Gary Gibson - The Thousand Emperors

For reasons that remained obscure to Luc, Offenbach preferred to maintain an outward physical appearance considerably more advanced than most. Liver spots dotted his hands, while a hawklike nose that always made Luc think of a half-opened flick-knife jutted from the centre of his face.

‘I’m looking for something very specific,’ said Luc, grasping at a set of brightly coloured filaments just within his reach. Tiny clumps of words, names and reference numbers pulsed like jellyfish as his fingers brushed against them. He made a claw of his hand, then flung his fingers wide, causing the clumps to suddenly expand, revealing more details, along with the broad outlines of the financial links that connected the filaments together, almost fractal in their compact density. He performed another deft sleight of hand, and the filaments of data shrank once more.

To one side of the two men floated several dense clusters, rendered in luminous orange and green, representing the financial concerns of more than a dozen Benarean resistance movements. Dark nebulae of restricted or missing data weaved in and out of these brightly glowing clouds, but Luc knew that even this vast quantity of interconnected data represented only one very minor sub-branch of the complete Black Lotus data-set.

‘Something specific?’ Offenbach spluttered. ‘Well, I should hope so.’

Luc leaned back. ‘The focus I want is on a medium-broad spectrum of interconnectivity, representing whatever relationship existed between Winchell Antonov and Sevgeny Vasili.’

Offenbach blinked a couple of times, clearly choosing his next words carefully. ‘I can tell you right now that any such records are likely to be heavily flagged and restricted.’

‘That’s hardly news to me, Jared.’ Luc’s work on the Black Lotus data-set had been a constant struggle with restricted-data flags. If Offenbach hadn’t been able to help him circumnavigate a number of them in the past, he might never have succeeded in tracking Antonov down. Offenbach was, in many ways, Archives’ unsung hero.

Offenbach gave him a look of wry amusement, then reached out, manipulating the data before him with practised ease. The entire set rotated on an invisible axis, bringing clusters representing the relationships between the Temur Council and Sevgeny Vasili into clearer focus. Luc could see that most of the clusters reached back for centuries, all the way to the pre-Schism days. Many of the strands were colour-coded brown and grey, to indicate their special restricted status.

‘Strange,’ Offenbach muttered.

‘What?’

The librarian shook his head. ‘Your revised security rating should have gone through now you’ve been promoted to Master of Archives, but these data-sets simply won’t respond to your new rating. They still appear restricted to your eyes, don’t they?’

Luc glanced again at the brown-and-grey coded links and nodded. Each member of SecInt, depending on their personal security ratings, saw different things even when looking at the same visualized information. What might appear restricted to Luc might instead show as fully available to Offenbach, and vice versa.

Luc reached out and touched a grey strand, but it vibrated without expanding.

‘You’re right,’ he said, staring at the restricted strands. ‘I can’t access a lot of these.’ He glanced at other, neighbouring strands, which appeared not to be flagged in the same way. ‘But I can see others that look like I could access them, if I wanted to.’

Offenbach nodded distractedly. ‘But all of these should be accessible to you now.’ He tapped one finger against the arm of his chair. ‘Maybe your new rating is taking time to percolate through the system.’

‘That sounds like bullshit even to me, Jared.’

Offenbach sighed and nodded. ‘A lot of these threads were capped following Antonov’s death. If that much has propagated through the data-sets, then your new rating should have taken effect, unless . . .’

‘Unless what?’

Offenbach looked suddenly uncomfortable. ‘Usually, when something like this happens, it’s because of orders coming from way, way up the food chain.’

A member of the Council, in other words. Luc had a mental flash of Cripps, standing in his apartment.

Offenbach raised one magnificently hairy eyebrow. ‘You mentioned when you came in that you were asked to help in an investigation of some kind. Would that investigation perhaps be connected to stories I’ve been hearing about your trip up to the White Palace?’

Luc made a face. ‘I see I’m the talk of the town.’

Offenbach let out a half-muffled giggle. ‘Yes. So much intrigue .’

Despite his outward appearance, Luc sometimes wondered if Offenbach might actually be a good deal younger than himself. He certainly acted like it at times.

‘I want to show you something,’ said Offenbach, his face lit up with nearly palpable excitement. He sent data-sets flying by with disorienting speed, galaxies of information vanishing into the darkened recesses of his office in rapid order. Finally a single, vast constellation appeared, orbited by dozens of other, smaller clusters.

‘What you’re looking at here,’ said Offenbach, ‘is the total data-set for the preparations for Reunification. I don’t need to tell you the predictive power of a set like this, do I?’

No you don’t, thought Luc, his eyes automatically tracing lines of real and potential influence. ‘You don’t need to work in Archives to guess a lot of things are going to change following Reunification, Jared.’

‘But look here at these subsets. They show regions of unusually high activity surrounding Sevgeny Vasili over just the last few days, considerably more than might be expected even given his role in making Reunification a success. Clearly something is up.’

Luc tried not to show his surprise. ‘You were already looking into Vasili?’

Offenbach clapped his hands in excitement, his eyes glittering from across the room. ‘Not officially, no. But that level of activity naturally draws our attention and raises flags. Now, as for Vasili’s links to Antonov , all we really have to go on is a relatively scant quantity of publicly available data. You know, of course, that they were both on the Committee for Reconstruction following the Abandonment.’

Luc nodded. ‘I know that before Antonov turned against the Council, the two men had worked together.’

‘In the early days,’ Offenbach agreed. ‘And later, of course, they became diametrically opposed when Father Cheng took power.’

Luc nodded. ‘I’m looking for something deeper than that,’ he said.

‘I thought you might be,’ Offenbach replied. Screeds of text appeared, flickering by at a speed even Luc, despite his experience, found difficult to follow.

For the thousandth time, Luc recalled Vasili’s last message to posterity, recorded on the pages of a book the head of Archives couldn’t prove existed: Winchell, I was wrong, so very wrong. I see that now.

A lifetime of questions were contained within that one simple statement.

‘What I can tell you,’ said Luc, ‘is that there should be a recent connection between the two men, possibly as recently as within the last year.’

Offenbach raised his eyebrows in surprise, suddenly sober. ‘ That recent?’

Luc nodded slowly and Offenbach whistled. A moment later the window de-opaqued, letting afternoon light seep in. A thin layer of dust became evident, coating many of the ageing data-readers stacked around them.