apparent.
“At least some people in Aubusson have heard of Jules, but no one knows me from Adam. I’m Paula Thory. I keep butterflies, and not even very rare or beautiful ones.”
“Hello,” Thalia said.
Paula Thory nudged the man who’d made the owl.
“Go on, then,” she said.
“I know you’re itching to tell her.”
“I’m Broderick Cuthbertson. I make mechanical animals. It’s my—”
“Hobby, yes. You said.” Thalia smiled nicely.
“There’s an active subculture of automaton builders in Aubusson. I mean real automaton builders, obviously. Strictly PreCalvinist. Otherwise it’s just cheating.”
“I can imagine.”
“Meriel Redon,” said a young, willowy-looking woman, raising a tentative hand.
“I make furniture out of
wood.”
“Cyrus Parnasse,” another man said, a beefy, red-faced farmer type with a burr to his voice who could have stepped out of the Middle Ages about five minutes ago.
“I’m a curator in the Museum of Cybernetics.”
“I thought the Museum of Cybernetics was in House Sylveste.”
“Ours isn’t as big,” Parnasse said.
“Or as flashy or dumbed-down. But we like it.”
One by one the others introduced themselves, until the last of the twelve had spoken. As if obeying some process of collective decision-making that took place too subtly for Thalia to detect, they all turned to look at Jules Caillebot again.
“We were selected randomly,” he explained.
“When it was known that an agent of Panoply was to visit, the polling core shuffled the names of all eight hundred thousand citizens and selected the twelve you see standing before you. Actually, there was a bit more to it than that. Our names were presented to the electorate, so that our fitness for the task could be certified by a majority. Most people voted ’no objection’, but one of the original twelve was roundly rejected by a percentage of citizens too large for the core to ignore. Something of a philanderer, it seems. He’d made enough enemies that when his one shot at fame arose, he blew it.”
“If you call this fame,” Parnasse, the museum curator, said.
“In a couple of hours you’ll be out of Aubusson, girl, and we’ll all have returned to deserved obscurity. It is that kind of visit, isn’t it? If this is a lockdown, no one warned us.”
“No one ever warns you,” Thalia said dryly, not taking to the grumpy undercurrent she had heard in the man’s voice.
“But no, this isn’t a lockdown, just a routine polling core upgrade. And whether or not you think being part of this reception party is something to be proud of, I am grateful for the welcome.” She picked up the cylinder, relishing its lightness before she returned to full gravity.
“All I really need is someone to show me to the polling core, although I can locate it myself if you prefer. You can all stick around if you want, but it isn’t necessary.”
“Do you want to go straight to the core?” asked Jules Caillebot.
“You can if you like. Or we can first take some tea, some refreshments, and then perhaps a leisurely stroll in one of the gardens.”
“No prizes for guessing whose gardens,” someone said, with a snigger.
Thalia raised a calming hand.
“It’s kind of you to offer, but my bosses won’t be too happy if I’m late back at Panoply.”
“We can be at the core in twenty minutes,” Jules Caillebot said.
“It’s just beyond the second window band. You can see it from here, in fact.”
Thalia had been expecting the core to be buried in the skin of the world, like a subcutaneous implant.
“We can?”
“Let me show you. The new housing’s rather elegant, even if I say so myself.”
“That’s one opinion,” Parnasse rumbled, just loud enough for Thalia to hear.
They led her to the window. The remaining two kilometres of the endcap curved away below her to merge with the level terrain of the main cylinder. Caillebot, the landscape gardener, stood next to her and pointed into the middle distance.
“There,” he said, whispering.
“You see the first and second window bands? Now focus on the white bridge crossing the second band, close to that kidney-shaped lake. Follow the line of the bridge for a couple of kilometres, until you come to a ring of structures grouped around a single tall talk.”
“I’ve got it,” Thalia said. Since it lay directly ahead, the stalk was aligned with her local vertical too closely to be coincidence given the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree curvature of the habitat. She had presumably been directed down the appropriate elevator line for a visit to the polling core.
“Remind you of anything?” Caillebot asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Milk splashing into milk, perhaps. That ring of stalks, with the little spheres on top of each one, and then the tall one in the middle—”
“That’s exactly what it is,” Parnasse said.
“A perfect representation of a physical instant. That’s the original Museum of Cybernetics. Then the Civic Planning Committee got it into their heads that what it really needed was a gigantic single stalk rising from the middle, to house the polling core in the sphere on top. Completely ruined the purity of the original concept, needless to say. You can’t get a central stalk and a ring of stalks from a single splash, no matter how hard you try.”
“Why did the core need a new housing?”
“It didn’t,” Parnasse said, before anyone else had a chance to contribute.
“It worked fine the way it used to be, out of sight and out of mind. Then the Civic Planning Committee decided we needed to celebrate our embracing of true Demarchist principles by making the core a visible symbol that could be seen from anywhere in the habitat.”
“Most people like the new arrangement,” Caillebot said, with a strained smile.
Parnasse wasn’t having it.
“You’re only saying that because they had to rip out the old gardens to accommodate the new stalk. The ones put in by your rival. You’d feel differently if you actually had to work there.”
Thalia coughed, deciding it was best not to take sides at this point. Moving a core was hardly routine, but Panoply would have been consulted, and if there had been any technical objection it would not have been permitted.
“I need to see it close up, no matter what the controversies,” she said.
“We’ll be there in no time at all,” Caillebot said, extending a hand back towards the wall where a row of elevator doors stood open.
“Would you like some help with that equipment? It’ll be heavier on the surface.”
“I’ll cope,” Thalia said.
Miracle Bird opened its metal beak and emitted a raucous mechanical chime as it took flight and led the way towards the elevators.
CHAPTER 12
Dreyfus held his breath, still anticipating an attack despite the evidence from the scans. The corvette’s sensors had probed the rock’s embattled surface and revealed no further evidence of active weaponry, although he considered it likely that there were still guns buried in the other hemisphere. The same scans had pinpointed a likely entry point, what appeared to be an airlock leading to some kind of subsurface excavation. The scans could only
