“And this mechanical assembly has shifted by two centimetres. The movement was quite sudden. We don’t know what to make of either change.”
Dreyfus glanced at the other lab technicians. He presumed they were fully aware of the situation, or Demikhov wouldn’t be talking so openly.
“It’s getting ready for something,” he said.
“That’s my fear.”
“After eleven years: why now?”
“It’s probably reading stress levels.”
“That’s what she told me,” Dreyfus said, “but this isn’t the first crisis we’ve had in the last eleven years.”
“Maybe it’s the first time things have been this bad. It’s self-reinforcing, unfortunately. We can only hope that her elevated hormone level won’t trigger another change.”
“And if it does?”
“We may have to rethink that safety margin of which we’ve always been so protective.”
“You’d make that call?”
“If I felt that thing was about to kill her.”
“And in the meantime?”
“The usual. We’ve altered her therapeutic regime. More drugs. She doesn’t like it, says it dulls her consciousness. She still self-administers. We’re treading a very fine line: we have to take the edge off her nerves, but we mustn’t put her to sleep.”
“I don’t envy you.”
“No one envies us, Tom. We’ve grown used to that by now.”
“There’s something you need to know. Things aren’t going to get any easier for Jane right now. I’m working a case that might stir up some trouble. Jane’s given me the green light to follow my investigation wherever it leads.”
“You’ve a duty to do so.”
“I’m still worried how Jane’ll take things if the crisis worsens.”
“She won’t step down, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Demikhov said.
“We’ve been over that a million times.”
“I wouldn’t expect her to resign. Right now the only thing keeping her sane is her job.” Dreyfus sat before his low black table, sipping reheated tea. The wall opposite him, where he normally displayed his mosaic of faces, now showed only a single image. It was a picture of the rock sculpture, the one that Sparver and he had found in the incinerated ruin of Ruskin-Sartorious. Forensics had dragged it back to Panoply and scanned it at micron-level resolution. A neon-red contour mesh emphasized the three-dimensional structure that would otherwise have been difficult to make out.
“I’m missing something here,” Sparver said, sitting next to him at the table.
“We’ve got the killers, no matter what Dravidian might have wanted us to think. We’ve got the motive and the means. Why are we fixating on the art?”
“Something about it’s been bothering me ever since we first saw it,” Dreyfus said.
“Don’t you feel the same way?”
“I wouldn’t hang it on my wall. Beyond that, it’s just a face.”
“It’s the face of someone in torment. It’s the face of someone looking into hell and knowing that’s where they’re going. More than that, it’s a face I feel I know.”
“I’m still just seeing a face. Granted, it’s not the happiest face I’ve ever seen, but—”.
“What bothers me,” Dreyfus said, as if Sparver hadn’t spoken, “is that we’re clearly looking at the work of a powerful artist, someone in complete control of their craft. But why haven’t I ever heard of Delphine Ruskin- Sartorious before?”
“Maybe you just haven’t been paying attention.”
“That’s what I wondered. But when I searched for priors on Delphine, I only got sparse returns. She’s been contributing pieces to exhibitions for more than twenty years, but with no measurable success for most of that time.”
“And lately?”
“Things have begun to take off for her.”
“Because people caught on to what she was doing, or because she got better at it?”
“Good question,” Dreyfus said.
“I’ve looked at some of her older stuff. There are similarities with the unfinished sculpture, but there’s also something missing. She’s always been accomplished from a technical standpoint, but I didn’t get an emotional connection with the older works. I’d have marked her down as another rich postmortal with too much time on her hands, convinced that the world owes her fame in addition to everything else it’s already given her.”
“You said you thought you knew the face.”
“I did. But forensics didn’t make any connection, and when I ran the sculpture through the Search Turbines, nothing came up. Hardly surprising, I suppose, given the stylised manner in which she’s rendered the face.”
“So you’ve drawn a blank.” Dreyfus smiled.
“Not quite. There’s something Vernon told me.”
“Vernon?” Sparver said.
“Delphine’s suitor, Vernon Tregent, one of the three stable recoverables. He told me the work had been part of her ’Lascaille’ series. The name meant something to me, but I couldn’t quite place it.”
“So run it through the Turbines.”
“I don’t need to. Just sitting here talking to you, I know where I’ve heard that name before.” And it was true. Whenever he voiced the word in his mind, he saw a darkness beyond comprehension, a wall of starless black more profound than space itself. He saw darkness, and something falling into that darkness, like a white petal floating down into an ocean of pure black ink.
“Are you going to put me out of my misery?” Sparver asked.
“Lascaille’s Shroud,” Dreyfus answered, as if that was all that needed to be said. Thalia was reviewing the summary file on Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma when the call came in. She lifted her eyes from her compad and conjured her master’s face into existence before her. Slow-moving habitats, vast and imperious as icebergs, were visible through the slight opacity of the display pane.
“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” Dreyfus asked. Thalia tried not to sound flustered.
“Not at all, sir.”
“No one told me you were outside.”
“It all came together quite quickly, sir. I have the patch for the polling bug, the one that allowed Caitlin Perigal to bias the results. I’m going to dry-run it before going live across the whole ten thousand.”
“Good. It’ll be one less headache to deal with. Who’s with you?”
“No one, sir. I’m handling the initial upgrades on my own.” Something twitched in the corner of his right eye, the lazy one.
“How many are you doing?”
“Four, sir, ending with House Aubusson. I told the seniors that I can have the upgrades complete inside sixty hours, but I was being deliberately cautious. If all goes well I should be done a lot quicker than that.”
“I don’t like the idea of you handling this alone, Thalia.”
“I’m quite capable of doing this, sir. Another pair of hands would only slow me down.”
“That isn’t the issue. The issue is one of my deputies going out there without back-up.”
“I’m not going out there to initiate a lockdown, sir. No one’s going to put up a fight.”
“We don’t start being popular just because we aren’t enforcing lockdowns. The citizenry moves from hating and fearing us to guarded tolerance. That’s as good as it gets.”
“I’ve been doing this for five years, sir.”
“But never alone.”
“I was alone in Bezile Solipsist for eight months.”
“But no one noticed you. That’s why they call it Bezile Solipsist.”
“I need to prove that I can handle a difficult assignment on my own, sir. This is my chance. But if you really
