“That’s my side of the arrangement,” Saavedra said.
“Now tell me what you know about it.”
“If I do, will you let me talk to it?”
“Just tell us what you know. We’ll worry about the other stuff later.”
“I only came down here for one reason. The longer we delay, the harder it’s going to be to stop Aurora. People are dying up there while we hesitate.”
“Tell us where it came from, like you promised. Then we’ll talk.”
“It didn’t come from SIAM,” Dreyfus said.
“It was created somewhere else, more than ten years earlier.”
“Could you try to be less cryptic?” Veitch said.
“Does the name Philip Lascaille mean anything to you?” Dreyfus asked rhetorically.
“Of course it does. You’re educated prefects. You know your history.”
“What does Lascaille have to do with anything?” Saavedra asked.
“Everything. He became the Clockmaker.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Veitch said, looking away with a dismissive smile on his lips.
“Lascaille went mad after he got back from the Shroud. He died years ago.”
Dreyfus nodded patiently.
“As you’ll doubtless recall, he was found drowned in the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies. It was always assumed that he’d committed suicide, that the madness he came back with had finally caught up with him. But that wasn’t the only explanation for his death. He’d been silent for years, but just before his death he’d opened up to Dan, the scion of the family. He’d imparted clues that allowed Dan to go off on his own expedition to the Shrouders, confident of success where others had
failed. People concluded that Lascaille, having relieved himself of this enormous burden of knowledge, had viewed his life’s work as being complete. Either way, it was still suicide.”
“You don’t think it was,” Saavedra said, curiosity vying with suspicion in her voice.
“Like I said, a man was murdered. I think that’s where this all began.”
“But why?” she said.
“He was already mad. If people were worried about what he might say to Dan, the time to kill him would have been before they spoke, not after.”
“That’s not the reason he died,” Dreyfus said.
“He wasn’t killed because certain people were worried about the knowledge inside his head. He was killed because certain people wanted to get at that knowledge more than anything else in the universe. And killing him was the only way they knew to reach it.”
“You’re not making much sense,” Veitch said.
“He’s talking about alpha-level scanning,” Saavedra said, with dawning comprehension.
“Lascaille had to die because the process was fatal. Right, Dreyfus?”
“They wanted the patterns in his head, the structures left behind when he returned from the Shroud. They thought that if they could understand those structures, they’d have another shot at understanding the Shrouders. But to scan at the necessary resolution meant cooking his mind alive.”
“But things have improved since the Eighty,” Veitch said.
“Not by the time Lascaille died. All this took place thirty years after the Eighty, but for most of that time there’d been a moratorium concerning that kind of technology. They took him and did it anyway. They burnt his brains out, but they got their alpha-level scan. Then they took his body and dumped it in the fish pond. He was known to be insane, so no questions were asked when it looked as if he’d drowned himself.”
“Who would have done this?”
Dreyfus shrugged at Saavedra’s question. He hadn’t got that far yet, and his mind was freewheeling with the possibilities.
“I don’t know. It would have needed to be someone high up in the Sylveste organisation. I doubt that it was Dan himself—it would have been against his own interests since he already had an insight into how to contact the Shrouders. But who’s to say he didn’t have a rival, a spy in the clan, interested in beating him to the prize?”
“But you’ll go looking, won’t you?” she said.
“I can’t let a murder go uninvestigated. Of course, there are a couple of matters we need to deal with first. Surviving the next fifty-two hours would be a good start.” Dreyfus turned his attention to Veitch.
“Which is why we need the Clockmaker. I’ve stated my case as best I can. Now I want you to show me how to communicate with it.”
“It’s an interesting theory you have, concerning its origin,” Veitch said.
“It may even be true. But that doesn’t mean it makes any sense to let it loose now.”
“I’m not talking about letting it loose,” Dreyfus replied patiently.
“I’m talking about—”
“You think it makes a scrap of difference to the Clockmaker whether you open that cage or give it a hotline to the networks?”
Dreyfus felt a powerful wave of exhaustion crash over him. He had done his best. He had explained things to Saavedra and Veitch as clearly as he could, trusting that they would see his sincerity and understand that the Clockmaker really was the only effective weapon against Aurora, as unpalatable a prospect as that undoubtedly was. And it hadn’t worked. Perhaps Saavedra had begun to come around, or at least believe that he had not come to destroy it. With time she could have been turned. But Veitch was showing no inclination to see things Dreyfus’ way.
“I came here to negotiate,” he said, offering his hands in surrender.
“I could have had you killed, you and the Clockmaker. A single nuke would have done it. Do you think I’d have come here if I felt there was another option?”
“Prefect, listen to me,” Veitch said.
“No matter how bad things are up there, no matter how desperate they look, nothing can possibly be bad enough to justify giving the Clockmaker an angstrom of freedom. This is pure fucking evil incarnate, understand? It’s the devil in chrome.”
“I know.”
“You can’t know. No one really knows unless they’ve had direct experience with it, day after day, year after year, the way we have.”
“I was there,” Dreyfus said calmly.
“What do you mean, you were there?”
“When we went into SIAM. I was one of the prefects who went inside, before it was nuked out of existence.”
Veitch shot a nervous glance at Saavedra. Dreyfus recognised the look. They thought he was losing it. He looked at Sparver and saw the same expression on the face of his former deputy, though only Dreyfus would have recognised it.
“Prefect, we have clearance that exceeds Pangolin, clearance that exceeds even Manticore,” Veitch answered, in tones of slow reasonableness.
“We know everything that happened that day, to the last minute. We know who was involved, where they were, what they were doing.”
“Except the facts were changed,” Dreyfus said.
“My involvement was expunged from the record, from all documents except those intended for the eyes of Jane Aumonier alone. But I was there. I just didn’t remember much about it until now.”
“He’s losing it,” Veitch said.
“Dusollier committed suicide shortly after the Clockmaker crisis,” Dreyfus continued, “but it wasn’t because of decisions he took for himself. He killed himself rather than deal with the consequences of the actions I initiated, acting with Dusollier’s blessing.”
“What do you mean, actions you initiated?”
“There was no prefect of higher rank in the vicinity of the crisis. The Clockmaker had already reached Jane. She was out of the equation. Dusollier authorised me to go in and use whatever measures were necessary to save the people still inside SIAM.”
