But the goggles were a necessary evil. In the Captain’s realm, she had to consent to his rules.
The bas-relief image took a definite step towards her and then emerged from the wall, solid now, taking on form and detail, exactly as if a physical person had stepped out of a highly localised sandstorm.
Now she did flinch, for the illusion of presence was striking. She could not help but take a step backwards.
There was something different about the manifestation this time. The space helmet was not quite as ancient as the one she remembered, and it was covered in different symbols. The suit, while still of an old design, was not as utterly archaic as the first he had worn. The chest-pack was more streamlined, and the whole suit fitted its wearer more tightly. Antoinette was no expert, but she judged that the new suit must be fifty-odd years ahead of the one he had worn last time.
She wondered what that meant.
She was on the point of taking another step backwards when the Captain halted his approach and again raised a gloved hand. The gesture served to calm her, which was probably the intention. Then he began to work the mechanism of his visor, sliding it up with a conspicuous hiss of equalising air pressure.
The face inside the helmet was instantly recognisable, but it was also the face of an older man. There were lines where there had been none before, grey in the stubble that still shadowed his cheeks. There were wrinkles around his eyes, which appeared more deeply set. The cast of his mouth was different, too, curving downwards at the corners.
His voice, when he spoke, was both deeper and more ragged. “You don’t give up easily, do you?”
“As a rule, no. Do you remember the last chat we had, John?”
“Adequately.” With one hand he punched a matrix of controls set into the upper surface of the chest-pack, keying in a chain of commands. “How long ago was it?”
“Do you mind if I ask you how long ago you think it was?”
“No.”
She waited. The Captain looked at her, his expression blank.
“How long ago do you think it was?” she asked, eventually.
“A couple of months. Several years of shiptime. Two days. Three minutes. One point one eight milliseconds. Fifty-four years.”
“Two days is about right,” she said. 1 “I’ll take your word for it. As you’ll have gathered, my memory isn’t quite the razor-sharp faculty it once was.”
“Still, you did remember that I’d come before. That counts for something, doesn’t it?”
“You’re a very charitable person, Antoinette.”
“I’m not surprised that your memory works in funny ways, John. But it’s enough for me that you remembered my name. Do you remember anything else we talked about?”
“Give me a clue.”
“The visitors, John? The presences in the system?”
“They’re still here,” he said. For a moment he was again distracted by the functions of his chest-pack. He looked more vigilant than concerned. She saw him tap the little bracelet of controls that encircled one wrist, then nod as if satisfied with some subtle change in the suit’s parameter settings.
“Yes,” she said.
“They’re also closer. Aren’t they?”
“We think so, John. That’s what Khouri told us was happening, and everything she’s said has checked out so far.”
“I’d listen to her, if I were you.”
“It’s not just a question of listening to Khouri now. We have her daughter. Her daughter knows things, or so we’ve been led to believe. We think we may have to start listening to what she tells us to do.”
“Clavain will guide you. Like me, he understands the reach of historical time. We’re both phantoms from the past, hurtling into futures neither of us expected to see.”
Antoinette bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got some bad news. Clavain’s dead. He was killed saving Khouri’s daughter. We have Scorpio, but…”
The Captain was a long time answering. She wondered if the news of Clavain’s death had affected him more than she had anticipated. She had never thought of Clavain and the Captain as having any kinship, but now that the Captain put it like that, the two had a lot more in common with each other than with most of their peers.
“You don’t have absolute faith in Scorpio’s leadership?” he asked.
“Scorpio’s served us well. In a crisis, you couldn’t ask for a better leader. But he’d be the first to admit that he doesn’t think strategically.”
“Then find another leader.”
Something happened then that surprised her. Unbidden, she had a flashback to the earlier meeting in the High Conch. She saw Blood swaggering in at the start of it and then she saw Vasko Malinin arriving late for the same meeting. She saw Blood reprimanding him for his lateness and Vasko shrugging off that same reprimand as an irrelevance. And she realised, with hindsight, that she had accepted the young man’s insouciance as a necessary correlative to what he was and what he would become, and that she had, on some level, found it admirable.
She had seen a gleam of something shining through, like steel.
“This isn’t about leaders,” Antoinette said hastily. “It’s about you, John. Are you intending to leave?”
“You suggested I should give the matter some thought.”
She recalled those elevating neutrino levels. “You seem to be giving it a bit more than thought.”
“Perhaps.”
“We need to be careful,” she said. “We may well need to get into space at short notice, but we have to think about the consequences for those around us. It will take days to get everyone loaded aboard, even if everything goes without a hitch.”
“There are thousands aboard now. Their survival will have to be my main priority. I’m sorry about the others, but if they don’t get here in time they may have to be left behind. Does that sound callous to you?”
“I’m not the one to judge. Look, some people will choose to stay behind anyway. We may even encourage them, just in case leaving Ararat turns out to be a mistake. But if you leave now, you’ll kill everyone not already aboard.”
“Have you considered moving them aboard faster?”
“We’re doing what we can, and we’ve begun to make plans to relocate a limited number of people away from the bay. But by this time tomorrow there’ll still be at least a hundred thousand people we haven’t moved.”
I For a moment the Captain faded back into the dust storm. Antoinette stared at the rough leathery texture of the wall. She thought she had lost him and was about to turn away. Then he emerged again, stooping against an imagined wind.
He raised his voice over something only he could hear. “I’m sorry, Antoinette. I understand your concerns.”
“Does that mean you’ve listened to a word I said, or are you just going to leave when it suits you, regardless?”
He reached up to lower his visor. “You should do all that you can to get the others to safety, whether it’s aboard the ship or further from the bay.”
“That’s it, then, is it? Those that we haven’t moved will just have to take their chances?”
“None of this is easy for me.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to wait until we can get everyone to safety.”
“But it might, Antoinette. It might do exactly that.”
Antoinette turned away in disgust. “Remember what I told you last time? I was wrong. I see it now, even if I didn’t then.”
“What was that exactly?”
She looked back at him. She felt spiteful and reckless. “I said you’d paid for your crimes. I said you’d done it a hundred thousand times over. Nice dream, John, but it wasn’t true, was it? You didn’t care a damn about those people. It was only ever about saving yourself.”
The Captain did not answer her. He pulled down the visor and vanished back into the storm, still angling his body against the tremendous lacerating force of that invisible wind. And Antoinette began to wonder whether this visit hadn’t a
fter all been a grave mistake, exactly the sort of reckless behaviour that her father had always warned her about.
“No joy,” she told her companions back in the High Conch.
Around the table sat a quorum of colony seniors. She did not notice any obvious absences except for Pellerin, the swimmer. Even Scorpio was now present. It was the first she had seen of him since Clavain’s death, and there was, Antoinette thought, something in his gaze that she had never seen there before. Even when he looked directly at her his eyes were focused on something distant and almost certainly hostile—a glint on some imagined horizon, an enemy sail or the gleam of armour. She had seen that look somewhere else recently, but it took her a moment to remember where. The old man had been sitting in the same place at the table, fixated on the same remote threat. It had taken years of pain and suffering to bring Clavain to that state, but only days to do it to the pig.
Antoinette knew that something awful had happened in the iceberg. She had flinched from the details. When the others had told her she did not need to know—that she was much better off not knowing—she had decided to believe them. But although she had never been very good at reading the expressions of pigs, in Scorpio’s face half the story was already laid out for her inspection, the horror anatomised if only she had the wit to read the signs.
“What did you tell him?” Scorpio asked.
“I told him we’d be looking at tens of thousands of casualties if he decided to lift off.”
“And?”
“He more or less said ‘too bad.’ His only immediate concern was for the people already aboard the ship.”
“Fourteen thousand at the last count,” Blood commented.
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Vasko said. “That’s—what? Not far off a tenth of the colony already?”
Blood toyed with his knife. “You want to come and help us squeeze in the next five hundred, son, you’re more than welcome.”
“It’s that difficult?” Vasko asked.
“It gets worse with every consignment. We might manage to get it up to twenty thousand by dawn, but only if we start treating them like cattle.”
‘They’re human beings,“ Antoinette said. ”They deserve better treatment than that. What about the freezers? Aren’t they helping?“
“The caskets aren’t working as well as they used to,” Xavier Liu said, addressing his wife exactly as he would any other colony senior. “Once they’re cooled down they’re OK, but putting someone under means hours of supervision and tinkering. There’s no way to process them fast enough.”
Antoinette closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips against her eyelids. She saw turquoise rings, like ripples in water. “This is about as bad as things can get, isn’t it?” Then she reopened her eyes and tried to shake some clarity into her head. “Scorp—any contact with Remontoire?”
“Nothing.”
“But you’re still convinced he’s up there?”
“I’m not convinced of anything. I’m merely acting on the best intelligence I have.”
“And you think we’d have seen a sign by now, some attempt to communicate with us, if he were up there.”
“Khouri was that sign,” Scorpio said.
‘Then why haven’t they sent down someone else?“ Antoinette replied. ”We need to know, Scorp: do we sit tight or get the hell off Ararat?“
“Believe me, I’m aware of the options.”
“We can’t wait for ever,” Antoinette said, frustration seeping into her voice. “If Remontoire loses the battle, we’ll be looking at a sky full of wolves. No way out once that happens, even if they don’t touch Ararat. We’ll be locked in.”
“As I said, I’m aware of the options.”
She had heard the menace in his voice. Of course he was aware. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just… don’t know what else we can do.”
No one spoke for a while. Outside, an aircraft swept low overhead, curving away with another consignment of refugees. Antoinette did not know if they were being taken to the ship or the far side of the island. Once the need to get people to safety had been recognised, the evacuation effort had been split down the middle.
“Did Aura offer anything useful?” Vasko asked.
Scorpio turned to him, the leather of his uniform creaking. “What sort of thing were you thinking of?”
“It wasn’t Khouri that was the sign,” Vasko said, “it was Aura. Khouri may know things, but Aura is the hotline. She’s the one we really need to talk to, the one who might know the right thing to do.”
“I’m glad you’ve given the matter so much consideration,” Scorpio said.
“Well?” Vasko persisted.
Antoinette stiffened. The atmosphere in the meeting room had never exactly been relaxed, but now it made the hairs on the back of her hands tingle. She had never dared speak to Scorpio like that, and she did not know many who had.
But Scorpio answered calmly. “She—Khouri—said the word again.”
“The word?” Vasko repeated.
“Hela. She’s said it several times since we revived her, but we didn’t know what it meant, or even if it had any particular significance. But there was another word this time.” Again the leather creaked as he shifted his frame. For all that he appeared disconnected from events in the room, the violence of which he was capable was a palpable thing, waiting in the wings like an actor.
“The other word?” Vasko asked.
“Quaiche,” Scorpio replied.
The woman walked to the sea. Overhead the sky was a brutal, tortured grey and the rocks under her feet were slippery and unforgiving. She shivered, more in apprehension than cold, for the air was humid and oppressive. She looked behind her, along the shoreline towards the ragged edge of the encampment. The buildings on the fringe of the settlement had a deserted and derelict air to them. Some of them had collapsed and never been reoccupied. She thought it very unlikely that there was anyone around to notice her presence. Not, of course, that it mattered in the slightest. She was entitled to be here, and she was entitled to step into the sea. The fact that she would never have asked this of her own swimmers did not mean that her actions were in any way against colony rules, or even the rules of the swimmer corps. Foolhardy, yes, and very probably futile, but that could not be helped. The pressure to do something had grown inside her like a nagging pain, until it could not be ignored.
It had been Vasko Malinin who had tipped her over the edge. Did he realise the effect his words had had?
Marl Pellerin halted where the shoreline began to curve back around on itself, enclosing the waters of the bay. The shore was a vague grey scratch stretching as far as the eye could see, until it became lost in the mingled wall of sea-mist and cloud that locked in the bay in all directions. The spire of the ship was only intermittently visible in the silvery distance, and its size and remoteness varied from sighting to sighting as her brain struggled to cope with the meagre evidence available to it. Marl knew that the spire reached three kilometres into the sky, but at times it looked no larger than a medium-sized conch structure, or one of the communications antennae that ringed the settlement. She imagined the squall of neutrinos streaming out from the spire—actually from the submerged part of it, of course, where the engines lay underwater—as a shining radiance, a holy light knifing through her. The particles sang through her cell membranes, doing no damage as they sprinted for interstellar space at a hair’s breath below the speed of light. They meant that the engines were gearing up for star-flight. Nothing organic could detect those squalls, only the most sensitive kinds of machine. But was that really true? The Juggler organisms—taken as a single planet-spanning entity—constituted a truly vast biomass. The Juggler organisms on a single planet outweighed the cumulative mass of the entire human species by a factor of a hundred. Was it so absurd to think that the Jugglers in their entirety might not be as oblivious to that neutrino flux as people imagined? Perhaps they, too, sensed the Captain’s restlessness. And perhaps in their
slow, green, nearly mindless fashion they comprehended something of what his departure would mean.
At the sea’s edge something caught Marl’s eye. She walked over to examine it, skipping nimbly from rock to rock. It was a lump of metal, blackened and twisted like some melted sugar confection, strange folds and creases marring its surface. Smoke coiled up from it. The thing buzzed and crackled, and an articulated part resembling the sectioned tail of a lobster twitched horribly. It must have come down recently, perhaps in the last hour. All around Ararat, wherever there were human observers, one heard reports of things falling from the sky. There were too many near these outposts to be accidental. Efforts were being concentrated above centres of human population. Someone—or something—was trying to get through. Occasionally, some small shard succeeded.
The thing disturbed her. Was it alien or human? Was it friendly-human or Conjoiner-human? Was anyone still making that kind of distinction?
Marl walked past the object and stopped at the water’s edge. She disrobed. Preparing to enter the sea, she had a weird flash of herself from the sea’s perspective. Her vision seemed to bob up and down from the water. She was a thin, naked thing, a pale upright starfish on the shore. The smashed object pushed a quill of smoke into the sky.
Marl wet her hands in water that had gathered in a rockpool. She splashed her face, wetting back her hair. The water stung her eyes, made them blur with tears. Even the water in the pools was fetid with Juggler life. Pellerin’s skin itched, especially in the band across her face where she already showed signs of Juggler takeover. The two colonies of micro-organisms—the one in the water and the one buried in her face—were recognising each other, fizzing with excitement.
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