towards the stars. Fronds of dark cold dust eddied around it at a greater distance, the remnants of earlier explosive activity.
Eta Carinae is one of the most massive, and therefore unstable, stars in the galaxy. It is also the most dauntingly elegant. I could appreciate why the transcendients had chosen to base themselves here, ten thousand light-years away from Earth. Despite its glory, an ever-present reminder of matter’s terrible fragility. Such a monster could never last for more than a few million years. Its triumphant end will come as a detonation that will probably be seen from galactic superclusters halfway towards the edge of infinity.
How Justin Ascham Raleigh would have loved this.
The habitat appeared in our forward sensors. A simple white circle against the swirling red fogs of the hulking sky. Two hundred miles across, it was alone in interstellar space apart from its companion portal. One side flung out towers and spires, alive with sparkling lights. The other was apparently open to space, its surface undulating gently with grassy vales and meandering streams. Forests created random patches of darker green that swarmed over the low hills.
‘We have landing clearance,’ Neill Heller Caesar said.
‘Have they changed the governing protocols?’ I asked. I wasn’t unduly nervous, but I did want this case to go to its absolute completion.
He paused, consulting his cybershadow. ‘No. The biononic connate acknowledges our authority.’
The deepflight ship slid through the habitat’s atmospheric boundary without a ripple. We flew along an extensive valley, and alighted at its far end, just before the central stream broke up into a network of silver runnels that emptied into a deep lake. There was a small white villa perched on the slope above the stream, its roof transparent to allow the inhabitants an uninterrupted view of Eta Carinae.
I followed Neill Heller Caesar across the spongy grass, impressed by how clean and natural the air smelt. A figure appeared in the villa’s doorway and watched us approach.
It was so inevitable, I considered, that this person should be here of all the places in the universe we had reached. The transcendent project was attempting to imprint a human mind on the fabric of space-time itself. If they succeeded we would become as true angels, creatures of pure thought, distracted by nothing. It was the final liberation to which Bethany Maria Caesar had always aspired.
She smiled knowingly at me as I came through the gate in the white picket fence surrounding her garden. Once again, the elegant twenty-year-old beauty I’d seen in Justin’s rooms at Dunbar College. I could scarcely remember the wizened figure who’d talked to me on Io.
‘Edward Buchanan Raleigh.’ She inclined her head in a slight bow. ‘So you never gave up.’
‘No.’
‘I appreciate the pursuit of a goal, especially over such a length of time. It’s an admirable quality.’
‘Thank you. Are you going to deny it was you?’
She shook her head. ‘I would never insult you like that. But I would like to know how you found out.’
‘It was nothing you could have protected yourself from. You see, you smiled.’
‘I smiled?’
‘Yes. When my back was turned. I’ve spent the last thirty years reviewing Carter’s memories of his time at Oxford; accessing a little chunk of them almost every day. I’d gone over everything, absolutely everything, every event I considered remotely relevant was played again and again until I was in danger of becoming more like him than he ever was himself. It all amounted to nothing. Then I played his memories right to the bitter end. That night when Francis and I arrived at Justin’s rooms, I asked Detective Pitchford to take blood samples from all of you. He was rather annoyed about it, some junior know-it-all telling him how to do his job. Quite rightly, too. And that was when you smiled. I couldn’t see it, but Carter did. I think he must have put it down to you being amused by Pitchford’s reaction. But I’ve seen you smile like that on one other occasion. It was when we were on Io and I asked you to come back to Earth because of the way low gravity was harming you. I asked you because I didn’t understand then what the Caesars wanted with Jupiter. You did. You’d worked out in advance what would happen when biononics reached their full potential and how it could be used to your advantage. You were quite right too, that particular orthodox branch of your family has already consumed Ganymede to build their habitats, and they show no sign of slowing their expansion.’
‘So I smiled at you.’
‘Yes. Both times you were outsmarting me. Which made me wonder about the blood sample. I had your sample taken out of stasis and analysed again. The irony was, we actually had the relevant test back in eighteen thirty. We just never ran it.’
‘You found I had excessive progestin in my blood. And I smiled because your request confirmed the investigation would go the way I’d extrapolated. I knew I’d be asked for a sample by the police, but it was a risk I was prepared to take, because the odds of anyone making a connection from that to the murder were almost non- existent.’
‘The most we’d be likely to ask was how you got hold of an illegal contraception. But then you were a biochemist, you were probably able to make it in the lab.’
‘It wasn’t easy. I had to be very careful about equipment usage. The church really stigmatizes contraception, even now.’
‘Like you say, using it still wasn’t a reason to murder someone. Not by itself. Then I wondered why you were taking contraception. Nearly a third of the girls at university became pregnant. They weren’t stigmatized. But then they’re free to come back in fifty or seventy years after they’ve finished having children, and pick up where they left off. Not you though. I believed you were suffering from low-gravity deterioration on Io because I had no reason to think differently.’
‘Of course you didn’t,’ she said disdainfully. ‘Everybody thinks the Sport of Emperors just bred the families for long life. But the Caesars were much cannier and crueller than that. There are branches of the family bred to reinforce other traits.’
‘Like intelligence. They concentrated on making you smart at the expense of longevity.’
‘Very astute of you, Edward. Yes, I’m a Short. Without biononic DNA reset I wouldn’t have lived past a hundred and twenty.’
‘You couldn’t afford time off from university to have children. It would have taken up half of your life, and you could already see where the emerging sciences were leading. That century was the greatest age of discovery and change we’ve ever had. It would never be repeated. And you might have been left behind before biononics reached fruition. No problem for us, but in your case being left behind might mean death.’
‘He didn’t care,’ she said. Her eyes were closed, her voice a pained whisper. ‘He loved me. He wanted us to be together forever and raise twenty children.’
‘Then he found out you weren’t going to have children with him.’
‘Yes. I loved him, too, with all my heart. We could have had all this future together, if he’d just made an allowance for what I was. But he wouldn’t compromise, he wouldn’t listen. Then he threatened to tell my college if I didn’t stop taking the progestin. I couldn’t believe he would betray me like that. I would have been a disgrace. The college would have sent me away. I didn’t know how much value the Caesars would place on me, not back in those days, before I’d proved myself. I didn’t know if they’d cover for me. I was twenty-one and desperate.’
‘So you killed him.’
‘I sneaked up to his room that night to ask him one last time. Even then he wouldn’t listen. I actually had a knife in my hand, and he still said no. He was such a traditionalist, a regular bloke, loyal to his family and the world’s ideology. So, yes, I killed him. If I hadn’t, today wouldn’t exist.’
I looked up at the delicate strata of red light washing across the sky. What a strange place for this to finally be over. I wondered what Francis would make of it all. The old man would probably have a glass of particularly fine claret, then get on with the next case. Life was so simple when he was alive.
‘It would,’ I said. ‘If not you, then someone else would have reached the breakthrough point. You said it yourself, we were freefalling to the plateau.’
‘All this does put us in an extremely awkward position,’ Neill Heller Caesar said. ‘You are the inventor of biononics, the mother of today’s society. But we can hardly allow a murderer to go around unpunished, now can we?’
‘I’ll leave,’ she said. ‘Go into exile for a thousand years or whatever. That way nobody will be embarrassed, and the family won’t lose any political respect.’
