Redemption Ark

‘That was the odd thing. There were no other people — Sukhoi had always worked alone. We had no other victims to worry about. The technology was slightly damaged, but soon showed itself to be capable of limited self-repair. Sukhoi was conscious and coherent, so we assumed that when she was on her feet again she would go back down to the basement.’

‘And?’

‘She asked a strange question. One that, if you will pardon the expression, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.’

Clavain rejoined H near the door. ‘Which was?’

‘She asked what had happened to the other experimenter.’

‘Then there was some neurological damage. False memories.’ Clavain shrugged. ‘Hardly surprising, is it?’

‘She was quite specific about the other worker, Mr Clavain. Even down to his name and history. She said that the man had been called Yves, Yves Mercier, and that he had been recruited from the Rust Belt at the same time that she had.’

‘But there was no Yves Mercier?’

‘No one of that name, or any name like it, had ever worked in the Chateau. As I said, Sukhoi had always tended to work alone.’

‘Perhaps she felt the need to attach the blame for the accident to another person. Her subconscious manufactured a scapegoat.’

H nodded. ‘Yes, we thought that something like that might have happened. But why transfer blame for a minor incident? No one had been killed, and no equipment had been badly damaged. As a matter of fact, we had learned much more from the accident that we had with weeks of painstaking progress. Sukhoi was blameless, and she knew it.’

‘So she made up the name for another reason. The subconscious is an odd thing. There doesn’t have to be a perfectly obvious rationale for anything she said.’

‘That’s precisely what we thought, but Sukhoi was adamant. As she recovered, her memories of working with Mercier only sharpened. She recalled the minutest details about him — what he had looked like, what he had liked to eat and drink, his sense of humour, even his background; what he had done before he came to the Chateau. The more we tried to convince her that Mercier had not been real, the more hysterical she became.’

‘She was deranged, then.’

‘Every other test said she wasn’t, Mr Clavain. If she had a delusional system, it was focused solely on the prior existence of Mercier. And so I began to wonder.’

Clavain looked at H and nodded for him to continue.

‘I did some research,’ H added. ‘It was easy enough to dig into Rust Belt records — those that had survived the plague, anyway. And I found that certain aspects of Sukhoi’s story checked out with alarming accuracy.’

‘Such as?’

‘There had been someone named Yves Mercier, born in the same carousel that Sukhoi claimed.’

‘It can’t be that unusual a name amongst Demarchists.’

‘No, probably not. But in fact there was only one. And his date of birth accorded precisely with Sukhoi’s recollections. The only difference was that this Mercier — the real one — had died many years earlier. He had been killed shortly after the Melding Plague destroyed the Glitter Band.’

Clavain forced a shrug, but with less conviction that he would have wished. ‘A coincidence, then.’

‘Perhaps. But you see, this particular Yves Mercier was already a student at the time. He was well advanced on studies into exactly the same quantum-vacuum phenomena that would, according to Sukhoi, eventually bring him into my orbit.’

Clavain no longer wanted to be in the room. He stepped up, back into the blue-lanterned corridor. ‘You’re saying her Mercier really existed?’

‘Yes, I am. At which point I found myself faced with two possibilities. Either Sukhoi was somehow aware of the dead Mercier’s life story, and for one reason or another chose to believe that he had not in fact died, or that she was actually telling the truth.’

‘But that isn’t possible.’

‘I rather think it may be, Mr Clavain. I think everything Pauline Sukhoi told me may have been the literal truth; that in some way we can’t quite comprehend, Yves Mercier never died for her. That she worked with him, here in the room you have just left, and that Merrier was present when the accident happened.’

‘But Merrier did die. You’ve seen the records for yourself.’

‘But suppose he didn’t. Suppose that he survived the Melding Plague, went on to work on general quantum-vacuum theory, and eventually attracted my attention. Suppose also that he ended up working with Sukhoi, together on the same experiment, exploring the less stable state transitions. And suppose then that there was an accident, one that involved a shift to a very dangerous state indeed. According to Sukhoi, Merrier was much closer to the field generator than she was when it happened.’

‘It killed him.’