the mist thinned. Gaius Gonatus walked a few more steps down the rough trail and found that he was below the cloud, and looking over forested foothills to the moors of southeastern Illyria. The wire of the refugee camp glinted in the valley just a couple of kilometers below. It seemed farther away than the entire journey behind him. He wondered if the perception of distance to be traveled was logarithmic. He wondered if “logarithmic” was the appropriate analogy. Pondering this thought kept him going until he reached “asymptopic” and the gate.
The guard had the green helmet of the Civil Corps. He had watched Gaius’s slow approach without moving to help.
“Welcome to Illyria,” he said, without moving his eyes.
“Fuck you,” said Gaius. “I’m Illyrian.”
He lurched through the open gate and into the reception area. His feet had just been examined for frostbite and treated with disinfectant for blisters and cuts when the Department’s man in the camp found him and loaded him onto a big military autogyro reeking of paraffin and full of North Genean mercenaries. He was back in New Babylon in two hours. The autogyro landed between craters at the main airport. The sound of distant small arms fire came from several directions. The mercenaries deployed to the perimeter. Gaius limped to the terminal building. Illyrian, Lapithian, and Genean League soldiers were everywhere. Attulus met him in the lounge. The window was broken but the bar was open.
“What the hells happened downtown?” asked Gaius, as soon as the first brandy was inside him and the next was in front of him.
“Tactical nuke,” said Attulus. “Volkov is alive, apparently. He ordered the strike from orbit.”
Gaius felt the back of his neck tighten, hunching his shoulders against a blow from above. He straightened up.
“It’s all right,” said Attulus. “Volkov’s safe in our hands. So are the space stations.”
“How?”
“Mingulayan advance guard. It was their skiffs we saw. They came in on our side. They and their furry alien friends.”
Atullus scuttled his fingers across the tabletop. Gaius closed his eyes and opened them again.
“Why did Volkov nuke his own capital?”
“He made an impassioned television broadcast just before he was captured, calling on all good Volkovists to rise.” Attulus waved at the window. “Which they have. He claimed that the central apparat was riddled with people who had sold out to the Spiders, starting at the top. The very top.”
“Good gods above. Where did he get that idea from?”
“You should know, old chap,” said Attulus.
Gaius took a gulp of brandy to stop the hot rise of his gorge. “They tapped my call?”
Attulus grinned thinly. “Nothing so melodramatic. As soon as we got your call we passed every juicy detail, garbled rumor, and reckless speculation to our contacts in the Volkovist old guard in the SDK. I must admit, we didn’t expect to get quite so much detonation for a dinar, but there you go.”
Gaius said nothing. His mouth had dried up completely. A burst of small arms fire echoed from beyond the perimeter.
“The same with Volkov’s call to his supporters to attack the Regime’s degenerate apparatus. Very convenient for us. That’s exactly what we want them to do. With the Regime’s air force in disarray and the space stations in our hands, we’ve been able to just walk in. Unopposed air and sea landings, mostly. Of course he also called on patriots to attack the aristocratic reactionary invaders, but our boys are giving them something of an education in confining their attention to easier targets. It’s not just the old guard, of course. We’ve won, but there’s no one left to surrender to us. Various units of the Regime’s forces and local militias are running around shooting at each other for tediously obscure reasons. All sorts of scores are being settled out there. Lampposts and petrol, you know the sort of thing. Very messy. But it means we’re the only force which can maintain order, so we’ll end up on top of the heap.”
“Some heap,” said Gaius. “And what about the Bright Star Cultures?”
Attulus shrugged. “The Mingulayans and the Multipliers—I gather that’s what the Spiders call themselves—are presently firmly under the guns of the Ducal Marines, though they may not realize it yet. They can’t move against us, that’s the main thing.”
“I was thinking of their main force,” said Gaius.
“Well,” said Attulus, “they evidently thought New Babylon’s Space Defense was a threat to that main force. It’s now Illyria’s Space Defense—which rather suggests we can handle them when they do turn up.”
“We’re not going to fight them?”
“Not for me to say, old chap. Political decision. Point is, we have the option.” Attulus frowned. “Same applies here, of course. Until we’re quite certain that the Spiders aren’t going to eat our brains and turn us into drooling zombies, we need to keep a very firm grip on people with baby Spiders swimming around in their blood. Without going quite as far as Volkov and his brave band of renegades, one can understand his concern about the ex-Traders and de Zama’s camarilla. Potential enemy within, and all that.”
“I don’t know about the ex-Traders,” said Gaius, “but surely de Zama and her lot are all dead under the rubble.”
“I rather think not,” said Attulus. “If they are, they’d be the first ruling clique in history to stay in their top-floor offices while expecting war within hours. We may hope so, of course, but it would be foolish to count on it.” He smiled. “Which is where you come in, Gonatus. You know your way around the city—what’s left of it. Find the de Tenebre woman and her sept. Find any Traders or senior Modern Society members that you can. Find them, and pull them in.”
“I may possibly need a revolver,” said Gaius. He looked at his feet. “A decent pair of boots would not go amiss.”
Attulus snorted. “We’re not asking you to do it on your own. We’re rounding up both categories as part of the peacemaking operation—protective custody, detention centers, fair trials, health inspections—you know the score. All you have to do is winkle out the Spider people. Plenty of backup on call, and a couple of good assistants.”
He stood up and beckoned. Gaius turned to see two junior officers of the Illyrian Army bestir themselves from a nearby table and head toward where he sat.
“John Terence and Matthew Scipion,” said Attulus, introducing them. “Sound chaps. They’ll look after you.” He stuck out his hand. “Must be off. See you around.”
The low-slung, open-topped Army vehicle careened down Astronaut Avenue, swerving in and out between abandoned cars and fallen masonry. After a certain point all the windows were shattered, their glass covering the street like ice on a refrozen lake, shards crunching under the thick tires. A few hundred meters further, and everything was covered with dust. There was black dust and there was white dust, and here and there a flash of color from something—the side of a car, a scrap of clothing, a sign—that had been momentarily sheltered from the monochrome hurricane. A little further on, the ruins started. All the buildings of the Volkov era and the Modern Regime had been blown away, leaving the granite and marble and sandstone blocks of the ancient city merely damaged.
Closer now, and everything was down. Rubble blocked the streets. People with and without equipment were already—or had been all night—hauling it off chunk by chunk, shovelful by shovelful. Black-furred flying squirrels pawed through it like demonic rescue workers. At the sound of the car, they glanced over their caped shoulders and resumed their sinister rummaging and occasional exultant caw.
Terence pulled up and turned off the engine. They got out. It was the first morning of Gaius’s new job—he had collapsed with exhaustion the previous afternoon and slept all night—and he had felt obliged to see the destruction before he settled into any kind of routine. Terence and Scipion had not queried his motive.
They ascended the rubble barrier—it was like going up a very unreliable staircase—and paused at the top. The sun was in their eyes.
“Gods above,” said Gaius.
For about a kilometer, there was not even rubble. The very stones had been pulverized to jagged lumps, fist-sized and smaller. Faint traces of radial lines indicated the direction of the blast, outward from a central crater several meters deep. A dozen or so yellow-painted ground vehicles and two green autogyros stood about at random points within the blast radius, as though they had miraculously survived it. Whatever initial impulse had taken them there had ebbed at the sight, leaving them stranded. There was simply no possibility of anything’s being alive here. Not even the carrion-eating flying squirrels were looking into it.
Gaius crunched and slithered forward down the atomic scree, occasionally stopping to peer and poke at the ground. Terence and Scipion came after him.
“What are you looking for?” Terence asked.
Gaius straightened and put the heels of his hands on the small of his back. “Spiders.”
There were no Spiders. The three men traversed the blast area in two directions and returned to the vehicle in a couple of hours. A stench had risen with the sun, but it didn’t come from the blast area. It came from the wider area around it, the next circle of hell.
“Boss,” said Scipion, after draining a water bottle, “shouldn’t we get to work?”
“That was work,” Gaius said. His back ached and his eyes stung. He was beginning to worry, belatedly, about radioactivity. He brushed his palms together briskly. “But you’re right. Let’s go and look for Spiders somewhere else.”
What constituted a safe route through the streets changed by the minute. Scipion crouched on the back seat yelling instructions with a radio-telephone at his ear and a street map in front of him, penciling updated locations of allied occupation troops, Regime loyalists, Regime defectors, Volkovist partisan bands, and gangs of youths who had gone immediately and utterly feral.
For all that, the streets outside the bomb-damaged area and the immediate rescue or recovery operations were busy and, Gaius thought, livelier than they had been before the war. Stalls had sprung up everywhere, selling food, Illyrian goods, and loot. Most businesses were open. Above all people were talking to each other, in ones and twos or in larger groups, in a way he hadn’t seen before. They talked to the troops and to the members of the less belligerent, or just temporarily inactive, militias on the corner. Every so often a flurry of shots would clear a street, and then the firefight would continue until superior forces arrived, or would die down of themselves, and people would drift back and resume their activities. Here and there Terence had to swerve or reverse rapidly out of such incidents, or away from scuffles as Illyrian soldiers broke up lynchings, or arrived too late to do more than cut down the bodies of the victims and shoot at the likely—because fleeing—perpetrators.
Eventually the car managed to fall in with a convoy of New Babylonian trucks driven by Illyrian troops and escorted by Lapithian motorcycle outriders and a clattering autogyro high overhead. The convoy took them to a newly built camp on the outskirts. Hundreds of meters square, it was surrounded by four-meter posts with barbed wire still being strung around the outside. Existing buildings had become part of the camp, and soldiers and prisoners were busy erecting prefabricated huts.
Gaius and his men showed their passes and drove in. They parked the car in a big pound and headed for the admin block. The Ducal raptor-claw crest on a sky-blue flag fluttered above it. There was a long list of names to look through, and it was extending with every courier who came in from the screening sheds. The clerks were far too busy to help, and the names they’d typed out had not gone into their long-term memories. They did not put it quite like that.
“Look for de Tenebre,” Gaius said. “Any other Trader names you recognize, sure—Rodriguez, Delibes, Bronterre. But de Tenebre is the goods.”
Scipion found a cluster of names within half an hour. “De Tenebre, P, F, C, and E,” he announced.
Gaius hid his disappointment with a pleased smile.
A clerk was able to tell them, by a quick flip through a card index, that the three people mentioned had been screened and had not yet had their health check, so they were probably in the—
“Oh, and thank you, gentlemen,” he said to the banging door.
A burly man with ginger hair and a stubborn scowl stood in front of a long table behind which sat medics in white coats.
“Why?” he was saying.
“There’s a big demand for blood products,” the technician said. “A lot of burns and lacerations and major trauma. Suspected radiation sickness. We need every contribution we can get.”
“Ah, I understand that,” the man said. “Unfortunately I can’t help.” He glanced around at three women on the front bench a few steps behind him. “Nor can my w . . . my wife and her friends. We’re all Traders, and we’ve all picked up some nasty bugs on our travels. Always been told not to donate.”
“I know that’s been the policy,” said the technician patiently. She glanced at the impassive Illyrian military policeman at her shoulder. “Nevertheless. This is an emergency and frankly the people down at the hospitals are not worried about malaria or odd tropical diseases. They’re dying down there for lack of platelets and plasma.” She licked her lips. “Come on, this is just a test. If there’s anything really nasty, we’ll pick it up. Stick out your hand. It’s just a prick in your finger.”
The man folded his arms.
“No.”
Gaius tapped his shoulder. “Esias de Tenebre?”
“Who the hells are you?”
“Gaius Gonatus, Allied Civil Assistance,” Gaius improvised smoothly. “I believe I can help you to find Lydia.”
De Tenebre’s face convulsed with consternation and rage. “I know where Lydia is,” he said. “She’s in the hospital. Emergency Field Hospital Two, Ward Five. The serious burns unit.” He looked away. “You can tell who she is by the name on the end of the bed.”
Gaius met his eyes. They were distressed, but calmer than his voice had sounded. “You know she’s going to be all right,” Gaius said. “And I know that’s why you don’t want to cooperate here.”
Esias tensed and looked around but it was too late. Five military policemen had already surrounded the three women, and Terence and Scipion were closing on his arms.
“Now please come with us,” said Gaius. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Only a little prick in your finger.”
The building to which Gaius took the four prisoners had been some kind of cattle shed. It stank of herbivore shit, and the electric lamps were few and dim. Gaius dismissed the military policemen with thanks and asked the prisoners to line up against a stack of bales of hay. Under the guns of Terence and Scipion they complied. Gaius shoved a barrel against the door with his foot and sat down on it, cradling a revolver. The polygamist and his three wives were, according to their particulars in the admin files, in their early fifties, but they looked a lot younger. Gaius was not surprised.
“I and these gentlemen,” said Gaius, “have been asked by Illyrian Military Intelligence to detain people who are suspected of being infected by the Spiders. What I know, and what these gentlemen don’t, is what Spider infection does to people. Citizen Esias de Tenebre, I am about to toss a small knife on the ground in front of you. I strongly urge you not to do anything foolish with it. Instead, I would like you to demonstrate to my colleagues some of the more, ah, spectacular effects of Spider infection.”
“Sure,” said Esias, picking up the knife. He opened it and tested the blade on his thumb. Then he held up his hand and made a quick, deep slash across the palm. The welling of blood was dark and clear in the yellow light. He clenched his fingers over it, laid the knife back on the trampled straw, and walked over to the two soldiers.
“Boo!” he said, opening his hand.
Childish though the gesture was, it made them jump.
“Five little Spiders,” said Esias. He clapped his hand to his mouth, then held it out again, palm upward. “And then there were none.”
“He never cut himself,” said Terence.
“Good gods,” said Gaius. “Please repeat the demonstration, slowly.”
“Do I have to?” said Esias. “It bloody hurts.”
“Your own fault for leaving open the possibility of a trick,” said Gaius. “Do it again.”
Esias retrieved the knife and did so, right in front of Scipion and Terence. This time he didn’t close his hand.
“Satisfied?” said Gaius.
The soldiers nodded. Esias strolled back to his wives.
“How long have you had this infection?” asked Gaius.
“Ten years,” said Esias. He glanced sidelong at his wives. “The ladies, a bit less.”
“Now, if—purely hypothetically you understand—I and these gentlemen were to shoot you down where you stand, what would happen?”
Esias paled. “If you were to blow our brains out,” he said, “we’d be dead. Otherwise, we’d, well, recover. Not that I would like to try it.” His voice became more cheerful as he added, “Blood would get everywhere, you know.”
“Oh, I know,” said Gaius. “I’ve seen what happens when people are shot. Blood gets, as you say, everywhere. Especially when brains are, as you say, blown out. And we’ve seen what happens when your blood is spilt, and starts to dry. How easy would it be, do you reckon, to retrieve or confine or destroy the little Spiders that would swarm from your blood?”
“Not easy at all,” said Esias. “They come in all sizes, down to the size of germs, and when they have to survive independently they can be very hard to deal with. You’d have to catch or kill every last one, and I don’t know if even burning the barn around us would do the trick. You’d have to, I don’t know—”
“Nuke the place,” said Gaius. “I know.”
He looked over at Terence and Scipion. “As we saw this morning, that seems to do the trick.”
“What’s all this in aid of?” said Scipion. “I mean, it’s very interesting, but where’s it getting us?”
“Ah,” said Gaius. “In a moment, gentlemen.”
He gestured to the de Tenebres. “Please, citizens. Haul yourselves down some bales to sit on, and heave a couple over for my friends here. This may take some time.”
It took some time. At the end of it, Gaius and the soldiers returned with the de Tenebres to the medical shed. He led them over to the blood transfusion technicians.
“We’ve checked them over,” he said. “Unfortunate misunderstanding earlier. There’s nothing wrong with their blood. In fact, you can put them down as universal donors.”
The technician looked at him suspiciously. “Are you certain of that?”
“Absolutely,” said Gaius. “We’ve tested them thoroughly. Take as much as they can spare out of each of them. There’s no time to waste. People are dying as we speak. In fact, I can take their donations directly to the hospital—and any others you have ready, of course.”
“That would be helpful. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” said Gaius. “We’re going there anyway.”
He had thought the center of the nuclear blast was the most appalling place in the city, but the emergency field hospital was worse. It was a town of tents in a park, and it was full of people who had been pulled from the rubble or who had staggered in or been carried from the flash radius. The serious burns unit was the worst of all. Perhaps not quite. There was a closed ward beyond it, where great efforts had been made to maintain a sterile atmosphere, and to which there was no admittance. Gaius had a horrible suspicion that there was nothing much on offer there but palliative care and opiate euthanasia.
He and his two guardians were stopped by a teenage soldier at the positive-pressure plastic flap of the burns unit. Gaius showed him the chit from the transfusion service.
“Go ahead.”
Gaius had three liters of the de Tenebres’ blood in sterile plastic bags with valves at the top. The other two had larger quantities of other blood donations from the detainees. They walked over to the harried nurse at the admissions desk, averting their eyes from the scores of beds. The place smelled of disinfectant and of cooked meat. Gaius realized that transfusions would not do the job, would not begin to do the job. He felt sick and feverish, and a little light-headed. He smiled at the nurse and walked on past the desk and up the ward. He took out his knife and slit the bags one by one and squirted and sprayed blood over every patient he passed, aiming at what areas of exposed flesh were visible. He got all the way to the end of the ward before a man in a white coat rushed up.
“What are you doing?” he shouted.
“Excuse me,” said Gaius, and straight-armed the medic hard as he walked past him, faster now. There was a lot of screaming going on, not all of it from the patients.
“Soldier!” yelled the medic, staggering as he rebounded off the end of a bed. “Guard!”
The young soldier ducked through the flap.
“Stop that man!”
Gaius slashed the remaining bag and whirled it around as the soldier raised his rifle. Blood spattered everywhere, like in the ceremonies of a primitive cult. The bag was empty, and the room was still not bloody enough. He threw the bag against a wall.
“Careful, soldier,” said the medic. “He’s got a knife.”
Terence and Scipion had slipped out. Good. They would do their bit too, in other wards.
“Drop that knife! Sir.”
“Please don’t shoot,” said Gaius. “I’m about to drop the knife.”
And he did, but not before he’d managed to slash his left forearm. Down, not across, wasn’t that the way? The blood spurted with shocking speed and abundance. The knife clattered. Gaius clawed his arm, trying to keep the wound open as long as possible. There was a loud bang and something hit him very hard in the chest. The last thing he saw before the floor hit his face was a reddish mist.
Gaius awoke from strange dreams that, unlike most dreams, didn’t fade from his mind. It hurt to breathe. His left arm throbbed dully. From the woolly feeling in his head he knew that he would be hurting a lot more if he weren’t soused in opiates. His eyes opened stickily to focus on Attulus. He found himself suddenly and acutely aware of the man, of his uniqueness and of the universality of the divine spark that blazed behind his eyes, the consciousness that—
“Ah, there you are,” said the Director, without enthusiasm.
“Where am I?”
“Illyrian military hospital,” said Attulus. “You have been unconscious for two days, from the infection and from your bullet wound.”
“Ah.” A military hospital. That would explain the green walls and the scratchy sheets. “How much trouble am I in?”
“You really have been very foolish,” said Attulus. “Because of your bizarre actions in the burns unit, seven of the patients there have died, in considerable pain. The fever of the infection raised their body temperature to the point where they went into hyperthermic shock. The other patients are making . . . remarkable progress. Similar outcomes are reported from the other major trauma units where Terence and Scipion made their own dramatic blood donations.” He sighed. “I suppose it’s my fault. I didn’t realize you would consider yourself responsible for the New Babylon blast.”
“If I hadn’t—” Gaius began miserably.
Attulus raised his hand. “Your action was a link in a chain of causes. Even if it had led to the attack, that still would not make you morally responsible. As it happens, it didn’t. There was no nuclear attack.”
“What?”
“It was a meteor strike. Volkov has said so, and we’ve confirmed it. The raised levels of radioactivity in the immediate area and in the fallout plume came from pulverized granite. All that your action triggered off was Volkov’s call for an uprising.”
“Oh, gods,” said Gaius. He felt immensely relieved, and at the same time guilty all over again.
“And don’t start a whole new round of beating yourself up over the patients who died,” said Attulus. “Those who wouldn’t have died anyway would have wished they had. Well, perhaps not, if the Spiders’ healing powers are as great as your friends claim. Still. You have other problems.”
“What—”
“Oh, what you might expect. I’m spending a lot of political capital holding back people who regard you as a menace to the human race.”
“To hell with the human race,” said Gaius. He tried to raise himself on his elbows, failed and settled for raising his head off the pillow. “What has happened to Lydia de Tenebre?”
“She is one of those who are recovering. She already was, as I’m sure you know.”
“I would like to see her.”
“You would not,” said Attulus. “Not for some time. I assure you of that.”
“Where was she?”
“In de Zama’s private clinic, somewhat to the west of the blast area. So was de Zama, who had decided, on the brink of death, to accept the Multiplier infection—which she already had heard rumors of, and which her agents were alert to evidence for. Evidence which, one way or another, you or your contact may have inadvertently provided.”
Gaius winced, remembering how quickly the agents had come for Lydia after her demonstration of the infection. Or had it been lithomancy that had done it, after all? It no longer mattered. Attulus was still talking.
“Madame President poses something of a problem, as I’m sure you can imagine.” Attulus smirked. “One solution that’s being floated is to affect not to recognize her. Not diplomatically—physically, we would literally not recognize her when she completes her recovery. The healthy and younger woman who then claims to be de Zama is obviously deluded or an impostor.”
Gaius laughed painfully. “It’s too late for that.”
Attulus fingered his beard. “You’re right, of course. Rumors are spreading faster than the infection. People are actively demanding the infection, for themselves or for people who are seriously injured. Particularly in New Babylon, there is a huge wish to believe that the Bright Star Cultures are not a threat. In a sense they are throwing off the defensive part of Volkov’s legacy, and embracing the part which he used to attract initial support—the quest for longevity and other benefits of biological engineering. One or two Traders who’ve escaped the dragnet have popped up with wild tales of what the Bright Star Cultures have achieved in symbiosis with the Multipliers—not just in biological matters, but in terms of wealth. I reserve judgment on that, but for the moment we have to accept that it is unstoppably becoming the popular view. Unfortunately it undermines the rationale for space defense, which we now need more urgently than ever.”
“Ah, yes,” said Gaius. “The meteor.”
Attulus nodded. “Precisely. More where that came from, as they say.” He twined a ringlet of hair around a finger. “And, ah, this may come as a shock. Volkov and the Mingulayans—with the cooperation of some officers in the Ducal Marines, I’m astonished to tell you—have already taken some preemptive action in that respect.”
“They’ve stopped another meteor attack?”
“No,” said Attulus uncomfortably. “They have destroyed a god.”
Gaius fell back to the pillow and stared at the ceiling for a while. The knowledge that he, like every educated person, had in the back of his mind suddenly became vivid and visual. He could see, he could imagine, the ring of asteroids and outside it and the farthest planets, the light-year-wide sphere of cometary bodies around the sun. An unknown but large proportion of them, he knew, harbored the strange slow life of the extremophile nanobacteria, and the innumerable fast minds that that life sustained. Trillions of intelligent beings, megayears of civilization, lay within each one, and over all the sum of the minds of each a wider consciousness, a god. To strike at and destroy such a thing, even in self-defense, was blasphemous in its disproportionality, appalling in its hubris. To exterminate all life on a planet to avert a sting—even a fatal sting—from one of that planet’s insects would be only the faintest analogy to the shocking scale of the offense.
His hands were clutching the sheets, regardless of the pain in his arm. He wanted to pull the sheets over his head.
“Gods above,” he said. “Do the people know this?”
“Not yet,” said Attulus.
“Good.” Gaius was beginning to calm down, and beginning to think through the ramifications. “There’s a serious danger of the returned Volkov—in our hands or otherwise—becoming a popular hero. From our point of view, he was the tyrant, and the Regime since his departure is an improvement. From the point of view of a lot of people in New Babylon, he’s a much more ambiguous figure, to say the least. The camarilla and the bureaucracy are hated much more than his memory. The fact that Volkov can still raise a small army of insurgents while many people suspect his supporters in Space Defense of having struck at the heart—or the head—of New Babylon just shows how dangerous things are. The one thing that could shock people out of their deluded fascination with the Engineer is if we can nail the charge of theicide to his forehead.” He lay back and thought some more. “The same applies, of course, to the Mingulayans and the Multipliers—also implicated, and also potential contenders for popular influence.”
Attulus frowned. “Very astute, Gonatus. But I thought you were sympathetic to the Multipliers—given your propensity for spreading their infection about!”
“You misunderstand,” said Gaius. “The Bright Star Cultures are founded on mutual adaptation between the Multipliers and the Mingulayans. There is no reason why there should not be a new culture, based on Multipliers adapting to us.” He smiled. “The way the Multipliers reproduce, after all, is to divide.”
“As I said, I’ll reserve judgment on that. The question is, what do we do now?”
Gaius wasn’t sure whether the Director really was asking him for advice, or brainstorming for ideas to which he would apply his own judgment. He decided not to flatter himself too much.
“What I would suggest,” he said, trying to sit up again and succeeding in propping himself on his right elbow this time, “is that we return Julia de Zama to power as soon as she is fit to be seen in public. New Babylon is unlikely to accept Illyrian occupation for long, memory and gratitude being what they are. She is unpopular, but she is likely to be more popular than us, and an element of stability. And who knows, if she has visibly become rejuvenated she should make a very different impression than when she was a living corpse on a drip. Meanwhile, we make quite clear to her that she is in power on our sufferance, and get as many concessions as possible with regard to internal reforms, trade, and peace. We talk individually to the members of the Bright Star Culture expedition—not all of whom, I am sure, will have gone along with the theicide, and even fewer of whom will be willing to stand by it in the cold light of day. We isolate Volkov and his Mingulayan accomplices, and then we make the evidence of what they have done public. The resulting howl of execration should demoralize the Volkovists, including those in the Space Defense apparatus.”
“Hmm,” said Attulus, rising from his bedside seat. “This has been a very useful conversation, old chap. You have, as they say, given me something to lay before the Duke. There is one problem. If we expose Volkov and his accomplices as theicides, we shall have no choice but to shoot them.”
“Is that a problem?”
Attulus chuckled darkly and went out.