Thory’s voice became reverential. ‘Somewhere out there, Prefect, is a being we call the Quadruple. We know he walks amongst us because the system says he is a citizen of House Aubusson. But the Quad has never revealed himself to any other citizen. Perhaps he fears a public stoning. His own wisdom must be a wonderful and terrifying gift, like the curse of Cassandra. Yet he still only carries four votes, in a population of a hundred million. Pebbles on an infinite beach.’
‘Tell me how you stay ahead of the curve,’ Thalia said.
‘With blood, sweat and toil. All of us take our issues seriously. That’s what citizenship in Aubusson entails. You don’t get to live here unless you can hold a weighted voting average above one point two five. That means we’re all required to think very seriously about the issues we vote on. Not just from a personal perspective, not just from the perspective of House Aubusson, but from the standpoint of the greater good of the entire Glitter Band. And it pays off for us, of course. It’s how we make our living — by trading on our prior shrewdness. Because our votes are disproportionately effective, we are
‘Political bribes?’
‘Hardly. They buy our attention, our willingness to listen. That doesn’t guarantee that we will vote according to their wishes. If all we did was follow the money, our collective indices would ramp down to one before you could blink. Then we’d be no use to anyone.’
‘It’s a balancing act,’ put in Caillebot. ‘To remain useful to the lobbyists, we must maintain a degree of independence from them. This is the central paradox of our existence. But it is the paradox that allows me to spend my time designing gardens, and Paula to breed her butterflies.’
Thory leaned forward. ‘Since we’ve been on this train, I’ve already participated in two polling transactions. There’s a third coming up in two minutes. Minor issues, in the scheme of things — the kinds of things most citizens let their predictive routines take care of.’
‘I didn’t notice.’
‘You wouldn’t have. Most of us are so used to the process now that it’s almost autonomic, like blinking. But we take each and every vote as seriously as the last.’ Thory must have seen something amiss in Thalia’s expression, for she leaned forward concernedly. ‘Everything I’ve just described is completely legal, Prefect. Panoply wouldn’t allow it to happen otherwise.’
‘I know it’s legal. I just didn’t think it had become systematized, made the basis for a whole community.’
‘Does that distress you?’
‘No,’ Thalia answered truthfully. ‘If the system allows it, it’s fine by me. But it just reminds me how many surprises the Glitter Band still has in store.’
‘This is the most complex, variegated society in human history,’ Thory said. ‘It’s a machine for surprising people.’
Dreyfus studied the spectacle of the ship floating before him, pinned in the vivid blue lights at the core of the Nerval-Lermontov rock. It was a midnight-black form in a pitch-black cavern. He did not so much see the ship as detect the subtle gradation in darkness between its hull and the background surface of the rock’s hollowed-out heart. It was like an exercise in optical trickery, a perceptual mirage that kept slipping out of his cognitive grasp.
But he knew exactly what he was looking at. Though it was smaller than most, the vehicle was clearly a starship. It had the sleek, tapering hull of a lighthugger, and the two swept-back spars that held the complicated nacelles of its twin drives. He remembered the burning wreck of the
Dreyfus smiled to himself. He’d felt the scope of the investigation widening the moment a connection to the Eighty entered the frame. But nothing had prepared him for this shift in perspective.
‘Keep talking to me, Boss. I’m still on the line.’
‘There’s a Conjoiner ship here. It’s just sitting in the middle of the rock.’
Sparver paused before answering. Dreyfus could imagine him working through the ramifications of the discovery.
‘Remind me: what have Conjoiners got to do with our case?’
‘That’s what I’m very eager to find out.’
‘How did the ship get where it is?’
‘No idea. Can’t see any sign of a door in the chamber, and there definitely wasn’t one on the outside. Almost looks as if it’s been walled-up in here, encased in rock.’
‘You think the Conjoiners hid it here for a reason?’
Dreyfus brushed his hand over the control panel again. ‘I don’t think so. Apart from the ship itself, nothing in the rock looks Conjoiner. It’s more as if the ship’s being held here by someone else.’
‘Someone managed to capture and contain a Conjoiner ship? That’s a pretty good trick in anyone’s book.’
‘I agree,’ Dreyfus said.
‘Next question: why would anyone do that? What would they hope to gain?’
Dreyfus looked at the one facet in the chamber that was burnished silver and realised that it was a sealed door rather than an opaque panel in the bank of windows. The chamber’s illumination traced the ribbed tube of a docking connector, stretching across space from the door panel to meet the light-sucking hull of the ship.
‘That’s what I’m going to have to go aboard to find out.’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, Boss.’
Dreyfus turned to the panel again. Every cell in his body was screaming at him to leave. But the policeman in him had to know what was inside that ship; what secret was worth murdering to protect.
His hand alighted on another toggle control, this one marked {X} — the universal symbol for an airlock actuator. The silver panel whisked aside silently and smoothly. Sensing his intentions, lights came on in sequence along the connector. The golden band arced down until it vanished into a docking port on the side of the lighthugger.
Nothing now prevented him from boarding.
‘I’m going inside. Call me back as soon as you get through to Panoply.’
While Thalia had been talking with her House Aubusson companions, they had crossed another window band spanning a brief ocean of space and stars (most of which were in fact other habitats), and now the train was slowing as it neared its destination. They crossed a series of manicured lawns, skimming high above them on a filigreed wisp of a bridge, then descended back down to ground level. On either side, Thalia saw the tapering stalks of the Museum of Cybernetics, each structure rising at least a hundred metres into the air, each surmounted by a smooth blue-grey sphere, each sphere marked with a symbol from the hallowed history of information processing. There was the ampersand, which had once symbolised a primitive form of abstraction. There was an ever-tumbling hourglass, still the universal symbol for an active computational process. There was the apple with a chunk missing, which (so Thalia had been led to believe) commemorated the suicidal poisoning of the info-theorist Turing himself.
The train plunged into a tunnel, then slowed to a smooth halt in a plaza under the central stalk of the polling core. People came and went from trains parked at adjoining platforms, but Thalia’s party had an entire section of the station to themselves, screened off by servitors and glass barriers. They rode escalators into hazy daylight, surrounded by the ornamental gardens and rock pools clustering around the base of the main stalk. Nearby, a bright blue servitor was diligently trimming a hedge into the shape of a peacock, its cutting arms moving with lightning speed as it executed the three-dimensional template in its memory.
Thalia craned her head back to take in the entirety of the stalk. It rose from a gradually steepening skirt, climbing five or six hundred metres above the ground before tapering to a neck that appeared only just capable of supporting the main sphere. The sphere was much larger than those balanced on the smaller stalks, banded with tiny round windows where they were blank. Geometric shapes were in constant play on its surface, indicating — so
