‘Surgeon-General,’ she said.
‘Like a wee word, if that won’t take too much of your time.’
‘I’m on my way to the garret. The dean has a new Ultra delegation to interview.’
‘This won’t take a moment. I understand how useful you’ve become to him.’
Rashmika shrugged: clearly she was going nowhere until Grelier was done with her. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Nothing much,’ he said, ‘just a small anomaly in your bloodwork. Thought it worth mentioning.’
‘Then mention it,’ she said.
‘Not here, if you don’t mind. Loose lips, and all that.’
She looked around. There was no one else in sight. There was, now that she thought about it, almost never anyone else in sight when the surgeon-general was in the vicinity. He made witnesses melt into the architecture, especially when he did his rounds with the medical case and its arsenal of loaded syringes. Today all he carried was the cane, the head of which he tapped against the bottom of his chin as he spoke.
‘I thought you said it would only take a moment,’ Rashmika said.
‘It will, and it’s on your way. We’ll just make a stop in Bloodwork, and then you can go about your duty.’
He escorted her to the nearest Clocktower elevator, slid the trelliswork door closed and set the carriage in motion. Outside it was daytime. The coloured light from the stained-glass windows slid tints across his face as they rose.
‘Enjoying your work here, Miss Els?’
‘It’s work,’ she said.
‘You don’t sound sparklingly enthusiastic. I’m surprised, frankly. Given what you might have ended up with - dangerous work in a clearance gang - haven’t you landed on your feet?’
What could she tell him? That she was scared to death by the voices that she had started hearing?
No. That wasn’t necessary at all. She had enough rational fears to draw from without invoking the shadows.
‘We’re seventy-five kilometres from Absolution Gap, Surgeon-General, ’ she said. ‘In just under three days this cathedral is going to be crossing that bridge.’ She mimicked his tone of voice. ‘Frankly, there are places I’d rather be.’
‘Alarms you, does it?’
‘Don’t tell me that you’re thrilled at the prospect.’
‘The dean knows what he’s doing.’
‘You think so?’
Green and pink light chased each other across his face. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘You don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘You’re as scared as I am, aren’t you? You’re a rational man, Surgeon-General. You don’t have his blood in your veins. You know this cathedral can’t be taken over the bridge.’
‘There’s a first time for everything,’ he said. Self-conscious of her attention, he was trying so hard to control his expression that a muscle in the side of his temple had started twitching.
‘He has a death wish,’ Rashmika said. ‘He knows that the vanishings are heading towards a culmination. He wants to mark the occasion with a bang. What better way than to smash the cathedral to dust and make a holy martyr of himself in the process? He’s the dean now, but who’s to say he doesn’t have his mind set on sainthood?’
‘You’re forgetting something,’ Grelier said. ‘He’s thinking beyond the crossing. He wants the long-term protection of Ultras. That isn’t the desire of a man planning suicide in three days. What other explanation is there?’
Unless she was reading him badly, Grelier believed that himself. She began to wonder just how much Grelier really knew about what Quaiche had in mind.
‘I saw something odd when I was on my way here,’ Rashmika said.
Grelier neatened his hair. His usually impeccably tidy white bristle-cut showed signs of distress. It was getting to him, Rashmika thought. He was as scared as everyone else, but he could not let it show.
‘Saw something?’ he echoed.
‘Towards the end of the caravan trip,’ she said, ‘after we’d crossed the bridge and were on our way to meet the cathedrals, we passed a huge fleet of machines moving north - excavating equipment, the sort they use to open out the largest scuttler seams. Whatever it was, it was on its way somewhere.’
Grelier’s eyes narrowed. ‘Nothing strange in that. They’d have been on their way to fix a problem with the Permanent Way before the cathedrals got there.’
‘They were moving in the wrong direction for that,’ Rashmika said. ‘And whatever they were doing, the quaestor didn’t want to talk about them. It was as if he’d been given orders to pretend they didn’t exist.’
‘This has nothing to do with the dean.’
‘But something on that scale could hardly take place without him knowing about it, surely,’ Rashmika said. ‘In fact, he probably authorised it. What do you think it is? A new scuttler excavation he doesn’t want anyone to know about? Something they’ve found that can’t be left to the usual settlement miners?’
‘I have no idea.’ The twitch in the side of his temple had set up camp. ‘I have no idea and I don’t care. My responsibility is to Bloodwork and the dean’s health. That’s all. I have enough on my plate without worrying about interecumenical conspiracies.’ The carriage shuddered to a halt, Grelier shrugging with evident relief. ‘Well, we’re here, Miss Els. And now, if you don’t mind, it’s my turn to ask the questions.’
‘You said it would only take a wee moment.’
He smiled. ‘Well, that may well have been a wee fib.’
He sat her down in Bloodwork and showed her the results of her blood analysis, which had been correlated against some other sample he had not deigned to identify.
‘I was interested in your gift,’ Grelier said, resting his chin on the head of his cane, looking at her with heavy-lidded, heavily bagged eyes. ‘Wanted to know if there was a genetic component. Fair enough, eh? I’m a man of science, after all.’
‘If you say so,’ Rashmika replied.
‘Problem was, I hit a block even before I could start looking for any peculiarities.’ Affectionately, Grelier tapped his medical kit. It was resting on a bench. ‘Blood’s my thing,’ he said. ‘Always has been, always will be. Genetics, cloning, you name it - but it all boils down to good old blood in the end. I dream about the stuff. Torrential, haemorrhaging rivers of it. I’m not what you’d call a squeamish man.’
‘I’d never have guessed.’
‘The thing is, I take a professional pride in understanding blood. Everyone who comes near me gets sampled sooner or later. The archives of the Lady Morwenna contain a comprehensive picture of the genetic make-up of this world, as it has evolved over the last century. You’d be surprised at how distinctive it is, Rashmika. We haven’t been settled in piecemeal fashion, over many hundreds of years. Almost everyone who now lives on Hela is descended from the colonists of a handful of ships, right back to the Gnostic Ascension, all from single points of origin, and all of those worlds have very distinct genetic profiles. The newcomers - the pilgrims, the evacuees, the chancers - make very little difference at all to the gene pool. And of course even their blood is sampled and labelled at their point of entry.’ He took a vial from the case and shook it, inspecting the frothy raspberry-red liquid within. ‘All of which means that - unless you happen to have just arrived on Hela - I can predict what your blood will look like, to a high degree of precision. Even more accurately if I know where you live, so that I can factor in interbreeding. The Vigrid region’s one of my specialities, actually. I’ve studied it a lot.’ He tapped the vial against the side of the display showing the unidentified blood sample. ‘Take this fellow, for instance. Classic Vigrid. Couldn’t be mistaken for the blood of someone from any other place on Hela. He’s so typical it’s almost frightening.’
Rashmika swallowed before speaking. ‘That blood is from Harbin, isn’t it?’ she asked.
‘That’s what the archives tell me.’
‘Where is he? What happened to him?’
‘This man?’ Grelier
made a show of reading fine print at the bottom of his display. ‘Dead, it looks like. Killed during clearance work. Why? You weren’t going to pretend he was your brother, were you?’
She felt nothing yet. It was like driving off a cliff. There was an instant when her trajectory carried on normally, as if the world had not been pulled from under her.
‘You know he was my brother,’ she said. ‘You saw us together. You were there when they interviewed Harbin.’
‘I was there when they interviewed someone,’ Grelier said. ‘But I don’t think he could have been your brother.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘In the strict genetic sense, I’m afraid it must be.’ He nodded at the display, inviting her to draw her own conclusion. ‘You’re no more related to him than you are to me. He was not your brother, Rashmika. You were never his sister.’
‘Then one of us was adopted,’ she said.
‘Well, funny you should say that, because it crossed my mind as well. And it struck me that perhaps the only way to get to the bottom of this whole mess was to pop up there myself and have a bit of a nose around. So I’m off to the badlands. Won’t keep me away from the cathedral for more than a day. Any messages you’d like me to pass on, while I’m up there?’
‘Don’t hurt them,’ she said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t hurt them.’
‘No one said anything about hurting anyone. But you know how it is with those communities up there. Very secular. Very closed. Very suspicious of interference from the churches.’
‘You hurt my parents,’ she said, ‘and I’ll hurt you back.’
Grelier placed the vial back in the case, snapped shut its lid. ‘No, you won’t, because you need me on your side. The dean’s a dangerous man, and he cares very much about his negotiations. If he thought for one moment that you weren’t what you said you were, that you might in any way have compromised his discussions with the Ultras . . . well, I wouldn’t want to predict what he might do.’ He paused, sighed, as if they had simply got off on the wrong foot and all he needed to do was spool back to the start of the conversation and everything would be fine. ‘Look, this is as much my problem as yours. I don’t think you’re everything you say you are. This blood of yours looks suspiciously foreign. It doesn’t look as though you ever had ancestors on Hela. Now, there may be an innocent explanation for this, but until I know otherwise, I have to assume the worst.’
‘Which is?’
‘That you’re not at all who or what you say you are.’
‘And why is that a problem for you, Surgeon-General?’ She was crying now, the truth of Harbin’s death hitting her as hard as she had always known it would.
‘Because,’ he said, snarling his answer, ‘I brought you here. It was my bright idea to bring you and the dean together. And now I’m wondering what the hell I’ve brought here. I’m also assuming I’ll be in nearly as much trouble as you if he ever finds out.’
‘He won’t hurt you,’ Rashmika said. ‘He needs you to keep him alive.’
Grelier stood up. ‘Well, let’s just hope that’s the case, shall we? Because a few minutes ago you were trying to convince me he had a death wish. Now dry your eyes.’
Rashmika rode the elevator alone, up through strata of stained-glass light. She cried, and the more she tried to stop crying the worse the tears became. She wanted to think it was because of the news she had just learned about Harbin. Crying would have been the decent, human, sisterly response. But another part of her knew that the real reason she was crying was because of what she had learned about herself, not her brother. She could feel layers of herself coming loose, peeling away like drying scabs, revealing the raw truth of what she was, what she had always been. The shadows had been right: of that she no longer had any doubt. Nor was there was any reason for Grelier to have lied about her blood. He was as disturbed by the discovery as she was.
She felt sorry for Harbin. But not as sorry as she felt for Rashmika Els.
What did it mean? The shadows had spoken of machines in her head; Grelier thought it unlikely that she had even been born on Hela. But her memories said she had been born to a family in the Vigrid badlands, that she was the sister of someone named Harbin. She looked back over her past, examining it with the raptorial eye of someone inspecting a suspected forgery, attentive to every detail. She expected a flaw, a faint disjunction where something had been pasted over something else. But her recent memories flowed seamlessly into the past. Everything that she recalled had the unmistakable grain of lived experience. She didn’t just see her past in her mind’s eye: she heard it, smelt it, felt it, with the bruising, tactile immediacy of reality.
Until she looked back far enough. Nine years, the shadows had said. And then things became less certain. She had memories of her first eight years on Hela, but they felt detached: a sequence of anonymous snapshots. They could have been her memories; they could equally well have belonged to someone else.
But perhaps, Rashmika thought, that was what childhood always felt like from the perspective of adulthood: a handful of time-faded moments, as thin and translucent as stained glass.
Rashmika Els. It might not even be her real name.
The dean waited in his garret with the next Ultra delegation, sunglasses covering the eye-opener. When Rashmika arrived the air had a peculiar stillness, as if no one there had spoken for several minutes. She watched the shattered components of herself prowl through the confusion of mirrors, trying to reassemble the expression on her own face, anxious that there should be no indication of the upsetting conversation she had just had with the surgeon-general.
‘You’re late, Miss Els,’ the dean observed.
‘I was detained,’ she told him, hearing the tremble in her voice. Grelier had made it clear she was to make no mention of her visit to Bloodwork, but some excuse seemed necessary.
‘Have a seat, drink some tea. I was just having a chat with Mr Malinin and Miss Khouri.’
The names, inexplicably, meant something to her. She looked at the two visitors and felt another tingle of recognition. Neither of them looked much like Ultras. They were too normal; there was nothing obviously artificial about either of them, no missing or augmented bits, no suggestion of genetic reshaping or chimeric fusion. He was a tall, slim, dark-haired man, about ten years older than her. Handsome, even, in a slightly self-regarding way. He wore a stiff red uniform and stood with his hands behind his back, as if at attention. He watched her as she sat down and poured herself some tea, taking more interest in her than any of the other Ultras had done. To them she had only ever been part of the scenery, but from Malinin she sensed curiosity. The other one - the woman called Khouri - looked at her with something of the same inquisitiveness. Khouri was a small-framed older woman, sad eyes dominating a sad face, as if too much had been taken from her and not enough given back.
Rashmika thought she had seen both of them before. The woman, in particular.
‘We haven’t been introduced,’ the man said, nodding towards Rashmika.
‘This is Rashmika Els, my advisor,’ the dean said, the tone of his voice indicating that this was all he was prepared to say on the matter. ‘Now, Mr Malinin . . .’
‘You still haven’t properly introduced us,’ he said.
The dean reached out to adjust one of his mirrors. ‘This is Vasko Malinin, and this is Ana Khouri,’ he said, gesturing to each of them in turn, ‘the human representatives of the Nostalgia for Infinity, an Ultra vessel recently arrived in our system.’
The man looked at her again. ‘No one mentioned anything about advisors sitting in on negotiations.’
‘You have a particular problem with that, Mr Malinin? If you do, I can ask her to leave.’
‘No,’ the Ultra said, after a moment’s consideration. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
The dean invited the two visitors to sit down. They took their seats opposite Rashmika, on the other side of the little table where she poured tea.
‘What brought you to o
ur system?’ the dean asked, directing his question to the male Ultra.
‘The usual. We have a belly full of evacuees from the inner systems. Many of them specifically wanted to be brought here, before the vanishings reach culmination. We don’t question their motives, so long as they pay. The others want to be taken further out, as far away from the wolves as possible. We, of course, have our own technical needs. But we don’t plan on staying very long.’
‘Interested in scuttler relics?’
‘We have a different incentive,’ the man said, pressing a crease from his suit. ‘We’re interested in Haldora, as it happens.’
Quaiche reached up and unclipped his sunglasses. ‘Aren’t we all?’
‘Not in the religious sense,’ the Ultra replied, apparently unfazed by Quaiche lying there with his splayed-open eyelids. ‘But it’s not our intention to undermine anyone’s belief system. However, since this system was discovered, there’s been almost no scientific investigation into the Haldora phenomenon. Not because no one has wanted to examine it, but because the authorities here - including the Adventist church - have never permitted close-up examinations.’
‘The ships in the parking swarm are free to use their sensors to study the vanishings,’ Quaiche said. ‘Many have done so, and have circulated their findings to the wider community.’
‘True,’ the Ultra said, ‘but those long-distance observations haven’t been taken very seriously beyond this system. What’s really needed is a detailed study, using physical probes - instrument packages fired into the face of the planet, that kind of thing.’
‘You might as well spit in the face of God.’
‘Why? If this is a genuine miracle, it should withstand investigation. What do you have to fear?’
‘God’s ire, that’s what.’
The Ultra examined his fingers. Rashmika read his tension like a book. He had lied once, when he told the dean about the ship being full of evacuees who wanted to witness the vanishings. There might be a host of mundane reasons for that. Beyond that he had told the truth, so far as she was able to judge. Rashmika glanced at the woman, who had said nothing yet, and felt another electric shock of recognition. For a moment their eyes met, and the woman held the gaze for a second longer than Rashmika found comfortable. It was Rashmika who looked away, feeling the blood rush to her cheeks.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 296