“How many times?” Cori wanted to know.
Vargo looked down at her. “Six,” he said.
“Exactly six?” said Marea.
“You never forget one.”
“You saw it happen?” Cori asked.
Vargo didn’t reply directly. He addressed the ship: “Show us the freezer compartment.”
Lidded flaps on the wall opened, revealing a low but wide horizontal chamber bathed in a frosty light. There was room for several bodies.
“Do they put you in there?” said Marea.
“It’s a corpse hold. For storage until the ship reaches its destination.”
“And then what?”
“Who knows? Maybe they’d have used you for spare parts, or biowired your cortex into a ship’s control system. Ship, does your consciousness derive from a crim?”
“Certainly not!” the ship replied huffily. “I was grown on Iapetus, Dhall Transfigurations, politia craft a speciality. My cognitive functions were developed by a specialized team.”
“Any information on the potential usage of the corpse of Marea Elodaris, Bellona Environs, Mars?”
The ship made a burbling noise, then a chirrup. “There’s nix on my mangofeast. Poot.”
“Sometimes they install you in a pleasure centre as a piece of erotica,” Vargo said. “Or maybe—”
“You knew,” Marea interrupted.
“Yes, I knew.”
“Is that why you agreed to come with me?”
“Dying’s a lonely business. It’s even worse when it’s an execution. When there’s no one there who knows you or cares a damn.”
Marea gazed at him for long moments without speaking. She was dark-eyed, haggard.
“Did they choose you because of your religion?”
“Maybe they did. I never asked.”
She withdrew her hands from the gloves and rose from the terminal, wrapping her cloak tight around her.
“Didn’t you ever feel any qualms?”
“You know the kinds of people who get blanked? Child murderers. Multiple killers. Individuals who refuse corrective psychosurgery, who relish their crimes. Those are the ones I saw off.”
“I didn’t do any of those things.”
“It was hard to imagine you did.”
“Was this the ship they were going to send?”
“The very same.”
“Why didn’t you say anything? You knew it had a null-shrine.”
“What difference would it have made? They’d have had to web you in if you’d known. I’ve seen it happen. Not a pretty sight.”
Marea looked again at the twin seats, the spaces in the corpse hold. “Do they do them in batches?”
“It’s happened,” Vargo said. “Not in my time. I only ever carried singletons.”
“Did they know?” Cori asked.
“Sometimes.”
“Were they scared?”
“To their souls.”
She was full of ghoulish interest. “So who did the executing?”
“Usually it would be an expediter or a judicator. No flashing lights or melting flesh or screams of torment. One minute you were alive, the next you were dead.”
But he said it dramatically, peering close at Cori. She drank his words in and then, as if she had weighed it up and finally reached her conclusion, announced: “Well I think it’s perfectly horrible.”
She went over to Marea and hugged her.
“You shouldn’t have made her hide in there.”
This was Tunde, speaking to me. Only now did I fully realize that I was inhabiting him again. There had been a period of complete darkness and blankness immediately following Imrani’s collapse. I had no idea how long it had lasted.
Tunde must have spoken aloud, because Cori said, “I was safe. I had Nina with me. She’s back.”
Vargo gazed at her, then at Tunde. “You, too?”
Tunde nodded.
“What do they want?”
Tunde waited for me to answer, but it was Cori who spoke:
“All we know is that we’re being guided by servants of the Noosphere.”
It was Nina speaking through her. Vargo didn’t try to hide the fact that he was less than delighted by our return.
“What is it this time?” he asked.
“We want to help,” I said through Tunde.
“We don’t need you,” he said. “Or the ones you claim are directing you.”
“Really?” I said acidly. “Without our help, you’d have never got off Io.”
Marea stalked past us and went down the gangway.
Tunde made to follow her, but Vargo blocked the way, holding Cori back too.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I don’t trust either of you. You let anything nasty happen to her and I’ll kill you.”
Cori gave a little squeak of terror. Vargo swept her up into his arms. “ ’Course I’d have to do it without hurting you,” he said to her.
“Orbituary,” the ship blurted. “Loop-de-loop. No villains please.”
I understood from Tunde that Vargo had only been able partially to restore the ship’s cortex; it phased in and out of lucidity.
We joined Marea in the bridgehead. Hours must have passed since I last inhabited Tunde because we were in orbit around Europa, a cloud-streaked water world not unlike Earth, except that it lacked significant landmasses. Europans lived on floating plantations, harvesting various crops for export to other worlds.
“I suppose I should thank you,” Marea said to Tunde.
I decided to take a backseat. Tunde said, “Will you marry me, Marea?”
Her expression didn’t alter. She went to a dispensary and punched up a tube of vine-milk.
“You like your women without hair?” she said.
“It’ll grow back. I’m serious.”
She sucked the milk through a straw, draining it avidly, eyes on him. But she said nothing further.
I had the impression that he had done much more explaining during my absence, telling her the truth about his life, or at least the truth as he saw it.
“Will you?”
“You can certainly pick your moment. This is hardly the time, is it?”
“I love you.”
She shook her head.
“I do.” He said it as if it were a statement of principle.
“That’s easy to say. How do I know I can trust you?”
Cori had been listening with absorbed curiosity. “She’s quite right, Father,” she remarked. “I think you’re lucky you got away with a smack on the cheek.”
Marea laughed. “Is that you speaking, or the other one?”
“Me, of course!” Cori said indignantly. “He’s my father.”
Without a further word, Marea walked off, heading towards the rear of the ship. Tunde made to follow, but Vargo said, “Leave her.”
I agreed with him, and told Tunde as much. He stood rooted with indecision. After a minute or so the shrine sensitory on the flight ridge winked on.
Marea was communing with her ancestors.
In our absence, Vargo had suggested making for Europa. It was the closest settled world to Io, and he had friends in a small Deist community on one of the equatorial plantations who might be prepared to shelter them. But there was to be no opportunity to test this.
“Hectic,” the ship burbled. “Meddlesummer.” Then it announced in more normal fashion that another craft was in the vicinity and on an interception course.
The longsight showed it to be a heavily armed interdictor, the mainstay of the politia fleet that patrolled the interworld flight paths to discourage smuggling and piracy. It was already asking us to identify ourselves.
The ship was big and fearsome-looking, its armoured hull and barbed wings sprouting pulse-cannons, scorpion tail packed with plasma borbs.
“It’s decision time,” Vargo said to Tunde. “Do we stay and chat, or run for it?”
Tunde didn’t like the idea of having to decide. I wanted to see how he would
react without my intervention.
“Can we get away?” he asked.
“In theory,” Vargo said. “Interdictors are fast, but the scuttle could probably outpace it on a short run. That’s assuming they don’t decide to fire on us.”
A single direct hit from a pulse-cannon would be enough to disable the ship, while a plasma borb, a sphere of incandescent antimatter, would annihilate it in a flash.
“I thought your friends are supposed to know the answers,” Vargo was saying. “What do they tell you?”
I hadn’t been aware of Chloe and Lucian until now; they manifested themselves, telling me what to do.
Through Tunde I spoke another code to the ship, which promptly acknowledged and transmitted it.
Vargo looked suspicious. “What was that about?”
“I suggest we swap clothes,” I said. “You’ve just been reinstated to the politia at your former rank, your criminal records erased.”
He simply stood there.
“I’m not joking,” I said. “This is straight from the Noosphere. How’d you think we got control of this ship in the first place?”
Vargo was a pragmatic man, as evidenced by the fact that he had accommodated himself to the presence of Nina and myself within Cori and Tunde, despite his misgivings. While we changed clothes, the scuttle broadcast the information that it was transporting a blanked prisoner from Io under the command of Varentinian Goboruwulan Peichnek.
“Is that your full name?” I couldn’t resist asking.
The ship’s mobile console weaved up to him, gurgitating an irised lens which I instructed him to put in his blind eye. With some reluctance, he did so. It had the effect of making the eye appear normal.
The interdictor confirmed that the flight was authorized, but requested person-to-person communication. This was a surprise; even Chloe and Lucian seemed to believe that we would have been allowed to fly on without further inquiry.
Vargo climbed into the pilot’s seat while the rest of us had out of the comlink’s line of sight.
The optic opened, showing a woman pilot at the controls of the interdictor.
“Your ship is armed,” she said; it was a statement rather than a question: all scuttles were fitted with pulse-cannons as a minimum. “You’re needed for other duties. Proceed immediately to Callisto orbit and await further instructions.”
Vargo was taken by surprise at this, and he almost glanced back to where Tunde was hiding.
“What is this?” he said angrily. “I’ve got a corpse to deliver. It can’t wait.”
“These are emergency orders,” the woman said. “They override your previous instructions.”
Vargo held his ground. “This is judicial business. You’re executive. Back off.”
The woman didn’t even blink. “You have two minutes to comply, Commander Peichnek. If you don’t, and attempt to resist or escape, we’ll disable your craft—even if that means you die as a result.”
The optic blanked.
Vargo jumped up as the rest of us came out of hiding.
“I thought we were supposed to be in the clear!” he said.
I had a sense that Chloe and Lucian had been referring back, presumably to some source in the Noosphere. They conveyed what was apparently unanticipated information to me. I passed it on through Tunde:
“The order is new, and there’s no way of countermanding it. It’s come direct from the Advocates themselves.”
Twelve
The Advocates’ ship was like a pearl-white bird with arching wings and a forked tail. Yet this was no decorative ceremonial craft but a powerful and agile flyer, heavily armed in case of unwarranted attack, its crew hand-picked by Orela and Julius themselves. There was talk that the Advocates had named it The Glory Rode.
The ship was on full propulsion, six hours out from Mercury. Bezile had tried to nap in the interim, but sleep eluded her. The summons to accompany the Advocates had been another bolt from the blue.
Leanderic, the Advocates’ chief steward, escorted Bezile and Luis from their quarters to the bridgehead, a study in poise with his delicate movements and impeccable manners. The bridgehead itself was spacious enough to hold an entire convocation of arbiters, tiered skulldecks rising from the navigation pit where both crew and palace minions attended the sensitories. Banks of optics on the flight ridges fed in a constant welter of information from the Settled Worlds so that the Advocates were kept informed of the current status of the Noosphere, wherever they were. Julius and Orela always had been an itinerant pair, never dwelling long in one place. They also travelled light: the entire ship’s complement numbered no more than two dozen souls.
Bezile was irritable from lack of sleep, and when Luis wondered aloud, and with his usual trepidation, where they were heading, she simply told him to shut up. The council had been adjourned abruptly soon after her appointment as Venzano’s successor, Julius and Orela telling everyone to return posthaste to their Arbitrations to await further important instructions. She had no idea what was afoot, but the Advocates plainly enjoyed mystery. She only hoped that none of it was connected with the loss of the womb. Even before Shivaun had betrayed her calling, she had received a personal communication from Leanderic directing her to say nothing of the affair to anyone. Absolutely nothing. Well, she’d abided by that. Even Luis hadn’t got the slightest hint. Especially Luis.
They were led down a spiralway into the big hospitality chamber in the belly of the ship. The plass floor gave a dizzying perspective of space, the star-mottled darkness stretching downwards for ever. Bezile raised her gaze, breathing steadily to control herself, surprised to see that the entire chamber was empty except for the small conical cloud of a privacy screen at its furthest end. As they approached it, Luis stumbled and almost fell face down, but Leanderic grasped his arm in one effortless movement and steadied him. Bezile resisted the urge to chuckle. Luis looked quite uncoordinated with fear, his mouth soundlessly opening and closing in thanks.
They faced the screen.
“Step through,” they were told.
Bezile did not hesitate: it was better to get it done. Taking Luis’s elbow, she passed through the veil.
Julius and Orela sat together among a nest of white sofa snakes. Bezile was startled to see that both of them were quite naked, only the padded coils of the snakes preserving a certain modesty. She had to admit she was shocked. Though nudity was in no sense disreputable in many societies of the Noospace, Julius and Orela had never been seen publicly—or privately, insofar as she knew—without some vestment of their office. Apart from anything else, the people expected their Advocates to maintain a proper sense of their status. Bezile felt as if she and Luis had stumbled unwittingly on a private moment.
But both Julius and Orela seemed perfectly at ease with themselves, indicating stools in front of them. Stools! And inorganic at that, bare ribbed metal with a kind of grating on top, like cast-offs from some ancient vintage ship. Bezile had never put her ample bottom on anything more uncomfortable.
“We’re so pleased you were able to accompany us,” Orela said, as if there had been a real choice in the matter. “We felt a private audience was most appropriate, given everything that’s happened. Once again, our heartfelt congratulations on your worthy appointment as Prime Arbiter.”
“Such a refreshingly unexpected outcome,” Julius added with apparent enthusiasm. “We’re quite confident you will serve us most successfully.”
Bezile didn’t like the tenor of this. She noticed that Luis’s hands were clasped together as if in prayer, the fingerjoints bloodless. He was staring at the Advocates’ feet.
She decided to take the initiative.
“It was indeed unexpected,” she agreed. “I truly did not aspire to the post but I will serve to the best of my capacities.”
“Naturally you will,” said Julius. “We expect nothing less.”
“I’m grateful for the opportunity to express my regrets directly to you over the episode with the womb. The
woman was a clone-daughter, a perfectly trustworthy servant of the Noosphere in the past. I had no reason to think that she would betray us.”
Julius waved her apology aside. “We’ve no desire to rake over the past. What’s done is done. You were less culpable than others, though it might have been wiser to have contacted the Noosphere directly you acquired the womb rather than Prime Arbiter Venzano. He is—was—not perhaps as diligent a servant as yourself, and certainly not as efficient, given that he allowed himself to be fooled by a crude simulacrum. And let the woman escape into the bargain.”
It sounded like they had no regrets about Venzano’s passing. Bezile stopped this line of thought immediately.
“He was also rather tardy in informing us that it was in his possession,” Orela said. “It’s essential that the Prime Arbiter maintains an intimate degree of communication with our offices.”
Bezile managed to swallow. “Of course,” she said briskly.
“No matter,” said Julius. “And yet you must have been curious.”
“Curious?”
“About the womb itself. Its very nature.”
“I made some investigations,” she admitted. “Consulted an old and trusted friend who has now passed on. He was able to tell me very little.”
Orela stroked her cheek against one of the snakes. “We know you to be a loyal servant after your own fashion, and we feel it only proper that we tell you the secret of the womb.”
It was a qualified compliment, and for an instant Julius’s eyes had gone to Luis. In that microsecond, Bezile understood that Luis was an agent of the Advocates, doubtless reporting everything she did to them. She quelled the flash of anger she felt, used every iota of self-control to keep herself focused on what was being said.
“The womb was made by Augmenter sympathizers within the Noosphere itself,” Orela said. “It contains two foetuses, a male and a female. They are intended to be our heirs.”
She could tell that even Luis had not known this.
“The Augmenters have infiltrated the Noosphere?”
“They have followers everywhere,” Orela said. “Small in number, but they nevertheless exist.”
“Who are they?”
“At present we only know them by their actions. They hide their tracks well, but we’re taking steps to root them out.”
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