The Revelation Space Collection (547 page)

Dreyfus waved a dismissive hand. ‘It was foolish of me. These things happen.’

‘Not down here they don’t. I checked the search log and you were right. Of all the queries handled by the Turbines in the final second before the accident, yours was the last one to come in. You searched for priors on the Nerval-Lermontov family, correct?’

‘Yes,’ Dreyfus said cautiously.

‘Just after your query was shuffled into the process stack, the Turbine began to exceed its own maximum authorised spin rate. It spun itself apart in less than one quarter of a second.’

‘It must still have been a coincidence.’

‘Prefect, now I’m the one trying to convince you. Something went wrong, but I don’t believe it was coincidence. The operating logic of one of these things is complex, and much of the instruction core was lost when the Turbine failed. But if I could ever piece it back together, I think I know what I’d find. Your search query was a trigger. Someone had implanted a trap in the operating logic, waiting to be primed by your question.’

Dreyfus mulled over her hypothesis. It dovetailed with his suspicions, but it was another thing entirely to hear it from Trajanova’s lips.

‘You honestly think someone could have done that?’

‘I could have done it, if I’d had the mind to. For anyone else, it would have been a lot more difficult. Frankly, I don’t see how they could have done it without triggering high-level security flags. But somehow they managed.’

‘Thank you,’ Dreyfus said softly. ‘I appreciate your candour. Given what’s happened, are you satisfied that I won’t cause any more damage just by querying the system?’

‘I can’t promise anything, but I’ve installed manual overspeed limits on both operating Turbs. No matter what traps may still be lurking in the logic, I don’t think the Turbs will be able to self-destruct. Go ahead and ask whatever you need to ask.’

‘I will,’ Dreyfus said. ‘But I’ll tread ever so softly.’

Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious appraised him with her sea-green eyes, cool as ice. ‘You look very tired. More so than last time, and you already looked tired back then. Is something the matter?’

Dreyfus pressed a fat finger against the side of his brow, where a vein was throbbing. ‘Things have been busy.’

‘Have you made progress on the case?’

‘Sort of. I’ve an idea who may have been behind the murders but I’m still not seeing a motive. I was hoping you’d be able to join a few dots for me.’

Delphine pushed strands of dirty black hair under the cloth scarf she wore as a hairband. ‘You’ll have to join some for me first. Who is this suspect you’re thinking of?’

Dreyfus sipped from the bulb of coffee he’d conjured just before stepping into the room. ‘My deputy and I followed an evidence chain, trying to find out who called your habitat to put you off making the deal with Dravidian. The lead we followed brought us to the name of another family in the Glitter Band.’

Delphine’s eyes narrowed.

Genuine interest
, Dreyfus thought.

‘Who?’ she asked.

Feeling as if he was treading across a minefield, he said, ‘The Nerval-Lermontovs. Do you know of them?’

Beneath the workstained white smock, her slight shoulders moved in an easy shrug. ‘I know
of
them. Who doesn’t? They were one of the big families, fifty or sixty years ago.’

‘What about a specific connection with your family?’

‘If there is one, I can’t think of it. We didn’t move in the same social orbits.’

‘Then there’s no specific reason you can think of why the Nerval-Lermontovs would want to hurt your family?’

‘None whatsoever. If you have a theory, I’d love to hear it.’

‘I don’t,’ Dreyfus said. ‘But I was hoping you might.’

‘It can’t be the answer,’ she said. ‘The trail you followed must have led you up a blind alley. The Nerval-Lermontovs would never have done something to my family. They’ve had their share of tragedy, but that doesn’t make them murderers.’

‘You mean Aurora?’

‘She was just a girl when it happened to her, Prefect. Calvin Sylveste’s machines ate her mind and spat out a clockwork zombie.’

‘So I heard.’

‘What are you not telling me?’

‘Suppose a member of the Nerval-Lermontov family was planning something.’

‘Such as?’

‘Like, say, a forced takeover of part of the Glitter Band.’

She nodded shrewdly. ‘Hypothetically, of course. If something like that was actually happening, you’d have told me, wouldn’t you?’

Dreyfus smiled tightly. ‘If it was, can you think of a reason why your family might have posed an obstacle to those plans?’

‘What kind of obstacle?’

‘All the evidence at my disposal says that someone connected with the Nerval-Lermontov family arranged for the torching of your habitat. Dravidian had nothing to do with it: he was set up, his ship and crew infiltrated by people who knew how to trigger a Conjoiner drive.’

‘Why?’

‘Wish I knew, Delphine. But here’s a guess: someone or something connected with the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble was considered a threat to those plans.’

‘I can’t imagine who or what,’ she said defiantly. ‘We were just minding our own business. Anthony Theobald was trying to marry me into a rich industrial combine. He had his friends, people who came to visit him, but they weren’t acquaintances of mine. Vernon just wanted to be with me, even if that meant being spurned by
his
family. I had my art...’

The second time he had invoked her, she had mentioned visitors to Anthony Theobald. When he’d pressed her for more information, she’d become reticent. A family secret, something she’d sworn not to talk about? Perhaps. He’d gone easy on her since then, earning her trust, but he knew that the matter could not be put off indefinitely.

He would have to come at it sideways.

‘Let’s talk about the art. Maybe there’s a clue there that we’re missing.’

‘But we’ve already been over that: the art was just a pretext, an excuse to disguise the true reason we were murdered.’

‘I wish I could convince myself of that, but there’s a connection that won’t stop surfacing. The family that did this to you had close ties with House Sylveste because of what happened to their daughter. And your breakthrough art - the pieces that started getting you attention - were inspired by Philip Lascaille’s journey into the Shroud. Lascaille was a “guest” of House Sylveste when he drowned in that fish pond.’

‘Is there an aspect of life in this system that those bloody people
haven’t
dug their claws into?’

‘Maybe not. But I’m still convinced there’s a link.’

She took so long to answer that for a while he thought she was ignoring the question, treating it with contempt. As if a policeman could have the slightest insight into the artistic process . . .

‘I told you how it happened. How one day I stepped back from a work in progress and felt that something had been guiding my hand, shaping the face to look like Lascaille.’

‘And?’

‘Well, there was a bit more to it than that. When I made that mental connection, it was as if a bolt of lightning had hit my brain. It wasn’t just a question of tackling Lascaille because I felt it was potentially interesting. It was about having no choice in the matter. The subject was
demanding
that I treat it, pulling me in like a magnetic field. From that moment on I could not ignore Philip Lascaille. I had to do his death justice, or die creatively.’

‘Almost as if Philip Lascaille was speaking through you, using you as a medium to communicate what he endured?’

She looked at him scornfully. ‘I don’t believe in the afterlife, Prefect.’

‘But figuratively, that’s how it felt to you. Right?’

‘I felt a compulsion,’ she said, as if this admission was the hardest thing she had ever had to do. ‘A need to see this through.’

‘As if you were speaking for Philip?’

‘No one had done that before,’ she said. ‘Not properly. If you want to call it speaking for the dead, so be it.’

‘I’ll call it whatever you call it. You were the artist.’

‘I
am
the artist, Prefect. No matter what you might think of me, I still feel the same creative impulse.’

‘Then if I gave you the means, a big piece of rock and a cutting torch, you’d still want to make art?’

‘Isn’t that what I just said?’

‘I’m sorry, Delphine. I’m not trying to pick a fight with you. It’s just that you’re the most assertive beta-level I’ve ever encountered.’

‘Almost as if there’s a person behind these eyes?’

‘Sometimes,’ Dreyfus admitted.

‘If your wife hadn’t died the way she did, you’d feel differently about me, wouldn’t you? You’d have no reason to disavow the right of a beta-level to call itself alive.’

‘Valery’s death changed nothing.’

‘You think that, but I’m not so sure. Look at yourself in a mirror one of these days. You’re a man with a wound. Whatever happened back then, there was more to it than what you told me.’

‘Why would I keep anything from you?’

‘Perhaps because there’s something you don’t want to face up to?’

‘I’ve faced up to everything. I loved Valery but now she’s gone. That was eleven years ago.’

‘The man who gave the order to kill those people, so that the Clockmaker would be stopped,’ Delphine prompted.

‘Supreme Prefect Dusollier.’

‘What was so abhorrent about that decision that he felt compelled to kill himself afterwards? Didn’t he do a brave and necessary thing? Didn’t he at least give those citizens a quick and painless death, as opposed to what would have happened if the Clockmaker had reached them?’

Dreyfus had lied to her before. Now he felt compelled to speak the truth, as if that was the only decent thing to do. He spoke slowly, his throat dry, as if he was the one under interrogation.

‘Dusollier left a suicide note. He said: “We made a mistake. We shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry for what we did to those people. God help them all.”’

‘I still don’t understand. What was there to be sorry about? He had no other choice.’

‘That’s what I’ve been telling myself for eleven years.’

‘You think something else happened.’

‘There’s an anomaly. The official record says that the nukes were used almost immediately after Jane Aumonier was extracted. By then, Dusollier and his prefects knew there was no hope of rescuing the trapped citizens, and that it would only be a matter of time before the Clockmaker escaped to another habitat.’

‘And the nature of this anomaly?’

‘Six hours,’ Dreyfus said. ‘That was how long they actually waited before using the nukes. They tried to cover it up, but in an environment like the Glitter Band, wired to the teeth with monitors, you can’t hide a thing like that.’

‘But shouldn’t a prefect, of all people, be able to find out what happened during those missing hours?’

‘Pangolin privilege will only get you so far.’

‘Have you thought to ask anyone? Like Jane Aumonier, for instance?’

Dreyfus smiled at his own weakness. ‘Have you ever put your hand into a box when you don’t know what’s inside it? That’s how I feel about asking that question.’

‘Because you fear the answer.’

‘Yes.’

‘What is it that you fear? That something might have killed Valery before SIAM was destroyed?’

‘Partly, I suppose. There’s another thing, though. There was a ship called the
Atalanta
. It had been floating in the Glitter Band for decades, mothballed. Then Panoply moved it, at the same time as the crisis, to a holding position very close to SIAM.’

‘Why had the ship been mothballed?’

‘It was a white elephant, financed by a consortium of Demarchist states with a view to freeing themselves from any dependence on the Conjoiners. Problem was, its drive system didn’t work as well as it was meant to. It only ever made one interstellar flight, and then they abandoned any plans to make more of them.’

‘But you think it would have made an excellent lifeboat.’

‘It’s crossed my mind.’

‘You think Panoply tried to get those people off during those missing six hours. They brought in this abandoned ship, docked it with SIAM and evacuated the trapped citizens.’

‘Or they tried to,’ Dreyfus said.

‘But something must have gone wrong. Or else why would Dusollier have shown such remorse?’

‘All I know is that the
Atalanta
is part of the key. But that’s as much as I’ve been able to find out. Part of me doesn’t want to find out anything else.’

‘I can see why this is so hard for you,’ Delphine said. ‘To lose your wife is one thing. But to have this mystery hanging over her death . . . I’m truly sorry for you.’

‘I have another part of the key. I have this vivid picture of Valery in my head. She’s turning towards me, kneeling on soil, with flowers in her hand. She’s smiling at me. I think she recognises me. But there’s something wrong with the smile. It’s the mindless smile of a baby seeing the sun.’