The shuttle banked away from the cathedral. He could see the rough, ungraded surface of the Permanent Way stretching ahead of the Lady Morwenna. But it did not stretch very far before meeting the dark, shadowed absence of Ginnungagap Rift. Vasko knew exactly what the locals called it.
The Way appeared to end at the edge of Absolution Gap. On the far side of the Rift, forty kilometres from the near side, the road continued. There appeared to be nothing in between but forty kilometres of empty space. It was only when the shuttle had climbed a little higher that a particular angle of the light picked out the absurdly delicate filigree of the bridge, as if it had been breathed into being just at that moment.
Vasko looked at the bridge, then back to the cathedral. It still appeared to be stationary, but he could see that the landmarks that had been next to it a few minutes earlier were now just behind it. The crawl was slug-slow, but there was also an inevitability about it.
And the bridge did not look remotely capable of carrying the cathedral to the other side of the rift.
He opened the secure channel to the larger shuttle waiting in orbit, the one that would relay his signal to the Nostalgia for Infinity, which was still waiting in the parking swarm.
“This is Vasko,” he said. “We’ve made contact with Aura.”
“Did you get anything?” asked Orca Cruz.
He looked at Khouri. She nodded, but said nothing.
“We got something,” Vasko said.
Aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, Parking Swarm, 107 Piscium, 2727
Scorpio came to consciousness knowing that this sleep had been even longer than the one before. He could feel the messages of chemical protestation from his cells flooding his system as they were cajoled back towards the grudging labour of metabolism. They were picking up tools like disgruntled workers, ready to down them for good at the slightest provocation. They had had enough mistreatment for one lifetime. Join the club, Scorpio thought. It was not as if the management was enjoying it, either.
He groped back into memory. He recalled, clearly enough, the episode of waking in the Yellowstone system. He remembered seeing the evidence of the wolves’ handiwofk, Yellowstone and its habitats reduced to ruins, the system gutted. He remembered also the part he had played in the dispute over the evacuees. He had won that particular battle—the shuttle had been allowed aboard—but it seemed-that he had lost the war. The choice had been his: surrender command and submit to a passive role as an observer, or go into the freezer again. Practically, the two amounted to the same thing: he would be out of the picture, leaving the running of the ship to Vasko and his allies. But at least if frozen he would not have to stand there watching it happen. It was a small compensation, but at his point in life it was the small compensations that mattered.
And now at last he was being awoken. His position aboard the ship might be just as compromised as before he went under, but at least he would have the benefit of some different scenery.
“Well?” he asked Valensin, while the doctor ran his usual battery of tests. “Ducked the odds again, didn’t I?”
“You always had an even chance of surviving it, Scorpio, but that doesn’t make you immortal. You go into that thing again, you won’t come out of it.”
“You said I had a ten per cent chance of survival the next time.”
“I was trying to cheer you up.”
“It’s worse than that?”
Valensin pointed at the reefersleep casket. “You climb into that box one more time, we might as well paint it black and put handles on it.”
But the true state of his current health, even when he filtered out Valensin’s usual tendency to put a positive spin on things, was still bad. In some respects it was as if he had not been in the casket at all; as if the flow of time had operated on him with stealthy disregard for the supposed effects of cryogenic stasis. His vision and hearing had degenerated further. He could barely see anything in his peripheral vision now, and even in full view, things that had been sharp before now appeared granular and milky. He kept having to ask Valensin to speak up above the churn of the room’s air conditioners. He had never had to do that before. When he walked around he found himself tiring quickly, always looking for somewhere to rest and catch his breath. His heart and lung capacities had weakened. Pig cardiovascular systems had been engineered by commercial interests for maximum ease of transgenic transplantation. The same interests hadn’t been overly concerned about the longevity of their products. Planned obsolescence, they called it.
He had been fifty when he left Ararat. To all intents and purposes he was still fifty: he had lived through only a few subjective weeks of additional time. But the transitions to and from reefersleep had put another seven or eight years on the clock, purely because of the battering his cells had taken. It would have been worse if he had stayed awake, living through all those years of shiptime, but not by very much.
Still, he was alive. He had lived through more years of worldtime than most pigs. So what if he was pushing the envelope of pig longevity? He was weakened, but he wasn’t on his back just yet.
“So where are we?” he asked Valensin. “I take it we’re around 107 Piscium. Or did you just wake me up to tell me how bad an idea it was to wake me up?”
“We’re around 107 Piscium, yes, but you still need to do a little catching up.” Valensin helped him off the examination couch, Scorpio noticing that the two old servitors had finally broken down and been consigned to new roles as coat racks, standing guard on either side of the door.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Scorpio said. “How long has it been? What’s the year?”
“Twenty-seven twenty-seven,” Valensin said. “And no, I don’t like the sound of that any more than you do. One other thing, Scorpio.”
“Yes?”
Valensin handed him a curved white shard, like a flake of ice. “You were holding this when you went under. I presumed it had some significance.”
Scorpio took the piece of conch material from the doctor.
There was something wrong, something that no one was telling him. Scorpio looked at the faces around the conference table, trying to see it for himself. Everyone that he would have expected to be there was present: Cruz, Urton, Vasko, as well as a good number of seniors he did not know so well. Khouri was also there. But now that he saw her he realised the obvious, screaming absence. There was no sign of Aura.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“She’s all right, Scorp,” Vasko said. “She’s safe and well. I know because I’ve just seen her.”
“Someone tell him,” Khouri said. She looked older than last time, Scorpio thought. There were more lines on her face, more grey in her hair. She wore it short now, combed across her brow. He could see the shape of her skull shining through the skin.
“Tell me what?” he asked.
“How much did Valensin explain?” Vasko asked him.
“He told me the date. That was about it.”
“We had to take some difficult decisions, Scorp. In your absence, we did the best we could.”
In my absence, Scorpio thought: as if he had walked out on them, leaving them in the lurch when they most needed him; making him feel as if he was the one at fault, the one who had shirked his responsibilities.
“I’m sure you managed,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. He had woken up with a headache. It was still there.
“We arrived here in 2717,” Vasko said, “after a nineteen-year flight from the Yellowstone system.”
The back of Scorpio’s neck prickled. “That’s not the date Valensin just gave me.”
“Valensin didn’t lie,” Urton said. “The local system date is 2727. We arrived around Hela nearly ten years ago. We’d have woken you then, but the time wasn’t right. Valensin told us we’d only get one shot. If we woke you then, you’d either be dead now or frozen again with only a small chance of revival.”
“This is the way it had to happen, Scorp,” Vasko said. “You
were a resource we couldn’t afford to squander.”
“You’ve no idea how good that makes me feel.”
“What I mean is, we had to think seriously about when would be the best time to wake you. You always told us to wait until we’d arrived around Hela.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Well, think of this as our proper arrival. As far as the system authorities are concerned—the Adventists—we’ve only shown up in the last few weeks. We left and came back again, making a loop through local interstellar space.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because of what had to happen,” Vasko said. “When we got here ten years ago, we realised that the situation in this system was vastly more complex than we’d anticipated. The Adventists controlled access to Haldora, the planet that keeps vanishing. You had to deal with the church to get near Hela, and even then you weren’t allowed to send any probes anywhere near the gas giant.”
“You could have shot your way in, taken what you wanted by force.”
“And risked a bloodbath? There are a million innocent civilians on Hela, not to mention all the tens of thousands of sleepers in the ships parked in this system. And it’s not as if we knew exactly what we were looking for. If we’d come in with guns blazing, we might have destroyed the very thing we needed, or at the very least made sure that we’d never get our hands on it. But if we could get close to Quaiche, then we could get at the problem from the inside.”
“Quaiche is still alive?” Scorpio asked.
“We know that for sure now—Khouri and I met him today,” Vasko said. “But he’s a recluse, kept alive with faltering longevity therapies. He never leaves the Lady Morwenna, his cathedral. He doesn’t sleep. He’s had his brain altered so that he doesn’t need to. He doesn’t even blink. He spends every waking instant of his life staring at Haldora, waiting for it to blink instead.”
“He’s insane, then.”
“In his situation, wouldn’t you be? Something awful happened to him down there. It pushed him over the edge.”
“He has an indoctrinal virus,” Cruz said. “It’s always been in his blood, since before he came to Hela. Now there’s a whole industry down there, fractioning it off, splicing it into different grades, mixing it with other viruses brought in by the evacuees. They say he has moments of doubt, when he realises that everything he’s created here is a sham. That deep down inside he knows the vanishings are a rational phenomenon, not a miracle. That’s when he has a new strain of the indoctrinal virus pumped back into his blood.”
“Difficult man to get to know, sounds like,” Scorpio observed.
“More difficult than we anticipated,” Vasko said. “But Aura saw the way. It was her plan, Scorp, not ours.”
“And the plan was?”
“She went down there nine years ago,” Khouri said, looking straight at him, as if the two of them were alone in the room. “She was eight years old, Scorp. I couldn’t stop her. She knew what she’d been sent out into the world to do, and it was to find Quaiche.“
He shook his head. “You didn’t send an eight-year-old girl down there alone. Tell me you didn’t do it.”
“We had no choice,” Khouri said. “Trust me. I’m her mother. Trying to stop her from going down there was like trying to stop a salmon Swimming upriver. It was going to happen whether we liked it or not.”
“We found a family,” Vasko said. “Good people, living in the Vigrid badlands.
They had a son, but they’d lost their only daughter in an accident a couple of years earlier. They didn’t know who or what Aura was, only that they weren’t to ask too many questions. They were also told to treat her exactly as if she’d always been with them. They fell into the role very easily, telling her stories of things that their other daughter had done when she was younger. They loved her very much.“
“Why the pretence?”
“Because she didn’t remember who she really was,” Khouri said. “She buried her own memories, suppressing them. She’s halfway to being a Conjoiner. She can arrange her own head the way the rest of us arrange furniture. It wasn’t all that difficult for her to do, once she realised it had to happen.”
“Why?” he asked.
“So that she’d fit in without her whole life becoming an act. If she believed she’d been born on Hela, so would the people she met.”
“That’s horrific.”
“You think it was any easier for me, Scorp? I’m her mother. I was with her the day she decided to forget me. I walked into the same room as her and she barely noticed me.”
He gradually learned the rest of the story, doing his best to ignore the sense of unreality he felt. More than once he had to examine his surroundings, convincing himself that this was not just another revival nightmare. He felt foolish, having slept through all these machinations. But their story, or at least what he had been told of it, was seamless. It also had, he was forced to admit, a brutal inevitability. It had taken the Nostalgia for Infinity decades to reach Hela: more than forty years just trav-elling from Ararat via the Yellowstone system. But Aura’s mission had begun long before that, when she was hatched within the matrix of the Hades neutron star. Given all the time that she had been on her way, an extra nine years was really not all that serious an addition. Yes:now that he put it like that, it all made a horrid kind of sense. But only if you chose not to view the universe through the eyes of a pig close to the end of his life.
“She didn’t really forget anything,” Vasko said. “It was just buried subconsciously, planted there to bubble up as she grew older. We knew that sooner or later she would start to be compelled by those hidderf memories, even if she didn’t know exactly what was going on herself.”
“And?” Scorpio asked.
“She sent us a signal. It was to warn us that she was on her way to meet Quaiche. That was our cue to start making approaches to the Adventists. By the time we got through to him, Aura had already worked her way into his confidence.”
The leather of Scorpio’s jacket creaked as he folded his arms across his chest. “She just strolled into his life?”
“She’s his advisor,” Vasko said. “Sits in on his dealings with Ultras. We don’t know exactly what she’s doing there, but we can guess. Aura had—has—a gift. We saw it even when she was a baby.”
“She can read our faces better than we can,” Khouri said, “can tell if we’re lying, if we’re sad when we say we’re happy. It doesn’t have anything to do with her implants, and it won’t have gone away just because she hid those memories of herself.”
“She must have drawn attention to herself,” Vasko said, “made herself irresistible to Quaiche. But that was really just a short cut to his attention. Sooner or later she’d have found her way there, no matter what the obstacles. It was what she was born to do.”
“Did you talk to her?” Scorpio asked.
“No,” Vasko said. “It wasn’t possible. We couldn’t let Quaiche suspect that we’d ever met. But Khouri has the same implants, with the same compatibilities.”
“I was able to dig into her memories,” Khouri said, “once we were in the same room. It was close enough for direct contact between our implants without her suspecting anything.”
“You revealed yourself to her?” Scorpio asked.
“No. Not yet,” Khouri said. “She’s too vulnerable. It’s safer if she doesn’t remember everything straight away. That way she can continue to play the role Dean Quaiche expects of her. If he suspects she’s an Ultra spy, she’s in as much trouble as we are.”
“Let’s hope no one takes too close an interest in her, then,” Scorpio said. “How long are we looking at before she remembers everything on her own?”
“Days,” Khouri said. “No more than that. Maybe less. The cracks must already be showing.”
“About these talks with the dean,” Scorpio said. “Would you mind telling me exactly what was discussed?”
Vasko told him what he had talked about with the dean. Sco
rpio could tell that he was glossing over details, omitting anything not strictly essential. He learned of the dean’s request for a ship to provide local defence duties for Hela, orbiting the planet, sponsored by the Adventists. He learned that many Ultras were unwilling to accept the contract even with the sweeteners Quaiche had offered. They were frightened that their ships would be damaged by whatever had destroyed the Gnostic Ascension, the ship that had originally brought Quaiche to Hela.
“But that isn’t a problem for us,” Vasko said. “The risk is probably overstated in any case, but even if something does take a pot shot at us, we’re not exactly lacking defences. We’ve kept all the new technologies hidden ever since we approached the system, but that doesn’t mean we can’t turn them on again if we need them. I doubt that we’d have much to worry about from a few buried sentry weapons.”
“And for that protection, Quaiche is willing to let us take a closer look at Haldora?”
“Grudgingly,” Vasko said. “He still doesn’t like the idea of anyone poking sticks into the face of his miracle, but he wants that protection very badly.”
“Why is he so scared? Have other Ultras been causing trouble?”
Vasko shrugged. “The occasional incident, but nothing serious.”
“Sounds like an overreaction, in that case.”
“It’s his paranoia. There’s no need to second-guess him, so long as it gives us a licence to get close to Haldora without firing a gun.”
“Something isn’t right,” Scorpio said, his headache returning, having gone away and sharpened itself.
“You’re naturally cautious,” Vasko said. “There’s no fault in that. But we’ve waited nine years for this. This is our one chance. If we don’t take it, he’ll make the contract with another ship.”
“I still don’t like it.”
“Maybe you’d feel differently if it was your plan,” Urton said. “But it’s not. You were sleeping while we put this together.”
“That’s all right,” he said, obliging her with a smile. “I’m a pig. We don’t do long-term plans anyway.”
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