Auger put the delicate black disc back in its sleeve, and returned the sleeve to the table. "Is that what

you were playing?"

"No. That was a little Bach. The Sixth Brandenburg Concerto, for what it's worth. Unlike the Mahler, neither the score nor the original recording were ever lost."

"This is an original recording," Auger said, fingering the record sleeve. "Isn't it?"

"Yes, but until very recently none were known to have survived. Now that we have that recording,

someone somewhere is trying to reverse engineer Mahler's original score. A hopeless enterprise, of course. We've more chance of unearthing an intact one." She still had that p.r.i.c.kly sense of being tested or led into a trap. "Wait. I'm missing something. You're telling me that this piece of music was completely lost?"

"Yes."

"And now you've found an intact recording?"

"Exactly so. It's a cause for great celebration. The record you just examined was recovered from Paris

only a matter of weeks ago."

"I don't see how that can be," Auger said, careful not to accuse him outright of lying. "Nothing bigger

than a pinhead comes out of Paris without my knowing about it. I'd definitely have heard if something as significant as that had been unearthed. In fact, I'd probably be the one who found it."

"This is something you missed. Shall I tell you something else very interesting?"

"Oh, why not."

"This is the original, not a copy. This is the actual artefact, exactly as it was recovered. No restorative

work has taken place."

"That's also highly unlikely. The disc might have survived three or four hundred years with relatively little damage, but not the packaging." Caliskan had returned to his monstrously large desk. Sitting behind it, he looked like a little boy visiting his father's office. He steepled his fingers, peering over them owlishly. "Go on. I'm listening."

"Paper doesn't last, especially not the wood-pulp paper they were using in that era. Ironically, the cotton-pulp paper from much earlier lasts a lot better. Not as easy to bleach, but the alum they used in the wood-pulp process undergoes hydrolysis and produces sulphuric acid."

"Not good."

"That's not all. There are metal tannins in the inks that also lead to deterioration. Not to mention airborne contaminants. Then the glues dry up. The labels come off and the sleeve begins to come apart at the seams. The dyes fade. Lacquer on the card turns brown and cracks off." Auger picked up the sleeve and examined it again, certain she must have missed something. "With the right methods, you can correct a lot of that damage. But the resultant artefacts are still incredibly fragile-far too valuable to be handled like this. And this one definitely hasn't been restored."

"As I just told you."

"All right. Then it must have spent three-hundred-odd years in a vacuum chamber, or some other preserving agent. Someone must have taken deliberate steps to keep it intact."

"No special measures were taken," Caliskan insisted. "As I said, it's exactly as we found it. Here's another question: if you suspected the recording was a fake, how would you prove it?"

"A recent fake?" Auger shrugged. "There are a lot of things I could try. Chemical a.n.a.lysis of the sh.e.l.lac, for one thing, but of course I wouldn't want to touch it until we'd laser-scanned the grooves and got the whole thing on magnetic tape."

"Very sound methodology. What else?"

"I'd run a radiocarbon a.n.a.lysis on the cellulose fibres in the paper."

Caliskan rubbed his nose speculatively. "Tricky, for an object suspected to be only three or four hundred years old."

"But doable. We've made some refinements in the calibration curves lately. And I wouldn't be trying to date it exactly, just establish that it wasn't recent."

"And your antic.i.p.ated conclusions?"

"I try not to antic.i.p.ate conclusions, but I'd put good money on that artefact being a clever hoax, no matter how watertight its provenance."

"Well, you'd be right," Caliskan said. "If you ran the usual tests, you'd conclude that the artefact must have been manufactured very recently."

Auger felt a curious sense of deflation, as if she had been excited about something without quite realising it. "Is there a point to this, sir?"

"The point is, it still sounds like Mahler to me."

"I wouldn't know about that," Auger said.

"Do you miss music?"

"You can't miss what you've never known, sir."

"You've never known rain, either. Not real rain, falling from a real sky."

"That's different," she said, needled that he knew so much about her. "Sir, do you mind if I ask what this

is all about? What are you doing here, so far from Antiquities? What business do you have dragging me halfway across Tanglewood?"

"Careful, Verity."

"I have a right to know."

"You have no right to know anything. However, since I'm feeling generous...I take it you were told about the Contingencies Board?"

"Yes. I also know there's no such thing."

"There is," Caliskan said. "And I should know-I happen to run it."

"No, sir," she said. "You run Antiquities."

"That, too. But my sideways promotion into Antiquities was only ever a matter of expediency. Two

years ago, something dropped into our laps. A find..." He paused before correcting himself. "Two finds, if you like-both of staggering strategic value. A pair of linked discoveries that have the potential to change our entire relationship with the Polities. Discoveries that could, in fact, alter our entire relationship with reality."

"I don't like Slashers," Auger said. "Especially after what happened in Paris." "Don't you think we should let bygones be bygones?"

"Easy for you to say, sir. You weren't touched by Amusica. You didn't have that taken from you."

"No," Caliskan said. "The Amusica virus didn't touch me, just as it didn't touch one person in a thousand. But I lost something rather dearer to me than the mere perception of music."

"If you say so."

"I lost a brother to Slashers," he said, "in the final stages of the Phobos offensive, when we were trying

to retake the Moon. If anyone has a right to hate them, I do."

She didn't know that Caliskan had even had a brother, let alone that he had died in the last war. "Do you hate them, sir?"

"No. I treat them as what they are: a commodity to be exploited, as and when it suits us. But hatred? No."

She decided it might be time to listen. "And the connection with Antiquities?"

"A very profound one. As the nature of the second discovery became clear, we realised that we needed

to work with Antiquities on a more fundamental level. The simplest solution was to replace DeForrest with myself, so that I had an absolute overview of all Earth-based activities."

"I always said it was a political appointment."

"But not in the way you meant it." His tinted spectacles caught the light, like two little windows into clear blue sky. "Now I want to ask you about the maps."

She p.r.i.c.kled, realising that she had been under surveillance all along. She should have known they would keep their eye on her. "Were you responsible for sending them? Were the maps some pointless test, like the Mahler recording?"

This seemed to amuse him. "They warned me about you."

"And what did they say?"

"That you'd speak your mind. I already knew from personal experience that you have little respect for

authority." His tone softened. "They also told me you have a good eye for detail. Now tell me what you

made of the maps."

A small inner voice told her that more depended on her answers than was immediately apparent. She felt her voice catching in her throat, her usual fluency deserting her. "I only looked at one, and there was something about it that didn't make sense."

"Continue," Caliskan said.

"According to the copyright information, the map was printed over a century before the Nanocaust, yet it was in excellent condition-just like the Mahler recording."

"Did the period of the map strike you as significant in any way?"

"No," she said. "Only in so far as it just about falls within my frame of interest."

"Only just?"

Auger nodded. "Yes. I'm pretty good on Paris in the Void Century, up to twenty seventy-seven. Things

get a bit foggier if you go back to nineteen fifty-nine. It's not that I don't know anything about that

period, just that I'm much less familiar with it than I am with the later decades."

Caliskan pushed his gla.s.ses back up the bridge of his nose. "Let's say I wanted to talk to someone who was an avowed expert on precisely that period. Given your network of academic contacts, who would you suggest?"