Aristoi, page 10
“How?” he demanded. “The Hyperlogos was set up centuries ago to preserve everything. Special care was taken with the code so as to make tampering impossible. The Seal of the Hyperlogos has a higher priority even than the Seal of the Aristoi. Not even one of us— ”
Bitter amusement twisted Cressida’s lips. “Are you, Gabriel Vissarionovich Aristos, about to tell me what an Aristos can and cannot do?”
Gabriel realized he wasn’t and fell silent again. His daimones began to palpate Cressida’s revelation with cautious little paws.
“Never mind how,” Cressida said. “How isn’t important— concede for a moment there’s a way to do it. The why is what matters. Why did Saigo tamper with the Hyperlogos? Why did he invent a fictional supernova and have an entire sphere of stars declared off-limits? Why is he spending so much time there?” She leaned closer and gazed at him intently. “What is he doing that he doesn’t want the rest of us to know?”
The inviolable Seal of the Hyperlogos broken. Very well. Gabriel was willing, at least in theory, to start from that point and reason backwards.
“You’ve had longer to think about this than I,” he said. “What do you think is going on?”
“There is a potentially habitable planet orbiting the star that Saigo says will blow up,” Cressida said. “It had occurred to me that there might be . . . another species . . . living on it.”
Gabriel thought about that. No complex lifeforms other than Earth-descendants had ever been found, but that didn’t mean this would never happen. “Do your original data support that?” he asked.
“Not really. The original scan revealed an atmosphere composed of CO, CO2, and a lot of elemental sulfur. Surface temperature averages over 200 Celsius and any oxygen seems tied up in carbon oxysulfide. I don’t suppose life is completely impossible under those conditions, but if it existed it would be damned unusual life.”
“What else could he be up to?”
“There are hundreds of stars in that sphere. Even Saigo’s tampered data shows many with planets capable of supporting life once some terraforming is done. I— ” She hesitated. “I think he’s creating life out there. Completely new life, or experimenting with human genetics in ways of which we wouldn’t approve. He’s a specialist on human evolution as well as stellar evolution, he’s done a lot of publishing on the human genome.”
“He could do that sort of thing at home. We might disapprove, but we couldn’t stop him.”
“What he’s doing might be dangerous. He might be using mataglap nano.”
A cold chill rose Gabriel’s spine at the very sound of the word.
“Still,” Cressida said, “whatever he’s doing, he’s tampering with the Seal, and that compromises almost everything in the Logarchy. Almost every tachline communication is routed through switching system in the Hyperlogos. Even our private sealed communications— the Seal of the Aristoi won’t hold once the Hyperlogos Seal is broken. He’s got access to everything, and he can tamper with all of it. Our entire civilization is based on free and unlimited access to data. Even the Seal of the Aristoi fades after the Aristoi that sealed it die or retire. Saigo can change data, communications . . . history itself. And we don’t know if he’s doing this alone, or with others. ”
A cold wind blew through the seagrass outside. The sun subsided below the murky horizon. Back on the Pyrrho, Gabriel shivered.
“Why me?” Gabriel demanded. “Why are you telling me this?”
“You’re nearest to the Gaal Sphere. It occurred to me that you could monitor events in the Sphere without Saigo knowing about it. Possibly from your home system, possibly by sending out probes.” She gave an uncomfortable smile. “Besides, I had to tell someone. Preferably someone who hasn’t been connected with Saigo.”
Gabriel’s reno spun him Saigo’s life history. The man was almost six hundred years old and the number of people he’d had contact with was phenomenal. He’d only turned reclusive in the last century or so.
“I don’t know what to do, Gabriel,” Cressida said. “I’m not a conspirator, a politician, an ideologue. I only want to know the truth when I see it. And Saigo is tampering with the truth.”
“You should present what you’ve learned to the others.”
“Which of them are a part of it? What will happen if I send messages through the Hyperlogos to all the Aristoi, and Saigo or one of his hypothetical allies decides to disrupt all communications? What if they decide to take possession of the Hyperlogos for themselves— all human knowledge, controlled by one man or a small group? What if it means war by one group of Aristoi against another?”
Back on the Pyrrho, Gabriel’s felt his mouth turn dry. “We’ve never had a war,” he said.
“With the potential weaponry we’ve got available, with gravity generators that can warp space and matter, with mataglap nano that can eat whole planets the way Earth1 was consumed— what happens to our obligation to the Demos then?”
Gabriel’s mind whirled. Daimones cried for attention or driveled hopelessly among each other. “We need to consider,” Gabriel said. “We need to think further.”
Perhaps, Horus’s coldly logical voice, a series of private tachline nets, like the one you and Cressida share. A counterconspiracy.
But who to contact? Gabriel wondered.
“We’ve been absent from the reception too long,” Cressida said. “I never hid the fact that I recorded that data off the feed— my access codes are right there in the Hyperlogos. And once I found the discrepancy I went into the Hyperlogos and checked the data there very thoroughly, along with a history of who’s accessed it. So if Saigo was paying attention, he knows that I know.”
“If he was paying attention, he knew three months ago.”
“As soon as I worked all this out, I withdrew to my orbital lab Sanjay. There are only a few people here and I can control access very well. I’ve been taking care of business through the oneirochronon, but this can’t go on indefinitely.”
“No.” Gabriel was shaken by the thought that Cressida considered herself in danger.
She’s contaminated us! Augenblick was outraged. If she’s imperiled, so are we!
She should not have taken us here from the reception, Horus said. This communication should have been private from start to finish.
Gabriel thankfully replaced his clothing with his Median cloak. “When we speak again,” he said, “we shouldn’t switch over to our private line from the Hyperlogos comm net.”
Cressida’s eyes widened. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t think— ”
“It may mean nothing. It’s been centuries since the decisions were taken regarding the Gaal Sphere.” (Gabriel’s daimones felt free to disbelieve this.) “Saigo may have assumed long ago that you’d never look at the raw data once he’d reduced it and made it available in the Hyperlogos.”
“I have no talent for conspiracy. I said that right at the start.”
“Find a daimon who’s good at it.”
“I’ve been trying.”
“Let’s set a time for talking again. I want to be able to digest all of this.”
They agreed to speak after the next night’s reception. Cressida opened the door to the screened porch, and they stepped through to the reception.
“A total exaggeration of my position!” Astoreth was saying. “Almost a parody!” She was speaking to a pair of gold cat’s eyes adhered to one of Tallchief’s slowly-falling colored sphere. Feathery plumes swayed about Astoreth’s elaborate headdress: her skin was a becoming shade of violet. She turned to Gabriel as he stepped through the door. “I’m outraged!” she said.
The falling sphere struck the floor and punctured. Several miniature musical instruments fell out and began to play maniacally, as if trying to get an entire concerto into a three-second burst. They finished, then disappeared with a brief bagpipe honk.
Dorothy St.-John’s cat’s eyes floated up from the burst of chaos. Gabriel turned to Cressida and set his skiagénos into a Posture of Formal Regard. She returned it.
“Outraged!” Astoreth prompted.
Gabriel turned to her. “I am heartily distressed on your account, Ariste.”
“As if I would ever endanger the Demos! My critique is aimed purely at the Aristoi— to urge us to greater and greater exertions! Let the universe ring with the spirit of discovery and adventure, the way that once it did! Where is the spirit of Captain Yuan?”
“Lost on a quest to the center of the galaxy,” said Gabriel. “Along with the rest of him.”
Astoreth gave him a look. “That wasn’t what I meant,” she said.
“I beg pardon, Ariste. I seem to be inexcusably literal tonight.”
Somehow his heart wasn’t in this. Across the room he saw the looming form of Saigo, bearded, dressed in dark colors, locked in an intent conversation with the shimmering sphere of the Platonist Sebastian. He wondered if Saigo was planning to kill him.
(Horus logically evolved a plan in response to this situation. Gabriel didn’t feel quite ready to make preparations as yet. Something in him wanted further convincing.)
He wanted to fly off into the night and commit himself to something irresponsible, but he made himself stay at the reception until half the guests had left.
Returning his focus to the Pyrrho, he floated out to the shuttle and told White Bear to take the controls. Something was still tugging at him. He went into the oneirochronon briefly to query the Residence’s main reno as to Clancy’s whereabouts, and found that she’d been in the Carnation Suite for three hours, presumably sleeping the sleep of the just.
Gabriel wanted something more irresponsible than just sleep. He found himself wanting something delinquent.
He told White Bear to take him to Standing Wave.
Chapter Five
LOUISE: With woolly tongue and throbbing head
To wake up in a stranger’s bed . . .
(refrain) Life’s an adventure!
If he were going to be delinquent, Gabriel decided, he might as well do it properly.
He lay on satin in Marcus’s pale outflung arms. The Freising Gorge fell away above them, white water glowing in the spotlights and spilling upward into vertiginous black igneous depths . . .
The house he had designed for Marcus was called Standing Wave and spanned the gorge on a site that Gabriel had reserved for himself when Illyricum had been settled for the simple reason that he didn’t want anyone else’s architecture spoiling the scenery.
The building was compressed between two white buttresses that stood at either side of the gorge like giant compacting hands. The name came from the design, which was precisely that of a giant double standing wave, the image of the compacted gravity waves that filled the structure and provided its other dominant feature.
Gravity generators had been built into the buttresses— Gabriel had granted himself a special waiver to use them on-planet, and they were protected from abuse by ingenious and elaborate security arrangements. Their special compressed waves, imaged in the building’s architecture, canceled the planet’s gravity within the structure and allowed the unique perspective granted the inhabitants, in which direction was altered, permitting Gabriel and Marcus to lie on a bed on the ceiling and gaze upward to watch, through a transparent floor, the white water thunder and roar and arc away, ever upward, into the blue welcoming pool . . .
The structure had been long since finished. The decoration, plaster and paint and tile, was taking longer— Marcus’s living quarters had been finished first and he’d moved in, but the rest was chaos. Every wall, ceiling, and floor was slightly curved, which meant the larger pieces of furniture, all the doors and windows and cabinets, had to be custom-made to conform. Gabriel could have had everything designed and built by CAD in a matter of days, if not hours, but he valued hand-built objects much more than those conceived in the oneirochronon and constructed by autolathe, had founded the Workshop simply to give voice to his prejudice.
An idea crept softly into Gabriel’s mind. He turned to Marcus. “Black-Eyed Ghost,” he said, “do you have a brush and paper?”
Marcus’s drowsing lashes fluttered open. He’d long since grown used to the fact that Gabriel slept many fewer hours than he did. “Next room,” he said. “The black lacquer desk.”
Gabriel eased from the bed, put on a dressing gown, and walked (gravity shifting subtly at every step) to the small dark-paneled room next door. The rumble of the falls filled the close space. Gabriel could smell the fine rag paper before he found it in the drawer. He made some ink, rubbing the sumi-stick into the inkstone, lubricating with drops of water, until the ink was the blackest color imaginable, black as a singularity, with an accretion disk of tiny rainbow bubbles. Gabriel summoned Psyche and picked up a large calligraphy brush.
For a brief space Psyche dwelt in his arm and mind. When Gabriel let her soar away, he looked down to find on the paper the poem she had sung, in the Intermediate Ideography, as Gabriel implanted the blastocyst in Marcus. He let the characters sound in his heart once again.
Gabriel’s awareness slowly expanded outward from his hand and arm, and he became aware that Marcus was standing behind him and watching over his shoulder.
“Beautiful,” Marcus said. “I remember you speaking those words, but to see them . . . ”
“The contribution of one of my daimones,” Gabriel said. He began to clean the brush.
“In a nutshell: Shakyamuni.” Marcus took a long breath, let it out. “I’m very happy to be that nutshell, Gabriel Vissarionovich.”
Gabriel turned to look at Marcus over his shoulder. “The other day you seemed full of second thoughts.”
“Yes. Sorry. I’ve always been that way when it comes to big changes, you know. That’s why I’ve been hesitating on retaking my exams. But now that I’m . . . a nutshell . . . I’m happy with it.” He smiled. “Last night I was down at the bottom of the gorge, on the little meadow there. And I was dancing for joy. Literally, there on the grass. Your Divertimento in B was running through my head.”
Gabriel finished cleaning his writing materials, then put them away. The ink on the paper dried. He took the paper, rose from his chair, handed the paper to Marcus.
“I’ll have it framed for the nursery,” Marcus said. “Somewhere by the egg you gave me.”
They returned to the bedroom. White water soared above their heads, diving into a gorge in deepening shadow.
“It’s getting late,” Marcus said. “Will you be staying? Shall we have an early breakfast?”
Gabriel shook his head. “I have to go to my father’s tomb. I want to be there at dawn.”
“May I go with you?”
Gabriel touched Marcus’s cheek. “I’d rather not. I want to be alone there.”
“I heard that Dr. Clancy is moving into the Carnation Suite.”
Gabriel looked at him. “Yes.”
A little smile brushed Marcus’s lips. “She’s a sweet person. I had a call from her the other day, asking if I was well.” He reached out, touched Gabriel’s cheek. “I hope you will be good for her, Aristos.”
“Isn’t the normal phrasing usually the reverse?”
“I’m certain, Gabriel, she will be good for you.”
Gabriel kissed him. “Be happy, Ghost.”
“You as well.”
White Bear had gone to sleep hours ago, so Gabriel piloted himself. From Standing Wave his shuttle took him on shadowed wings to the tomb he had built of rosy marble high in the Cordillera Oriental, where the rising dawn would find it every morning.
The landing-place was on a small plateau two hundred meters below the tomb, and he ascended, breath frosting, via a zigzag path. The predawn air was cold, and he was glad for his warm sheepskin jacket. The stars shone above, along with one rocketing, unwinking ice crystal moon. Below, spread out over the invisible world, was a layer of opalescent cloud.
The tomb was simple, with Doric pillars and a simple lintel leading to the interior. His mother had wanted something far more grand, but part of Gabriel’s reason for keeping the place small and difficult of access was so that members of his cult couldn’t mob the place.
Still, worshipers were there— Gabriel could hear music, which was cued by a sensor when someone entered the tomb. Since there wasn’t any transport in the landing-place, these had either hiked up the mountainside or been dropped off by someone else.
Gabriel walked on his soft suede boots to the entrance and activated the IR scanners he’d had implanted in his otherwise organic eyes.
There were two people inside. One weathered-looking woman, clad only in a white loincloth, meditated in a crosslegged stance, and another was wrapped in a sleeping bag.
The music was Gates’ Electronic Diffusion. Gabriel could remember his father conducting it.
Gabriel moved briskly into the interior, stepping carefully around offerings of flowers, money, icons, and food, and pulsed a command through the oneirochronon to open the interior door.
The weathered woman was deep in trance and showed no sign that she was aware of Gabriel’s presence, but a head jerked up from the sleeping bag: Gabriel could sense someone trying to make out, through sleep-ridden eyes, what was going on.
The inner door swung open in silence, Gabriel stepped through, and closed it behind him. Perhaps the person in the sleeping bag would think it only a dream.
Light rose in the cold mountain grotto. Frost rimed the walls, glittered like distant galaxies. The music played here as well as outside. There was a small bench, a simple wooden table, tools, and a piece of bone. The coffin, carved roughly out of the mountain itself, rested in a niche. Above it, in Greek, was inscribed a quote from Aeschylus: Sweet is a grief well ended.
The grief, in Gabriel’s case, had not yet ended.
Vissarion Simonovich Kamanev, Gabriel’s primary father, had been a musician and conductor. He had reached the rank of Therápon Hextarchon largely through the goodwill of Dorothy St.-John, who had promoted him two grades in the years before his death— as, Gabriel suspected, a favor to his son.
