Absolution Gap

TWENTY

Rashmika watched the icejammer being winched down to the rolling ribbon of road. There was a scuff of ice as the skis touched the surface. On the icejammer’s roof, the two suited men unhitched the hooks and rode them up to the top of the winches, before being swung back on to the top of the caravan vehicle. Crozet’s tiny-looking vehicle bobbed and yawed alongside the caravan for several hundred metres, then allowed itself to be slowly overtaken by the rumbling procession. Rashmika watched until it was lost to view behind the grinding wheels of one of the machines.

She stepped back from the inclined viewing window. That was it, then: all her bridges burned. But her resolve to continue remained as strong as ever. She was going onwards, no matter what it took.

“I see you’ve made your mind up, then.”

Rashmika turned from the window. The sound of Quaestor Jones’s voice shocked her: she had imagined herself alone.

The quaestor’s green pet cleaned its face with its one good forelimb, its tail wrapped tight as a tourniquet around his upper arm.

“My mind didn’t need making up,” she said.

“I had hoped that the letter from your brother would knock some sense into your head. But it didn’t, and here you are. At least now we have a small treat for you.”

“I’m sorry?” Rashmika asked.

“There’s been a slight change in our itinerary,” he said. “We’ll be taking a little longer to make our rendezvous with the cathedrals than planned.”

“Nothing serious has happened, I hope.”

“We’ve already incurred delays that we can’t make up by following our usual route south. We had intended to traverse the Ginnungagap Rift near Gudbrand Crossing, then move south down the Hyrrokkin Trail until we reached the Way, where we’d meet the cathedrals. But that simply isn’t possible now, and in any case, there’s been a major icefall somewhere along the Hyrrokkin Pass. We don’t have the gear to shift it, not quickly, and the nearest caravan with ice-clearing equipment is stuck at Glum Junction, pinned down by a flash glacier. So we’ll have to take a short cut, if we aren’t to be even later.”

“A short cut, Quaestor?”

“We’re approaching the Ginnungagap Rift.” He paused. “You know about the rift, of course. Everything has to cross it at some point.”

Rashmika visualised the laceration of the Rift, a deep sheer-sided ice canyon slicing diagonally across the equator. It was the largest geological feature on the planet, the first thing Quaiche had named on his approach.

“I thought there was only one safe crossing,” she said.

“For the cathedrals, yes,” he allowed. “The Way deviates a little to the north, where the walls of the Rift have been tiered in a zigzag fashion to allow the cathedrals to descend to the floor. It’s a laborious process, costs them days, and then they have to repeat the process climbing up the far side. They need a good head start on Haldora if they aren’t to slip behind. They call that route the Devil’s Staircase, and every cathedral master secretly dreads it. The descent is narrow and collapses aren’t uncommon. But we don’t have to take the Staircase: there’s another way across the Rift, you see. A cathedral can’t make it, but a caravan doesn’t weigh anywhere near as much as a cathedral.”

“You’re talking about the bridge,” Rashmika said, with a shiver of fear and anticipation.

“You’ve seen it, then.”

“Only in photos.”

“What did you think?”

“I think it looks beautiful,” she said, “beautiful and delicate, like something blown from glass. Much too delicate for machines.”

“We’ve crossed it before.”

“But no one knows how much it can take.”

“I think we can trust the scuttlers in that regard, wouldn’t you say? The experts say it’s been there for millions of years.”

“They say a lot of things,” Rashmika replied, “but we don’t know for sure how old it is, or who built it. It doesn’t look much like anything else the scuttlers left behind, does it? And we certainly don’t know that it was ever meant to be crossed.”

“You seem unnaturally worried about what is—in all honesty—a technically simple manoeuvre, one that will save us many precious days. Might I ask why?”

“Because I know what they call that crossing,” she said. “Ginnungagap Rift is what Quaiche named the canyon, but they have another name for it, don’t they? Especially those who decide to cross the bridge. They call it Absolution Gap. They say you’d better be free from sin before you begin the crossing.”

“But of course, you don’t believe in the existence of sin, do you?”

“I believe in the existence of reckless stupidity,” Rashmika replied.

“Well, you needn’t worry yourself about that. All you have to do is enjoy the view, just like the other pilgrims.”

“I’m no pilgrim,” she said.

The quaestor smiled and popped something into his pet’s mouth. “We’re all either pilgrims or martyrs. In my experience, it’s better to be a pilgrim.”

Antoinette put on the goggles. The view through them was like a smoky counterpart of the real room, with red Canasian numerals tumbling in her right visual field. For a moment nothing else changed. The haphazard skeletal machine—the class-three apparition—continued to stand amid the discarded slurry of junk from which it had been birthed, one limb frozen in the act of tossing her the goggles.

“Captain…” she began.

But even as she spoke the apparition and its detritus were merging into the background, losing sharpness and contrast against the general clutter of the chamber. The goggles were not working perfectly, and in one square part of her visual field the skeletal machine remained unedited, but elsewhere it was vanishing like buildings into a wall of sea fog.

Antoinette did not like this. The machinery had not threatened her, but it troubled her not to have a good idea of where it was. She was reaching up for the goggles, ready to slip them off, when a voice buzzed in her ear.

“Don’t. Keep them on. You need them to see me.”

“Captain?”

“I promise I won’t hurt you. Look.”

She looked. Something was emerging now, being slowly edited into her visual field. A human figure—utterly real, this time—was forming out of thin air. Antoinette took an involuntary step backwards, catching her torch against an obstruction and dropping it to the floor.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he told her. “This is what you came for, isn’t it?”

“Right now I’m not sure,” she breathed.

The human figure had stepped out of history. He wore a truly ancient space suit, a baggy, bulging affair of crinkled rust-orange fabric. His boots and thick-fingered gloves were clad in the same tawny material, ripped here and there to reveal a laminated mesh of underlying layers. He wore a dull silver belt festooned with numerous tools of unclear function. A rugged square box hung on the chest region of his suit, studded with chunky plastic-sealed controls large enough to be worked despite the handicap of the gloves. An even larger box sat on his back, rising above his neck. Moulded from bright red plastic, a thick ribbed hose dangled from the backpack over his left shoulder, its open end resting against the upper shelf of the chest-pack. The silver band of the suit’s neck ring was a complexity of locking mechanisms and black rubberised seals. Between the neck ring and the upper part of the suit were many unrecognisable logos and insignia.

He wore no helmet.

The Captain’s face looked too small for the suit. On his scalp—which appeared shaven—he wore a padded black and white cap veined with monitor wires. In the smoky light of the goggles she couldn’t guess at the shade of his skin. It was smooth, stretched tight over his cheekbones, shadowed with a week’s growth of patchy black beard. He had very fine razor-cut eyebrows, which arched quizzically above wide-set, doglike eyes. She could see the whites of those eyes between the pupil and the lower eyelid. He had the kind of mouth—thin, straight, perfect for a certain superciliousness—that she might find either fascinating or untrustworthy, depending on her mood. He did not look like a man much inclined to small talk. Usually that was all right with Antoinette.

“I brought this back,” she said. She stooped down and picked up the helmet.

“Give it to me.”

She moved to throw it.

“No,” he said sharply. “Give it to me. Walk closer and hand it to me.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready to do that,” she said.

“It’s called a gesture of mutual trust. You either do it or the conversation ends here. I’ve already said I won’t hurt you. Didn’t you believe me?”

She thought of the machinery that the goggles had edited out of her vision. Perhaps if she took them off, so that she saw the apparition as it really was…

“Leave the goggles on. That’s also part of the deal.”

She took a step closer. It was clear that she had no choice.

“Good. Now give me the helmet.”

Another step. Then one more. The Captain waited with his hands at his sides, his eyes encouraging her forwards.

“I understand that you’re scared,” he said. “That’s the point. If you weren’t frightened, there’d be no show of trust, would there?”

“I’m just wondering what you’re getting out of this.”

“I’m trusting you not to let me down. Now pass me the helmet.”

She held it out in front of her, as far as her arms would stretch, and the Captain reached out to take it from her. The goggles lagged slightly, so that a flicker of machinery was briefly visible as his arms moved. His gloved fingers closed around the helmet. She heard the rasp of metal on metal.

The Captain took a step back. “Good,” he said, approvingly. He rolled the helmet in his hands, inspecting it for signs of wear. Antoinette noticed now that there was a vacant round socket in one side, into which the red umbilical was meant to plug. “Thank you for bringing this down to me. The gesture is appreciated.”

“You left it with Palfrey. That wasn’t an accident, was it?”

“I suppose not. What did you say it was—a ‘calling card?’ Not far from the truth, I guess.”

“I took it as a sign that you were willing to talk to someone.”

“You seemed very anxious to talk to me,” he said.

“We were. We are.” She looked at the apparition with a mixture of fear and dangerous, seductive relief. “Do you mind if I ask you something?” She took his silence to indicate assent. “What shall I call you? ‘Captain’ doesn’t seem quite right to me, not now that we’ve been through the mutual-trust thing.”

“Fair point,” he conceded, not sounding entirely convinced. “John will do for now.”

“Then, John, what have I done to deserve this? It wasn’t just my bringing back the helmet, was it?”

“Like I said, you seemed anxious to talk.”

Antoinette bent down to pick up her torch. “I’ve been trying to reach you for years, with no success at all. What’s changed?”

“I feel different now,” he said.

“As if you were asleep but have finally woken up?”

“It’s more as if I need to be awake now. Does that answer your question?”

“I’m not sure. This might sound rude, but… who am I talking to, exactly?”

“You’re talking to me. As I am. As I was.”

“No one really knows who you were, John. That suit looks pretty old to me.”

A gloved hand moved across the square chest-pack, tracing a pattern from point to point. To Antoinette it looked like a benediction, but it might equally have been a rote-learned inspection of critical systems. Air supply, pressure integrity, thermal control, comms, waste management … she knew that litany herself.

“I was on Mars,” he said.

“I’ve never been there,” she said.

“No?” He sounded disappointed.

“Fact of the matter is, I really haven’t seen all that many worlds. Yellowstone, a bit of Resurgam, and this place. But never Mars. What was it like?”

“Different. Wilder. Colder. Savage. Unforgiving. Cruel. Pristine. Bleak. Beautiful. Like a lover with a temper.”

“But this was a while back, wasn’t it?”

“Uh huh. How old do you think this suit is?”

“It looks pretty damn antique to me.”

“They haven’t made suits like this since the twenty-first century. You think Clavain’s old, a relic from history. I was an old man before he took a breath.”

It surprised her to hear him mention Clavain by name. Clearly the Captain was more aware of shipboard developments than some gave him credit for. “You’ve come a long way, then,” she said.

“It’s been a long, strange trip, yes. And just look where it’s brought me.”

“You must have some stories to tell.” Antoinette reckoned that there were two safe areas of conversation: the present and the very distant past. The last thing she wanted was to have the Captain dwelling on his recent sickness and bizarre transformation.

“There are some stories I don’t want told,” he said. “But isn’t that true for us all?”

“No argument from me.”

His thin slit of a mouth hinted at a smile. “Dark secrets in your own past, Antoinette?”

“Nothing I’m going to lose any sleep over, not when we have so much else we need to worry about.”

“Ah.” He rotated the helmet in his gloved hands. “The difficult matter of the present. I am aware of things, of course, perhaps more than you realise. I know, for instance, that there are other agencies in the system.”

“You feel them?”

“It was their noises that woke me from long, calm dreams of Mars.” He regarded the icons and decals on the helmet, stroking them with the stubby tip of one gloved finger. Antoinette wondered about the memories they stirred, preserved across five or six hundred years of experience. Memories thick with the grey dust of centuries.

“We thought that you were waking,” she said. “In the last few weeks we’ve become more aware of your presence. We didn’t think it was coincidence, especially after what Khouri told us. I know you remember Khouri, John, or you wouldn’t have brought me down here.”

“Where is she?”

“With Clavain and the others.”

“And Ilia? Where is Ilia?”

Antoinette was sweating. The temptation to lie, to offer a soothing platitude, was overwhelming. But she did not doubt for one instant that the Captain would see through any attempt at deception. “Ilia’s dead.”

The black and white cap bowed down. “I thought I might have dreamed it,” he said. “That’s the problem now. I can’t always tell what’s real and what’s imagined. I might be dreaming you at this very moment.”

“I’m real,” she said, as if her assurance would make any difference, “but Ilia’s dead. You remember what happened, don’t you?”

His voice was soft and thoughtful, like a child remembering the significant events in a nursery tale. “I remember that she was here, and that we were alone. I remember her lying in a bed, with people around her.”

What was she going to tell him now? That the reason Ilia had been in a bed in the first place was because she had suffered injuries during her efforts to thwart the Captain’s own suicide attempt, when he had directed one of the cache weapons against the hull of the ship. The scar he had inflicted on the hull was visible even now, a vertical fissure down one side of the spire. She was certain that on some level he knew all this but also that he did not need to be reminded of it now.

“She died,” Antoinette said, “trying to save us all. I gave her the use of my ship, Storm Bird, after we’d used it to rescue the last colonists from Resurgam.”

“But I remember her being unwell.”

“She wasn’t so unwell that she couldn’t fly a ship. Thing is, John, she felt she had something to atone for. You remember what she did to the colonists, when your crew were trying to find Sylveste? Made them think she’d wiped out a whole settlement in a fit of pique? That’s why they wanted her for a war criminal. Towards the end, I wonder whether she didn’t start believing it herself. How are we to know what went through her head? If enough people hate you, it can’t be easy not to start thinking they might be right.”

“She wasn’t a particularly good woman,” the Captain said, “but she wasn’t what they made her out to be. She only ever did what she thought right for the ship.”

“I guess that makes her a good woman in my book. Right now the ship is about all we have, John.”

“Do you think it worked for her?” he asked.

“What?”

“Atonement, Antoinette. Do you think it made the slightest difference, in the end?”

“I can’t guess what went through her mind.”

“Did it make any difference to the rest of you?”

“We’re here, aren’t we? We got out of the system alive. If Ilia hadn’t taken her stand, we’d probably all be smeared over a few light-hours of local solar space around Resurgam.”

“I hope you’re right. I did forgive her, you know.”

Antoinette knew that it had been Ilia who had allowed the Captain’s Melding Plague to finally engulf the ship. At the time she did it, it had seemed the only way to rid the ship of a different kind of parasite entirely. Antoinette did not think that Ilia had taken the decision lightly. Equally—based on her very limited experience of the woman—she did not think consideration of the Captain’s feelings had had very much influence on her decision.

“That’s pretty generous of you,” she said.

“I realise that she did it for the ship. I realise also that she could have killed me instead. I think she wanted to, after she learned what I had done to Sajaki.”

“Sorry, but that’s way before my time.”

“I murdered a good man,” the Captain said. “Ilia knew. When she did this to me, when she made me what I am, she knew what I’d done. I would have sooner she’d killed me.”

“Then you’ve paid for whatever you did,” Antoinette said. “And even if you hadn’t then, even if she hadn’t done whatever she did, it doesn’t matter. What counts is that you saved one hundred and sixty thousand people from certain death. You’ve repaid that one crime a hundred thousand times over and more.”

“You imagine that’s the way the world works, Antoinette?”

“It’s good enough for me, John, but what do I know? I’m just a space pilot’s daughter from the Rust Belt.”

There was a lull. Still holding the helmet, The Captain took the end of the ribbed red umbilical and connected it to the socket in the side of the helmet. The interface between the real object and the simulated presence was disturbingly seamless.

“The trouble is, Antoinette, what good was it to save those lives, if all that happens is that they die now, here on Ararat?”

“We don’t know that anyone’s going to die. So far the Inhibitors haven’t touched us down here.”

“All the same, you’d like some insurance.”

“We need to consider the unthinkable, John. If the worst comes to the worst, we’ll need to leave Ararat. And you’re going to have to be the man with the plan.”

He slipped the helmet on to his neck ring, twisting it to and fro to engage the latching mechanisms. The faceplate glass was still up. The whites of his eyes were two bright crescents in the shadowed map of his face. Green and red numerals were back-reflected on to his skin.

“It took some guts to come down here on your own, Antoinette.”

“I don’t think this is a time for cowards,” she said.

“It never was,” he said, beginning to slide down the faceplate glass. “About what you want of me?”

“Yes?”

“I’ll give the matter some thought.”

Then he turned around and walked slowly into the darkness. A skirl of red-brown dust swelled up to block him from view. It was like a sandstorm on Mars.

The Ultra captain was called Heckel, his ship the Third Gazometric. He had come down in a red-hulled shuttle of very ancient design—a triad of linked spheres with large, stylised tarantula markings.

Even by recent standards, Heckel struck Quaiche as a very strange individual. The mobility suit in which he came aboard the Lady Morwenna was a monstrous contraption of leather and brass, with rubberised accordion joints and gleaming metal plates secured by rivets. Behind the tiny grilled-over eyeholes of his helmet, wiper blades flicked back and forth to clear condensation. Steam vented from poorly maintained joints and seals. Two assistants had accompanied him: they were constantly opening and closing hatches in the suit, fiddling with brass knobs and valves. When Heckel spoke, his voice emerged from a miniature pipe organ projecting from the top of his helmet. He had to keep making adjustments to knobs in his chest area to stop the voice becoming too shrill or deep.

Quaiche understood none of Heckel’s utterances, but that was all right: Heckel had also brought along a baseline interpreter. She was a small doe-eyed woman dressed in a more modern spacesuit. Her helmet had folded back on itself, retracting like a cockatoo’s crest so that everyone could see her face.

“You’re not an Ultra,” Quaiche remarked to the interpreter.

“Does it matter?”

“I just find it amusing, that’s all. It’s where I started, doing the same line of work as you.”

“That must have been a long time ago.”

“But they still don’t find it any easier to negotiate with the likes of us, do they?”

“Us, Dean?”

“Baseline humans, like you and me.”

She hid it well, but he read her amused reaction. He saw himself from her point of view: an old man reclining on a couch, deathly frail, surrounded by an audience of moving mirrors, his eyed peeled open like fruits. He was not wearing the sunglasses.

Quaiche moved a hand. “I wasn’t always like this. I could pass for a baseline human, once, move in normal society with no one so much as batting an eyelid. I was taken into the employment of Ultras, just as you have been. Queen Jasmina, of the Gnostic Ascension …”

Heckel adjusted his chest knobs, then piped out something incomprehensible.

“He says Jasmina did not have the best of reputations, even amongst other Ultras,” the interpreter said. “He says that even now, in certain Ultra circles, mentioning her name is considered the height of bad taste.”

“I didn’t know Ultras even recognised bad taste as a concept,” Quaiche replied archly.

Heckel piped back something shrill and peremptory.

“He says there is a lot you need to remember,” the interpreter said. “He also says he has other business he needs to attend to today.”

Quaiche fingered the edge of his scarlet blanket. “Very well, then. Just to clarify… you would be willing to consider my offer?”

The interpreter listened to Heckel for a moment, then addressed Quaiche. “He says he understands the logic of your proposed security arrangement.”

Quaiche nodded enthusiastically, forcing the mirrors to nod synchronously. “Of course, it would work to the benefit of both parties. I would gain the protection of a ship like the Third Gazometric, insurance against the less scrupulous Ultra elements we all know are out there. And by agreeing to provide that security—for a fixed but not indefinite period, naturally—there would be compensations in terms of trading rights, insider information, that sort of thing. It could be worth both our whiles, Captain Heckel. All you’d have to do is agree to move the Third Gazometric closer to Hela, and to submit to some very mild mutual friendship arrangements… a small cathedral delegation on your ship and—naturally—a reciprocal party on the Lady Morwenna. And then you’d have immediate access to the choicest scuttler relics, before any of your rivals.” Quaiche looked askance, as if seeing enemies in the garret’s shadows. “And we wouldn’t have to be looking over our shoulders all the time.”

The captain piped his reply.

“He says he understands the benefits in terms of trading rights,” the interpreter said, “but he also wishes to emphasise the risk he would be taking by bringing his ship closer to Hela. He mentions the fate that befell the Gnostic Ascension …”

“And there was me thinking it was bad taste to mention it.”

She ignored him. “And he wishes to have these beneficial trading arrangements clarified before any further discussion takes place. He wishes also to specify a maximum term for the period of protection, and…” She paused while Heckel piped out a series of rambling additions. “He also wishes to discuss the exclusion from trade of certain other parties currently in the system, or approaching it. Parties to be excluded would include, but not be limited to, the trade vessels Transfigured Night, Madonna of the Wasps, Silence Under Snow …”

She continued until she noticed Quaiche’s raised hand. “We can discuss these things in good time,” he said, his heart sinking. “In the meantime, the cathedral would—of course—require a full technical examination of the Third Gazometric, to ensure that the ship poses no hazard to Hela or its inhabitants…”

“The captain wonders if you doubt the worthiness of his ship,” the interpreter said.

“Not at all. Why should I? He made it this far, didn’t he? On the other hand, if he has nothing to hide…”

“The captain wishes to retire to his shuttle to consider matters.”

“Of course,” Quaiche said with sudden eagerness, as if nothing was too much to ask. “This is a serious proposal, and nothing should be agreed in haste. Sleep on it. Talk to some other parties. Get a second opinion. Shall I call an escort?”

“The captain can find his own way back to the shuttle,” she said.

Quaiche spread his fingers in farewell. “Very well, then. Please convey my best wishes to your crew… and consider my offer very seriously.”

The captain swung around, his assistants continuing to adjust the control valves and levers in his ludicrous kettle of a suit. With a mad rhythmic clanking he began to locomote towards the door. His departure was as painfully slow as his arrival had been, the suit appearing incapable of moving more than an inch at a time.

The captain paused, then laboriously turned around. The wiper blades flicked back and forth. The pipe organ chimed out another sequence of notes.

“Begging your pardon,” the interpreter said, “but the captain has another question. Upon his approach to the Lady Morwenna, he made an unscheduled excursion from the usual flight path due to a technical problem with the shuttle.”

“A technical problem? Now there’s a surprise.”

“In the process of this deviation he witnessed significant excavation work taking place a little to the north of the Permanent Way, near the Jarnsaxa Flats. He saw what appeared to be a partially camouflaged dig. Investigating with the shuttle’s radar, he detected a sloping cavity several kilometres in length and at least a kilometre deep. He assumed that the dig was related to the unearthing of scuttler relics.”

“That may be the case,” Quaiche said, affecting an uninterested tone.

“The captain was puzzled. He admits to being no expert on Hela affairs, but he was given to understand that most significant scuttler relics have been unearthed in the circumpolar regions.”

“Scuttler relics are found all over Hela,” Quaiche said. “It’s just that due to quirks of geography they’re easier to get at in the polar regions. I don’t know what this dig was that you saw, or why it was camouflaged. Most of the digging work takes place outside the direct administration of the churches, alas. We can’t keep tabs on everyone.”

“The captain thanks you for your most helpful response.”

Quaiche frowned, and then corrected his frown to a tolerant smile. What was that: sarcasm, or had she just not hit quite the right note? She was a baseline human, like himself, the kind of person he had once been able to read like a diagram. Now she and her kind—not just women, but almost everyone—lay far beyond the boundaries of his instinctive understanding. He watched them leave, smelling something hot and metallic trailing in the captain’s wake, waiting impatiently while the room cleared of the noxious steam.

Soon, the tapping of a cane announced Grelier’s arrival. He had not been far away, listening in on the proceedings via concealed cameras and microphones.

“Seems promising enough,” the surgeon-general ventured. “They didn’t dismiss you out of hand, and they do have a ship. My guess is they can’t wait to make the deal.”

“That’s what I thought as well,” Quaiche said. He rubbed a smear of condensation from one of his mirrors, restoring Hal-dora to its usual pinpoint sharpness. “In fact, once you stripped away Heckel’s not very convincing bluster I got the impression they needed our arrangement very badly.” He held up a sheet of paper, one that he had held tightly to his chest throughout the negotiations: “Technical summary on their ship, from our spies in the parking swarm. Doesn’t make encouraging reading. The bloody thing’s falling to bits. Barely made it to 107 P.”

“Let me see.” Grelier glanced at the paper, skimming it. “You can’t be certain this is accurate.”

“I can’t?”

“No. Ultras routinely downplay the worthiness of their ships, often putting out misinformation to that effect. They do it to lull competitors into a false sense of superiority, and to dissuade pirates interested in stealing their ships.”

“But they always overstate their defensive capabilities,” Quaiche said, wagging a finger at the surgeon-general. “Right now there isn’t a ship in that swarm that doesn’t have weapons of some kind, even if they’re disguised as innocent collision avoidance systems. They’re scared, Grelier, all of them, and they all want their rivals to know they have the means to defend themselves.” He snatched back the paper. “But this? It’s a joke. They need our patronage so they can fix their ship first. It should be the other way around, if their protection is to have any meaning to us.”

“As I said, where the intentions of Ultras are concerned nothing should be taken at face value.”

Quaiche crumpled the paper and threw it across the room. “The problem is I can’t read their bloody intentions.”

“No one could be expected to read a monstrosity like Heckel,” Grelier said.

“I don’t mean just him. I’m talking about the other Ultras, or the normal humans that come down with them, like that women just now. I couldn’t tell if she was being sincere or patronising, let alone whether she really believed what Heckel was having her say.”

Grelier kissed the head of his cane. “You want my opinion? Your assessment of the situation was accurate: she was just Heckel’s mouthpiece. He wanted to do business very badly.”

“Too bloody badly,” Quaiche said.

Grelier tapped the cane against the floor. “Forget the Third Gazometric for the time being. What about the Lark Descending! The third-party summaries suggested a very useful weapons allocation, and the captain seemed willing to do business.”

“The summaries also mentioned an instability in her starboard drive. Did you miss that bit?”

Grelier shrugged. “It’s not as though we need them to take us anywhere, just to sit in orbit around Hela intimidating the rest of them. As long as the weapons are sufficient for that task, what do we care if the ship won’t be capable of leaving once the arrangement is over?”

Quaiche waved a hand vaguely. “To be honest, I didn’t really like the fellow they sent down. Kept leaking all over the floor. Took weeks to get rid of the stain after he’d left. And a drive instability isn’t the mild inconvenience you seem to assume. The ship we come to an agreement with will be sitting within tenths of a light-second of our surface, Grelier. We can’t risk it blowing up in our faces.”

“Back to square one, in that case,” Grelier said, with little detectable sympathy. “There are other Ultras to interview, aren’t there?”

“Enough to keep me busy, but I’ll always come back to the same fundamental problem: I simply cannot read these people, Grelier. My mind is so open to Haldora that there isn’t room for any other form of observation. I cannot see through their strategies and evasions the way I once could.”

“We’ve had this conversation before. You know you can always seek my opinion.”

“And I do. But—no insult intended, Grelier—you know a great deal more about blood and cloning than you do about human nature.”

“Then ask others. Assemble an advisory council.”

“No.” Grelier, he realised, was quite right—they had been over this many times. And always it came round to the same points. ‘These negotiations for protection are, by their very nature, extremely sensitive. I can’t risk a security leak to another cathedral.“ He motioned for Grelier to clean his eyes. ”Look at me,“ he went on, while the surgeon-general opened the medicine cabinet and prepared the antiseptic swabs. ”I’m a thing of horror, in many respects, bound to this chair, barely able to survive without it. And even if I had the health to leave it, I would remain a prisoner of the Lady Morwenna, still enmeshed in the optical sightlines of my beloved mirrors.“

“Voluntarily,” Grelier said.

“You know what I mean. I cannot move amongst the Ultras as they move amongst us. Cannot step aboard their ships the way other ecumenical emissaries do.”

“That’s why we have spies.”

“All the same, it limits me. I need someone I can trust, Grelier, someone like my younger self. Someone able to move amongst them as I used to. Someone they wouldn’t dare to suspect.”

“Suspect?” Grelier dabbed at Quaiche’s eyes with the swabs.

“I mean someone they would automatically trust. Someone not at all like you.”

“Hold still.” Quaiche flinched as the stinging swab dug around his eyeball. It amazed him that he had any nerve endings there at all, but Grelier had an unerring ability to find those that remained. “Actually,” Grelier said, musingly, “something did occur to me recently. Perhaps it’s worth mentioning.”

“Go ahead.”

“You’re aware I like to know what’s happening on Hela. Not just the usual business with the cathedrals and the Way, but in the wider world, including the villages.”

“Oh, yes. You’re always on the hunt for uncatalogued strains, reports of interesting new heresies from the Hauk settlements, that sort of thing. Then out you ride with your shiny new syringes, like a good little vampire.”

“I won’t deny that Bloodwork plays a small role in my interest, but along the way I do pick up all sorts of interesting titbits. Keep still!‘

“And you keep out of my sightlines! What sort of titbits?”

“The last but one time I was awake was a two-year interval, between ten and eight years ago. I remember that revival very well: it was the first occasion on which I found myself needing this cane. Towards the end of that period awake I made a long trip north, following leads on those uncatalogued strains you just mentioned. On the return journey I rode with one of the caravans, keeping my eyes peeled—sorry—for anything else that might take my fancy.”

“I remember that trip,” Quaiche said, “but I don’t recall you saying that anything of significance happened during it.”

“Nothing did. Or at least nothing seemed to, at the time. But then I heard a news bulletin a few days ago and it reminded me of something.”

“Are you going to drag this out much longer?”

Grelier sighed and began returning the equipment to its cabinet. “There was a family,” he said, “from the Vigrid badlands. They’d travelled down to meet the caravan. They had two children: a son and a younger daughter.”

“Fascinating, I’m sure.”

“The son was looking for work on the Way. I sat in on the recruitment interview, as I was permitted to do. Idle curiosity, really: I had no interest in this particular case, but you never know when someone interesting is going to show up.” Grelier snapped shut the cabinet. “The son had aspirations to work in some technical branch of Way maintenance—strategic planning, something like that. At the time, however, the Way had all the pencil-pushers it needed. The only vacancies available were—shall we say—at the sharp end?”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Quaiche said.

“Quite. But in this case the recruiting agent decided against a full and frank disclosure of the relevant facts. He told the son that there would be no difficulty in finding him a safe, well-paid job in the technical bureau. And because the work would be strictly analytical, requiring a clear-headed coolness of mind, there would be no question whatsoever of viral initiation.”

“If he’d told the truth, he’d have lost the recruit.”

“Almost certainly. He was a clever lad, no doubt about that. A waste, really, to throw him straight into fuse laying or something with an equally short life-expectancy. And because the family was secular—they mostly are, up in the badlands—he definitely didn’t want your blood in his veins.”

“It isn’t my blood. It’s a virus.”

Grelier raised a finger, silencing his master. “The point is that the recruiting agent had good reason to lie. And it was only a white lie, really. Everyone knew those bureau jobs were thin on the ground. Frankly, I think even the son knew it, but his family needed the money.”

“There’s a point to this, Grelier, I’m sure of it.”

“I can barely remember what the son looked like. But the daughter? I can see her now, clear as daylight, looking through all of us as if we were made of glass. She had the most astonishing eyes, a kind of golden brown with little flecks of light in them.”

“How old would she have been, Grelier?”

“Eight, nine, I suppose.”

“You revolt me.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Grelier said. “Everyone there felt it, I think, especially the recruiting agent. She kept telling her parents he was lying. She was certain. She was visibly affronted by him. It was as if everyone in that room was playing a game and she hadn’t been told about it.”

“Children behave oddly in adult environments. It was a mistake to have her there.”

“She wasn’t behaving oddly at all,” Grelier said. “In my view, she was behaving very rationally. It was the adults who weren’t. They all knew that the recruiting agent was lying, but she was the only one who wasn’t in denial about it.”

“I expect she overheard some remark before the interview, something about how the recruiting agents always lie.”

“She may have done, but even at the time I thought it went a little deeper than that. I think she just knew that the recruiter was lying simply by looking at him. There are people, individuals, who have that ability. They’re born with it. Not more than one in a thousand, and probably even fewer who have it to the extent of that little girl.”

“Mind-reading?”

“No. Just an acute awareness of the subliminal information already available. Facial expression, primarily. The muscles in your face can form forty-three distinct movements, which enable tens of thousands in combination.”

Grelier had done his homework, Quaiche thought. This little digression had obviously been planned all along.

“Many of these expressions are involuntary,” he continued. “Unless you’ve been very well trained, you simply can’t lie without revealing yourself through your expressions. Most of the time, of course, it doesn’t matter. The people around you are none the wiser, just as blind to those microexpressions. But imagine if you had that awareness. Not just the means to read the people around you when they don’t even know they’re being read, but the self-control to block your own involuntary signals.”

“Mm.” Quaiche could see where this was heading. “It wouldn’t be much use against something like Heckel, but a baseline negotiator… or something with a face … that’s a different matter. You think you could teach me this?”

“I can do better than that,” Grelier said. “I can bring you the girl. She can teach you herself.”

For a moment, Quaiche regarded the hanging image of Haldora, mesmerised by a writhing filament of lightning in the southern polar region.

“You’d have to bring her here first,” he said. “Not easy, if you can’t lie to her at any point.”

“Not as difficult as you think. She’s like antimatter: it would only be a question of handling her with the right tools. I told you something jogged my memory a few days ago. It was the girl’s name. Rashmika Els. She was mentioned in a general news bulletin originating from the Vigrid badlands. There was a photo. She’s eight or nine years older than when I last saw her, obviously, but it was her all right. I wouldn’t forget those eyes in a hurry. She’d gone missing. The constabulary were in a fuss about her.”

“No use to us, then.”

Grelier smiled. “Except I found her. She’s on a caravan, heading towards the Way.”

“You’ve met her?”

“Not exactly. I visited the caravan, but didn’t reveal myself to Miss Els. Wouldn’t want to scare her off, not when she can be so useful to us. She’s very determined to find out what happened to her brother, but even she will be wary of getting too close to the Way.”

“Mm.” For a moment the beautiful conjunction of these events caused Quaiche to smile. “And what exactly did happen to her brother?”

“Died in clearance work,” Grelier said. “Crushed under the Lady Morwenna.”