from many less than sentient subminds. Light-speed communications bound together the dumb elements, weaving slow, secure thoughts. More rapid processing was assigned to individual units. The overseer’s larger thought processes were necessarily sluggish, but this was a limitation that had never handicapped the Inhibitors. Nor had they ever attempted to weave together an overseer’s subelements with superluminal communication channels. There were too many warnings in the archive concerning the hazards of such experiments, entire species that had been edited out of galactic history because of a single foolish episode of causality violation.
The overseer was not only slow and distributed. It was also temporary, permitted to achieve only fleeting consciousness. Even as its sense of self had come into being it had known with grim fatality that it would die once its duties were accomplished. But it felt no sense of bitterness at the inevitability of this fate, even after it had sifted through archived memories of its previous apparitions, memories laid down during other cleansings. It was simply the way things had to be. Intelligence, even machine intelligence, was something that could not be allowed to infect the galaxy until the coming crisis had been averted. Intelligence was, quite literally, its own worst enemy.
It found itself remembering some of the earlier cleansings. Of course, it had not really been the same overseer that had masterminded those extinction episodes. When Inhibitor swarms met, which was rarely, they traded knowledge of recent kills and outbreaks, methods and anecdotes. Lately, those meetings had become more rare, which was why there had been only one significant addition to the library of starcide techniques in the last five hundred million years. Swarms, isolated from each other for so long, reacted cautiously when they met. There were even rumours of different Inhibitor factions clashing over extinction rights.
Something had certainly gone wrong since the old days, when the kills had happened cleanly and methodically, and no major outbreaks slipped through the net. The overseer could not avoid drawing conclusions. The great galaxy-encompassing machine for holding back intelligence — the machine of which the overseer was one dutiful part — was failing. Intelligence was starting to slip through the cracks, threatening infestation. The situation had certainly worsened in the last few million years, and yet this was nothing compared with the thirteen Galactic Turns — the three billion years — that lay ahead, before the time of crisis arrived. The overseer had grave doubts that intelligence could be held in check until then. It was almost enough to make it give up now, and let this particular species go uncleansed. They were quadrupedal vertebrate oxygen-breathers, after all. Mammals. It felt a distant echo of kinship, something that had never troubled it when it was extinguishing ammonia-breathing gasbags or spiny insectoids.
The overseer forced itself out of this mood. Very probably it was just this sort of thinking that was decreasing the success rate of cleansings.
No, the mammals would die. That was the way, and that was how it would be.
The overseer looked on the extent of its works around Delta Pavonis. It knew of the previous cleansing, the wiping out of the avians who had last inhabited this local sector of space. The mammals had probably not even evolved locally, meaning that this would only be phase one of a more protracted cleansing. The last lot had really botched things up, it thought. Of course, there was always a desire to perform a cleansing with the minimum amount of environmental damage. Worlds and suns were not to be converted into weapons unless a class-three breakout was imminent, and even then it was to be avoided wherever possible. The overseer did not like inflicting unnecessary devastation. It had a keen sense of the irony of ripping apart stars now, when the whole point of its work was to avoid greater destruction three billion years down the line. But what was done was done. A certain amount of additional damage had now to be tolerated.
Messy. But that, as the overseer reflected, was ‘life’.
The Inquisitor looked out across rain-soaked Cuvier. Her own reflection hovered beyond the window, a spectral figure stalking the city.
‘Will you be all right with this one, ma’am?’ the guard who had brought him asked.
‘I’ll cope,’ she said, not yet turning around. ‘If I can’t, you’re only a room away. Undo his cuffs and then leave us alone.’
‘Are you certain, ma’am?’
‘Undo his cuffs.’
The guard wrenched the plastic restraints apart. Thorn stretched his arms and touched his face nervously, like an artist checking paint that might not have dried.
‘You can go now,’ the Inquisitor said.
‘Ma’am,’ the guard replied, closing the door after him.
There was a seat waiting for Thorn. He collapsed into it. Khouri continued to look out of the window, her hands clasped behind her back. The rain drooled in great curtains from the overhang above the window. The night sky was a featureless haze somewhere between red and black. There were no stars tonight, no troubling omens in the sky.
‘Did they hurt you?’ she asked.
He remembered to keep in character. ‘What do you think, Vuilleumier? That I did this to myself because I like the sight of blood?’
‘I know who you are.’
‘So do I — I’m Renzo. Congratulations.’
‘You’re Thorn. The one they’ve been looking for.’ Her voice was raised a little bit louder than normal. ‘You’re very lucky, you know.’
‘I am?’
‘If Counter-Terrorism had found you, you’d be in a morgue by now. Maybe several morgues. Luckily the police who arrested you had no idea who they were dealing with. I doubt they’d have believed me if I’d told them, quite frankly. Thorn’s like the Triumvir to them, a figure of myth and revulsion. I think they were expecting a giant among men, someone who could pull them apart with his bare hands. But you’re just a normal-looking man who could walk unnoticed down any street in Cuvier.’
Thorn rummaged around in his mouth with the tip of one finger. ‘I’d apologise for being such a disappointment if I was Thorn.’
She turned around and walked towards him. Her bearing, her expression, even the aura she radiated, was not of Khouri. Thorn experienced a dreadful moment of doubt, the thought flashing through his mind that perhaps everything that had happened since his last meeting here had been a fantasy, that there was no Khouri at all.
But Ana Khouri was real. She had told him her secrets, not just concerning her identity and the identity of the Triumvir, but the hurting secrets that went deeper, those that concerned her husband and the way they had been cruelly separated. He never doubted for one instant that she was still terribly in love with the man. At the same time he desperately wanted to break her away from her own past, to make her see that she had to accept what had happened and move on. He felt bad about it because he knew that there was a streak of self-justification in what he wanted to do, that it was not all about — or even mainly about — helping Khouri. He also wanted to make love to her. He despised himself for it, but the urge was still there.
‘Can you stand?’ she asked.
‘I walked in here.’
‘Come with me, then. Do not attempt anything, Thorn. It will be very bad for you if you do.’
‘What do you want with me?’
‘There’s a matter we need to discuss in private.’
‘Here’s fine by me,’ he said.
‘Would you like me to turn you over to Counter-Terrorism, Thorn? It’s very easily arranged. I’m sure they’d be delighted to see you.’
She took him into the room he remembered from his first visit, with the walls covered in shelves loaded with bulging paperwork. Khouri shut the door behind her — it sealed tightly and hermetically — and then removed a slim silver cylinder the size of a cigar from a desk drawer. She held it aloft and slowly turned around in the centre of the room, while tiny lights buried in the cigar flicked from red to green.
‘We’re safe,’ she said, after the lights had remained green for three or four minutes. ‘I’ve had to take extra precautions lately. They got a bug in here when I was up on the starship.’
Thorn said, ‘Did they learn much?’
‘No. It was a crude device and by the time I got back it was already faulty. But they’ve made another attempt
