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responsible. It would be like accusing a tyrant’s photograph of war crimes.”
    “I gave you sight, you ungrateful little sod.” The seat swivelled so that its high solid back was facing Sylveste. “I admit your eyes are hardly state of the art, but what could you expect?” The seat spun round. Calvin was dressed like Sylveste now, his hair similarly styled and his face possessing the same smooth cast. “Tell me about the Shrouders,” he said. “Tell me about your guilty secrets, son. Tell me what really happened around Lascaille’s Shroud, and not the pack of lies you’ve been spinning since you got back.”
    Sylveste moved to the escritoire, ready to flip out the cartridge. “Wait,” Calvin said, holding up his hands suddenly. “You want my advice?”
    “Finally, we’re getting somewhere.”
    “You can’t let Girardieau win. If a coup’s imminent, you need to be back in Cuvier. There you can muster what little support you may have left.”
    Sylveste looked through the crawler’s window, towards the box grid. Shadows were crossing the baulks—workers deserting the dig, moving silently towards the sanctuary of the other crawler. “This could be the most important find since we arrived.”
    “And you may have to sacrifice it. If you keep Girardieau at bay, you’ll at least have the luxury of returning here and looking for it again. But if Girardieau wins, nothing you’ve found here will matter a damn.”
    “I know,” Sylveste said. For a moment there was no animosity between them. Calvin’s reasoning was flawless, and it would have been churlish to pretend otherwise.
    “Then will you be following my advice?”
    He moved his hand to the escritoire, ready to eject the cartridge. “I’ll think about it.”

TWO
    Aboard a lighthugger, interstellar space, 2543
    The trouble with the dead, Triumvir Ilia Volyova thought, was that they had no real idea when to shut up.
    She had just boarded the elevator from the bridge, weary after eighteen hours in consultation with various simulations of once-living figures from the ship’s distant past. She had been trying to catch them out, hoping one or more of them would disclose some revealing fact about the origins of the cache. It had been gruelling work, not least because some of the older beta-level personae could not even speak modern Norte, and for some reason the software which ran them was unwilling to do any translating. Volyova had been chain-smoking for the entire session, trying to get her head around the grammatical peculiarities of middle Norte, and she was not about to stop filling her lungs now. In fact, back stiff from the nervous tension of the exchanges, she needed it more than ever. The elevator’s air-conditioning was functioning imperfectly, so it took only a few seconds for her to veil the interior with smoke.
    Volyova hoisted the cuff of her fleece-lined leather jacket and spoke into the bracelet which wrapped around her bony wrist. “The Captain’s level,” she said, addressing the Nostalgia for Infinity, which would in turn assign a microscopic aspect of itself to the primitive task of controlling the elevator. A moment later, the floor plunged away.
    “Do you wish musical accompaniment for this transit?”
    “No, and as I’ve had to remind you on approximately one thousand previous occasions, what I wish is silence. Shut up and let me think.”
    She rode the spinal trunk, the four-kilometre-long shaft which threaded the entire length of the ship. She had boarded somewhere near the nominal top of the shaft (there were only 1050 levels that she knew of) and was now descending at ten decks a second. The elevator was a glass-walled, field-suspended box, and occasionally the lining of the trackless shaft turned transparent, allowing her to judge her location without reference to the elevator’s internal map. She was descending through forests now: tiered gardens of planetary vegetation grown wild with neglect, and dying, for the UV