreyfus said as the beta-level copy of Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious resumed existence in the interview suite, ‘but I wondered if you wouldn’t mind answering a few more questions.’
‘I’m at your disposal, as you’ve already made abundantly clear.’
Dreyfus smiled briefly. ‘Let’s not make this any harder than it has to be, Delphine. We may not agree on the sanctity of beta-level simulation, but we both agree a crime’s been committed. I need your help to get to the bottom of it.’
She had her arms crossed before her, silver bracelets hanging from her wrists. ‘Which will inevitably lead us back to the vexed question of my art, I suppose.’
‘Something made someone angry enough to destroy your habitat, ’ Dreyfus went on. ‘Your art may have been a factor in that.’
‘We’re back to the jealousy thing.’
‘I’m wondering if it was more than that. You may have strayed into a politically sensitive area when you picked Philip Lascaille as your subject matter.’
‘I’m not sure I follow you.’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I looked at your history as an artist and until recently you were keeping something of a low profile. Then suddenly — well, I won’t say you became an overnight celebrity, but all of a sudden your work was being talked about, and your pieces were starting to sell for more than just small change.’
‘These things happen. It’s why we keep struggling.’
‘All the same, it appears that your work started attracting attention from about the time you began work on the Lascaille series.’
Delphine shrugged, giving nothing away. ‘I’ve worked on many thematic sequences. This is just the most recent one.’
‘But it’s the one that got people looking at your work, Delphine. For one reason or another,
‘I’m not sure where you’re going with this, Prefect. Lascaille and everything that happened to him is part of our shared history. There are already a million works of art inspired by his visit to the Shroud. Is it any great surprise that I have incorporated a tragic and familiar figurehead into my own?’
Dreyfus made an equivocal face. ‘But it
‘Doesn’t mean there isn’t still resonance in the theme,’ she countered.
‘I don’t deny it. But has it occurred to you that you might have raked over some ground that was better left undisturbed?’
‘With Lascaille?’
‘Why not? The man came back a lunatic. He was barely capable of feeding himself. Word is he drowned himself in the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies. That made some of the other organisations with an interest in the Shrouders very unhappy. They’d long wanted to get their own hands on Lascaille, so that they could look into his skull and see what the hell had happened to him. Then word got out that he’d drowned himself in an ornamental fish pond.’
‘He was more than likely suicidal. You’re not suggesting someone murdered him?’
‘Only that his dying didn’t look good for House Sylveste.’
‘So what you’re saying is — let me get this right — someone killed me and my family, not to mention my entire habitat, because I had the temerity to refer to Philip Lascaille in my art?’
‘It’s a theory. If someone connected to the Sylveste family perceived your art as a veiled critique of their actions, they might well have considered retaliation.’
‘But why not just kill me, if I made them so angry?’
‘I don’t know,’ Dreyfus admitted. ‘But it would help if I knew that you really hadn’t intended that work to embarrass the Sylvestes.’
‘Would that have been a crime, if I had?’
‘No, but if you’d intended the art to provoke a response, it wouldn’t be too surprising that you got one.’
‘I can’t speculate on the motives of the Sylveste family.’
‘But you can tell me why you picked Lascaille.’
She looked at him witheringly, as if she’d only just appreciated his true worth. ‘You think it’s that easy? You think I can articulate my reasons for choosing that subject matter as if it was no more complicated or involved than picking the colour of a chair?’
‘I’m not saying—’
‘You’ve precious little insight into the artistic process, Prefect. It’s a shame; I pity you. You must see the world in such drab, mechanistic terms. What a crushing, regimented, soullessly predictable universe you must inhabit. Art — anything that can’t be described in strictly procedural terms — is utterly alien to you, isn’t it?’
‘I knew my wife,’ Dreyfus said quietly.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘She was an artist.’
Delphine looked at him for long moments, her expression softening. ‘What happened to her?’ she asked.
‘She died.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Delphine said, Dreyfus hearing genuine remorse in her voice. ‘What I just said to you — that was cruel and unnecessary.’
‘You were right, though. I’ve no artistic side. But I spent enough time with my wife to understand something of the creative process. ’
‘Do you want to tell me what happened to her?’
Dreyfus shot her a steely smile. ‘Quid pro quo is the phrase, I believe.’
‘I don’t need to know about your wife. But you do need to know about my art.’
‘You’re curious, though. I can tell.’
She breathed out through her nose, looking down it at him. ‘Tell me what kind of an artist she was.’
‘Valery wasn’t exceptionally talented,’ Dreyfus said. ‘She discovered that early enough in her career for it not to cause her too much grief and disappointment when she brushed against real genius. But she still wanted to find a way to make art her vocation.’
‘And?’
‘She succeeded. Valery became interested in art created by machine intelligences. Her mission was to prove that it was as valid as purely human art; that there wasn’t some essential creative spark that required the input of a flesh-and-blood mind.’
‘That’s reassuring, given that I’m no longer a flesh-and-blood intelligence myself.’
‘Valery would have insisted that your art be taken just as seriously now as when you were alive. But she wasn’t so much interested in what beta-level simulations could produce as she was in art created by intelligences that had no human antecedents. That was what took her to SIAM.’
‘That rings a bell.’
‘The Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation.’
‘That family again.’
