She read his question. 'No; I don't think he's found who he's looking for, though doubtless we'll find out shortly.'

'And your own quest?'

'I'm not looking for a specific individual. My only constraint is that whoever I find should be saner than Boris Nagorny. That ought not to pose any great difficulties.' She let her gaze drift around the drinkers in the bar. Although none of the people looked definitely psychotic, neither was there anyone who exactly looked stable and well-adjusted. 'At least I hope not.'

Hegazi lit a cigarette and offered Volyova a second. She took it gratefully and smoked it solidly for five minutes, until it resembled a glowing speck of fissile material wrapped in glowing embers.

She made a mental note to replenish her supply of cigarettes during this stopover. 'But my search is only just beginning,' she said. 'And I have to handle it delicately.'

'You mean,' Hegazi said with a knowing smile, 'that you're not actually going to tell people what the job is before you recruit them.'

Volyova smirked. 'Of course not.'

The sapphire-hulled shuttle he was riding had not come far: only a short inter-orbital hop from the Sylvestes' familial habitat. Even so, it had been difficult to arrange. Calvin strongly disapproved of his son having any contact with the thing which now resided in the Institute, as if the thing's state of mind might infect Sylveste by some mysterious process of sympathetic resonance. Yet Sylveste was twenty-one. He chose his own associations now. Calvin could go hang, or bum his neurons to ash in the madness he was about to inflict on himself and his seventy-nine disciples... but he was not going to dictate who Sylveste could see.

He saw SISS looming ahead, and thought, none of this is real; just a narrative strand from his biography. Pascale had given him the rough-cut and asked for his comments. Now he was experiencing it, still walled in his prison in Cuvier, but moving like a ghost through his own past, haunting his younger self. Memories, long buried, were welling up unbidden. The biography, still far from complete, would be capable of being accessed in many ways, from many viewpoints, and with varying degrees of interactivity. It would be an intricately faceted thing, detailed enough that one could easily spend more than a lifetime exploring only a segment of his past.

SISS looked as real as he remembered. The Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies had its organisational centre in a wheel-shaped structure dating from the Amerikano days, although there was not a single cubic nanometre which had not been reprocessed many times over the intervening centuries. The wheel's hub sprouted two grey, mushroom-shaped hemispheres, pocked with docking interfaces and the modest defence systems permitted by Demarchist ethics. The wheel's edge was a hectic accretion of living modules, labs and offices, embedded in a matrix of bulk chitin polymer, linked by a tangle of access tunnels and supply pipes walled in shark-collagen.

'It's good.'

'You think so?' Pascale's voice was distant.

'That's how it was,' Sylveste said. 'How it felt when I visited him.'

'Thanks, I... well, this was nothing -- the easy part. Fully documented. We had blueprints for SISS, and there are even some people in Cuvier who knew your father, like Janequin. The hard part's what happened afterwards -- where we have so little to go on except what you told them on your return.'

'I'm sure you've done an excellent job of it.'

'Well, you'll see -- sooner rather than later.'

The shuttle coupled with the docking interface. Institute security servitors were waiting beyond the lock, validating his identity.

'Calvin won't be thrilled,' said Gregori, the Institute's housekeeper. 'But I suppose it's too late to send you home now.'

They had been through this ritual two or three times in the last few months, Gregori always washing his hands of the consequences. It was no longer necessary to have someone escort Sylveste through the shark-collagen tunnels to the place where they kept him; the thing.

'You've nothing to worry about, Gregori. If Father gives you any trouble, just tell him I ordered you to show me around.'

Gregori arched his eyebrows, the emotionally attuned entoptics around him registering amusement.

'Isn't that just what you're doing, Dan?'

'I was trying to keep things amicable.'

'Utterly futile, dear boy. We'd all be much happier if you just followed your father's lead. You know where you are with a good totalitarian regime.'

It took twenty minutes to navigate the tunnels, moving radially outwards to the rim, passing through scientific sections where teams of thinkers -- human and machine -- grappled endlessly with the central enigma of the Shrouds. Although SISS had established monitoring stations around all the Shrouds so far discovered, most of the information-processing and collating took place around Yellowstone. Here elaborate theories were assembled and tested against the facts, which were scant, but unignorable. No theory had lasted more than a few years.

The place where they kept him, the thing Sylveste had come to see, was a guarded annex on the rim; a generously large allocation of volume given the lack of evidence that the thing within was actually capable of appreciating the gift. The thing's name -- his name -- was Philip Lascaille.

He did not have many visitors now. There had been lots in the early days, shortly after his return.

But interest had dwindled when it became clear that Lascaille could tell his inquisitors nothing, useful or otherwise. But, as Sylveste had quickly appreciated, the fact that no one paid Lascaille much attention these days could actually work to his advantage. Even Sylveste's relatively infrequent visits -- once or twice a month -- had been sufficiently far from the norm to enable a kind of rapport to form between the two of them... between himself and the thing Lascaille had become.

Lascaille's annex contained a garden, under an artificial sky glazed the deep blue of cobalt. A breeze had been created, sufficient to finger the windchimes suspended from the bower of over- arching trees which fringed the garden.

The garden had been landscaped with paths, rockeries, knolls, trellises and goldfish ponds, the effect being of a rustic maze, so that it always took a minute or so to find Lascaille. When Sylveste did find him the man was usually in the same state: naked or half-naked, filthy to some degree, his fingers smeared with the rainbow shades of crayons and chalks. Sylveste would always know he was getting warm when he saw something scrawled on the stone path; either a complex symmetrical pattern, or what looked like an attempt at mimicking Chinese or Sanskrit calligraphy, without actually knowing any real letters. At other times the things which Lascaille marked on the path looked like Boolean algebra or semaphore.

Then -- it was always only a question of time -- he would round a corner and Lascaille would be there, working on another marking, or carefully erasing one he had worked on previously. His face would be frozen in a rictus of total concentration, and every muscle in his body would be rigid with the exertion of the drawing, and the process would take place in complete silence, except for the stirring of the windchimes, the quiet whisper of the water or the scraping of his crayons and chalks against stone.

Sylveste would often have to wait hours for Lascaille to even register his presence, which would generally amount to nothing more than the man turning his face to him for an instant, before continuing. Yet the same thing always happened in that instant. The rictus would soften, and in its place would be -- if only for a moment -- a smile; one of pride or amusement or something utterly beyond Sylveste's fathoming.

And then Lascaille would return to his chalks. And there would be nothing to suggest that this was a man -- the only man -- the only human being -- to ever touch the surface of a Shroud and return alive.

'Anyway,' Volyova said, quenching what remained of her thirst, 'I'm not expecting it to be easy, but I have no doubts that I will find a recruit sooner or later. I've begun to advertise, stating our planned destination. As far as the work is concerned, I say only that it requires someone with implants.'

'But you're not going to take the first one that comes along,' Hegazi said. 'Surely?'

'Of course not. Though they won't know it, I'll be vetting my candidates for some kind of military experience in their backgrounds. I don't want someone who's going to crack up at the first hint of trouble, or someone unwilling to submit to discipline.' She was beginning to relax now, after all her difficulties with Nagorny. A girl was playing on stage, working a gold teeconax through endlessly spiralling ragas. Volyova did not greatly care for music; never had done. But there was something mathematically beguiling about the music which for a moment worked against her prejudices. She said: 'I'm confident of success. We need only concern ourselves with Sajaki.'

At that moment Hegazi nodded towards the door, where bright daylight forced Volyova to squint.

A figure stood there, majestically silhouetted in the glare. The man was garbed in a black anklelength cloak and a vaguely defined helmet, the light making it resemble a halo cast around his head. His profile was split diagonally by a long smooth stick which he gripped two-handedly.

The Komuso stepped into the darkness. What looked like a kendo stick was only his bamboo shakuhachi; a traditional musical instrument. With well-rehearsed rapidity he slid the thing into a sheath concealed behind the folds of his cloak. Then, with imperial slowness, he removed the wicker helmet. The Komuso's face was difficult to make out. His hair was brilliantined, slickly tied back in a scythe-shaped tail. His eyes were lost behind sleek assassin's goggles, infrared sensitive facets dully catching the room's tinted light.

The music had come to an abrupt stop, the girl with the teeconax vanishing magically from the stage.

'They think it's a police bust,' Hegazi breathed, the room quiet enough now that he didn't need to raise his voice. 'The local cops send in the basket-cases when they don't want to bloody their own hands.'

The Komuso swept the room, flylike eyes targeting the table where Hegazi and Volyova sat. His head seemed to move independently of the rest of his body, like some species of owl. With a bustle of his cloak he cruised towards them, appearing to glide more than locomote. Nonchalantly Hegazi kicked a spare seat out from under the table, simultaneously taking an unimpressed drag on his cigarette. 'Good to see you, Sajaki.'

He dropped the wicker helmet next to their drinks, ripping the goggles away from his eyes as he did so. He lowered himself into the vacant chair, then turned casually around to the rest of the bar.

He made a drinking gesture, imploring the people to get on with their own business while he attended to his. Gradually the conversation rumbled back into life, although everyone was keeping half an eye on the three of them.

'I wish the circumstances merited a celebratory drink,' Sajaki said.

'They don't?' Hegazi said, looking as crestfallen as his extensively modified face permitted.

'No, most certainly not.' Sajaki examined the nearly spent glasses on the table and lifted Volyova's, downing the few drops which remained. 'I've been doing some spying, as you might gather from my disguise. Sylveste isn't here. He isn't in this system any more. As a matter of fact, he hasn't been here for somewhere in the region of fifty years.'

'Fifty years?' Hegazi whistled.

'That's quite a cold trail,' Volyova said. She tried not to sound gloating, but she had always known this risk existed. When Sajaki had given the order to steer the lighthugger towards the Yellowstone system, he had done so on the basis of the best information available to him at the time. But that was decades ago, and the information had been decades old even when he received it.

'Yes,' Sajaki said. 'But not as cold as you might think. I know exactly where he went to, and there's no reason to assume he's ever left the place.'

'And where would this be?' Volyova asked, with a sinking feeling in her stomach.

'A planet called Resurgam.' Sajaki placed Volyova's glass down on the table. 'It's quite some distance from here. But I'm afraid, dear colleagues, that it must be our next port of call.'

He fell into his past again.

Deeper this time; back to when he was twelve. Pascale's flashbacks were non-sequential; the biography was constructed with no regard for the niceties of linear time. At first he was disorientated, even though he was the one person in the universe who ought not to have been adrift in his own history. But the confusion slowly gave way to the realisation that her way was the right one; that it was right to treat his past as shattered mosaic of interchangeable events; an acrostic embedded with numerous equally legitimate interpretations.

It was 2373; only a few decades after Bernsdottir's discovery of the first Shroud. Whole academic disciplines had sprung up around the central mystery, as well as numerous government and private research agencies. The Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies was only one of dozens of such organisations, but it also happened to be backed by one of the wealthiest -- and most powerful -- families in the whole human bubble. But when the break came, it was not via the calculated moves of large scientific organisations. It was through one man's random and dedicated madness.

His name was Philip Lascaille.

He was a SISS scientist working at one of the permanent stations near what was now called Lascaille's Shroud, in the trans Tau Ceti sector. Lascaille was also one of a team kept on permanent stand-by should there ever be a need for human delegates to travel to the Shroud, although no one considered that this was very likely. But the delegates existed, with a ship kept in readiness to carry them the remaining five hundred million kilometres to the boundary, should the invitation ever arrive.

Lascaille decided not to wait.

Alone, he boarded and stole the SISS contact craft. By the time anyone realised what was happening, it was far too late to stop him. A remote destruct existed, but its use might have been construed by the Shroud as an act of aggression, something no one wanted to risk. The decision was to let fate take its course. No one seriously expected to see Lascaille come back alive. And though he did eventually return, his doubters had in a sense been right, because a large portion of his sanity had not come back with him. Lascaille had come very close indeed to the Shroud before some force had propelled him back out again -- perhaps only a few tens of thousands of kilometres from the surface, although at that range there was no easy way of telling where space ended and the Shroud began. No one doubted that he had come closer than any other human being, or for that matter any living creature.

But the cost had been horrific.

Not all of Philip Lascaille -- not even most of him -- had come back. Unlike those who had gone before him, his body had not been pulped and shredded by incomprehensible forces near the boundary. But something no less final appeared to have happened to his mind. Nothing remained of his personality, except for a few residual traces which served only to heighten the almost absolute obliteration of everything else. Enough brain function remained for him to keep himself alive without machine assistance, and his motor control seemed completely unimpaired. But there was no intelligence left; no sense that Lascaille perceived his surroundings except in the most simplistic manner; no indication that he had any grasp of what had happened to him, or was even aware of the passage of time; no indication that he retained the ability to memorise new experiences or retrieve those that had happened to him before his trip to the Shroud. He retained the ability to vocalise, but while Lascaille occasionally spoke well-formed words, or even fragments of sentences, nothing he uttered made the slightest sense.

Lascaille -- or what remained of Lascaille -- was returned to the Yellowstone system, and then to the SISS habitat, where medical experts desperately tried to construct a theory for what might have happened. Eventually -- and it was more out of desperation than logic -- they decided that the fractal, restructured spacetime around the Shroud had not been able to support the information density of his brain. In passing through it, his mind had been randomised on the quantum level, although the molecular processes of his body had not been noticeably affected. He was like a text which had been transcribed imprecisely -- so that much of the meaning was lost -- and then retranscribed.

Yet Lascaille was not the last person to attempt such a suicide mission. A cult had grown up around him, its chief rumour being that, despite his exterior signs of dementia, the passage close to the Shroud had bestowed on him something like Nirvana. Once or twice every decade, around the known Shrouds, someone would attempt to follow Lascaille into the boundary, and the results were miserably uniform, and no improvement on what Lascaille himself had achieved. The lucky ones came back with half their minds gone, while the unlucky ones never made it back at all, or did so in ships so mangled that their human remains resembled a salmon-coloured paste.

While Lascaille's cult bloomed, people soon forgot about the man himself. Perhaps the salivating, mumbling reality of his existence was a touch too uncomfortable.

Sylveste, however, did not forget. More than that, he had become obsessed with teasing a last, vital truth out of the man. His familial connections guaranteed him an audience with Lascaille whenever he wanted -- provided he ignored Calvin's forebodings. And so he had taken to visiting, and waiting in absolute patience while Lascaille attended to his pavement drawings, ever watchful for the one, transient clue which he knew the man would eventually bequeath him.

In the end, it was a lot more than a clue.

It was difficult to remember how long he had waited, on that day when the waiting finally paid off. For all that he intended to focus his mind with absolute attentiveness on what Lascaille was doing, he had been finding it increasingly difficult. It was like staring intently at a long series of abstract paintings -- one's concentration inevitably began to wane, no matter how much one tried to keep it fresh. Lascaille had been halfway through the sixth or seventh hopeless chalk mandala of the day, executing the task with the same fervent dedication he brought to every mark he made.

Then, with no forewarning, he had turned to Sylveste and said, with complete clarity: 'The Jugglers offer the key, Doctor.'

Sylveste was too shocked to interrupt.

'It was explained to me,' Lascaille continued blithely. 'While I was in Revelation Space.' Sylveste forced himself to nod, as naturally as possible. Some still-calm part of his mind recognised the phrase which Lascaille had spoken. As far as anyone had ever been able to tell, it was what Lascaille now called the Shroud boundary -- 'space' in which he had been granted certain 'revelations' too abstruse to relate.

Yet now his tongue seemed to have been loosened.

'There was a time when the Shrouders travelled between the stars,' Lascaille said. 'Much as we do now -- although they were an ancient species and had been starfaring for many millions of years.

They were quite alien, you know.' He paused to switch a blue chalk for a crimson one, placing it between his toes. With that, he continued his work on the mandala. But with his hand -- now free from that task -- he began to sketch something on an adjacent patch of ground. The creature he drew was multi-limbed, tentacled, armour-plated, spined, barely symmetrical. It looked less like a member of a starfaring alien culture than something which might have flopped and oozed its way across the bed of a Precambrian ocean. It was utterly monstrous.

'That's a Shrouder?' Sylveste said, with a shiver of anticipation. 'You actually met one?'

'No; I never truly entered the Shroud,' Lascaille said. 'But they communicated with me. They revealed themselves to my mind; imparted much of their history and nature.'

Sylveste tore his gaze away from the nightmarish creature. 'Where do the Jugglers come into it?'

'The Pattern Jugglers have been around for a long time and they're to be found on many worlds.

All starfaring cultures in this part of the galaxy encounter them sooner or later.' Lascaille tapped his sketch. 'Just like we did, so did the Shrouders, only very much earlier. Do you understand what I'm saying, Doctor?'

'Yes...' He thought he did, anyway. 'But not the point of it.'

Lascaille smiled. 'Whoever -- or whatever -- visits the Jugglers is remembered by them.

Remembered absolutely, that is -- down to the last cell; the last synaptic connection. That's what the Jugglers are. A vast biological archiving system.'

This was true enough, Sylveste knew. Humans had gleaned very little of significance concerning the Jugglers, their function or origin. But what had become clear almost from the outset was that the Jugglers were capable of storing human personalities within their oceanic matrix, so that anyone who swam in the Juggler sea -- and was dissolved and reconstituted in the process -- would have achieved a kind of immortality. Later, those patterns could be realised again; temporarily imprinted in the mind of another human. The process was muddy and biological, so the stored patterns were contaminated by millions of other impressions, each subtly influencing the other. Even in the early days of Juggler exploration it had been obvious that the ocean had stored patterns of alien thought; hints of otherness bleeding into the thoughts of the swimmers -- but these impressions had always remained indistinct.

'So the Shrouders were remembered by the Jugglers,' Sylveste said. 'But how does that help us?'

'More than you realise. The Shrouders may look alien, but the basic architectures of their minds were not completely dissimilar to our own. Ignore the bodyplan; realise instead that they were social creatures with a verbal language and the same perceptual environment. To some degree, a human could be made to think like a Shrouder, without becoming completely inhuman in the process.' He looked at Sylveste again. 'It would be within the capabilities of the Jugglers to instil a Shrouder neural transform within a human neocortex.'

It was a chilling thought: achieve contact not by meeting an alien, but by becoming it. If that was what Lascaille meant. 'How would that help us?'

'It would stop the Shroud from killing you.'

'I don't follow you.'

'Understand that the Shroud is a protective structure. What lies within are... not just the Shrouders themselves, but technologies which are simply too powerful to be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Over millions of years, the Shrouders combed the galaxy seeking harmful things left over by extinct cultures -- things which I can almost not even begin to describe to you. Things which may once have served good, but which are also capable of being used as weapons of unimaginable horror. Technologies and techniques which may only be deployed by ascended races: means of manipulating spacetime, or of moving faster-than-light... other things which your mind literally can't encompass.'

Sylveste wondered if that really were the case. 'Then the Shrouds are -- what? Treasure chests, where only the most advanced races get the keys?'

'More than that. They defend themselves against intruders. A Shroud's boundary is almost a living thing. It responds to the thought patterns of those who enter it. If the patterns do not resemble those of the Shrouders... it fights back. It alters spacetime locally, creating vicious eddies of curvature. Curvature equals gravitational sheer stress, Doctor. It rips you apart. But the right kinds of mind... the Shroud admits them; guides them closer, protects them in a pocket of quiet space.'

The implications, Sylveste saw, were shattering. Think like a Shrouder and one could slip past those defences... into the glittering heart of the treasure box. So what if humans were not advanced enough by Shrouder reckoning to behold that treasure? If they were clever enough to break open the box, were they not entitled to take what they found? According to Lascaille, the Shrouders had assumed the role of galactic matron when they secreted those harmful technologies... but had anyone asked them to do it? Then another question ghosted into his mind.

'Why did they let you know this, if what was inside the Shrouds had to be protected at all costs?'

'I don't know if it was intentional. The barrier around the Shroud that bears my name must have failed to identify me as alien, if only fleetingly. Perhaps it was damaged, or perhaps my... state of mind... confused it. Once I had begun to penetrate the Shroud, information began to flow between us. That was how I learned these things. What the Shroud contained, and how its defences might be circumvented. It's not a trick machines can learn, you know.' The last remark seemed to have come from nowhere; for a moment it hung there before Lascaille continued. 'But the Shroud must have begun to suspect that I was foreign. It rejected me; flung me back out into space.'

'Why didn't it just kill you?'

'It must not have been completely confident in its judgement.' He paused. 'In Revelation Space, I did sense doubt. Vast arguments taking place around me, quicker than thought. In the end, caution must have won the day.'

Now another question; the one he had wanted to ask since the moment Lascaille had opened his mouth.

'Why have you waited until now to tell us these things?'