He wouldn’t have that comfort the next time.
The holdfast readied itself below the Nostalgia for Infinity. The ship was close now, or at least what remained of it. During his descent from orbit, the Captain had committed himself to a series of terminal transformations, intent on protecting those in his care while doing what was necessary to safeguard Aura. He had shed much of his hull cladding around the midsection, revealing the festering complexity of his innards: structural spars and bulkhead partitions larger than many medium-sized spacecraft, the gristlelike tangle of densely packed ship systems, grown wild and knotted as strangler vines. As he discarded these protective sections he felt a chill of nakedness, as if he was exposing vulnerable skin where once he had been armoured. It had been centuries since these internal regions had last been open to vacuum.
He continued his transformation. Within him, major elements of ship architecture were reshuffled like dominos. Umbilical lines were severed and reconnected. Parts of the ship that had relied on others for the supply of life-giving power, air and water were now made self-sufficient. Others were allowed to die. The Captain felt these changes take place within him with a queasy sense of abdominal movement: pressure and cold, sharp pains and the sudden, troubling absence of any sensation whatsoever. Although he had instigated and directed the alterations, he still felt an unsettling sense of self-violation.
What he was doing to himself could not be easily undone.
He lowered closer to Hela, correcting his descent with bursts of docking thrust. Gravitational gradients stressed the geometry of his hull, soft fingers threatening to rip him apart.
He fell further. The landscape slid beneath him - not just ice and crevasses now, but an inhabited territory pocked with tiny hamlets and scratched with lines of communication. The maw of the holdfast was a golden cleft on the horizon.
He convulsed, like something giving birth. All the preparations were complete. From his midsection, neatly separated chunks of himself detached from the hull, leaving geometric holes. They trailed thousands of severed connections, like the pale roots beneath blocks of uprooted turf. The Captain had dulled the pain where it was possible, but ghost signals still reached him where cables and feed-lines had been ripped in two. This, the Captain thought, is how it feels to be gored. But he had expected the pain and was ready for it. In a way, it was actually quite bracing. It was a reminder that he was alive, that he had begun his thinking existence as a creature of flesh and blood. As long as he felt pain, he could still think of himself as distantly human.
The twenty chunks fell with the Nostalgia for Infinity, but only for a moment. Once they were safely clear of each other, the tiny sparks of steering rockets boosted them away. The rockets were not capable of pushing the chunks beyond Hela’s gravitational influence, but they were sufficient to lift them back into orbit. There, they would have to take care of themselves. He had done what he could for his eighteen thousand sleepers - he had brought many of them all the way from Ararat, and some from Yellowstone - but now they were safer outside him than within.
He just hoped someone else would arrive to take care of them.
The holdfast loomed much larger now. Within it, the waiting cradles and harnesses were moving, preparing to lock themselves around his gutted remains.
‘What do you want with the scrimshaw suit?’ Quaiche asked.
‘I want to take it with me,’ Rashmika said, with a forcefulness that surprised her. ‘I want to remove it from the Lady Morwenna.’
Vasko looked at Khouri, then at Rashmika. ‘You remember it all now?’ he asked.
‘I remember more than I did,’ she said, turning to her mother. ‘It’s coming back.’
‘She means something to you?’ Quaiche asked.
‘She’s my mother,’ Rashmika said. ‘And my name isn’t Rashmika. That was the name of the daughter they lost. It’s a good name, but it isn’t mine. My real name is something else, but I don’t quite remember it yet.’
‘It’s Aura,’ Khouri said.
Rashmika heard the name, considered it, and then looked her mother in the eye. ‘Yes. I remember now. I remember you calling me that.’
‘I was right about the blood,’ Grelier said, unable to suppress a smirk of satisfaction.
‘Yes, you were right,’ Quaiche said. ‘Happy now? But you brought her here, Surgeon-General. You brought this viper into our nest. It was your mistake.’
‘She’d have found her way here in the end,’ Grelier replied. ‘It was what she came to do. Anyway, why should you worry?’ Grelier indicated the video capture of the descending ship. ‘You’ve got the thing you wanted, haven’t you? You’ve even got your holy machinery looking down at you in congratulation.’
‘Something’s happened to the ship,’ Quaiche said, raising a trembling hand towards the image. He snapped a look at Vasko. ‘What is it?’
‘I have no idea,’ he replied.
‘The ship will still work,’ Khouri said. ‘You only needed it for its engines. You’ve got that much. Now let us leave with the scrimshaw suit.’
He appeared to consider her request. ‘Where will you take it, without a ship?’
‘Anywhere other than the Lady Morwenna would be a good start,’ Khouri said. ‘You may have suicidal inclinations, Dean, but we don’t.’
‘If I had the slightest inclination towards suicide, do you think I’d have lived as long as I have?’
Khouri looked at Malinin, then at Rashmika. ‘He has a way off this thing. You were never planning on staying aboard, were you?’
‘It’s a question of timing,’ Quaiche said. ‘The ship is nearly in the holdfast. That’s the moment of triumph. That’s the moment when everything on Hela changes. The moment - indeed - when Hela itself changes. Nothing will be the same again, you see. There will be no more Permanent Way, no more procession of cathedrals. There will be only one spot on Hela that is precisely beneath Haldora, and that spot will no longer be moving. And there will only be one cathedral occupying it.’
‘You haven’t built it yet,’ Grelier said.
‘There’s time, Surgeon-General. All the time in the world, once I stake my claim. I choose where that spot falls, understand? I have my hand on Hela. I can spin this world like a globe. I can stop it with my finger.’
‘And the Lady Morwenna?’ Grelier asked.
‘If this cathedral crosses the bridge, so be it. If it doesn’t, it will only emphasise the end of one era and the start of another.’
‘He doesn’t want it to succeed,’ Vasko whispered. ‘He never did.’
On the dean’s couch something started chiming.
Scorpio stood his ground even though every instinct told him to run backwards. The wrinkled purple-black sphere of the nearest bladder-mine detonation had raced towards him in an eyeblink, an unstoppable wall threatening to engulf him and the portion of the bridge on which he stood. But he had placed the three charges carefully, and he knew from Remontoire’s specifications that the bladder-mines were highly predictable in their effects, assuming that they worked in the first place. There was no air on Hela, so no shockwave to consider; all he had to worry about was the limiting radius of the nearest expanding sphere. With a small margin of error to allow for undulations in the surface, he would be safe only a few hundred metres beyond the nominal boundary.
The bridge was forty kilometres wide; he had arranged the charges in a row with their centres seven kilometres apart, the middle one situated at the highest point of the span. The combined effect of the overlapping spheres would take out the central thirty-four kilometres of the bridge, leaving only a few intact kilometres at either side of the rift. When he detonated the charges, Scorpio had still been standing more than a kilometre and a half out over open space.
The boundary of the sphere was nearly a kilometre away, but it looked as if it was just beyond his nose. It rippled and bulged, wrinkles and blisters rising and falling on its shrivelled surface. The nearest part of the bridge still plunged into th
e wall: in his mind’s eye it was impossible not to imagine it continuing across the gap. But the bridge was already gone: nothing material would be left behind when the sphere evaporated.
It vanished. The middle one had already gone, and the furthest one popped out of existence a moment later.
He started walking to the edge. The tongue of bridge beneath his feet felt as steady as ever, even though it was no longer connected to the other side. He slowed as he neared the point where the tongue ended, mindful that this part might be a lot less stable than the portion nearer the cliff. It had been within metres of the edge of the bladder-mine detonation, where all sorts of peculiar quantum effects were to be expected. The atomic properties of the bridge’s material might have been altered, fatal flaws introduced. Time for a person - even a pig - to tread carefully.
Vertigo gripped him as he approached the edge. The cut was miraculously clean. The surgical neatness of it, and the complete absence of debris from the intervening section, made it look as if the bridge was merely under construction. It made him feel less like a vandal than a spectator, anticipating something yet to be finished.
He turned around. In the distance, beyond the crouched form of his parked ship, he saw the Lady Morwenna. From his point of view the cathedral looked as if it had virtually reached the edge of the cliff. He knew that it still had some way to travel, but it would not be long before it arrived there.
Now that the bridge was gone, though, they would have no choice but to stop. There was no longer any question of degrees of risk, any question of just possibly being able to cross Absolution Gap. He had removed any doubt from the situation. There would be no glory, only devastation.
If they were sane, they’d stop.
A flashing pink light came on inside his helmet, synchronised with a shrill alarm tone. Scorpio halted, wondering at first if there was something wrong with his suit. But the pink light meant only that the suit was receiving a powerful modulated radio signal, outside of the usual assigned communications bands. The suit was asking him if he wanted to have the signal interpreted and passed through to him.
He looked at the cathedral again. It had to be from the Lady Morwenna.
‘Do it,’ Scorpio said.
The radio signal, the suit told him, was a repeating one: it was cycling through a short prerecorded transmission. The format was audio/holographic.
‘Let me see it,’ he said, less sure now that it had anything to do with the cathedral.
A figure appeared on the ice a dozen metres from him. It was nobody he had been expecting; in fact, it was nobody he even recognised. The figure wore no spacesuit and had the odd, asymmetrical anatomy of someone who spent most of their existence in free fall. He had plug-in limbs and a face like a planetary surface after a small nuclear exchange. An Ultra, Scorpio thought; but then, after a moment’s consideration, he decided that the man probably wasn’t an Ultra at all, but a member of that other, less social spacefaring human faction: the Skyjacks.
‘You couldn’t leave it alone, could you?’ the figure asked. ‘You couldn’t just live with it; couldn’t tolerate the existence of something so beautiful and yet so enigmatic. You had to know what it was. You had to know what its limits were. My lovely bridge. My beautiful, delicate bridge. I made it for you, placed it here like a gift. But that wasn’t enough for you, was it? You had to test it. You had to destroy it. You had to fucking ruin it.’
Scorpio walked through the figure. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Not interested.’
‘It was a thing of beauty,’ the man said. ‘It was a thing of fucking beauty.’
‘It was in my way,’ Scorpio said.
None of them could see the report Quaiche was accessing, sent through to the private display of his couch. But Rashmika watched his lips move and observed the barest crease of a frown as he reread the summary, as if he had made a mistake the first time.
‘What is it?’ Grelier asked.
‘The bridge,’ Quaiche answered. ‘It doesn’t seem to be there any more.’
Grelier leant closer to the couch. ‘There must be some mistake.’
‘There doesn’t seem to be one, Surgeon-General. The inductance cable - the line we use for emergency navigation - is quite clearly severed.’
‘So someone cut the cable.’
‘I’ll have surface imagery in a moment. Then we’ll know.’
They all turned to the screen that had been showing the descent of the Nostalgia for Infinity. The image flickered with ghostly colours, then stabilised around a familiar view captured by a static camera that must have been mounted on the wall of Ginnungagap Rift itself.
The dean was right: there was no longer any bridge. All that remained were the extremities of the span: those curlicued fancies of scrolled sugar and icing flung out from either cliff as if to suggest the rest of the bridge by a process of elegant mathematical extrapolation. But most of the span was simply not there. Nor was there any hint of wreckage down on the floor. In her mind’s eye, Rashmika had thought of the bridge collapsing time and again, ever since she had known she would have to cross it. But always she had seen it coming down in an avalanche of splintering shards, forming a jewelled, glinting scree that was in itself a thing of wonder: an enchanted glass forest you could lose yourself in.
‘What happened?’ the dean asked.
Rashmika turned to him. ‘Does it matter? It’s gone: you can see for yourself. Crossing it isn’t an issue now. There’s no reason not to stop the cathedral.’
‘Weren’t you listening, girl?’ he asked. ‘The cathedral doesn’t stop. The cathedral cannot stop.’
Khouri stood up, followed by Vasko. ‘We can’t stay aboard any longer. You’ll come with us, Aura.’
Rashmika shook her head. She was still not used to being called by that name. ‘I’m not leaving without the thing I came for.’
‘She is right,’ said a new voice, thin and metallic.
No one said anything. It was not the intrusion of a new voice that alarmed them, but its obvious point of origin. As one, they all turned to look at the scrimshaw suit. Outwardly, nothing about it had changed: it was exactly the same brooding silver-grey form, crawling with manic detail and the blistered seams of crude welding.
‘She is right,’ the suit continued. ‘We must leave now, Quaiche. You have your ship, the thing you wanted so badly. You have your means of stopping Hela. Now let us go. We are of no consequence to any of your plans.’
‘You never spoke except when I was alone before,’ Quaiche said.
‘We spoke to the girl, when you wouldn’t listen. She was easier: we could see straight into her head. Couldn’t we, Rashmika?’
Bravely, she said, ‘I’d rather you called me Aura now.’
‘Aura it is, then. It changes nothing, does it? You came all this way to find us. Now you have. And there’s nothing to prevent the dean from giving us to you.’
Grelier shook his head, as if he alone were the victim of an extended joke. ‘The suit is talking. The suit is talking and you’re all just standing around as if this happens every day.’
‘For some of us,’ Quaiche said, ‘it does.’
‘These are the shadows?’ Grelier asked.
‘An envoy of the shadows,’ the suit said. ‘The distinction need not detain us. Now, please, we must be removed from the Lady Morwenna immediately.’
‘You’ll stay here,’ Quaiche said.
‘No,’ Rashmika said. ‘Dean - give us the suit. It doesn’t matter to you, but it means everything to us. The shadows are going to help us survive the Inhibitors. But that suit is our only direct line of communication with them.’
‘If they mean that much to you, send another probe into Haldora.’
‘We don’t know that it will work twice. Whatever happened to you may have been a fluke. We can’t gamble everything on the off chance that it might happen again.’
‘Listen to her,’ the suit said urgently. ‘She is right: we are your only guaranteed contact with the
shadows. You must safeguard us, if you wish our assistance.’
‘And the price of this assistance?’ Quaiche asked.
‘Nothing compared to the price of extinction. We wish only to be allowed to cross over from our side of the bulk. Is that so much to ask? Is that so great a cost to pay?’
Rashmika faced the others, feeling as if she had been appointed as witness for the shadows. ‘They can cross over provided that the matter-synthesiser is allowed to function. It’s a machine at the heart of the Haldora receiver. It will make them bodies, and their minds will slip across the bulk and inhabit them.’
‘Machines, again,’ Vasko said. ‘We run from one group, and now we negotiate with another.’
‘If that’s what it takes,’ Rashmika said. ‘And they’re only machines because they had no choice, after everything they’d lived through.’ She remembered, in hypnagogic flashes, the vision she had been granted of life in the shadow universe: of entire galaxies stained green with the marauding blight; suns like emerald lanterns. ‘They were a lot like us once,’ she added. ‘Closer than we realise.’
‘They’re demons,’ Quaiche said. ‘Not people at all. Not even machines.’
‘Demons?’ Grelier asked tolerantly.
‘Sent to test my faith, of course. To undermine my belief in the miracle. To pollute my mind with fantasies of other universes. To make me doubt that the vanishings are the word of God. To cause me to stumble, in the hour of my greatest testing. It’s no coincidence, you know: as my plans for Hela grew towards culmination, so the demons increased their taunting of me.’
‘They were scared you’d destroy them,’ Rashmika said. ‘The mistake they made was to deal with you as a rational individual. If only they had pretended to be demons or angels they might have got somewhere.’ She leant over him, until she could smell his breath: old and vinegary, like a disused wine cellar. ‘They may be demons to you, Dean, I won’t deny it. But don’t deny them to us.’
The Revelation Space Collection Page 307