THIRTY-NINE.

Cerberus Interior, Final Chamber, 2567

The jewel shone with a noticeable bluish radiance now, as if his proximity had stilled its spectral transformations; forced it towards some temporary quiescence. Sylveste still felt that it was wrong to approach it, but now his own curiosity -- and a sense of predestiny -- was impelling him forwards. Maybe it was something springing from the basal parts of his mind; a need to confront the dangerous and thereby tame it. It was an instinct which must have driven the first touching of fire, the first flinch of pain and the wisdom that came with that pain.

The jewel unfolded before him, undergoing geometric transformations to which he did not dare devote too much attention, for fear that understanding them would cleave his mind open along similar fault lines.

'Are you sure this is wise?' Calvin asked, his utterances now more than ever forming part of the normal background of Sylveste's inner dialogue.

'It's too late to return now,' said a voice.

A voice which belonged neither to Calvin nor Sylveste, but which seemed deeply familiar, as if it had long been a part of him, merely silent.

'Sun Stealer, isn't it?'

'He's been with us all along,' Calvin said. 'Haven't you?'

'Longer than you imagine. Since you returned from Lascaille's Shroud, Dan.'

'Then everything Khouri said was right,' he said, while already knowing the truth of it. If Sajaki's empty suit had not confirmed it, then the revelations he had shared in the white light had ended his doubts, completely.

'What do you want of me?'

'Only that you enter the -- jewel -- as you call it.' The creature's voice, and its voice was the only thing that he heard, was sibilant; chillingly so. 'You have nothing to fear. You will not be harmed by it, nor will you be prevented from leaving.'

'You would say that, wouldn't you?'

'Except that it is the truth.'

'What about the bridgehead?'

'The device is still operational. It will remain so until you have left Cerberus.'

'There's no way of knowing,' Calvin said. 'Whatever he -- it -- says, could well be a lie. He's deceived and manipulated us at every step; all to bring you here. Why should he suddenly start telling the truth now?'

'Because it is of no consequence,' Sun Stealer said. 'Now that you have reached this far, your own desires play no further part in the matter.'

And Sylveste felt the suit surge forward, directly into the opened jewel, along a brilliantly faceted, ever-flickering corridor which extended into the structure.

'What----' Calvin began.

'I'm not doing anything,' Sylveste said. 'The bastard must have control of my suit!'

'Stands to reason. He could control Sajaki's, after all. Must have preferred to sit back and let you do all the work until now. Lazy bastard.'

'At this point,' Sylveste said, 'I don't think insulting him's going to make a great deal of difference.'

'Do you have a better idea?'

'As a matter of fact----'

The corridor surrounded him completely now, a glowing tracheal tunnel which twisted and turned until it seemed impossible that he could still be inside the jewel. But then, he told himself, he had never come to a clear conclusion as to its true size -- it might have been anywhere between a few hundred metres across or tens of kilometres. Its fluctuating shape made it impossible to know, and perhaps meant that there was no meaningful answer; in the same way that one could not specify the volume of a fractal solid.

'Uh, you were saying?'

'I was saying...' Sylveste trailed off. 'Sun Stealer, are you listening to me?'

'As always.'

'I don't understand why I had to come here. If you managed to animate Sajaki's suit -- and you had conscious control of mine all this time -- why did I have to come along in the first place? If there's something you want inside this thing, something you want to bring out, you could do it without me being here at all.'

'The device will only respond to organic life. An empty suit would be interpreted as machine sentience.'

'This -- thing -- is a device? Is that what you're saying?'

'It is an Inhibitor device.'

For a moment the words seemed meaningless, but only for a moment. Then fuzzily -- the words attached to some of the memories he retained from his time in the white light; the portal to the Hades matrix. Those memories attached to others; an endless braid of association.

And he came to a kind of understanding.

More than ever, he knew that he should not continue; that if he reached the inner realm of the jewel -- of the Inhibitor device, as he now knew it to be -- things would be very, very bad. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine how things could be worse.

'We can't go on,' Calvin said. 'I understand now what this is.'

'Me too, belatedly.'

The device had been left here by the Inhibitors. They had placed it in orbit around Hades, next to the glimmering white portal; something older even than the Inhibitors. It did not bother them that they did not properly understand its function, or have any real inkling of who had placed it there, next to the neutron star which -- according to some puzzling indications they had allowed to linger unexplored -- was not quite as it should be. But, the enigma of its origin aside, it entirely suited their plans. Their own devices were constructed to lure the sentient, and by placing one of them next to an entity even more perplexing, they were guaranteed visitors. It was a strategy they followed across the galaxy, in fact: leaving Inhibitor devices in close proximity to objects of astrophysical interest, or near the ruins of extinct cultures. Anywhere where they were likely to draw attention.

And the Amarantin had come, and tinkered, and made themselves known to the device. It had studied them, and learned their weaknesses.

And it had wiped them out -- all except for a handful of descendants of the Banished, who found two means to escape the ruthless predation of the Inhibitors. Some had used the portal itself, mapping themselves into the crustal matrix, where they continued to run as simulations, preserved in the impervious amber of nuclear matter enslaved for computational purposes.

It was hardly living, Sylveste thought, but at least something of them had been preserved.

And then there were the others: the others who had found the other way to escape the Inhibitors.

Their mode of escape had been no less drastic, no less irreversible...

'They became the Shrouders, didn't they?' Calvin was speaking now -- or was it Sylveste, voicing his own thoughts, the way he sometimes did, in the heat of concentration? He could barely tell, much less care. 'This was in the last days; when Resurgam was already gone, and most of the spaceborn had already been tracked down and annihilated. One faction went into the Hades matrix.

Another learned what they could about manipulating spacetime, probably from the transformations near the portal. And they found a solution; a way to barricade themselves against the Inhibitor weapons. They found a way to wrap spacetime around themselves; a way to curdle and solidify it, until it formed an impervious shell. And they retreated behind those shells and sealed them for eternity.

'But at least it was better than dying.'

Everything, for an instant, was clear in his head. How those behind the Shrouds had waited, and waited, barely cognisant of the outside universe; barely able to communicate with it, so secure were the walls they had wrapped around themselves.

And they had waited.

They had known, even at the time of enclosure, that the systems left behind by the Inhibitors were slowly failing; slowly losing their ability to suppress intelligence. Not soon enough, for them - - but after a million years of waiting, trapped in their bubble of spacetime, they began to wonder if the threat had now diminished...

They could not simply dismantle the Shrouds and look around -- far too hazardous; especially as the Inhibitor machines were nothing if not patient. Their apparent silence might only be part of the trap, a waiting game designed to entice the Amarantin -- who were now the Shrouders -- out of their shells, into the open arena of naked space, where they could be destroyed with ease, terminating the million-year purge against their kind.

Yet, in time, others came.

Perhaps there was something about this region of space which favoured the evolution of vertebrate life, or perhaps it was only coincidence, but in the newly starfaring humans, the Shrouders saw echoes of what they had once been. Something of the same psychosis, almost: the simultaneous craving for solitude and companionship; the need for the comfort of society and the open steppes of space; a schism which drove them onwards, outwards.

Philip Lascaille had been the first to meet them, around the Shroud which now bore his name.

The tortured spacetime around the Shroud had ripped his mind open, twisted it and reassembled it, into a drooling travesty of what it had once been. But it was a travesty shot with brilliance. They had put something in him; the knowledge that was needed for someone else to get much closer...

and the lie that would make him do it.

Just before he died, Lascaille had communicated this to the young Dan Sylveste.

Go to the Jugglers, he had said.

Because the Amarantin had once visited them; once imprinted their neural patterns into the Juggler ocean. Those patterns stabilised the spacetime around the Shroud; enabled one to penetrate deeper into its thickening folds without being torn asunder by the stresses. It was how Sylveste, having accepted the Juggler transform, was able to ride the storms into the depths of the Shroud itself.

He came out alive.

But changed.

Something had come back with him; something which called itself Sun Stealer, though he knew now that this was no more than a mythname; that the thing which had lived within him ever since was better thought of as an assemblage; an artificial personality woven into the shell of the Shroud, put there by those within who wanted Sylveste to act as their emissary; to extend their influence beyond the curtain of impassable spacetime.

What they wanted him to do was very simple, in hindsight.

Travel to Resurgam, where the bones of their corporeal ancestors were buried.

Find the Inhibitor device.

Place himself in a position where, if the device was still functioning, it would activate and identify him as a member of a newly uprisen intelligent culture.

If the Inhibitors were still around, humanity would be identified as the next species to be put to the slaughter.

If not, the Shrouders could emerge into safety.

Now the bluish light which surrounded him seemed evil; unspeakably so. He knew that simply by entering this place he might have already done too much; already exhibited enough apparent intelligence to convince the Inhibitor device that he represented a breed worthy of extinction.

He hated what the Amarantin had become; hated himself for devoting so much of his life to their study. But what could he do now? It was far too late for second thoughts.

The tunnel had widened, and where he found himself -- still without any conscious control of the suit -- was in a faceted chamber, bathed in the same putrid blue glow. The chamber was filled with odd hanging shapes, reminding him of reconstructions he had seen of the inside of a human cell.

The shapes were all rectilinear, complexly interconnected rectangles and squares and rhomboids, forming hanging sculptures which subscribed to no recognisable aesthetic tendency.

'What are they?' he breathed.

'Think of them as puzzles,' Sun Stealer said. 'The idea is that, as an intelligent explorer, you feel a curious urge to complete them, to move the shapes into the geometric configurations which are implied in the pieces.'

He could see what Sun Stealer meant. The nearest assemblage, for instance. It was obvious that with a few manipulations he could make the shapes into a tesseract... almost tempting...

'I won't do it,' he said.

'You won't have to.' And in demonstration, Sun Stealer made the limbs of his suit reach out towards the assemblage, which was much closer than he had first guessed. The suit fingers grasped for the first piece, swinging it effortlessly into place. 'There will be other tests, other chambers,' the alien said. 'Your mental processes will be subjected to rigid scrutiny, and -- later -- your biology. I do not expect that the latter procedure will be especially pleasant. But neither will it be fatal. That would deter others, from which a broader picture of the enemy could be assembled.' There was something almost like humour in the thing's voice now; as if he had been long enough in human company to glean some of their manners. 'You, alas, will be the only human representative to enter this device. But rest assured you will prove an excellent specimen.'

'That's where you're wrong,' Sylveste said.

The first hint of alarm entered Sun Stealer's implacable, noiseless voice. 'Please explain.'

For a moment Sylveste did not oblige. 'Calvin,' he said. 'There's something I have to say.' Even as he spoke, he was not really sure why he was doing so, not really sure who he was addressing.

'When we were in the white light -- when we shared everything, in the Hades matrix -- there was something I found out; something I should have known years ago.'

'About you, that is.'

'About me, yes. About what I am.' Sylveste wanted to cry, now, knowing that this would be his last chance, but his eyes did not allow that; they never had. 'About why I can't hate you, unless I want to turn that hatred against myself. If I ever really hated you in the first place.'

'It didn't really work, did it? What I made of you. It wasn't the way I planned it. But I can't say I'm disappointed with the way you turned out.' Calvin corrected himself. 'The way I turned out.'

'I'm glad I found out, even if it has to be now.'

'What are you going to do?'

'You already know. We shared everything, didn't we?' Sylveste found himself laughing. 'Now you know my secrets, as well.'

'Ah. You're talking about that little secret, aren't you?'

'What?' hissed Sun Stealer; voice like the radio crackle of distant quasars.

'I guess you were privy to the conversations I had on the ship,' he said, addressing the alien again.

'When I let them think I'd been bluffing.'

'Bluffing?' it asked. 'About what?'

'About the hot-dust in my eyes,' Sylveste said. He laughed, louder this time. And then executed the series of neural triggers, long committed to memory, which initiated a cascade of events in the circuitry of his eyes, and -- finally -- in the tiny motes of contained antimatter embedded within them.

There was a light purer than any he had known, even in the portal which led to Hades.

And then there was nothing.