The next day Rashmika got her first view of the bridge.
There was no fanfare. She was inside the caravan, in the forward observation deck of one of the two leading vehicles, having forsworn any further trips to the roof after the incident with the mirror-faced Observer.
She had been warned that they were now very close to the edge of the fissure, but for all the long kilometres of the approach there had been no change in the topography of the landscape. The caravan—longer than ever now, having picked up several more sections along the way—was winding its ponderous way through a sheer-sided ice canyon. Occasionally the moving machines scraped against the blue-veined canyon walls, which were twice as high as the tallest vehicle in the procession, dislodging tonnes of ice. It had always been hazardous for the walkers making their way to the equator on foot, but now that they had to traverse the same narrow defile as the caravan, it must have been downright terrifying. There was no room for the caravan to steer around them now, so they had to let it rollover them, making sure they were not aligned with the wheels, treads or stomping mechanical feet. If the machines didn’t get them, the falling ice-boulders probably would. Rashmika watched with a mingled sense of horror and sympathy as the parties vanished from view beneath the huge hull of the caravan. There was no way to tell if they made it out the other side, and she doubted that the caravan would stop if there was an accident.
There came a point where the canyon made a gentle curve to the right, blocking any view of the oncoming scenery for several minutes, and then suddenly there was an awful, heart-stopping absence in the landscape. She had not realised how used she had become to seeing white crags stepping into the distance. Now the ground fell away and the deep black sky dropped much lower than it had before, like a curtain whose tangled lower hem had just unfurled to its fullest extent. The sky bit hungrily into the land.
The road emerged from the canyon and ran along a ledge that skirted one wall of Ginnungagap Rift. To the left of the road, the sheer-sided canyon wall lurched higher; to the right, there was nothing at all. The road was just broad enough to accommodate the two-vehicle-wide procession, with the right-hand sides of the right-hand vehicles never more than two or three metres from the very edge. Rashmika looked back along the extended, motley train of the caravan—which was now thrillingly visible in its entirety as it had never been before—and saw wheels, treads, crawler plates, piston-driven limbs and flexing carapacial segments picking their way daintily along the edge, scuffing tonnes of ice into the abyss with each misplaced tread or impact. All along the caravan, the individual masters were steering and correcting like crazy, trying to navigate the fine line between smashing against the wall on the left and plunging over the side on the right. They couldn’t slow down because the whole point of this short cut was to make up valuable lost time. Rashmika wondered what would happen to the rest of the caravan if one of the elements got it wrong and went over the side. She had seen the inter-caravan couplings, but had no idea how strong they were. Would that one errant machine take the whole lot with it, or fall gallantly alone, leaving the others to close up the gap in the procession? Was there some nightmarish protocol for deciding such things in advance: a slackening of the couplings, perhaps?
Well, she was up front. If anywhere was safe, it had to be up at the front where the navigators had the best view of the terrain.
After several minutes during which no calamity occurred, she began to relax, and for the first time was able to pay due attention to the bridge, which had been looming ahead all the while.
The caravan was moving in a southerly direction, towards the equator, along the eastern flank of Ginnungagap Rift. The bridge was still some way south. Perhaps it was her imagination, but she thought she could see the curvature of the world as the high wall of the Rift marched into the distance. The top was jagged and irregular, but if she smoothed out those details in her mind’s eye, it appeared to follow a gentle arc, like the trajectory of a satellite. It was very difficult to judge how distant the bridge was, or how wide the Rift was at this point. Although Rashmika recalled that the Rift was forty kilometres wide at the point where the bridge spanned it, the ordinary rules of perspective simply had no application: there were no visual cues to assist her; no intermediate objects to offer a sense of diminishing scale; no attenuation of detail or colour due to atmosphere. Although the bridge and the far wall looked vast and distant, they could as easily have been five kilometres away as forty.
Rashmika judged the bridge to be still some fifty or sixty kilometres away as the crow flies—more than two-hundredths of the circumference of Hela—but the road along the ledge took many twists and turns getting there. She could easily believe they had another hundred kilometres of travel to go before they arrived at the eastern approach to the bridge.
Still, at least now she could see it—and it was everything she had ever imagined. Everyone said that photographs could not even remotely convey the true essence of the structure. Rashmika had always doubted that, but now she saw that the common opinion was quite correct: to appreciate the bridge, it was necessary to see it.
What people appeared to find most dismaying about the bridge, Rashmika knew, was its very lack of strangeness. Disregarding its scale and the materials that had been used to build it, it looked like something transplanted from the pages of human history, something built on Earth, in the age of iron and steam. It made her think of lanterns and horses, duels and courtships, winter palaces and musical fountains—except that it was vast and looked as if it had been blown from glass or carved from sugar.
The upper surface of the bridge described a very gentle arc as it crossed from one side of the Rift to the other, and was at its highest in the middle. Apart from that it was perfectly flat, unencumbered by any form of superstructure. There were no railings on either side of the road bed, which was breathtak-ingly shallow—from her present angle it looked like a rapier-thin line of light. It appeared broken in places, until she moved her head slightly and the illumination shifted. Fifty kilometres away, and the movement of her head was enough to affect what she could see of the delicate structure! The span was indeed unsupported for most of its width, but at either end—reaching out to a distance of five or six kilometres from the walls—was a delicate tracery of filigreed stanchions. They were curled into absurd spirals and whorls, scrolllike flourishes and luscious organic involutes catching the light and throwing it back to her, not in white and silver, but in a prismatic shimmer of rainbow hues. Every tilt of her head shifted the colours into some new configuration of glories.
The bridge looked evanescent, as if one ill-judged breath might be sufficient to blow it away.
Yet they were actually going to cross it.
As soon as he had washed and breakfasted, Vasko set off to report for duty at the nearest Security Arm centre. He had slept for little more than four hours, but the alertness he had felt the night before was still there, stretched a little thinner and tighter. First Camp was deceptively quiet; the streets were littered with debris, some premises and dwellings had been damaged and the evidence of fires smouldered here and there, but the vast numbers of people he had seen the night before seemed to have vanished. Perhaps they had responded to Scorpio’s pronouncement after all and returned to their homes, having grasped how unpleasant it was going to be on the Nostalgia for Infinity.
Vasko realised his error as soon as he turned the corner next to the Security Arm compound. A huge grey mob was pressed up against the building, many hundreds of people crushed together with their belongings piled at their feet. A dozen or so SA guards were keeping order, standing on railed plinths with small weapons presented but not aimed directly at the crowd. Other Arm personnel, in addition to unarmed administration officials, were manning tables that had been set up outside the two-storey conch structure. Paperwork was being processed and stamped; personal effects were being weighed and labelled. Most of the people had obviously decided not to wait for the official rules: they were here, now, ready to depart, and very few of them looked as if they were having second thoughts.
Vasko made his way through the crowd, doing his best not to push and shove. There was no sign of Urton, but this was not her designated Arm centre. He stopped at one of the tables and waited for the officer manning it to finish processing one of the refugees.
“Are they still planning to start flying them out at noon?” Vasko asked quietly.
“Earlier,” the man replied, his voice low. “The pace has been stepped up. Word is we’re still going to have trouble coping.”
“There’s no way that ship can accommodate all of us,” Vasko said. “Not now. It’d take months to get us all into the sleep caskets.”
“Tell that to the pig,” the man said and went back to his work, stamping a sheet of paper almost without looking at it.
Sudden warmth kissed the back of Vasko’s neck. He looked up and squinted against the blinding-bright underside of a machine, an aircraft or shuttle sliding across the square. He expected it to slow and descend, but instead the machine curved away, heading beyond the shore, towards the spire. It slid under the clouds like a bright ragged flake of daylight.
“See, they’ve already begun moving ‘em out,” the man said. “As if that’s going to make everyone else calmer…”
“I’m sure Scorpio knows what he’s doing,” Vasko said. He turned away before the man was able to answer.
He pushed beyond the processing tables, through the rest of the crowd, and into the conch structure. Inside, it was the same story: people squeezed in everywhere, holding paperwork and possessions aloft, children crying. He could feel the panic increasing by the minute.
He passed through into the part of the building reserved for SA personnel. In the small curved chamber where he usually received his assignments, he found a trio of people sitting around a low table drinking seaweed tea. He knew them all.
“Malinin,” said Gunderson, a young woman with short red hair. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
He didn’t care for her tone. “I came for my duties,” he said.
“I didn’t think you mixed with the likes of us these days,” she sneered.
He reached across the tea-drinkers to rip the assignment sheet from the wall. “I mix with whoever I like,” he said.
The second of the trio, a pig named Flenser, said, “We heard you were more likely to be hanging around with administration stiffs.”
Vasko looked at the docket. He couldn’t see his name against any of the regular duties. “Like Scorpio, you mean?”
“I bet you know a lot more than we do about what’s going on,” Gunderson said. “Don’t you?”
“If I did, I’d hardly be in a position to talk about it.” Vasko pinned the sheet back on the wall. “Truthfully, I don’t know very much more.”
“You’re lying,” the third one—a man named Cory—said. “You want to climb that ladder, Malinin, you’d better learn how to lie better than that.”
“Thanks,” he said, smiling, “but I’ll settle for learning how to serve this colony.”
“You want to know where to go?” Gunderson asked him.
“It would help.”
“They told us to pass you a message,” she said. “You’re expected in the High Conch at eight.”
“Thank you,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful.” He turned to leave.
“Fuck you, Malinin,” he heard her say to his back. “You think you’re better than us, is that it?”
“Not at all,” he replied, surprised by his calmness. He turned back to face her. “I think my abilities are average. I just happen to feel a sense of responsibility, an obligation to serve Ararat to the best of my abilities. I’d be astonished if you felt differently.”
“You think that now Clavain’s out of the picture, you can slime your way to the top?”
He looked at Gunderson with genuine surprise. “That thought never crossed my mind.”
“Well, that’s good, because if it had, you’d be making a se-rious mistake. You don’t have what it takes, Malinin. None of us have got what it takes, but you especially don’t have it.”
“No? And what exactly is it that I don’t have?”
“The balls to stand up against the pig,” she said, as if this should have been obvious to all present.
In the High Conch, Antoinette Bax was already seated at the table, a compad open in front of her. Cruz, Pellerin and several other colony seniors had joined her, and now Blood came in, swaggering like a wrestler.
“There’d better be a good reason for this,” he said. “It’s not as if I haven’t got a shitload of other things I really need to be taking care of.”
“Where’s Scorpio?” she asked.
“In the infirmary, checking on mother and daughter. He’ll be here as soon as he can,” Blood replied.
“And Malinin?”
“I had someone leave a message for him. He’ll get here eventually.” Blood collapsed into a seat. Reflexively, he took out his knife and began to scrape the blade against his chin. It made a thin, insectile noise.
“Well, we’ve got a problem,” Antoinette said. “In the last six hours, the neutrino flux from the ship has about trebled. If the flux increases another ten, fifteen per cent, that ship’s going to have nowhere to go but up.”
“There’s no exhaust yet?” asked Cruz.
“No,” Antoinette replied, “and I’m pretty worried about what will happen when those drives do start thrusting. No one was living around the bay when she came down. We need to think seriously about an evacuation to inland areas. I’d recommend moving everyone to the outlying islands, but I know that’s not possible given the existing load on aircraft and shuttles.”
“Yeah, dream on,” Blood said.
“All the same, we have to do something. When the Captain decides to take off, we’re going to have tidal waves, clouds of superheated steam, noise so loud it will deafen everyone within hundreds of kilometres, all kinds of harmful radiation spewing out… ” Antoinette trailed off, hoping she had made her point. “Basically, this isn’t going to be the kind of environment you want to be anywhere near unless you’re inside a spacesuit.”
Blood buried his face in his hands, making a mask of his stubby pig fingers. Antoinette had seen Scorpio do something similar when crises pressed on him from all sides. With Clavain gone and Scorpio absent, Blood was experiencing the responsibility he had always craved. Antoinette doubted that the novelty of command had lasted for more than about five minutes.
“I can’t evacuate the town,” he said.
“You have no choice,” Antoinette insisted.
He lowered his hands and jabbed a finger at the window. “That’s our fucking ship. We shouldn’t be speculating about what it’s going to do. We should be giving it orders, where and when it suits us.”
“Sorry, Blood, but that isn’t how it works,” Antoinette said.
“There’ll be panic,” Cruz said. “Worse than anything we’ve seen. All the processing stations wilt have to be closed down and relocated. It’ll delay exodus flights to the Infinity by at least a day. And where are those relocated people going to sleep tonight? There’s nothing for them inland—just a bunch of rocks. We’d have hundreds dead of exposure by daybreak.”
“I don’t have all the answers,” Antoinette said. “I’m just pointing out the difficulties.”
“There must be something else we can do,” Cruz said. “Damn, we should have had contingencies in place for this.”
“Should haves don’t count,” Antoinette said. It was something her father had always told her. It had annoyed her intensely, and she was dismayed to hear the same words coming out of her mouth before she could stop them.
“Pellerin,” Blood said, “what about swimmer corps intervention? Ararat seems to be on our side, or it wouldn’t have made a channel for the boats to reach the ship. Anything you can offer?”
Pellerin shook her head. “Sorry. Not now. If the Jugglers show signs of returning to normal activity patterns, we might sanction an exploratory swim, but not before then. I’m not sending someone to their death, Blood, not when there’s so little chance of a useful outcome.”
“I understand,” the pig said.
“Wait,” Cruz said. “Let’s turn this around. If it’s going to be such a bad thing to be anywhere near the ship when it lifts, maybe we should be looking at ways to speed up the exodus.”
“We’re already moving ‘em out as fast as we can,” Blood said.
“Then cut back on the bureaucracy,” Antoinette said. “Just move them and worry about the details later. And don’t take all day doing it. We may not have that much time left. Shit, what I wouldn’t give for Storm Bird now.”
“Perhaps there is something you can do for us,” Cruz said, gazing straight at her.
Antoinette returned the one-eyed woman’s stare. “Name it.”
“Go back aboard the Infinity. Reason with the Captain. Tell him we need some breathing space.”
It was not what she wanted to hear. She had, if anything, become even more frightened of the Captain since their conversation; the thought of summoning him again filled her with renewed dread.
“He may not want to talk,” she said. “Even if he does, he may not want to hear anything I have to say.”
“You might still buy us time,” Cruz said. “In my book, that’s got to be better than nothing.”
“I guess,” Antoinette agreed, reluctantly.
“So you may as well try it,” Cruz said. “There’s no shortage of transport to the ship, either. With administration privileges, you could be aboard in half an hour.”
As if this was meant to encourage her.
Antoinette was staring at her fingers, lost in the metal intricacies of her home-made jewellery and hoping for some remission from this duty, when Vasko Malinin entered the room. He was flushed, his hair glistening with rain or sweat. Antoinette thought he looked terribly young to be sitting amongst these seniors; it seemed unfair to taint him with such matters. The young were still entitled to believe that the world’s problems always had clear solutions.
“Have a seat,” Blood said. “Anything I can get you—coffee, tea?”
“I had trouble collecting my orders from my duty station,” Vasko said. “The crowds are getting quite heavy. When they saw my uniform, they wouldn’t let me leave until I’d more or less promised them seats on one of those shuttles.”
The pig played with his knife. “You didn’t, I hope.”
“Of course not, but I hope everyone understands the severity of the problem.”
“We’ve got a rough idea, thanks,” Antoinette said. Then she stood up, pulling down the hem of her formal blouse.
“Where are you going?” Vasko asked.
“To have a chat with the Captain,” she said.
In another part of the High Conch, several floors below, a series of partially linked, scalloplike chambers had been opened out of the conch matter with laborious slowness and much expenditure of energy. The chambers now formed the wards of the main infirmary for First Camp, where the citizenry received what limited medical services the administration could provide.
The doctor’s two green servitors budged aside as Scorpio entered, their spindly jointed limbs clicking against each other. He pushed between them. The bed was positioned centrally, with an incubator set on a trolley next to it on one side and a chair on the other.
Valensin stood up from the chair, placing aside a compad he had been consulting.
“How is she?” Scorpio asked.
“Mother or daughter?”
“Don’t be clever, doc. I’m not in the mood.”
“Mother is fine—except, of course, for the obvious and predictable side effects of stress and fatigue.” Milky-grey daylight filtered into the room from one high slit of a window, which was actually a part of the conch material left unpainted; the light flared off the glass in Valensin’s rhomboid spectacles. “I do not believe she requires any particular care other than time and rest.”
“And Aura?”
“The child is as well as can be expected.”
Scorpio looked at the small thing in the incubator. It was surprisingly shrivelled and red. It twitched like some beached thing struggling for air.
“That doesn’t tell me much.”
“Then I’ll spell it out for you,” Valensin said. Highlights in the doctor’s slicked-back hair gleamed cobalt blue. “The child has already undergone four potentially traumatic procedures. The first was Remontoire’s insertion of the Conjoiner implants to permit communication with the child’s natural mother. Then the child was surgically kidnapped, removed from her mother’s womb. Then she was implanted inside Skade, perhaps following another period in an incubator. Finally, she was removed from Skade under less than optimal field surgical conditions.”
Scorpio assumed Valensin had heard the full story of what happened in the iceberg. “Take my word for it: there wasn’t a lot of choice.”
Valensin laced his fingers. “Well, she is resting. That’s good. And there do not appear to be any immediate and obvious complications. But in the long run? Who can tell? If what Khouri tells us is true, then it isn’t as if she was ever destined for a normal development.” Valensin lowered himself back down into the seat. His legs folded like long hinged stilts, the crease in his trousers razor-sharp. “On a related matter, Khouri had a request. I thought it best to refer it to you first.”
“Go on.”
“She wants the girl put back into her womb.”
Scorpio looked again at the incubator and the child within it. It was a larger, more sophisticated version of the portable unit they had taken to the iceberg. Incubators were amongst the most valued technological artefacts on Ararat, and great care was taken to keep them running.
“Could it be done?” he asked.
“Under ordinary circumstances, I would never contemplate such a thing.”
“These aren’t ordinary circumstances.”
“Putting a child back inside a mother isn’t like putting a loaf of bread back into an oven,” Valensin said. “It would require delicate microsurgery, hormonal readjustment… a host of complex procedures.”
Scorpio let the doctor’s condescension wash over him. “But it could be done?”
“Yes, if she wants it badly enough.”
“But it would be risky?”
Valensin nodded after a moment, as if until then he had considered only the technical hurdles, rather than the hazards. “Yes. To mother and child both.”
“Then it doesn’t happen,” Scorpio said.
“You seem rather certain.”
“That child cost the life of my friend. Now that we’ve got her back, I’m not planning on losing her.”
“I hope you’ll be the one to break the news to the mother, in that case.”
“Leave it to me,” Scorpio said.
“Very well.” Scorpio had the feeling that the doctor was disappointed. “One other thing: she mentioned that word again, in her sleep.”
“What word?”
“Hella,” Valensin said. “Or something like it.”
Rashmika’s estimate turned out to have been optimistic. She had expected another two or three hours of travel before the caravan reached the eastern side of the bridge, but after four hours they appeared only to have made up half the distance. There had been many frustrating periods where the caravan doubled back on itself, following sinuous reverse-loops in the walls. There were times when they had to squeeze through runnels in the cliff, moving at little more than walking pace while the ice scraped against either side of the procession. Two or three times they had come to a complete halt while some technical matter was attended to—no explanation was ever forthcoming. She had the impression that the drivers tried to make up time after these delays, but the subsequent recklessness—which caused the vehicles to bounce and swerve perilously close to the edge—only added to her anxiety. When the quaestor had told her that they would be taking the bridge she had felt great apprehension, but now she was inclined to think it preferable to the many hazards of the ledge traverse. The road along the ledge was a human artefact: it had been blasted or cut into the cliffs within the last century and had probably been repaired and realigned several times since then. Doubt-less bits of it had collapsed over the years, and many vehicles must have taken the long, ballistic plunge to the bottom of the Rift. But the bridge was surely older than that. Now that she had given the matter some thought, it struck her as highly unlikely that it would choose her lifetime in which to come crashing down. It would actually be a remarkable privilege were that to happen.
Even so, she would still be glad when they reached the other side.
She was looking out of the viewing window when she saw another quick succession of flashes, like those she had observed from the roof. They were brighter now—she was undoubtedly closer to the source of whatever they were—and they left hemispherical purple after-images on her eyes, even when she blinked.
“You’re wondering what they are,” a voice said.
She turned. She was expecting to see Quaestor Jones, but the voice did not quite have his timbre. It was the voice of a younger man, with an accent from somewhere in the badlands.
Harbin, she wondered for an instant? Could it possibly be Harbin?
But it wasn’t her brother.
She didn’t recognise the man at all. He was taller than her and a little older, she guessed, although there was something in his expression—something in his eyes, now that she narrowed it down—that made him appear to be a lot older. He was not really bad-looking, she supposed. He had a thin, serious face, with prominent cheekbones and a jawline so sharp it hurt. His hair was cut very short, shorter than she liked it, so that she could see the exact shape of his skull: a phrenologist’s dream date. He had small ears that stuck out more than he might have wished. His neck was thin and his Adam’s apple was prominent in a way that always alarmed her in men, as if something inside his neck had popped out of alignment and needed to be pushed back before harm was done.
“How do you know what I’m wondering?” Rashmika asked.
“Well, you are, aren’t you?”
She half-scowled. “And you’d know all about them, I suppose?”
“They’re charges,” he said amicably, as if he was accustomed to this kind of rudeness. “Nuclear demolition charges. They’re being used by Permanent Way teams clearing the road ahead of the cathedrals. God’s Fire.”
She had already guessed that the explosions had something to do with the Way. “I didn’t think they ever used anything like that.”
“Mostly they don’t. I haven’t been keeping up with the news, but they must have hit some unusually heavy obstructions. They could clear it with conventional charges and digging, if they had all the time in the world. But of course that’s the one thing they never have, not when those cathedrals are coming closer all the while. My guess is it was a rearguard spoiler action:”
“Oh, do please enlighten me.”
“It’s what happens when the cathedrals at the back begin to lose ground. Sometimes they sabotage the Way behind them to cause trouble for the leading cathedrals when they come round again on the next loop. Of course, it’s nothing anyone can ever prove…”
She studied his clothing: trousers and a high-collared loose-sleeved shirt; light, flat-soled shoes; everything grey and nondescript. No indication of rank, status, wealth or religious affiliation.
“Who are you?” Rashmika asked. “You’re talking to me as if we’ve already met, but I don’t know you at all.”
“But you do know me,” the young man said.
His face said that he was telling the truth, or at least not believing himself to be lying. His certainty made her all the less willing to give ground, irrational as that was.
“I think you’re mistaken.”
“What I mean is, we have met. And I believe you owe me a debt of gratitude.”
“Do I, now?”
“I saved your life—when you were on the roof, looking down the access shaft. You nearly fell, and I caught you.”
“That wasn’t you,” she said. “That was…”
“An Observer? Yes, it was. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t me.”
“Don’t be silly,” Rashmika said.
“Why don’t you believe me? Did you see my face?”
“Not clearly, no.”
‘Then you have no reason to think it wasn’t me, either. Yes, I know it could have been anyone up there. But who else saw what happened?“
“You can’t be an Observer.”
“No, not now I can’t.”
She did not want his company. Not specifically his company, but company in general. She wanted only to observe the slow approach to the bridge, to compose her thoughts as they made the crossing, mentally mapping the difficult terrain that lay ahead of her. She did not want idle conversation or distraction, most certainly not with the sort of person he claimed to be.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked. “Are you an Observer or aren’t you?”
“I was, but now I’m not.”
She felt a flicker of sympathy. “Because of what happened on the roof?”
“No. That didn’t help, certainly, but my doubts had already set in before that happened.”
“Oh.” Then her conscience was clear.
“I can’t say you didn’t play a small part in it, though.”
“What?”
“I saw you the first time you came up. I was on the viewing platform, with the others. We were supposed to be concentrating on Haldora, blocking out all external distractions. They could make it easy for us by physically restricting our view, forcing our eyes to stay locked on the planet, but that’s not the way it’s done. There has to be an element of discipline, an element of self-control. We’re supposed to look at Haldora for every instant of the day, despite the distractions. There are devices in the helmets that monitor how well we do that, recording every twitch of the eye. And I saw you. Only in my peripheral vision, to begin with. My eye made an involuntary movement to bring you into focus and I lost contact with Haldora for a fraction of a second.”
“Naughty,” she said.
“Naughtier than you think. There would have been a disciplinary measure for just that violation. It’s not so much the fact that I looked away as that I was occupying a space on the roof that might have been used by someone more vigilant. That was the sin, because in that instant there was always a chance—no matter how small—that Haldora might vanish. And someone else would have been denied the chance of witnessing that miracle because I had the weakness of mind to look away.”
“But it didn’t vanish. You’re off the hook.”
“I assure you that isn’t the way they see it.” He looked down, sheepishly, she thought. “Anyway, it’s academic: I made things a lot worse. I didn’t look back towards Haldora even when I was consciously aware that I’d lost contact. I just watched you, straining to hold you in focus, not daring to move any part of my body. I couldn’t see your face, but I could see the way you moved. I knew you were a woman, and when I realised that it just made it worse. It wasn’t idle curiosity any more. I wasn’t simply being distracted by some oddity in the landscape.”
When he said “woman” she felt a quiet thrill that she hoped did not show in her face. When had anyone ever called her that before without prefacing it with “young,” or something equally diminishing?
She blushed. “You can’t possibly have known who I was, though.”
“No,” he said, “not for certain. But when you came up again, I thought, ‘She must be a very independent-minded person.’ Nobody else had come up on to the roof the whole time I was there. And when you nearly had your accident… well, then I did see your face. Not clearly, but enough to know I’d recognise you again.” He paused, and for a moment watched the rolling view himself. “I did have my doubts,” he said, “even when I saw you here. But when I saw the flashes, I knew I had to take the chance. I’m glad I did. You seem like a nice person, and now you’ve as good as admitted you were the same person I helped up on the roof. Do you mind if I ask your name?”
“Provided you tell me yours.”
“Pietr,” he said. “Pietr Vale. I’m from Skull Cliff, in the Hyrrokkin lowlands.”
“Rashmika Els,” she said guardedly. “From High Scree, in the Vigrid badlands.”
“I thought I recognised the accent. I guess I’m not really a badlander myself, but we’re not from places so very far apart, are we?”
Rashmika felt torn between politeness and hostility. “I think you’ll find we’re a lot further apart than you realise.”
“Why do you say that? We’re both going south, aren’t we? Both taking the caravan towards the Way. How different can we be?”
“Very,” Rashmika said. “I’m not on a pilgrimage. I’m on an… enquiry.”
He smiled. “Call it what you will.”
“I’m on personal business. Personal secular business. Business that has nothing to do with your religion—which, incidentally, I do not believe in—but which has everything to do with right and wrong.”
“I was right. You really are a serious and determined person.”
She didn’t like that. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to your friends?”
“They won’t let me back,” he said. “They might have tolerated a moment of inattention; they might even have forgiven me a lapse of the kind I mentioned before. But once you leave them, that’s it. You’re poisoned. There is no way back.”
“Why did you leave?”
“Because of you, as I said. Because seeing you up there opened a glint of doubt in my armour. I don’t suppose it was ever very secure, or I wouldn’t have noticed you in the first place. But by the second occasion, when you nearly fell, I was already doubting that I had the conviction to continue.” At that, Rashmika started to say something, but he held up his hand and continued. “You shouldn’t blame yourself. Really, it could have been anyone up there. My faith was never as strong as the others‘. And when I thought about what lay ahead, what I was setting myself up for, I knew I didn’t have the strength to go through with it.”
She knew what he meant. The rigours of this part of the pilgrimage were as nothing compared to what would happen when Pietr reached the cathedral that was his destination. There, his faith would be irreversibly consolidated by chemical means. And as an Observer he would be surgically and neurologically adapted to enable him to witness Haldora for every instant of his existence. No sleep, no inattention, not even the respite of blinking.
Only mute observance, until he died.
“I wouldn’t have the strength either,” she said. “Even if I believed.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Because I believe in rational explanations. I do not believe planets simply cease to exist without good reason.”
“But there is a good reason. The best possible reason.”
“The work of God?”
Pietr nodded. Fascinated, she watched the bob of his Adam’s apple pushing against the high edge of his collar. “What better explanation can you ask for?”
“But why here, why now?”
“Because these are End Times,” Pietr said. “We’ve had human war and human plagues. Then we had stranger plagues and reports of stranger wars. Don’t you wonder where the refugees come from? Don’t you wonder why they come here, of all places? They know it. They know this is the place where it will begin. This is the place where it will happen.”
“I thought you said you weren’t a believer.”
“I said I wasn’t sure of the strength of my faith. That isn’t quite the same thing.”
“I think if God wanted to make a point, He’d find a better way to do it than through the random vanishing of a gas-giant planet light-years from Earth.”
“But it isn’t random,” Pietr countered, evading the rest of her point. “That’s what everyone thinks, but it isn’t true. The churches know it, and those who take the time to study the records know it, too.”
Now, despite herself, she found that she wanted to hear what he had to say. Pietr was correct: the vanishings of Hal-dora were always spoken of by the churches as if they were random events, subject to inscrutable divine scheduling. And the shameful thing was that she had always taken this information at face value, without questioning it. She had never stopped to think that the truth might be more complex. She had been far too preoccupied with her academic study of the scut-tlers to look further afield.
“If it isn’t random,” she asked, “then what is it?”
“I don’t know what you’d call it if you were a mathematician or a scholar. I’m neither. I only know what such people have told me. It’s true that you can never predict when a vanishing will occur—in that sense they are random. But the average gap between vanishings has been growing shorter ever since Quaiche witnessed the first one. It’s just that until recently no one could see it clearly. Now you can’t miss it, if you study the evidence.”
The back of Rashmika’s neck prickled. “Then show me the evidence. I want to see it.”
The caravan swerved sharply as it entered another of the tunnels bored through the side of the cliff.
“I can show you evidence,” he said, “but whether it’s the right evidence or not is another matter entirely.”
“You’re losing me, Pietr.”
The caravan scraped and gouged its way through the narrow confines of the tunnel. Rashmika heard thumps as dislodged ceiling materials—rocks and ice—hammered against the roof. She thought of the Observers up there and wondered what it was like for them.
“We’ll reach the bridge in four or five hours,” he said. “When we’re halfway across, meet me on the roof, where we were before. I’ll have something interesting to show you.”
“Why would I want to meet you on the roof, Pietr? Can I trust you?”
“Of course,” he said.
But she only accepted his word because she knew that he believed what he said.
Khouri awoke. Scorpio was with her when she opened her eyes, sitting in the seat next to her bed where Valensin had been earlier. Another hour had passed, and he had missed the meeting in the High Conch. He considered this an acceptable trade-off.
The woman blinked and rubbed sleep gum from her eyes. Her lips were caked in the stringy white residue of dried saliva. “How long have I been out?”
“It’s the morning of the day after we rescued Aura. You’ve been out for most of it. Doc says it’s just fatigue catching up with you. That whole time you were with us, you must have been running on vapour.”
Khouri’s head turned to the other side of the bed. “Aura?”
“Doc says she’s doing OK. Like you, she just needs rest. Considering ail the crap she’s been through, she’s doing pretty well.”
Khouri closed her eyes. She sighed. In that moment Scorpio saw tension flood out of her. It was as if the whole time she had been with them, ever since they had pulled her out of the capsule, she had been wearing a mask. Now the mask had been discarded.
She opened her eyes again. They were like windows into a younger woman. He remembered, forcefully, the way Khouri had been before the two ships had separated in the Resurgam system. Half his life ago.
“I’m glad she’s safe,” she said. “Thank you for helping me. And I’m sorry for what happened to Clavain.”
“So am I, but there was no choice. Skade has us. She set the trap, we walked into it. Once she knew she couldn’t benefit from holding on to Aura, she was ready to give her back to us. But she wasn’t going to let us leave without paying. She felt Clavain still owed her.”
“But what she did to him…”
Scorpio touched her head gently. “Don’t think about it now. Don’t ever think about it, if you can help it.”
“He was your friend, wasn’t he?”
“Guess so. Inasmuch as I’ve ever had friends.”
“I think you’ve had friends, Scorp. I think you still have friends. Two more now, if you want them.”
“Mother and daughter?”
“We both owe you.”
“I’ll take it under advisement.”
She laughed. It was good to hear someone laugh. Khouri was the last one he’d have expected it from. Before the trip to the iceberg she had struck him as monomanically driven, like a purposeful preprogrammed weapon sent down from the heavens. But he understood now that she was as fragile and human as the rest of them. Whatever “human” meant for a pig.
“Mind if I ask you something?” he said. “If you’re sleepy, I can come back in a little while.”
“Fetch me that water, will you?”
He brought her the beaker of water she’d indicated. She drank half of it down, then wiped the white scurf from her moistened lips. “Go on, Scorp.”
“You have a link to Aura, don’t you? A mental connection, via the implants Remontoire put in both of you?”
“Yes,” she said;, guardedly.
“Do you understand everything that comes through it?”
“How do you mean?”
“You said that Aura speaks through you. Fine, I think I understand that. But do you ever pick up unintentional stuff?”
“Like what?”
“You know the leakage we have from the wolf war? Stuff slipping through the defences? Do you ever get leakage from Aura, things that cross over the gap between you, but which you can’t process?”
“I wouldn’t know.” She sounded less happy now than she had a minute earlier. She was frowning. The windows had slammed shut again. “What sort of thing were you thinking of, exactly?”
“Not sure,” he said. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s just a shot in the dark. When we pulled you out of that capsule, Valensin hit you with sedatives because you wouldn’t let us examine you. Knocked you out good and cold. But in your sleep you still kept saying something.”
“I did, did I?”
“The word was ‘Hella,’ or something like that. It appeared to mean something to you, but when we asked you about it, you gave me what I’d call a plausible denial. I’m inclined to believe you were telling the truth, that the word doesn’t mean anything to you. But I’m wondering if it might mean something to Aura.”
She looked at him with suspicion and interest. “Does it mean anything to you?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Certainly doesn’t mean anything to anyone on Ararat. But in the wider sphere of human culture? Could mean almost anything. Lot of languages out there. Lot of people, lot of places.“
“Still can’t help you.”
“I understand. But the thing is, while I was sitting here waiting for you to wake up, you said something else.”
“What did I say?”
“Quaiche.”
She lifted the beaker to her lips and finished what remained of the water. “Still doesn’t mean anything to me,” she said.
“Pity. I was hoping it might ring some bells.”
“Well, maybe it means something to Aura. I don’t know, all right? I’m just her mother. Remontoire wasn’t a miracle worker. He linked us together, but it’s not as if everything she thinks is accessible to me. I’d go mad if that was the case.” Khouri paused. “You’ve got databases and things. Why don’t you query them?”
“I will, when things quieten down.” Scorpio pushed himself up from the seat. “One other thing: I understand you communicated a particular desire to Doctor Valensin?”
“Yeah, I talked to the doc.” She said it in a lilting voice, parodying his earlier tone.
“I understand why you want that to happen. I respect your wish and sympathise with you. If there was a safe way…”
She closed her eyes. “She’s my baby. They stole her from me. Now I want to give birth to her, the way it was meant to happen.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I just can’t allow it.”
“There’s no room for argument, is there?”
“None at all, I’m afraid.”
She did not reply, did not even turn away from him, but there was a withdrawal and the sliding down of a barrier he didn’t have to see to feel.
Scorpio turned from the bed and walked slowly out of the room. He had expected her to weep when he broke the news. If not weeping, then hysterics or insults or pleading. But she remained still, silent, as if she had always known it would happen this way. As he walked away, the force of her dignity made the back of his neck tingle. But it changed nothing.
Aura was a child. But she was also a tactical asset.