by Eric Brown
Miller smiled. “That’s the obvious assumption, doctor. But I did wonder if there might be another, more subtle reason behind her decision to come here.”
Dr Patel shook her head. “I can’t recall her ever mentioning Kallithea. It was such a long time ago.”
Miller finished his tea. “You’ve been very helpful, Dr Patel. I’m sorry we’ve interrupted your packing.” He glanced across at the piled luggage. “You leave on the next transmission to Earth?”
“I’ll be here for another five days, Mr Miller, should you wish to see me again.”
Miller thanked her and they took their leave.
In the elevator, Miller looked at Hendrick and said, “Matt, you must have known about this—about Nordstrom’s sadism. Why didn’t you say?”
Hendrick shook his head. “Call me a fool, but I didn’t suspect a thing. And I find it hard to believe that she’d kill anyone.”
Miller gave him an odd look. “But she did, Matt. She severed the poor fucker’s head.”
“You heard what Patel said. I’m not excusing her actions, but she was suffering profound psychological effects of abuse. It’s sad—”
“It is sad—sad that Jurgens happened to have anything to do with her.”
They fell silent and rode the elevator down to the ground-floor plaza. On the covered slideway to the snowtrain station, Miller consulted his wrist-com. “There’s a train to the interior in an hour. It terminates at New Stockholm six hours later.”
“This friend of Kat’s?” Hendrick asked.
Miller read the name from his wrist-com. “One Magda Kallanova. Apparently they were good friends back in Amsterdam twenty years ago. She runs the National Museum in New Stockholm,” Miller went on, but Hendrick didn’t hear a word.
Magda Kallanova . . .
He stared ahead at the sleek, jet-black column of the snowtrain on the station platform, at the great V of the snowplough at its head.
“Matt, you’re miles away.”
Hendrick looked up. “I knew Magda. She worked in the gallery where Kat had exhibited her installations.”
“You did?” Miller stopped and stared at him. “And she and Nordstrom—how close were they?”
“They’d known each other since childhood,” Hendrick said. “Do you think she might have fled here seeking help from Magda?”
“It’s a possibility, I suppose,” Miller said. “Did Kallanova know about your affair with Nordstrom?”
Hendrick nodded. “Yes. As far as I was aware, she was the only person who did.”
“Well, we’re due to meet her for drinks at ten tonight. She’ll be in for a surprise when she sees you.”
They crossed the platform and approached the train. Miller said, “We have a few hours to kill before then, and I’d like to visit the icefields to the south of the city, where the suicides are . . . congregated. Take a guided tour. You game?”
Hendrick glanced at his friend. “As I said before, I think it’s macabre. But I admit that I’m more curious than squeamish. I’ve never understood the religious impulse. Even my parents’ Calvinism was a mystery to me.”
Miller laughed. “The Acolytes of the Ice are an order of magnitude beyond anything known on Earth, Matt.”
“What fascinates me is that it all stems from the same desire to transcend what we have here, now.” Hendrick shrugged. “But the here and now has always been enough for me.”
They boarded the train, bought coffee and sandwiches from the buffet car, and took their seats. Across from him, Miller busied himself with his wrist-com, absorbed. As the train accelerated from the enclosed station and bulleted up the coast, Hendrick stared out at the shattered, eerily motionless sea and sipped his coffee.
He would never forget his last meeting with Magda Kallanova.
All those years ago she had been Kat’s best friend, to whom Kat confided everything—including her affair with Hendrick. He had been nervous to the point of paranoia about anyone learning of his relationship with Kat. He went to elaborate measures to keep it from colleagues on the force, should word get back to his commanding officer. Kat had reassured him that he could trust Magda, and after meeting the tall, dark-haired Russian he’d felt a measure of ease; the woman clearly doted on Kat, despised her abusive husband Gregor Behrens, and she had warmed to Hendrick. Over the course of a couple of months, the three had become good friends.
His last meeting with Magda had occurred just days before Kat ended their affair. He’d bumped into the Russian in a café near the gallery where she worked, and where he was due to meet Kat for lunch.
Magda was nothing if not blunt, and she had asked Hendrick, in her heavily accented Russian, if he thought he was doing the wise thing.
“The wise thing?”
“Your affair with Katerina, in my opinion, is not wise. You are a good man, very young, no? You are inexperienced with women, yes?”
He’d coloured and murmured that he and Kat loved each other. “I don’t fear Behrens,” he’d added, which had been a callow lie.
She shrugged. “But it is not her husband you should fear, Matt.”
“Meaning?”
She shrugged again, made an expressive moue with her crimson lips, very Russian, and said, “I would not like to see you get hurt, Matt.”
Then, before he could ask her what she meant, Kat had arrived and the conversation had turned to other things.
Three days later Kat told him that their affair was over, and he thought he’d never survive her rejection.
Now Hendrick stared out at the frozen sea, which was drawing further away as the snowtrain took a long turn inland, and he realised that Magda Kallanova must have known about Kat’s perilous mental state all along.
He wondered if Kat had fled to Magda now, in extremis, and considered their meeting with the Russian that evening.
FIVE
NEW STOCKHOLM WAS A GLITTERING AGGLOMERATION of domes, like a pile of soap bubbles, situated on a slight rise overlooking the limitless ice plains on every side. Hendrick and Miller checked into the Hotel Odin, stowed their luggage, then took the elevator down to the lobby to await their guided tour of the infamous Holy Script.
The foyer was busy with Acolytes booking into the hotel—cowed, silent people, men and women of all ages and also, Hendrick was shocked to see, children accompanying their parents. He and Miller sat in the bar and stared at the procession of shaveskulls as they processed through reception. The Acolytes had the withdrawn, reserved manner of people convinced of their destiny, as if already the outside world, and the people who inhabited it, had ceased to exist. He wondered what past events, what terrible psychological traumas, might be responsible for their imminent actions. For surely no rational person could forego life on such flimsy a pretext as some charlatan guru’s promise of afterlife.
“I can’t begin to understand,” he said. “It doesn’t make rational sense. How can they? And they’re even taking their kids.”
He watched a couple with two children, a girl and a boy, cross to the elevator. They might have been any normal family on vacation. The girl was about ten—his own daughter’s age—and her resemblance to Samantha was painful.
“You’ve got to understand that some people don’t fear death,” Miller said. “They have belief. To them, death is just a beginning, a new start after what they regard as an illusion.”
“They must hate their lives, Ed.”
The detective rocked his head. “Haven’t you, at times?”
“Not enough to consider killing myself, no.” He stared at his friend. “You?”
Miller sighed. “Once or twice, after the bombing. And then when Marcus died.” He looked uncomfortable and said, as if relieved at the opportunity to change the subject, “I think this is the guide now.”
A young blonde woman, her smiling demeanour at odds with the subject of the tour she was about to conduct, breezed into the bar and announced, “Will everyone who has signed up for the six o’clock tour please follow me outsi
de? We’ll be taking a trolley bus to the outer skin of central dome, and then it’s out into the cold for a flier ride to the icefield. It’s sixty below zero out there, ladies and gentlemen, so I hope you’re all dressed appropriately.”
Hendrick sealed his thermal jacket and climbed from his stool, then followed Miller and the dozen other off-worlders out of the hotel.
• • •
The flier was a custom-built affair with seats on either side of a central aisle, each seat built into a transparent globe designed to give its occupant a bird’s-eye view of the ice plains. Still shivering from the short walk from the trolley bus to the flier, despite his suit, Hendrick sat down across the aisle from Miller. The other passengers were the kind of well-to-do tourists common the Expansion over: impeccably preserved, silver-haired men and women in their seventies and eighties, eager to tick off another wonder on their grand tour of the colonies.
The engines powered up and the flier rose vertically, pressing Hendrick into his seat. He looked through the enclosing glass as they ascended. The massed, lighted domes that comprised New Stockholm dropped away; within seconds the city was a tiny, coin-sized illumination on the vast grey expanse of the ice. Then the flier banked south and the city was lost to sight.
Their guide, swaddled in a tangerine puffa-suit and looking about twelve years old, stood at the end of the aisle, gripping the overhead luggage locker and smiling as the flier tilted and sped south.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Svenska Corp’s tour of the Acolyte’s Holy Script. I am Anika, your guide for the evening. Now I understand that some of you have been on the tour, five years ago. Welcome back, Mr and Mrs Kruger and Dr Smithson. For the rest of you, I will briefly describe the evening’s itinerary.” She consulted her wrist-com and went on. “The reason for the aerial tour is to give our guests a view of what the Acolytes call their Holy Declaration: the Kallithean script writ large in the form of thousands of sacrificial Acolytes. Once we have observed the Script from on high, as it were, we will descend and take a tour of the actual Script at ground level. After that, we will repair to the Holy Monastery of Akhellior, where we will watch the latest intake of Acolytes as they prepare themselves for the Ultimate Sacrifice.”
She gave a dazzling smile. “I’m sure most of you are familiar with the beliefs of the Acolytes. However, for those who are not: the Acolytes were founded twenty years ago by Cavendish Sagar, a student of the native Marl. He became a convert to their religion and adapted the tenets of their belief system to a credo which would appeal to members of his own race.”
At this, Hendrick exchanged a glance with Miller across the aisle.
He returned his attention to Anika as she went on. “Certain of the Marl hold that self-sacrifice is the noblest act in God’s universe and that every citizen who gives himself up to the ice will be rewarded with a place in the hereafter. Cavendish Sagar took the belief as his own and in time attracted a massive following of adherents across the Expansion.”
An old man in front of Hendrick raised a hand and asked, “But what kind of people become Acolytes?”
Anika smiled. “All types, all ages, and from all walks of life. The Acolytes boast rich and poor, from every nationality and from most colony worlds across the Expansion.”
“Forgive my ignorance,” another old man asked, “but if the ultimate act of obeisance of the Acolytes is self-annihilation, then how does the cult possibly sustain its membership?”
“A very good question, sir. The Acolytes recruit new members all the time, all around the Expansion. More than five thousand citizens join every year.”
Hendrick murmured incredulously, “Five thousand . . .”
“And every five years,” Anika went on, “during the ten days leading up to the start of winter proper, thousands of Acolytes step out onto the ice and achieve unity with the hereafter.” She smiled around the gathering. “Tonight is the first night of the Ten Days, and you will be fortunate indeed to watch the first intake of Acolytes leave the monastery and take their eternal place in the hallowed Script.”
Hendrick stared down at the star-washed ice, wondering what his reactions might be to watching healthy, able-bodied people of all ages go willingly to their deaths.
Anika turned and peered through her own view-globe. She pulled back her head and regarded the tourists, beaming. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you will care to look right and left, you will see the first words of the Holy Script.”
Hendrick leaned to his left and looked out. The ice presented a perfectly level surface, as pristine, he thought, as an expanse of parchment. And written onto the page, in an unfamiliar script that resembled the curls and hooks of Arabic, was a midnight-black inscription. He made out seven such words, flowing towards the horizon, and he found it hard to believe that each beautiful, cursive flourish comprised hundreds, even thousands, of frozen human beings. Fortunately, at this elevation, he could not make out the individual bodies. As he peered to the west he made out the area where the outline of the Holy Script had yet to be occupied by the sacrificial victims—or rather obliging devotees.
“In the first Sacrifice, twenty years ago,” Anika said, “four thousand Acolytes gave themselves. Last winter, five years ago, some fifteen thousand individuals stepped out onto the ice field—led by their Holy Leader, Cavendish Sagar himself.”
“Sagar sacrificed himself?” Miller said.
Anika smiled. “He himself led that last intake and positioned himself at the far end of the Holy Script. The full stop, as it were, of the Holy Declaration.”
“How many individuals will be down there when the Script is completed?” an old woman asked.
“Cavendish Sagar calculated that one hundred thousand souls will comprise the Holy Declaration upon completion. But that will not be for another twenty or thirty years.”
Hendrick leaned forward and smiled at Anika. “And then? What will become of the cult then, when the declaration is full and the devout can no longer sacrifice themselves? Will that spell—pun intentional—the end of the religion?”
Anika shook her head, her blonde bangs dancing. “His Holiness foresaw that eventuality and made provisions. He scoured the holy texts of the Marl for a suitable second inscription and found one. Last year, devotees marked out in the rock the outline of a second Holy Declaration, situated five kilometres to the south of our present position.”
“And when that is full of the faithful,” Miller said, “another will be found and inscribed, ad infinitum?”
Anika beamed at him. “Before he gave himself to the ice,” she said, “His Holiness taught his followers how to recognise the appropriate scripts that might be used in the far future.”
Hendrick peered down at the flowing script, the frozen corpses which comprised the words, still too far away to be made out individually. “But what does it say?” he asked.
“A literal translation is difficult,” she said. “To render the original Marl into English, or into any other human language, would be to lose much of its original meaning. However, a crude translation runs: ‘To God’s Children is vouchsafed the peace and everlasting balm of Akantha.’”
“Akantha being?” someone asked.
“The Marl’s own afterlife, or nirvana,” Anika said.
Across the aisle, Miller caught Hendrick’s attention and grimaced.
The flier banked. Anika gripped the back of a seat and announced, “We are coming in to land, ladies and gentlemen. If you would fasten your suits and don your face masks and goggles . . .”
She passed down the aisle, handing out earpieces and attached microphones. “In case you’d care to listen to my commentary when we’re out on the ice,” she explained. “Don’t hesitate to ask any questions you might have.”
Hendrick inserted the device into his right ear, sealed his suit and pulled down his visor. He peered through the globe at the frozen land as the flier descended vertically, its engines creating a spume of steam. They landed with a bump and the engines cu
t out, and when the steam dissipated Hendrick looked out across the frozen wastes.
He had expected to see a crowd of human beings, frozen and somehow secured upright. Instead, his first thought was that he was looking out across an alien garden, a plantation of improbable blooms which marched off in serried ranks across the ice plain.
“But,” he said into his microphone, “I thought . . .”
Anika looked at him. “Upon death,” she said, “the Acolytes undergo a blessed metamorphosis. They are transformed from their erstwhile fleshly forms into something . . . sublime and ineffable.”
“But what are they?” someone asked.
“The Marl believe that the truly holy are reborn, after death, into the beautiful ice flowers which bloom only once, every five years, at the height of winter—”
“But surely these can’t be . . . ?” Miller began.
Anika smiled. “These are Cavendish Sagar’s stylised representations of the volan, the ice flowers.”
“How is this achieved?” Miller asked.
“Please,” Anika said, addressing the group, “follow me.”
Hendrick stared across the ice to the transformed corpses a hundred metres away. His stomach turned at the thought, and yet a part of him wanted to leave the flier and take a closer look.
Anika pulled on her visor and goggles, cracked the hatch, and unfolded the stairs, then led the way out onto the ice.
Hendrick climbed down the steps and onto a heated metal walkway that crossed the ice to the Holy Script. The thermostat in his suit took a few seconds to kick in, and in that short duration the icy wind cut him to the bone. Behind them, the flier directed a beam of light towards the reconfigured Acolytes, but to either side of the cone of light all was in darkness.
“We are approaching the very first Acolytes to sacrifice themselves, twenty years ago,” Anika’s voice sounded in his ear. “The first few hundred Acolytes made up only a tenth of the initial holy word on the first day. At the end of the ten days, His Holiness Cavendish Sagar’s aim of completing the first word was accomplished.”