“What did you expect? He was a fugitive from Bosa Sennen. She was hardly going to write him an enthusiastic reference for future employment.” She looked down her nose at me, shaking her head very slowly. “I thought you might grasp the larger panorama here, sister. We do not have to like the man, or have a high opinion of his former career, to put him to good use.” She tilted her gaze to the globe. “Anyway, we can already put part of his claim to the test. Can you read the secondary inscription on this marble, Paladin? Focus your beams a little under the outer layer of the glass.”
A spray of red light danced over the red marble she had brought from the control room, still on the end of its stalk.
“It is legible, Captain Ness. The inscription is encoded, but in one of the encipherments we have already broken. It fits the established format for the orbital parameters of a body revolving around the Old Sun in an eccentric orbit, such as a bauble or a swallower.”
“Can you match these numbers to any known object?”
“Not yet.” His lights flashed a little more vigorously. “Orbits may have shifted between Occupations, of course, but … I do not yet have a match, even after expanding my search space.”
“Then it’s a bust,” I said, feeling a queer sort of relief.
“Not necessarily,” Fura said. “There are fifty million little rocks out there, and only a fraction of them have ever been properly entered into journals and almanacs. What Paladin’s telling us is that it isn’t a settled world or bauble, nor any place that anyone’s ever bothered visiting long enough to stick a name on it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t out there, still following its orbit. We know where to look for it, too. Bosa left it in the Glass Armillary, and these numbers should settle any remaining uncertainty.”
“Where is it now?” I asked.
Paladin answered. “Thirteen million leagues beyond the thirty-seventh processional, near the Sunward extremity of its orbit, and eight million leagues from our present location.”
“I expected it to be further out,” Fura said.
“Too far out and she wouldn’t have been able to visit it as often as Lagganvor says she did,” I replied. “She had to compromise, if she didn’t want to be lugging a hold full of heavy quoins around for years at a time. If it’s just a rock, with no possibility of settlement, and no rumours of treasure, there’s no great risk that anyone else would have stumbled on it while she was away. There’s no doubt, sister. It has to be the one.”
“The Miser,” she said, smiling, as if the words alone carried a rare and seductive flavour.
“Do you wish me to enter this designation into the memory registers, Captain Ness?”
“Wait,” I said, raising a hand. “She is not Captain Ness, so stop calling her that. Her name’s Arafura, and she has no more claim on the command of this ship than I do.”
“Tell her how she will be addressed henceforth, Paladin,” Fura said.
“I am instructed to call you Captain Ness, Miss Adrana. I am also instructed to call Miss Arafura Captain Ness.”
“What?” I asked, wrong-footed, and instinctively suspicious.
“Do not make more of it than is necessary,” Fura said, sighing, as if she had presented a gift and been underwhelmed by its reception. “I just thought it would simplify matters. I know I have no natural claim on the command of this ship, and that even if I felt our welfare was best served under my authority, it would engender bad feelings. So …” she turned her metal hand so that the palm was facing away from the table. “Let it be joint authority. I have my strengths, and you have yours … as you have demonstrated … and it is foolish to deny it.”
“The two of us seizing command is no better than one of us.”
“But you will not argue against it quite so vehemently, I fancy.” She favoured me with a smile, while her metal hand toyed with the magnetic paperweights on her desk. “It is not so very bad a solution, sister. And who else has shown the necessary fibre?”
“Prozor—” I began.
“Prozor,” she said, gently interrupting, “has been a good and loyal friend, and we could not have managed without her. But do you think she would welcome the mantle of responsibility? As for the others … Surt is barely literate, Strambli is still invalided, and Tindouf’s wits were scrambled years ago. And now we have three additional lives to consider. Make no mistake, Adrana. This is no easy station. But if the Ness sisters do not rise to the occasion then who shall?”
I should have denied her there and then. A great many things would have been avoided had I done so. Instead I brooded, and considered, and wondered if she did not make the tiniest grain of sense.
“You believe Lagganvor can get us into The Miser?”
“Yes …” she said, visibly relieved to be drawn away from matters of title. “He visited it, and knows enough about it. We won’t steer for it immediately, though. We’ll put some space between us and the wheel, enough that we drop off any sweepers, and run on dark sails before we make our turn. This is my prize, and I’ve no intention of leading anyone else to it.”
“You don’t even know how long we’d have to sail.”
“Paladin? Calculate a crossing for The Miser, given the terms I have just stipulated.”
“It is already done, Captain Ness. If we maintain a heading into the Empty, then turn once we are safely beyond deep sweeper range and have run out all catchcloth sails, we may approach The Miser in …” Paladin made a very human show of flickering his lights, even though I was certain he already had the desired figure. “Between forty-nine and fifty-one days.”
“Seven weeks,” Fura said, marvelling. “Seven weeks and it’s ours. Can we get there a little sooner if we run out the ordinary sails again, Paladin, once we’ve made our turn and we know we’ve lost ’em?”
“The additional photon pressure may spare us a save us two or three days, depending on the solar weather, Captain.”
“Then we’ll chance it. If I could tear my other arm to get us there an hour sooner, I would. I have to know what I’ve found myself.”
“What we have found,” I corrected her.
“Yes—transparently.” Then she shot me a penetrating, accusatory look. “Are you fully committed to this cause, sister? I need to know. There can’t be any half measures … no doubts.”
“Whatever it is.”
“Are you with me, sister? I need to know before I commit myself to this. There can’t be any half measures.”
Before I could give her the answer she desired, there was a knock at the door and Surt jammed her head through the widening gap. She studied us for a second, a judgemental look on her face, as if some shrewd part of her had already deduced the essentials of our recent conversation. “Begging your pardon, sisters, but it’s the doctor. He won’t stop harping on about his chaffin’ syringes.”
“It must be three or four hours now,” I said. “We’re safe, aren’t we?”
“Surt?” Fura said, beginning to unbuckle from her seat. “Bring Doctor Eddralder to the control room. I will see him by the squawk console.”
“Are you going there directly?” I asked.
“Almost. I thought I would have a word with Lagganvor first, just to see if his tongue is starting to loosen up. See me in the control room, will you?”
“I’ll be there in a moment,” I said. “I’d like to talk to Paladin about our course, and whether we ought to chance another turn around that swallower, if it’ll help us slip away a little faster, and throw ’em even further off our scent.”
“Do,” Fura said keenly. “After all, we have joint responsibility for these decisions now.”
When she was out of the room, and knowing I had only a few minutes to myself, I moved the paperweights aside until I had free access to The True and Accurate Testimony of Arafura Ness.
For once it was not the thick papers that drew my attention, nor the dark red handwriting that Fura had filled them with, laying out her version of our story. It was the cover that the pages had b
een bound into: all that remained of Rackamore’s personal copy of the 1384 edition of the Book of Worlds, the contents of which Bosa Sennen had gutted, before Fura liberated the remaining part from the wreck of the Monetta’s Mourn. The cover was very old and very worn, and had been like that even before Bosa hacked it about.
What concerned me now was the faint ghost of something on the inside of that cover, where a few swatches of marbled paper were glued to the backing.
“Paladin,” I said, very quietly. “There is an inscription here, I think. It has been effaced, but I think the pen might have dug into the paper enough to leave a trace. Do you think you can read what was written?”
“Present the book to me, Captain Ness.”
I held the cover up to his globe, where I knew it would fall within reach of his scanning beams. “You don’t have to call me that all the time,” I told him. “Miss Adrana will do just as well.”
“Do you wish me not to call you Captain Ness?”
“No,” I answered, on a hesitant falling note. “You can call me that. I’m not ashamed that we’ve taken this step—it’s the right thing; the only right thing.” Even if, I reflected, shame was a very large component of the misgivings I now felt. “But don’t overdo it, for the time being. Can you read the trace?”
“I think I can. It is easier than the inscription in the marble, and in quite a legible hand.”
“Tell me what it says.”
“I may show you, instead. Hold the book as steady as you are able, Miss Adrana.”
A scratch of red light came out of him, and played across the cover. Then it concentrated in the area where I thought the inscription had been rubbed away, and a neat, handwritten dedication presented itself to my eyes, etched in trembling red fire.
It said:
To Captain Pol Rackamore, on the achievement of his first command. With pride, admiration, and generous affection, from your brother.
“Is there a name?”
“No name, Adrana.”
I snapped tight the book, and returned it to its safe place under the paperweights.
“He never mentioned a brother,” I said, speaking as much for my own benefit as my robot companion. “But then again, he never mentioned having cause to strike out a brother’s dedication. That book meant a lot to him, and yet he could not bear to see his own brother’s hand on the inside cover. Something very bad must have come between them, I suppose.”
“Do you wish me to bring this inscription to the attention of your sister?”
“If she knew of it, you would not ask that question.”
“You have not answered mine, Miss Adrana.”
“Then … no. Not for the moment. There will come a time, I’m sure—but she has much too much on her mind at present.” Too much, certainly, for her to be made aware of the faint unease that was beginning to form in my own mind, an unease that was as yet far too tenuous to count as a suspicion. “Unless she makes a direct enquiry, this will remain between us, Paladin. No mention of that inscription, no mention of Rackamore’s brother, no mention of me talking to you about any of this. Is that understood?”
“It is, Miss Adrana.”
“I’m sorry to put you in this position. I’m not asking you to lie to her, though. Just … not mention things. That’s not so hard, is it?”
“I will do my best.”
“Then I’d better go to the control room. She’ll be wondering where I am.”
Surt, Doctor Eddralder and Fura were already gathered around the main squawk console when I arrived. The doctor had a sickly look to him, which I took to be the outward manifestation of a combination of worry, the recent strains, and his forced adaptation to near-weightlessness.
Fura had the handset clasped in her metal fist.
“Ah, Adrana—good of you to join us. We were just speaking of Glimmery’s predicament. Doctor Eddralder is most particular that the identity of the correct syringe be transmitted back to the infirmary.”
“That was the understanding,” I said, sensing the developing edge of something ominous, yet not quite comprehending its form or extent. “He gave his word.”
“He did, and I respect that.”
“Then let him send the information.”
“Doctor Eddralder,” Fura said. “Might I ask you something, before we discharge your obligation? It concerns a couple of rumours. I just wanted to clear the air, so to speak.”
“Whatever it is,” Eddralder said, “might we discuss it later?”
“We could, I suppose. Or we could discuss it now, while you’ve an extra incentive to come clean with me.” Her hand tightened on the handset, which emitted a creaking sound, as if under a developing strain. “Your terms of association with Glimmery, Doctor. Would you care to clarify them?”
“What needs to be clarified? You saw for yourself what he was doing to Merrix. He forced me to work for him. I needed him to keep the hospital running—if I’d denied him, he would have made things even harder for the other physicians and our patients.”
“There’s more to it than that, though,” Fura said. “Isn’t there?”
“I am not sure what more you expect me to say. Did it please me to serve under Glimmery? Not at all. I detested every minute in his presence. But it served a greater good.”
“They say you were also his torturer,” Fura said.
Doctor Eddralder met this remark with a curious stoicism. He was silent for a moment or two, then said, very calmly: “Might we discuss this after I have told them about the syringes?”
“Let him,” I urged.
“There’s no need. I absolve the doctor of any further responsibility in the matter. He would transmit the information, and that is all that needs to lie between him and his conscience.” With that, Fura squeezed harder. Under the terrible press of her fingers the handset gave away and shattered into a hundred tiny pieces, falling away like the shards of some ruined world. “The fact that he cannot is an entirely separate matter, which casts no shadow on the doctor’s good character. No additional shadow, I should say.”
“No,” I said, astonished, and not quite ready to believe what I had seen.
“You didn’t need to do that,” Surt said, in a low admonitory tone, as if she hardly dared raise her voice in criticism.
“I did,” Fura said, quite without rancour. “It was necessary. Glimmery would have given us no quarter, and so he deserved none. I am very glad to think of him choking on his last breath.”
But the one among us who ought to have been the most affronted was the least affected.
“You are wrong, Captain,” Doctor Eddralder said, more in regret than sorrow. “You have sullied my word, but that is only a private concern. Doubtless you could repair the squawk, rig in a substitute, or use the one on the launch, if you were so inclined. That was little more than theatre. Glimmery will still be alive in two hours. He will still be alive in three, and four, and perhaps longer. That depends on his enemies, not on the syringes.”
Fura loosened her fist and the remaining pieces of the squawk handset drifted free, following the slow arc of our feeble acceleration.
“No,” she said firmly. “He needed to know.”
“He did not,” Eddralder said. “I made certain of it. All of those syringes contained the counter-agent. It did not matter which one he took.”
Fura mouthed a nearly soundless: “Why?”
“Because it was always in my mind that I might die, or be prevented from calling back. That was unacceptable, Captain Ness. I had a duty to my patient until the very end.”
“But if they don’t know which one—” I started.
“They will use one eventually,” Eddralder said. “That is basic nature, Adrana. When he is close to his last breath, as your sister puts it, he would see no harm in committing his fate to chance. He would have nothing left to lose, and the men around him know it.”
“No,” Fura said again, but it was less a denial than an abject curse, delivered against herself and t
he creature she knew she was becoming. She had wished to see Glimmery dead, I think, because killing Glimmery would let her stop dwelling on her own fate, and the progression of the glowy.
Yet he lived, and she could do nothing about it now.
“You are right about me,” Eddralder said, letting out a sigh. “I did as he asked of me. All the things. Had I not done so, it would have been very much worse for Merrix, and for all those other people, as well. So I carried the knife for him, and used it as he ordered. I caused pain, and death, as well as preventing each. So, I was, as you say, his torturer. But you did not need to ask me that question, nor listen to the rumours. You should already have known.”
“Known what?” Fura asked sharply, a fleck of spittle flying from between her teeth.
“I kept him alive, didn’t I? He did far worse with his own hands than I ever did with mine. Where I cut with compassion, and speed, and skill, he hacked and butchered. Where I tried to make the pain as brief as possible, to bring death quickly, even at the risk of contradicting my orders, Glimmery sought to maximise and prolong those agonies. So that is my greater crime, Captain Ness. Not that I tortured for him, because I did, and I own that part of me, and I will carry it with me until I am dust; but because I allowed him to be what he was.” Something eased in the long lines of his face, his lips forming a half-smile. “But you already knew that, I think. And you were prepared to overlook it because I was useful to you. As I still am.” He turned from us. “You will find me in the kindness room. I still have a patient to attend to, and she is by no means out of danger.”
*
An hour or two after that difficult exchange, with the mood on the ship still tense, Prozor and I were passing each other on our way to different rooms. I touched her elbow, arresting her motion in a gentle but insistent manner.
“Can you spare a moment, Proz?”
Her face was set with complications. “You got a troubled look about you, girlie. I’m startin’ to think it’s moved in for good.”
“These haven’t been an easy few days, for any of us. Just when I thought we could do one good and honest thing, to help Eddralder, it turns out that nothing’s that simple. Now we’ve helped a torturer escape from justice!”
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