Dorthy didn’t rise to the bait, if that was what it was. She suspected that Baptista wasn’t trying to subtly pump her for information, anyway. He was preaching; he was trying to convert her. Like all fanatics, he really believed that once someone had been told the truth, they would see the light. Still, she had to admit that his voice had a certain hypnotic cadence.
‘We like to say that life is a general condition of the Universe,’ Baptista said. ‘For our Universe, out of all the universes that must surely exist, is uniquely suited to the evolution of life. The resonances of beryllium and helium nuclei, for instance, are finely tuned so that they are able to fuse inside stars and produce carbon. Without that fine coupling, carbon would be as rare as gold and life could not exist. Or at least, not as we know it. No doubt, as you are an astronomer, Dr Yoshida, you could furnish many other examples.’
‘That was a long time ago,’ Dorthy said.
‘You should not be bitter,’ Baptista said gently. ‘You will be witness to something wonderful here. We all will.’
But Dorthy knew that there were no gods to be found at the core. The old ones had long ago withdrawn, if they had been gods, leaving only vast enigmatic machineries that the marauders had put to their own use. The marauders did not want evolution; none of the Alea did. Mutant children smelt wrong, and were culled and eaten by their parent herders. (Marauders was a poor translation of an Alea obscenity which meant eaters of all children.) Intelligence was a product of stress, of danger, to be abandoned as soon as danger was past and the herders could revert to their peaceful existence, outside of history.
Dorthy could not tell the Witnesses that, of course. Worse than disbelieving her message, they would simply ignore it, pass over it as a ship in contraspace passes over the uncharted light years. Dorthy could feel Ang’s unquestioning belief right next to her, like a charge travelling across her skin from the point where the pilot grasped her elbow. With a touch of bitter self-pity Dorthy thought that at least she knew now why Ang had been so kind to her. Not for herself, but for her Talent. That was what it always came back to, Dorthy thought, scarcely listening as Baptista continued to preach about life proliferating everywhere in the Universe, precipitating out of precisely tuned physical constants like crystals out of a supersaturated solution, and so on, all the way to the bridge of the Vingança, where there was pandemonium.
A singleship, almost certainly the singleship that had vanished during the Event, had emerged from one of the wormhole pits in the planetoid. Dorthy had almost forgotten about it, and now here it was again. It had followed Talbeck Barlstilkin’s own ship past the neutron star and on to the hypervelocity star so closely that there had to be some connection with his scheming. He had mentioned allies on Titan, in Urbis: perhaps this was one of them. Perhaps they, like him, had been ambushed by the RUN police, had been forced to flee.
As was traditional in Navy ships, the bridge was in microgravity, with no concessions to the need of those unused to freefall for a local horizontal reference. Consoles were crammed in all over, making a kind of three dimensional maze. Only half a dozen were active, and only two were actually being operated, each by a Navy officer under the close supervision of a pair of armed Witnesses. Dorthy clung to a rail that girdled the equator of the navigation tank, Ang right beside her.
A dozen men and women clustered around the tank like so many roosting bats, making a lot of noise in the crowded, dimly lit, spherical room. Baptista hung on the far side, beyond a scattering of gridded indices, the glowing ghostly radar image of the planetoid, and the plot of the rogue ship’s track, a narrow loop like an exclamation mark with the planetoid at its point. It had shot out of the wormhole with tremendous velocity, decelerated hard, and now was closing on the Vingança.
Baptista was listening as a man in grey uniform coveralls reached into the tank, explaining something about the ship’s track that Dorthy couldn’t quite hear. Someone else suddenly broke away, twisting sinuously amongst the consoles like a dolphin darting through the gables and arches of a coral reef.
At the moment it didn’t matter who piloted the ship. Its appearance had been enough to throw the Witnesses into uproar. It was not in their plans. It was an unknown factor. The pilot, a woman, had spoken briefly with the duty officer, but now she wasn’t responding at all. Some of the Witnesses wanted to fire a missile at her ship, but Baptista had overruled them. It was, after all, a combat singleship; it could respond by launching its own attack. And besides, it might be a messenger, an answer to the Witnesses’ signal call. It had gone through a wormhole before the Vingança, but had emerged after it. It had been somewhere else, and now it was here.
Dorthy suspected that it was this argument, rather than the possibility of a counter-strike, that so easily won over the militant faction. It was a disturbing insight into Witness politics: everything, even survival, was secondary to the remotest possibility of transcendence. And if they were willing to gamble their lives so recklessly, how much less was her own life worth, or those of the unaligned scientists, of the Naval officers who ran the Vingança with pistols pointed at their heads?
Dorthy tried to ask Ang Poh Mokhtar about this, but the woman only told her not to worry, told her that Gregor Baptista was a great man to have led them all to the brink of history.
‘To the brink of someone else’s history,’ Dorthy said wearily. Someone had been passing around bags of lukewarm vegetable stew, but she was too tired and too scared to be hungry. She said, ‘I know what happened here, Ang. Don’t you see? There’s nothing here for us but danger. It all passed away long ago. There are only Alea here now, using abandoned technology. You fought in the Campaigns. You know how dangerous the Alea are.’
‘Oh, I know all about that,’ Ang said airily. ‘We all know your story, Dorthy, that is why we are here. You see it from only one perspective. That is why it frightens you. Don’t you see how glorious all this is? The creation of new stars out of nothingness, think of that! The RUN and the Navy were not interested in the runaway star. The Vingança was only bait held out to the unknown, not a proper expedition at all until Gregor Baptista arrived and made sure that we outnumbered everyone else. He brought us to this glorious moment despite the opposition of our enemies. He is a great man, Dorthy! It was so easy for us to infiltrate the Vingança, just because the Navy didn’t really care about it. I’ve told you before that women are invisible in the Navy. It is very true; many of us here are women precisely because of that fact. They did not notice us until it was too late.’
Ang’s smile was so wide that her eyes, narrowed to slits, glittered in the half-dark. Dorthy could almost feel the pilot’s adrenalin thrilling in her own blood. ‘When you arrived, it was like a sign. It was a sign indeed, when you saw your vision, on Colcha. I’ve often thought that there is a secret history, working beneath what we can actually perceive. Perhaps it has all been working towards this moment, do you think? This could be where everything fuses, becomes one, the real history and the secret history. When I came back from the Campaigns, I was very bad in my head. Because so many of my friends had been killed I blamed myself for having survived. Perhaps I survived to meet you, Dorthy, to take you down to Colcha. Everything has its purpose, you see.’
Dorthy said, ‘The Campaigns were just a mistake. The result of a terrible misunderstanding. The Alea around BD Twenty thought we were the enemy they’d fled from, and even when we understood that, we still destroyed them.’
But Ang wasn’t listening. She was looking into the navigation tank. A green spark was slowly scribing a line from the centre towards the red point of the singleship, which was now almost stationary relative to the Vingança’s orbit. ‘She does not complete the rendezvous, so we send a tug to fetch her,’ the pilot said. ‘Well. Perhaps you will find out where she has been, Dorthy.’
‘I don’t think so. I finished whoring my Talent long ago.’
‘It is why you are here, Dr Yoshida,’ Baptista said, across the navigation tank. ‘Surely you un
derstand that we need you.’
‘I’ll tell you what I understand. That for too long I’ve been in the grip of other people’s plans. Not even people sometimes,’ Dorthy added, thinking of the mindset of the Alea ancestor, working its subtle influence on her own mind. Turning her into the instrument of revenge for a war fought and lost more than a million years before her birth.
All the people floating around the equator of the tank were looking at her. She said, ‘All I ever wanted was to tell people the truth about P’thrsn. But the Navy wouldn’t listen, and wouldn’t let me talk to anyone else. You won’t believe me, and Talbeck Barlstilkin doesn’t want to know.’
Baptista said, ‘But we are the ones who have listened to your message, Dr Yoshida. As Ang said, your coming and what happened to you on Colcha were like a sign to us. You are the light that guided us here.’
‘You only hear what you want to hear, not what I’ve got to tell you. What kind of sign, what kind of light, is that?’
‘We understand what you have come to tell us better than you do, Dr Yoshida.’ Floating across from her, Baptista looked like a happy walrus all arrayed in white. ‘You are like Rilke’s angel, confused by your journey from Heaven and so dazzled by the radiance of the holy word you carry that you have forgotten the true meaning of your message. But simply by your being here, the message has been delivered. Your mistake is to believe that we are crazy religious fanatics. We are scientists who are not afraid of the truth, who are not afraid to live in the truth. Professor Doctor Gunasekra is a great man, surely, but he does not live in the truth of the Universe that he has uncovered. It is separate from his daily life. It is like a painting sold by an artist who can possess the moments of creation, but not the thing itself.’
Dorthy laughed; she couldn’t help herself. Her anger forced it out of her, as rising water forces air out of a sinking ship. ‘Is that how you see yourselves? You’re more foolish than I imagined, Dr Baptista!’
Baptista’s smile, framed by his white beard, did not waver. ‘You could be right. But here we are anyway, on the threshold of the transfiguration of all humankind. Surely you want the best for your child, Dr Yoshida? Would you not want it born into paradise?’
The tide of Dorthy’s anger roared in her ears. She hadn’t known until that moment whether or not she wanted to keep the fetus: but she knew now. She said, ‘What I want for my child is no concern of yours.’
‘You’ll work for us,’ Baptista told her, ‘one way or the other. When you were an indentured Talent, the research staff at the Kamali-Silver Institute implanted triggers in your brain, to enable them to obtain responses even when you were deep in the mind of someone else. Talbeck Barlstilkin knows the cues that evoke those triggers, and so, of course, do we. We would prefer to use your Talent with your cooperation, Dr Yoshida. But it isn’t necessary.’
Dorthy had been taught the rudiments of aikido years ago, when she’d set out on her brief career as a freelance Talent. All sorts of weirdos out there, someone had advised her, you’ll never know when you’ll need it. In fact, she’d never had to use it, had forgotten almost everything but the first thing she had been taught: that you never let your opponent know what you are doing. If you are going to leap, you leap. You don’t threaten, you don’t even scream. You just do it.
She did it.
She reversed her grip on the bar and twisted up and over, feet together, toes pointed as she launched herself square at Baptista. Green numbers and red traceries unravelled through the middle of her head as she flew like a spear across the navigation tank’s patterned volume. She hit Baptista just under his breastbone and felt something snap, let her knees give and did a tuck-and-roll somersault about her centre of gravity. Baptista flew off at a tangent, red mouth open in his white beard as faces and consoles whirled past her—and then they swung back with a dismaying jerk as someone grabbed one of her ankles. Hands were on her arms, over her mouth, her eyes. There was a sting in the side of her neck and everything went a very long way away.
The Witnesses didn’t punish Dorthy for her attack on their leader. They simply put her in a room to recover from the tranquillizing shot, and when she could walk again and manage to talk without slurring too much, they took her down to view their prize.
The singleship lay like a fallen black leaf in the launch cradle, frost smoking off it under blue-white arc lamps as its skin warmed from close to absolute zero. Water vapour trapped by the pressure curtain beneath the cradle rolled and swirled around the delta curve of the ship’s lifting surface. Under the arc lights, the mist glittered as if salted with diamond dust, but nothing reflected from the singleship’s matt black surface: light sank into it without a gleam or twinkle.
Ang Poh Mokhtar, her voice thickened by the wad of betel she’d tucked into one cheek, said, ‘Someone spent a great deal of money on that beauty. It is no ordinary explorer singleship, Dorthy. It is armed, do you see? I will bet it could have out-fought anything we flew in the Campaigns. Yes, indeed.’
Dorthy and Ang were standing on a platform high above the captured singleship. The arched and pierced framework of the docking bay’s ceiling was only a metre or so above their heads. The platform’s skinny rail creased Dorthy’s belly as she leaned against it. Her arms were behind her back, wrists taped together. Dizziness from the shot still fluttered behind her eyes; at least they’d known enough to use something that wouldn’t affect the delicate secretory biochemistry of her implant.
As she talked, Ang casually laid a hand on Dorthy’s shoulder. Dorthy supposed it was just in case she decided to dive headfirst for the floor. If they knew about the old keywords, no doubt they knew about her childish suicide attempts, too. But she wasn’t going to kill herself, it was just another of their fucking presumptions.
That was what hurt her most. The way the Witnesses had shrugged off her finest moment in ten years as if it were no more than the temper tantrum of some gifted toddler. Their assumption—she didn’t need her Talent to see it written clearly in every one of their heads—that no matter what she did they were in control, calmly omnipotent, endlessly generous in their ability to forgive because they were so fucking above it all…Ang had told Dorthy that her violence was due to her unevolved state of consciousness, to vikshipta. ‘I can lead you through some breathing exercises later,’ she had said, and when Dorthy had said she knew all about fucking pranayama Ang had merely added serenely, ‘It will calm you. I was like you, angry and confused with the world, until I understood the teachings. We are all of us at one with the Universe, Dorthy. It is why we are able to act without confusion or hesitation against our enemies.’
The plastic tape binding Dorthy’s wrists burned against her skin. Dorthy let herself relax, felt Ang’s grip on her shoulder lessen slightly, as if in acknowledgement of that relaxation. What she could not do, Dorthy thought, was let their arrogance diminish her, diminish what she had done. Because she had at last made a move of her own again.
The first had been when she had tried to escape from Talbeck Barlstilkin’s Chinese mountain retreat. She had known then that it was futile, known that the bonded servant would have been watching her make her way down the misty slopes of bamboo and rock. But it had not been a gesture. It had been an act of definition, the drawing of a line a little way beyond the limits of the cage she’d been in ever since the Navy had plucked her little research ship from its long slow orbit through the Oort Cloud, the beginning of the forcible recruitment which had taken her to P’thrsn, which had not ended when Talbeck Barlstilkin’s mercenaries had burst into the living quarters of the Arrul Terrek excavation site on Novaya Rosya, but simply changed direction and accelerated.
Now Dorthy had drawn another line, and if the Witnesses chose to ignore it that was their problem. She had defined to herself just how far she could be pushed, set a limit on the passivity which ten years of captivity had ground into her. Hands taped behind her back, guarded by a woman she’d once counted as a friend, Dorthy was beginning to remember what
it was to be free.
Ang said, ‘They’ll crack her open just as soon as they find out what’s inside.’
Half a dozen workpeople in bulky white contamination suits were toiling along cat-walks either side of the single-ship, waist deep in fog. A neutrino camera swung out on a long boom and began to describe graceful arcs over the ship’s profile. One of the suited figures touched a geiger stick at intervals along one edge of the lifting surface. Another ducked into the fog billowing around the ship’s streamlined nacelle, and a moment later a section of the black hull swung out to reveal a rack of slim missiles. Another of the figures gave the sign for all clear, arms crossed above its bubble helmet.
Ang spat bloody juice onto the mesh floor and told the platform to go down. It swung down into the layer of cold air inside the dock, stopped a few metres above a cat-walk where the person who had signalled the all-clear was shaking a lot of blonde hair out of the ring-collar of her suit. Her bubble helmet rested in the crook of her arm. She looked up at Dorthy and said, ‘So, are you reading my mind?’
Ang spat again, wiped a crimson dribble from her chin. She said, ‘Dorthy’s only here for a general impression, Givy. To see if there’s more than the pilot in there, see if there are any hitchhikers, if you know what I say.’ Dorthy noticed that Ang had undone the flap over the cross-hatched butt of her holstered pistol.
The blonde woman, Givy, was amused. ‘She can do that through a ship’s hull?’
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