“Then who made them?”
“We don’t know.”
“What do they want with us?”
“We don’t know that, either, only that they have taken an interest.”
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
“I’m not sure I like it either. They haven’t contacted us directly, and everything they’ve done suggests they have no intention of making their presence known. They’re more advanced than us, that’s for sure. They may skulk in the darkness, slinking around the Inhibitors, but they’ve survived. They’re still out there, when we’re on the brink of extinction.”
“They could help us.”
“Or they could turn out to be as bad for us as the Inhibitors.”
Scorpio looked into the old Conjoiner’s face: so maddeningly calm, despite the vast implications of their conversation. “You sound as if you think we’re being judged,” he said.
“I wonder if that isn’t the case.”
“And Aura? What does she have to say?”
“She has never made any mention of another party,” Remontoire said.
“Perhaps these are the shadows, after all.”
“Then why go to Hela to make contact with them? No, Scorp: these aren’t the shadows. They’re something else, something she either doesn’t know about, or chooses not to tell us.”
“Now you’re making me nervous.”
“That, Mr. Pink, was very much the idea. Someone has to know this, and it might as well be you.” ;
“If she doesn’t know about the other party, how can we be sure the rest of her information’s correct?”
“We can’t. That’s the difficulty.”
Scorpio fingered the shard. It was cool to the touch, barely heavier than the air it displaced. “I could talk to her about it, see if she remembers.”
“Or you could keep the information to yourself, because it is too dangerous to reveal to her. Remember: it may be misinformation created by Skade to destroy our confidence in Aura. If she were to deny knowledge of it, will you be able to trust her any more?”
“I’d still like the data,” Scorpio said.
“Too dangerous. If I passed it to you, it might find its way into her head. She’s one of us, Scorp: a Conjoiner. You’ll have to make do with the shard—call it an aide-memoire—and this conversation. That should suffice, should it not?”
“You’re saying I shouldn’t tell her, ever?”
“No, I’m merely saying you must make that decision for yourself, and that it should not be taken lightly.” Remontoire paused, and then offered a smile. “Frankly, I don’t envy you. Rather a lot may depend on it, you see.”
Scorpio pushed the shard into his pocket.
[Help us, Rashmika,] the voice said, when she was alone. [Don’t let us die when the cathedral dies.]
“I can’t help you. I’m not even sure I want to.”
[Quaiche is unstable,] the voice insisted. [He will destroy us, because we are a chink in the armour of his faith. That cannot be allowed to happen, Rashmika. For your sakes—for the sake of all your people—don’t make the same mistake as the scuttlers. Don’t close the door on us.]
She thrashed her head into the damp landscape of her pillow, smelling her own days-old sweat worked into the yellowing fabric during sleepless, voice-tormented nights such as this. All she wanted was for the voice to silence itself; all she wanted was a return to the old simplicities, where all she had to worry about was the imposition of her own self-righteous convictions.
“How did you get here? You still haven’t told me. If the door is closed—”
[The door was opened, briefly. During a difficult period with the supply of the virus, Quaiche endured a lapse of faith. In that crisis he began to doubt his own interpretation of the vanishings. He arranged for the firing of an instrument package into the face of Haldora, a simple mechanical probe crammed with electronic instrumentation.]
“And?”
[He provoked a response. The probe was injected into Haldora during a vanishing. It caused the vanishing to last longer than usual, more than a second. In that hiatus, Quaiche was granted a glimpse of the machinery the scuttlers made to contact us across the bulk.]
“So was everyone else who happened to see it.”
[That’s why that particular vanishing had to be stricken from the public record,] the voice said. [It couldn’t be allowed to have happened.]
She remembered what the shadows had told her about the mass-synthesiser. “Then the probe allowed you to cross over?”
[No. We are still not physically embodied in this brane. What it did reestablish was the communication link. It had been silenced since the last time the scuttlers spoke to us, but in the moment of Quaiche’s intervention it was reopened, briefly. In that window we transmitted an aspect of ourselves across the bulk, a barely sentient ghost, programmed only to survive and negotiate.]
So that was what she was dealing with: not the shadows themselves, but their stripped-down minimalist envoy. She did not suppose that it made very much difference: the voice was clearly at least as intelligent and persuasive as any machine she had ever encountered.
“How far did you get?” Rashmika asked.
[Into the probe, as it fell within the Haldora projection. From there—following the probe’s telemetry link—we reached Hela. But no further. Ever since then, we have been trapped within the scrimshaw suit.]
“Why the suit?”
[Ask Quaiche. It has some deeply personal significance for him, irrevocably entwined with the nature of the vanishings and his own salvation. His lover—the original Morwenna—died in it. Afterwards, Quaiche couldn’t bring himself to destroy the suit. It was a reminder of what had brought him to Hela, a spur to keep looking for an answer, for Morwenna’s memory. When it came time to send the probe into Haldora, Quaiche filled the suit with the cybernetic control system necessary to communicate with the probe. That is why it has become our prison.]
“I can’t help you,” she said again.
[You must, Rashmika. The suit is strong, but it will not survive the destruction of the Lady Morwenna. Yet without us, you will have lost your one channel of negotiation. You might establish another, but you cannot guarantee it. In the meantime, you will be at the mercy of the Inhibitors. They’re coming closer, you know. There isn’t much time left.]
“I can’t do this,” she said. “You’re asking too much of me. You’re just a voice in my head. I won’t do it.”
(You will if you know what’s good for you. We don’t know all that we would like to know about you, Rashmika, but one thing is clear: you are most certainly not who you claim to be.]
She pulled her face from the pillow, brushed lank, damp hair from her eyes. “So what if I’m not?”
[It would probably be for the best if Quaiche didn’t find out, don’t you think?]
* * *
THE SURGEON-GENERAL sat alone in his private quarters in the Office of Bloodwork, high in the middle levels of the Clocktower. He hummed to himself, happy in his environment. Even the faint swaying motion of the Lady Morwenna—exaggerated now that she was moving over the rough ground of the ungraded and potholed road that led to the bridge—was pleasing to him, the sense of continuing motion spurring him to work. He had not eaten in many hours and his hands trembled with anticipation as he waited for the assay to finish. The task of prolonging Quaiche’s life had offered many challenges, but he had not felt this sense of intellectual excitement since his days in the service of Queen Jasmina, when he was the master of the body factory.
He had already pored over the results of Harbin’s blood analysis. He had been looking for some explanation in his genes for the gift that had been so strongly manifested in his sister. There had never been any suggestion that Harbin had the same degree of hypersensitivity to expressions, but that might simply mean that the relevant genes had only been activated in his sister’s case. Grelier did not know exactly what he was looking for, but he had a roug
h idea of the cognitive areas that ought to have been affected. What she had was a kind of inverse autism, an acute sensitivity to the emotional states of the people around her, rather than blank indifference. By comparing Harbin’s DNA against Bloodwork’s genetic database, culled not just from the inhabitants of Hela but from information sold to him by Ultras, he had hoped to see something anomalous. Even if it was not immediately obvious, the software ought to be able to tease it out.
But Harbin’s blood had turned out to be stultifyingly normal, utterly deficient in anything anomalous. Grelier had gone back into the library and found a back-up sample, just in case there had been a labelling error. It was the same story: there was nothing in Harbin’s blood that would have suggested anything unusual in his sister.
So perhaps, Grelier reasoned, there was something uniquely anomalous in her blood, the result of some statistical reshuffling of her parents’ genes that had somehow failed to manifest in Harbin. Alternatively, her blood could turn out to be just as uninteresting. In that case he would have to conclude that her hypersensitivity had in some way been learned, that it was a skill anyone could acquire, given the right set of stimuli.
The analysis suite chimed, signalling that it had finished its assay. He leant back in his chair, waiting for the results to be displayed. Harbin’s analysis—histograms, pie charts, genetic and cytological maps—were already up for inspection. Now the data from Rashmika Els’s blood appeared alongside it. Almost immediately the analysis software began to search for correlations and mismatches. Grelier crackled his knuckles. He could see his own reflection, the ghostly white nimbus of his hair floating in the display.
Something wasn’t right.
The correlation software was struggling. It was throwing up red error messages, a plague of them appearing all over the read-out. Grelier was familiar with this: it meant that the software had been told to hunt for correlations at a statistical threshold far above the actual situation. It meant that the two blood samples were far less alike than he had expected.
“But they’re siblings,” he said.
Except they weren’t. Not according to their blood. Harbin and Rashmika Els did not appear to be related at all.
In fact, it looked rather unlikely that Rashmika Els had even been born on Hela.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Interstellar Space,
Near Epsilon Eridani, 2698
IN THE INSTANT of awakening he assumed there had been a mistake. He was still in the black cabinet. Only a moment earlier the technicians had been cutting him open, stuffing tubes into him, pulling pieces out, examining and replacing them like children looking for treats. Now they were here again, white-hooded forms shuffling around him in a gauzy haze of vapour. He found it difficult to focus on them, the white forms blurring and joining like clouds.
“What…” he started to say. But he couldn’t speak. There was something packed into his mouth, chafing his throat with sharp edges.
One of the technicians leant into his field of view. The blur of white relaxed into a face framed in a hood, the lower half concealed behind a surgical mask.
“Easy, Scorp, don’t try talking for a moment.”
He made a sound that was both furious and interrogative. The technician appeared to understand. He pushed back his hood and lowered the mask, revealing a face that Scorpio almost recognised. A man, like the older brother of someone he knew.
“You’re safe,” the man said. “Everything worked.”
He grunted another question. ‘The wolves?“
“We took care of them. In the end they evolved—or deployed—some defence against the hypometric weaponry. It just stopped working against them. But we still had the cache weapons we didn’t give to Remontoire.”
“How many?” he signalled.
“We used all but one finishing off the wolves.”
For a moment none of these things meant anything to Scorpio. Then the memories budged into some kind of order, some kind of sense. There was a feeling of dislocation, of standing on one side of a rift that was widening, gaping open to geological depths. The land that had seemed immediately in reach a second or two ago was racing away into the distance, forever inaccessible. The memory of the technicians pushing lines into him suddenly felt ancient, something from a second- or third-hand account, as if it had happened to someone else entirely.
They pulled the breather assembly from his throat. He took ragged breaths, each inhalation feeling as if finely ground glass had been stuffed into his pleural cavity. Was it ever this bad for humans, he wondered, or was reefersleep a special kind of hell for pigs? He guessed no one would ever know for sure.
It was enough to make him laugh. One weapon left. One fucking weapon, out of the nearly forty they had begun with.
“Let’s hope we saved the best until last,” he said, when he felt he could manage a sentence. “What about the hypometrics? Are you saying they’re just so much junk?”
“Not yet. Maybe in time, but the local wolves don’t seem to have evolved the defence that the others used. We still have a window of usefulness.”
“Oh, good. You said ‘local.’ Local to where?”
“We’ve reached Yellowstone,” the man said. “Or rather, we’ve reached the Epsilon Eridani system, but it isn’t good. We can’t slow down to system speeds, just enough to make the turn for Hela.”
“Why can’t we slow down? Is something wrong with the ship?”
“No,” the man replied. Scorpio had realised by then that he was talking to an older version of Vasko Malinin. Not a young man now, a man. “But there is something wrong with Yellowstone.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. “Show me,” Scorpio said.
BEFORE THEY SHOWED him, he met Aura. She walked into the reefersleep chamber with her mother. The shock of it nearly floored him. He didn’t want to believe it was her, but there was no mistaking those golden-brown eyes. Glints of embedded metal threw prismatic light back at him like oil in water.
“Hello,” she said. She held her mother’s hand, standing hip-high against Khouri’s side. “They said they were waking you, Scorpio. Are you all right?”
“I’m all right,” he replied, which was as much as he was prepared to commit. “It was always a risk, going in that thing.” Understatement of the century, he thought. “How are you, Aura?”
“I’m six,” she said.
Khouri gripped her daughter’s hand. “She’s having one of her child days, Scorp, when she acts more or less the way you’d expect a six-year-old to act. But she isn’t always like this. I just thought you should be prepared.”
He studied the two of them. Khouri looked a little older, but not dramatically so. The lines in her face had a little more definition, as if an artist had taken a soft-edged sketch of a woman and gone over it with a sharp pencil, lovingly delineating each crease and fold of skin. She had grown her hair to shoulder length, parted it to one side, clasping it there with a small slide the colour of ambergris. There were veins of white and silver running through her hair, but these served only to emphasise the blackness of the rest of it. Folds of skin he didn’t remember marked her neck, and her hands were somehow thinner and more anatomical. But she was still Khouri, and had he no knowledge that six years had passed he might not have noticed these changes.
The two of them wore white. Khouri was dressed in a floor-length ruffled skirt and a high-collared white jacket over a scoop-necked blouse. Her daughter wore a knee-length skirt over white leggings, with a simple long-sleeved top. Aura’s hair was a short, tomboyish black crop, the fringe cut straight above her eyes. Mother and daughter stood before him like angels, too clean to be a part of the ship he knew. But perhaps things had changed. It had been six years, after all.
“Have you remembered anything?” he asked Aura.
“I’m six,” she said. “Do you want to see the ship?”
He smiled, hoping it wouldn’t frighten the child. “That would be nice. But someone told me there was so
mething else I had to deal with first.”
“What did they tell you?” Khouri asked.
“That it wasn’t good.”
“Understatement of the century,” she replied.
BUT VALENSIN WOULD not let him out of the reefersleep chamber without a full medical examination. The doctor made him lie back on a couch and submit to the silent scrutiny of the green medical servitors. The machines fussed over his abdomen with scanners and probes while Valensin peeled back Scorpio’s eyelids and shone a migraine-inducing light into his head, tutting to himself as if he had found something slightly sordid hidden away inside.
“You had me asleep for six years,” Scorpio said. “Couldn’t you have made your examinations then?”
“It’s the waking that kills you,” Valensin said breezily. “That and the immediate period after revival. Given the antiquity of the casket you just came out of and the unavoidable idiosyncrasies of your anatomy, I’d say you have no more than a ninety-five per cent chance of making it through the next hour.”
“I feel fine.”
“If you do, that’s quite some achievement.” Valensin held up a hand, flicking his fingers around Scorpio’s face. “How many?”
“Three.”
“Now?”
“Two.”
“And now?”
“Three.”
“And now?”
“Three. Two. Is there a point to this?”
“I’ll need to run some more exhaustive tests, but it looks to me as if you’re exhibiting a ten or fifteen per cent degradation in your peripheral vision.” Valensin smiled, as if this was exactly the sort of news Scorpio needed: just the ticket for getting him off the couch and putting a spring in his step.
“I’ve just come out of reefersleep. What do you expect?”
“More or less what I’m seeing,” Valensin said. “There was some loss of peripheral vision before we put you under, but it has definitely worsened now. There may be some slight recovery over the next few hours, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you never get back to where you were.”
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