ANTOINETTE CAME TO see Scorpio after the meeting. He had taken the elevator back upship, to assist with the ongoing efforts to process the evacuees. There were people everywhere, huddled into filthy, dank, winding corridors as far as the eye could see.
He walked along one of these corridors, absorbing the frightened faces, fielding questions when he was able to, but saying nothing about the wider plans for the ship and its passengers. He told them only that they would be taken care of, that some of them would be frozen, but that every effort would be taken to make the process as painless and safe as possible. He believed it, too, for a while. But then it dawned on him, after navigating one corridor, that he had seen only a few hundred evacuees out of the thousands supposedly aboard.
He met Antoinette in a junction, where Security Arm militia were directing people to functioning elevators that would take them to different processing centres much further down the ship.
“It’s going to be all right, Scorp,” she said.
“Am I that easy to read?”
“You look worried, as if you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
“Funny, but that’s more or less how I feel.”
“You’ll hack it. Do you remember how it was with Clavain, when we were in the Mademoiselle’s Chateau?”
“That was a while back.”
“Well, I remember even if you don’t. He looked just the way you look now, Scorp, as if his whole life had been a sequence of errors, culminating in that one moment of absolute failure. He nearly lost it then. But he didn’t. He kept it together. And it worked out. In the end, that sequence of errors turned out to be exactly the right set of choices.”
He smiled. “Thanks for the pep talk, Antoinette.”
“I just thought you should know. Things are getting complicated, Scorp, and I know you sometimes don’t think that’s exactly your ideal milieu, if you get my drift. But you’re wrong. Your kind of leadership is just what we need now: blunt and to the point. You’re not a politician, Scorp. Thank God for that. Clavain would have agreed, you know.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. I’m just asking you not to have a crisis on us. Not now.”
“I’ll try not to.”
She sighed and punched him playfully on the arm. “I just wanted you to know that before I leave.”
“Leave?”
“I’ve made my mind up: I’m going back down to Ararat on one of Remontoire’s shuttles. Xavier’s down there.”
“That’ll be risky,” he warned. “Why not just let Remontoire bring Xavier back up here? He’s already agreed to bring Orca back from Ararat. I hate to be blunt—sorry—but at least that way we’d only lose one of you if the wolves take out the shuttle.”
“Because I’m not coming back,” she said. “I’m going down to Ararat and I’m staying there.”
It took a moment for that to sink in. “But you made it out,” he said.
“No, Scorp, I came up with the Infinity because I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. But my responsibilities are down there, with the thousands we’ll be leaving behind. Oh, they don’t really need me, I suppose, but they definitely need Xavier. He’s about the only one who knows how to fix anything when it goes wrong.“
“I’m sure you’ll make yourself useful,” Scorpio said, smiling.
“Well, if they let me fly something now and then, I guess I won’t go totally insane.”
“We could still use you up here. I could use an ally any time of the day.”
“You’ve got allies, Scorp; you just don’t know it yet.”
“You’re doing a brave thing,” he said.
“It’s not such a dreadful place,” she replied. “Don’t make me out to be too much of a martyr. I never really minded Ararat. I liked the sunsets. I guess I’ve even developed a taste for seaweed tea after all these years. All I’m really doing is staying at home.”
“We’ll miss you,” he said.
She looked down. He had the feeling that she could not look at his face. “I don’t know what’s going to happen now, Scorp. Maybe you’ll take this ship to Hela, like Aura says. Maybe you’ll go somewhere else. But I’ve a feeling we won’t ever meet again. It’s a big universe out there, and the chances of our paths ever crossing again…”
“It’s a big place,” he said, “but on the other hand, I guess that also makes it big enough for a few coincidences.”
“For some people, maybe, but not for the likes of you and me, Scorp.” She looked up then, staring hard into his eyes. “I was scared of you when I met you, I don’t mind admitting that now. Scared and ignorant. But I’m glad everything happened the way it did. I’m glad I got to know you for a few years.”
“It was half my life.”
“They were good years, Scorp. I won’t forget them.” Once more she looked down. He wondered if she was looking at his small, childlike shoes. Suddenly he felt self-conscious, wishing he was larger, more human, less like a pig and more like a man. “Remontoire’s going to have that shuttle ready soon,” she said. “I’d better be going. Take care of yourself, all right? You’re a good man. A good pig.”
“I try,” Scorpio said.
She hugged him, then kissed him.
Then she was gone. He never saw her again.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Hela, 2727
THE CARAVAN SIDLED up to the kerb of the Way, overtaking one cathedral after another. Monstrous machinery loomed over Rashmika. She was too overwhelmed to take it all in, retaining only a blurred impression of great dark-grey mechanisms, projected to an inhuman scale. As the caravan wormed between them, the cathedrals appeared to remain completely still, as fully rooted to the landscape as the buildings she had seen on the Jarnsaxa Flats. Except, of course, that these buildings were true skyscrapers, jagged fingers clawing across the face of Haldora. And that stillness, Rashmika knew, was only an illusion born of the caravan’s speed. Were they to stop, one or another of the cathedrals would be rolling over them within a few minutes.
It was said that the cathedrals never stopped. It was also said that they seldom deviated from their paths unless a given obstacle was too large to be safely crushed beneath their traction mechanisms.
The Way was much narrower than she had expected. She recalled what Quaestor Jones had said: that it was never more than two hundred metres wide, and usually much less than that. Distances were difficult to judge in the absence of any familiar landmarks, but she did not think the Way was more than one hundred metres wide at any point along this stretch. Some of the larger cathedrals were almost that wide themselves, squatting across the full width of the Way like mechanical toads. The smaller cathedrals were able to travel two abreast, but only by allowing parts of their superstructures to lean out over the edges of the Way. Here, it did not really matter: the Way was just a smoothed and cleared strip across the other-wise flat and unobstructed expanse of the Flats. Any one of the cathedrals could have diverted off the path prepared ahead of it, taking its chances on the slightly rougher ground on either side. But clearly no such risk-taking was on the cards today, and the relative order of the procession looked set to remain unchallenged for the time being. This was the normal way of things: the jockeying, jousting and general dirty tricks that one heard about in the badlands were very much the exception rather than the rule, and such stories, Rashmika had long suspected, enjoyed a degree of exaggeration as they travelled north.
For now, therefore, the flotillas of cathedrals would creep along the Way in a more or less fixed formation. If she thought of them as city-states, then now would be a period of trade and diplomacy rather than war. Doubtless there would be espionage and subtle gamesmanship, and doubtless plans were continually being drawn up for future contingencies. But for the moment what prevailed was a state of genteel cordiality, with all the strained courtesies one customarily expected between historical rivals.
This suited Rashmika: it would be difficult enough fitting in with
the repair gang without having to deal with additional crises and complications.
She had been given orders to collect her belongings—such as they were—and remain in one vehicle of the caravan. The reason soon became obvious, as the caravan fissioned into many smaller components. Rashmika watched as the quaestor’s workers hopped from vehicle to vehicle, unhooking umbilicals and couplings with cool indifference to the obvious risks.
Some of these sub-caravans were still several vehicles in length, and she watched as they peeled away to rendezvous with the larger cathedrals or cathedrals-clusters. To her disappointment, however, the vehicle to which she had been assigned departed on its own. She was not alone in it—there were a dozen or so pilgrims and migrant workers waiting with her—but any hope that the Catherine of Iron might turn out to be amongst the larger cathedrals was quickly dashed, if it only merited one portion of the caravan.
Well, she had to start somewhere, as the quaestor had said.
Quickly the vehicle nosed away from the major cathedrals, bouncing and jinking over the ruts and potholes they had left in their wake.
“You lot,” she said, addressing the other travellers, standing in front of them with arms akimbo. “Which one of those is the Lady Morwenna?”
One of her companions wiped a smear of mucus from his upper lip. “None of them, love.”
“One of them has to be,” she said. “That’s the main gathering. The sweet spot is right there.”
“That’s the main gathering all right, but no one said the Lady Mor was part of it.”
“Now you’re being oblique for the sake of it.”
“Hark at her,” someone else said. “Right stuck-up little cow.”
“All right,” she countered. “If the Lady Morwenna isn’t there, where is it?”
“Why are you so interested?” the first one asked.
“It’s the oldest cathedral on the Way,” she said. “I think it’d be a little strange not to want to see it, don’t you?”
“All we want is work, love. Doesn’t matter which one doles it out. It’s still the same fucking ice you have to shovel out the way.”
“Well, I’m still interested,” she said.
“It isn’t any of those cathedrals,” another voice said, bored but not unreasonable. She saw a man at the back of the gathering, lying down on a couch with a cigarette in one hand and the other tucked deep into his trousers, where it rummaged and scratched. “But you can see it.”
“Where?”
“Over here, little girl.”
She stepped towards the man.
“Watch him,” another voice said. “He’ll be on you like a rash.”
She hesitated. The man waved her over with his cigarette. He pulled his hand free from his trousers. It ended in a crude-looking metal claw. He transferred the cigarette to it and beckoned her over with his undamaged hand. “It’s all right. I stink a bit, but I don’t bite. Just want to show you the Lady Mor, that’s all.”
“I know,” she said. She stepped through the jumble of other bodies.
The man pointed to a small scuffed window behind him. He wiped it clean with his sleeve. “Look through there. You can still see the top of her spire.”
She looked. All she saw was landscape. “I’m not…”
“There.” The man nudged her chin until she was looking in exactly the right direction. He smelled like vinegar. “Between those bluffs, do you see something sticking up?”
“There’s something sticking up all right,” someone else said.
“Shut up,” Rashmika snapped. There must have been something in the tone of her voice because it had exactly the desired effect.
“See it now?” the man asked.
“Yes. What’s it doing all the way out there? It can’t be on the Permanent Way at all.”
“It is,” the man said. “Just not on the part we usually follow.”
“Doesn’t she know?” said another voice.
“If I did, I wouldn’t be asking,” Rashmika replied tartly.
“The Way branches near here,” the man said, explaining it to her the way you would explain something to a child. She decided that she did not really like him after all. He was helping her, but the manner in which he was helping mattered, too. Sometimes refusal was better than grudging assistance. “Splits in two,” he said. “One route is the one the cathedrals normally follow. Takes them all the way down to the Devil’s Staircase.”
“I know about that,” she said. “Zigzag ramps cut into the side of the Rift. The cathedrals follow them down to the bottom of the Rift, then up the other side again after they’ve crossed it.”
“Right. Care to have a guess where the other route takes them?”
“I’m assuming it crosses the bridge.”
“You’re a clever little girl.”
She pulled away from the window. “If there’s a branch of the Way from the bridge to here, why didn’t we follow it?”
“Because for a caravan it isn’t the quickest route. Caravans can cut corners, go up slopes and around tight bends. Cathe-drals can’t. They have to take the long way around anything they can’t blast through. Anyway, the route to the bridge doesn’t see much maintenance. You might not have noticed it was a part of the Way even if you were on it.”
“Then the Lady Morwenna will pull further and further away from the main gathering of cathedrals,” she said. “Doesn’t that mean Haldora won’t be overhead any more?”
“Not exactly, no,” he said. He scratched at the side of his face with his claw, metal rasping against stubble. “But the Devil’s Staircase isn’t bang on the equator, either. They had to dig it where they could dig it, not where it should have gone. Another thing, too: you go down the Devil’s Staircase, you’ve got overhanging ice to contend with. Not good for Observers: blocks their view of the planet. And the Staircase is where cathedrals stand the best chance of pulling ahead of each other. But if one of them ever managed to cross the bridge, it’d be so far ahead of the pack it’d have to stop to let the others catch up with it. After that, nothing would ever get ahead of them. They could build themselves as wide as they liked. Never mind the glory in having crossed the bridge. They’d rule the Way.”
“But no cathedral has ever crossed the bridge.” She remembered the cratered ruins she had seen from the roof of the caravan. “I know that one did try it once, but…”
“No one said it wasn’t madness, love, but that’s old pop-eyed Dean Quaiche for you. You should be glad you’re ending up on the Iron Katy; They say the rats have already started leaving the Lady Mor.”
“The dean must think he has a good chance of making it,” she said.
“Or he’s insane.” The man grinned at her, his yellow teeth like chipped tombstones. “Take your pick.”
“I don’t have to,” she said, then added, “Why did you call him pop-eyed?”
They all laughed at her. One of them made goggles of his fingers around his eyes.
“Girl’s got a lot to learn,” someone said.
THE CATHERINE OF Iron was one of the smaller cathedrals in the procession, travelling alone several kilometres to the rear of the main pack. There were others further behind it, but these were little more than spires on the horizon. Almost certainly they were struggling to catch up with the others, determined to bring themselves as close as possible to the abstract moving point on the Way that corresponded to Haldora sitting precisely overhead. The ultimate shame, from a cathedral’s point of view, was to fall so far back that even the casual observer became aware that Haldora was not quite at the zenith. Worse than that—unspeakably worse—was the stigma that went beyond shame that was the fate suffered by any cathedral that lost sight of Haldora altogether. That was why the work of the Permanent Way gangs was taken so seriously. A day’s delay here or there was nothing, but many such delays could have a catastrophic effect on a cathedral’s progress.
Rashmika’s vehicle slowed as it approached the Catherine of Iron, then looped around to
the rear. The partial circumnavigation afforded her an excellent view of the place that was to be her new home. Small though her assigned cathedral undoubtedly was, it was not an untypical example of their general style.
The flat base of the cathedral was a rectangle thirty metres wide and perhaps one hundred in length. Above this base towered the superstructure; below it—partially hidden by metal skirts—lay the rude business of engines and traction systems. The cathedral inched along the Way by dint of many parallel sets of caterpillar tracks. Currently, on one side, an entire traction unit had been hauled ten or so metres above the ice. Suited workers were lashed to the immobile underside of one of the tread plates, their welding and cutting torches flashing a pretty blue-violet as they effected some repair. Rashmika had never asked herself how the cathedrals dealt with that kind of overhaul, and the sheer bloody-minded ruthlessness of the solution—fixing part of the traction machinery while the cathedral was still moving—rather impressed her.
All around the cathedral, now that she noticed it, was more such activity; traceries of scaffolding covered much of the superstructure. Small figures were working everywhere she looked. The way they popped in and out of hatches, high above ground, made her think of clockwork automata.
Above the flat base, the cathedral conformed more or less to the traditional architectural expectations. Seen from above, the cathedral was an approximate cruciform shape, made up of a long nave with two stubbier transepts jutting out on either side and a smaller chapel at the head of the cross. Rising from the intersection of the nave and its transepts was a square-based tower. It rose for one hundred meters—about equal to the length of the cathedral—before tapering into a four-sided spire which was another fifty metres higher. The ridges of the spire were serrated, and at the very top of the spire was an assemblage of communications dishes and semaphoric signalling mirrors. Rising from the traction base and angling inwards to connect with the top part of the nave were a dozen or so flying buttresses formed from skeletal girderwork. One or two were obviously missing or incomplete. Much of the cathedral, in fact, had a haphazard look, with various parts of the architecture sitting in only approximate harmony with each other. There were whole sections that appeared to have been replaced in great haste, or at minimal expense, or some combination of the two. The spire appeared to lean at a small angle away from the true vertical. It was propped up on one side by scaffolding.
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