veined, with no visible skeletal underpinnings. Thalia’s pegasus wasn’t the only flying thing in the air. There were other flying horses, visible as slowly flapping translucent forms in the far distance. Some of them had riders; others must have been on their way to pick up passengers or were engaged in some errand of their own. There were also much more colourful things, suggestive of giant patterned moths, striped fish or elaborately tailed Chinese dragon kites. The pegasuses appeared to be confined to the habitat’s low-gravity regions (with those prismatic wings it wasn’t surprising) but the other flying forms had free roam of the entire interior. Amongst them, almost too small to make out, were the star-shaped forms of flying people, with wings or aerodynamic surfaces of their own. Thalia tried her glasses, but the overlay revealed no significant points of difference compared to naked reality. This confirmed everything that she had read about the Hourglass during her flight: the people here preferred to shape matter, not information. Gradually, she became aware of gravity pushing her deeper into the saddle. The horse was aiming itself at a tongue-like landing deck, buttressed out from a spired white mansion near the top of a city constructed on the slopes of the Hourglass’s midpoint constriction. As she neared the touchdown point, Thalia observed a civic welcoming party gathered around the perimeter of the deck. A pair of functionaries rushed to the side of the pegasus to help Thalia disembark as soon as the horse’s hooves clinked against glass flooring. The pull of gravity could still not have been more than a tenth of a gee, but the horse’s wings were beating constantly, fanning the air with an audible whoosh on each twisting downbeat. The functionaries—who were more or less baseline human in appearance—moved out of the way once Thalia was on her feet. A giant panda-like man, all black and white fur, ambled across to meet her. He moved with remarkable grace despite his obvious mass. His huge head was as wide as a vacuum helmet, his true eyes barely visible in the black ovals of his eyepatches. He stopped munching on a thin greenish stick and passed it to a functionary.
“Welcome, Deputy Field Prefect Ng,” he said in an unctuous tone.
“I am Mayor Graskop. It is a pleasure to welcome you to our modest little world. We trust your stay will be both pleasant and productive.” He offered her his paw in greeting. Thalia’s own small hand disappeared into a padding of warm, damp fur. She noticed that Mayor Graskop had five fingers and a thumb, all digits tipped with a shiny black nail.
“Thank you for sending the horse.”
“Did you like it? We’d have cultured something unique if we’d had more notice of your visit.”
“It was a very nice horse, thank you. You didn’t need to go to any more trouble.”
The mayor released his grip.
“Our understanding is that you wish to access our polling core.”
“That’s correct. What I have to do won’t take too long. It’s quite straightforward.”
“And afterwards? You’ll stay to enjoy some of our hospitality, won’t you? It’s not often we get a visitor from Panoply.”
“I’d love to, Mayor, but now isn’t a good time.”
He tilted his huge monochrome head.
“Trouble outside, is there? We’d heard reports, although I confess we don’t pay as much attention to such matters as we ought.”
“No,” Thalia said diplomatically.
“No trouble. Just a schedule I have to stick to.”
“But you will stay, just for a short while.” When the mayor spoke, she glimpsed fierce ranks of sharp white teeth and caught the sugary whiff of animal digestive products.
“I can’t. Not really.”
“But you simply must, Prefect.” He looked at the other members of the welcoming party, daring Thalia to disappoint them. Their faces, for the most part, were still recognisably human, albeit furred, scaled or otherwise distorted according to some zoological model. Their eyes were disturbingly beautiful, liquid and intense and childlike.
“We won’t detain you without good reason,” the mayor insisted.
“We receive so very few outsiders, let alone figures of authority. On such rare occasions that we do, it’s our custom to host an impromptu contest, or tournament, and to invite our honoured guest to participate in the judging. We were hoping you’d help with the adjudication in an air-joust—”
“I’d love to, but—”
He grinned triumphantly.
“Then it’s settled. You will stay.” He clasped his paws together in anticipation.
“Oh, how wonderful. A prefect as judge!”
“I’m not—”
“Let’s deal with the trifling business of the polling core, shall we? Then we can move on to the main event. It will be a wonderful air-joust! Are you happy to follow me? If you don’t like our low gravity, we can arrange a palanquin.”
“I’m doing just fine,” Thalia said tersely.
CHAPTER 11
Dreyfus was settled before his console, composing a query for the Search Turbines. He sought priors on the Nerval-Lermontov family, certain that the name meant something but incapable of dredging the relevant information from the event-congested registers of his own ageing memory. Yet he had no sooner launched the request, and was dwelling on the idle possibility of trawling his own mind, when he felt a sudden brief shudder run through the room. It was as if Panoply had suffered an earthquake.
He lifted his cuff, ready to call his deputy, fearing the worst. But he had not even uttered Sparver’s name before his console informed him that there had been a major incident in the Turbine hall.
Dreyfus stepped through his clotheswall and made his way from his room through the warrens of the rock to the non-centrifuge section where the Search Turbines were located. Even before he arrived, he realised that the incident had been grave. Prefects, technicians and machines were rushing past him. By the time he reached the entrance to the free-fall hall, medical crews were bringing out the wounded. Their injuries were shocking.
A conveyor band drew him into the vastness of the hall. He stared in stupefied amazement at the spectacle. There were no longer four Search Turbines, but three. The endmost cylinder was gone, save for the sleeve-like anchor points where it emerged from the chamber’s inner surface. The transparent shrouding had shattered into countless dagger-like shards, many of which were now embedded in the walling. Dreyfus couldn’t imagine the outward force that would have been necessary to rupture the armoured sheathing, which was the same kind of glass-like substance they used to form spacecraft hulls. As for the machinery that would have been whirling inside the glass just before it broke loose, nothing remained except a dusty residue, lathered several centimetres thick over every surface and hanging in the air in a choking blue-grey smog. The Turbine—its layered data stacks and whisking retrieval blades—had pulverised itself efficiently, leaving no components larger than a speck of grit. It was designed to do that, Dreyfus reminded himself, so that no information could be recovered by hostile parties in the event of a takeover of Panoply. But it was not meant to self-destruct during the course of normal operations.
He studied the other Turbines. The sheathing on the nearest of the three, the one that had been closest to the destroyed unit, was riven by several prominent cracks. The apparatus inside was spinning down, decelerating visibly. The other two units were undergoing the same failsafe shutdown, even though their casings appeared intact.
Keeping out of the way of the medical staff attending to hall technicians who’d been lacerated by glass and high-speed Turbine shrapnel—they’d already pulled out the most seriously wounded—Dreyfus found his way to a woman named Trajanova. She was the prefect in charge of archives, and considered supremely competent by all concerned. Dreyfus did not dissent from that view, but he did not like Trajanova and he knew that the feeling was mutual. He’d employed her once as a deputy, then dismissed her because she did not have the necessary instincts for fieldwork. She had never forgiven him for that and their rare meetings were tense, terse affairs. Dreyfus was nevertheless relieved to see that she had suffered no conspicuous injuries save for a gashed cheek. She was pressing her sleeve to it, her uniform dispensing disinfectant and coagulant agents. She had headphones lowered around her neck, glasses pushed up over her brow and a fine dusting of blue-grey debris on her clothes and
