router, you should still be able to keep backtracking it until you reach the original sender. It would be unusual for a message to pass through more than two or three relay stages.”
“Sparver should be able to handle the technical issues. It can’t be done remotely, can it?”
“No, sir. Someone needs to be physically present. But you’re right—Sparver will know exactly what to do.”
“I’m sure he will,” Dreyfus said. Without another word he closed the connection and prepared to rouse his other deputy.
CHAPTER 10
They did not look like people at all, but rather luminous pink branching coral formations, vast, dendritic and mysteriously chambered. For many seconds, Gaffney stared in mesmerised fascination at the three-dimensional patterns, awed at what he was seeing. If human souls could be frozen and captured in light, they would look something like this. Now that the flesh-and-blood individuals were deceased, and since none of the three had subjected themselves to alpha-level scanning, these beta-levels represented the last link with the living as far as Vernon Tregent, Anthony Theobald and Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious were concerned. Panoply might not regard beta-levels as anything other than forensic information, akin to photographs or bloodstains, but Gaffney was more open-minded. He didn’t hold with the orthodox view that only alpha-level simulations were to be accorded full human rights. The exterior effect was the only thing that mattered, not what was going on behind the mask. That was why it did not unduly concern him that he did not know exactly what Aurora was. So she might be a machine, rather than a living person. So what? What mattered was her compassion, her evident concern for the well-being of the hundred million souls orbiting Yellowstone. He’d had his doubts at first, of course. She had come to him five years earlier, four years after he’d been promoted to head of Panoply’s Internal Security division. He’d been a senior for years before that, and an outstanding field for as long again. He’d given his life to Panoply, and asked for nothing in return except the assurance that his colleagues cared about their duties as much as he did. He had invested his own identity in the idea of service, eschewing marriage and social relationships in preference to a life of disciplinary self-control. He lived and breathed the ideals of Panoply, the martial life of a career prefect. He didn’t just accept the sacrifices of his profession, he welcomed them.
But then something had happened that caused Gaffney to question the worth of Panoply, and by inference his own fitness as a human being. He had been sent to investigate possible voting anomalies in a habitat known as Hell-Five. It was a strange world, built around a perfect hemisphere of rock, as if a round asteroid had been sliced in two. Airtight structures rose up from both the flat face and the underlying pole, densely packed skyscrapers wrapped in coiling pressurised passageways. Once, Hell-Five had been a gambler’s paradise, before the fashion for such things waned. It had moved through several social models after that, each less remunerative than the last, before settling on the one Gaffney had witnessed during his visit. Within months of assuming its new identity, Hell- Five had become a dazzling success, with other habitats paying handsomely to access its lucrative new export.
That export was human misery.
Once a month, one of the habitat’s extremely wealthy citizens was selected at random. That unfortunate individual would be tortured, their excruciation prolonged via medical intervention until they eventually succumbed to death. Money flowed into Hell-Five’s coffers via the sale of viewing rights and the fact that the citizens of other habitats could sponsor a particular mode of torture, often after a series of escalating auctions.
The system sickened Gaffney to the marrow. He’d observed many extremes of human society in his tours of the Glitter Band, but nothing to compare with the depravities of Hell-Five. One glimpse of one of the victims-in- progress had sent him reeling. He had experienced a deep-seated conviction that Hell-Five was simply wrong; a social abomination that needed to be corrected, if not wiped out of existence.
But Panoply—and therefore Gaffney himself—could do nothing to curtail it. Panoply was concerned only with matters of security and voting rights as they pertained to the Glitter Band as a whole. What went on inside a given habitat—provided those activities did not contravene technological or weapons moratoriums, or deny citizens free voting rights—was entirely outside Panoply’s jurisdiction; a matter for local constabulary alone.
By these criteria, Hell-Five had done nothing wrong.
Gaffney found himself unable to accept this state of affairs. The phenomenon of the torture states, and the citizens’ collective refusal to see them ended, showed that the people could not be trusted with absolute freedom. Nor could Panoply be trusted to step in when a moral cancer began to spread through the Glitter Band.
Gaffney saw then that something had to be done. Too much power had been devolved to the habitats. For their own safety, central government needed to be reasserted. The citizens would never vote for that, of course; even the moderate states were wary of ceding too much authority to an organisation like Panoply. But needs must, no matter how unwilling the populace. Children were playing with some very sharp knives: it was a wonder more blood hadn’t already been spilled.
Gaffney had begun to express his thoughts in his personal journal. It was a way of clarifying and organising his precepts. He saw that Panoply had to change—perhaps even cease to exist—if the people were not to be abandoned to their own worst natures. He was aware that his ideas were heretical; that they cut against everything Sandra Voi’s name had stood for these past two hundred years. But history was not made by reasonable or cautious individuals. Sandra Voi had hardy been cautious or reasonable herself. Aurora had revealed herself to him soon after.
“You’re a good man, Sheridan. Yet you feel beleaguered, as if all those around you have forgotten their true responsibilities.” Gaffney had blinked at the sudden appearance of the face on his private security pane.
“Who are you?”
“A fellow sympathiser. A friend, if you wish.” He was inside Panoply. If she was reaching him, then she had to be inside as well. But he knew even then that she was not, and that Aurora had powers of infiltration and stealth that made a mockery of walls and doors, whether real or virtual. If she was a beta- or gamma-level, she was cleverer and more agile than most.
“Are you human?”
The question had clearly amused her.
“Does it really matter what I am, provided we share the same ideals?”
“My ideals are my own business.”
“Not now they aren’t. I’ve seen your words, shared your theories.” She nodded in answer to the question he’d barely begun to frame.
“Yes, I’ve looked into your private journals. Don’t be shocked, Sheridan. There is nothing shaming about them. Quite the contrary. I found them courageous. You are that rarest of creatures: a man with the wisdom to see beyond his own time.”
“I’m a prefect. It’s my job to think about the future.”
“But some people are better at it than others. You are a seer, Sheridan: much like myself. We just use different methods. Your policeman’s instincts tell you that Hell-Five is a symptom, a diagnostic of a looming pathology that may tax even Panoply’s resources. I see the future through a different lens, but I perceive the same ominous patterns, the same subtle indications of times of great crisis to come.”
“What do you see?”
“The end of everything, Sheridan. Unless brave men take the right action now to avert that catastrophe.”
She had looked at him testingly, like a teacher judging a bright but wayward pupil.
“The words in your journal show that you care. But caring is not enough. Words must become deeds.”
“I’m doing what I can. When my ideas are finalised, I can approach the other seniors—”.
“And have them drum you out of the organisation?”
“If I could only express myself properly—”.
“It’ll make no difference. You’re advocating authoritarian control. You know it is the right thing to do, but to most people the very idea is poison.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that.”
