Absolution Gap

SIX

While Vasko helped Clavain with his packing, Scorpio stepped outside the tent and, tugging aside his sleeve to reveal his communicator, opened a channel to Blood. He kept his voice low as he spoke to the other pig.

“I’ve got him. Needed a bit of persuading, but he’s agreed to come back with us.”

“You don’t sound overjoyed.”

“Clavain still has one or two issues he needs to work through.”

Blood snorted. “Sounds a bit ominous. Hasn’t gone and flipped his lid, has he?”

“I don’t know. Once or twice he mentioned seeing things.”

“Seeing things?”

“Figures in the sky, that worried me a bit—but it’s not as if he was ever the easiest man to read. I’m hoping he’ll thaw out a bit when he gets back to civilisation.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“I don’t know.” Scorpio spoke with exaggerated patience. “I’m just working on the assumption that we’re better off with him than without him.”

“Good,” Blood said doubtfully. “In which case you can skip the boat. We’re sending a shuttle.”

Scorpio frowned, pleased and confused at the same time. “Why the VIP treatment? I thought the idea was to keep this whole exercise low-profile.”

“It was, but there’s been a development.”

“The capsule?”

“Spot on,” Blood said. “It’s only gone and started warming up. Fucking thing’s sparked into automatic revival mode. Bio-indicators changed status about an hour ago. It’s started waking whoever or whatever’s inside it.”

“Right. Great. Excellent. And there’s nothing you can do about it?”

“We can just about repair a sewage pump, Scorp. Anything cleverer than that is a bit outside of our remit right now. Clavain might have a shot at slowing it down, of course…”

With his head full of Conjoiner implants, Clavain could talk to machines in a way that no one else on Ararat could.

“How long have we got?”

“About eleven hours.”

“Eleven hours. And you waited until now to tell me this?”

“I wanted to see if you were bringing Clavain back with you.”

Scorpio wrinkled his nose. “And if I’d told you I wasn’t?”

Blood laughed. “Then we’d be getting our boat back, wouldn’t we?”

“You’re a funny pig, Blood, but don’t make a career out of it.”

Scorpio killed the link and returned to the tent, where he revealed the change of plan. Vasko, with barely concealed excitement, asked why it had been altered. Scorpio, anxious not to introduce any factor that might upset Clavain’s decision, avoided the question.

“You can take back as much stuff as you like,” Scorpio told Clavain, looking at the miserable bundle of personal effects Clavain had assembled. “We don’t have to worry about capsizing now.”

Clavain gathered the bundle and passed it to Vasko. “I already have all I need.”

“Fine,” Scorpio said. “I’ll make sure the rest of your things are looked after when we send someone out to dismantle the tent.”

“The tent stays here,” Clavain said. Coughing, he pulled on a heavy full-length black coat. He used his long-nailed fingers to brush his hair away from his eyes, sweeping it back over his crown; it fell in white and silver waves over the high stiff collar of the coat. When he had stopped coughing he added, “And my things stay in the tent as well. You really weren’t listening, were you?”

“I heard you,” Scorpio said. “I just didn’t want to hear you.”

“Start listening, friend. That’s all I ask of you.” Clavain patted him on the back. He reached for the cloak he had been wearing earlier, fingered the fabric and then put it aside. Instead he opened the desk and removed an object sheathed in a black leather holster.

“A gun?” Scorpio asked.

“Something more reliable,” Clavain said. “A knife.”

Quaiche worked his way along the absurdly narrow companionway that threaded the Dominatrix from nose to tail. The ship ticked and purred around him, like a room full of well-oiled clocks.

“It’s a bridge. That’s all I can tell at the moment.”

“What type of bridge?” Morwenna asked.

“A long, thin one, like a whisker of glass. Very gently curved, stretching across a kind of ravine or fissure.”

“I think you’re getting overexcited. If it’s a bridge, wouldn’t someone else have seen it already? Leaving aside whoever put it there in the first place.”

“Not necessarily,” Quaiche said. He had thought of this al-ready, and had what he considered to be a fairly plausible explanation. He tried not to make it sound too well rehearsed as he recounted it. “For a start, it isn’t at all obvious. It’s big, but if you weren’t looking carefully, you might easily miss it. A quick sweep through the system wouldn’t necessarily have picked it up. The moon might have had the wrong face turned to the observer, or the shadows might have hidden it, or the scanning resolution might not have been good enough to pick up such a delicate feature… it’d be like looking for a cobweb with a radar. No matter how careful you are, you’re not going to see it unless you use the right tools.” Quaiche bumped his head as he wormed around the tight right angle that permitted entry into the excursion bay. “Anyway, there’s no evidence that anyone ever came here before us. The system’s a blank in the nomenclature database—that’s why we got first dibs on the name. If someone ever did come through before, they couldn’t even be bothered tossing a few classical references around, the lazy sods.”

“But someone must have been here before,” Morwenna said, “or there wouldn’t be a bridge.”

Quaiche smiled. This was the part he had been looking forward to. “That’s just the point. I don’t think anyone did build this bridge.” He wriggled free into the cramped volume of the excursion bay, lights coming on as the chamber sensed his body heat. “No one human, at any rate.”

Morwenna, to her credit, took this last revelation in her stride. Perhaps he was easier to read than he imagined.

“You think you’ve stumbled on an alien artefact, is that it?”

“No,” Quaiche said. “I don’t think I’ve stumbled on an alien artefact. I think I’ve stumbled on the fucking alien artefact to end them all. I think I’ve found the most amazing, beautiful object in the known universe.”

“What if it’s something natural?”

“If I could show you the images, rest assured that you would immediately dismiss such trifling concerns.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be so hasty, all the same. I’ve seen what nature can do, given time and space. Things you wouldn’t believe could be anything other than the work of intelligent minds.”

“Me, too,” he said. “But this is something different. Trust me, all right?”

“Of course I’ll trust you. It’s not as if I have a lot of choice in the matter.”

“Not quite the answer I was hoping for,” Quaiche said, “but I suppose it’ll have to do for now.”

He turned around in the tight confines of the bay. The entire space was about the size of a small washroom, with something of the same antiseptic lustre. A tight squeeze at the best of times, but even more so now that the bay was occupied by Quaiche’s tiny personal spacecraft, clamped on to its berthing cradle, poised above the elongated trap door that allowed access to space.

With his usual furtive admiration, Quaiche stroked the smooth armour of the Scavenger’s Daughter. The ship purred at his touch, shivering in her harness.

“Easy, girl,” Quaiche whispered.

The little craft looked more like a luxury toy than the robust exploration vessel it actually was. Barely larger than Quaiche himself, the sleek vessel was the product of the last wave of high Demarchist science. Her faintly translucent aerodynamic hull resembled something that had been carved and polished with great artistry from a single hunk of amber. Mechanical viscera of bronze and silver glimmered beneath the surface. Flexible wings curled tightly against her flanks, various sensors and probes tucked back into sealed recesses within the hull.

“Open,” Quaiche whispered.

The ship did something that always made his head hurt. With a flourish, various parts of the hull hitherto apparently seamlessly joined to their neighbours slid or contracted, curled or twisted aside, revealing in an eyeblink the tight cavity inside. The space—lined with padding, life-support apparatus, controls and read-outs—was just large enough for a prone human being. There was something both obscene and faintly seductive about the way the machine seemed to invite him into herself.

By rights, he ought to have been filled with claustrophobic anxiety at the thought of climbing into her. But instead he looked forward to it, prickling with eagerness. Rather than feeling trapped within the amber translucence of the hull, he felt connected through it to the rich immensity of the universe. The tiny jewel-like ship had enabled him to skim deep into the atmospheres of worlds, even beneath the surfaces of oceans. The ship’s transducers relayed ambient data to him through all his senses, including touch. He had felt the chill of alien seas, the radiance of alien sunsets. In his five previous survey operations for the queen he had seen miracles and wonders, drunk in the giddy ecstasy of it all. It was merely unfortunate that none of those miracles and wonders had been the kind you could take away and sell at a profit.

Quaiche lowered himself into the Daughter. The ship oozed and shifted around him, adjusting to match his shape.

“Horris?”

“Yes, love?”

“Horris, where are you?”

“I’m in the excursion bay, inside the Daughter.”

“No, Horris.”

“I have to. I have to go down to see what that thing really is.”

“I don’t want you to leave me.”

“I know. I don’t want to leave either. But I’ll still be in contact. The timelag won’t be bad; it’ll be just as if I’m right next to you.”

“No, it won’t.”

He sighed. He had always known this would be the difficult part. More than once it had crossed his mind that perhaps the kindest thing would be to leave without telling her, and just hope that the relayed communications gave nothing away. Knowing Morwenna, however, she would have seen through this gambit very quickly. -

“I’ll be quick, I promise. I’ll be in and out in a few hours.” A day, more likely, but that was still a “few” hours, wasn’t it? Morwenna would understand.

“Why can’t you just take the Dominatrix closer?”

“Because I can’t risk it,” Quaiche said. “You know how I like to work. The Dominatrix is big and heavy. It has armour and range, but it lacks agility and intelligence. If we—I—run into anything nasty, the Daughter can get me out of harm’s way a lot faster. This little ship is cleverer than me. And we can’t risk damaging or losing the Dominatrix. The Daughter doesn’t have the range to catch up with the Gnostic Ascension. Face it, love, the Dominatrix is our ticket out of here. We can’t place it in harm’s way.” Hastily he added, “Or you, for that matter.”

“I don’t care about getting back to the Ascension. I’ve burned my bridges with that power-crazed slut and her toadying crew.”

“It’s not as if I’m in a big hurry to get back there myself, but the fact is we need Grelier to get you out of that suit.”

“If we stay here, there’ll be other Ultras along eventually.”

“Yeah,” Quaiche said, “and they’re all such nice people, aren’t they? Sorry, love, but this is definitely a case of working with the devil you know. Look, I’ll be quick. I’ll stay in constant voice contact. I’ll give you a guided tour of that bridge so good you’ll be seeing it in your mind’s eye, just as if you were there. I’ll sing to you. I’ll tell you jokes. How does that sound?”

“I’m scared. I know you have to do this, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m still scared.”

“I’m scared as well,” he told her. “I’d be mad not be scared. And I really don’t want to leave you. But I have no choice.”

She was quiet for a moment. Quaiche busied himself checking the systems of the little ship; as each element came on line, he felt a growing anticipatory thrill.

Morwenna spoke again. “If it is a bridge, what are you going to do with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, how big is it?”

“Big. Thirty, forty kilometres across.”

“In which case you can’t very well bring it back with you.”

“Mm. You’re right. Got me there. What was I thinking?”

“What I mean, Horris, is that you’ll have to find a way to make it valuable to Jasmina, even though it has to stay on the planet.”

“I’ll think of something,” Quaiche said, with a brio he did not feel. “At the very least Jasmina can cordon off the planet and sell tickets to anyone who wants to take a closer look. Anyway, if they built a bridge, they might have built something else. Whoever they were.”

“When you’re out there,” Morwenna said, “you promise me you’ll take care?”

“Caution’s my middle name,” Quaiche said.

The tiny ship fell away from the Dominatrix, orientating herself with a quick, excited shiver of thrust. To Quaiche it always felt as if the craft enjoyed her sudden liberation from the docking harness.

He lay with his arms stretched ahead of his face, each hand gripping an elaborate control handle bristling with buttons and levers. Between the control handles was a head-up display screen showing an overview of the Scavenger’s Daughter’s systems and a schematic of her position in relation to the nearest major celestial body. The diagrams had the sketchy, cross-hatched look of early Renaissance astronomy or medical illustrations: quilled black ink against sepia parchment, annotated in crabby Latin script. His dim reflection hovered in the glass of the head-up display.

Through the translucent hull he watched the docking bay seal itself. The

Dominatrix grew rapidly smaller, dwindling until it was only a dark, vaguely cruciform scratch against the face of Haldora. He thought of Morwenna, still inside the Dominatrix and encased within the scrimshaw suit, with a renewed sense of urgency. The bridge on Hela was without doubt the strangest thing he had seen in all his travels. If this was not precisely the kind of exotic item Jasmina was interested in, then he had no idea what was. All he had to do was sell it to her, and make her forgive him his earlier failures. If a huge alien artefact didn’t do the trick, what would?

When it became difficult to pick out the other ship without an overlay, Quaiche felt a palpable easing in his mood. Aboard the Dominatrix he never entirely lost the feeling that he was under the constant vigilance of Queen Jasmina. It was entirely possible that the queen’s agents had installed listening devices in addition to those he was meant to know about. Aboard the much smaller Scavenger’s Daughter, though, he seldom felt Jasmina’s eye on him. The little ship actually belonged to him: she answered only to Quaiche and was the single most valuable asset he had ever owned in his life. She had been a not-insignificant incentive when he had first offered his services to the queen.

The Ultras were undoubtedly clever, but he did not think they were quite clever enough to bypass the many systems the Daughter carried aboard her to prevent surveillance taps or other forms of unwarranted intrusion. It was not much of an empire, Quaiche supposed, but the little ship was his and that was all that mattered. In her he could revel in solitude, every sense splayed open to the absolute.

To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one’s actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin—or meaningful good—than ants, or dust.

Worlds barely registered sin. Suns hardly deigned to notice it. On the scale of solar systems and galaxies, it meant nothing at all. It was like some obscure subatomic force that simply petered out on those scales.

For a long time this realisation had formed an important element of Quaiche’s personal creed, and he supposed he had always lived by it, to one degree or another. But it had taken space travel—and the loneliness that his new profession brought—to give him some external validation of his philosophy.

But now there was something in his universe that really mattered to him, something that could be hurt by his own actions. How had it come to this? he wondered. How had he allowed himself to make such a fatal mistake as to fall in love? And especially with a creature as exotic and complicated as Morwenna?

“Where had it all begun to go wrong?

Gloved within the Daughter’s hull, he barely felt the surge of acceleration as the ship powered up to her maximum sustainable thrust. The sliver of the Dominatrix was utterly lost now; it may as well not have existed.

Quaiche’s ship aimed for Hela, Haldora’s largest moon.

He opened a communications channel back to the Gnostic Ascension to record a message.

“This is Quaiche. I trust all is well, ma’am. Thank you for the little incentive you saw fit to pop aboard. Very thoughtful of you. Or was that all Grelier’s work? A droll gesture, one that—I’m sure you can imagine—was also appreciated by Morwenna.” He waited a moment. “Well, to business. You may be interested to hear that I have detected… something: a large horizontal structure on the moon that we’re calling Hela. It looks rather like a bridge. Beyond that, I can’t say for sure. The Dominatrix doesn’t have the sensor range, and I don’t want to risk taking it closer. But I think it is very likely to be an artificial structure. I am therefore investigating the object using the Scavenger’s Daughter—she’s faster, smarter and she has better armour. I do not expect my excursion to last more than twenty-six hours. I will of course keep you informed of any developments.“

Quaiche replayed the message and decided that it would be unwise to transmit it. Even if he did find something, even if that something turned out to be more valuable than anything he had turned up in the five previous systems, the queen would still accuse him of making it sound more promising than it actually was. She did not like to be disappointed. The way to play the queen, Quaiche now knew, was with studied understatement. Give her hints, not promises.

He wiped the message and started again.

“Quaiche here. Have an anomaly that requires further investigation. Commencing EVA excursion in the Daughter. Estimate return to the Dominatrix within… one day.”

He listened to that and decided it was an improvement, but not quite there yet.

He scrubbed the buffer again and drew a deep breath.

“Quaiche. Popping outside for a bit. May be some time. Call you back.”

There. That did it.

He transmitted the buffer, aiming the message laser in the computed direction of the Gnostic Ascension and applying the usual encryption filters and relativistic corrections. The queen would receive his announcement in seven hours. He hoped she would be suitably mystified, without in any way being able to claim that he was exaggerating the likely value of a find.

Keep the bitch guessing.

What Culver had told Rashmika Els was not quite the truth. The icejammer was moving as quickly as it could in ambulatory mode, but once it cleared the slush and obstacles of the village and hit a well-maintained trail, it locked its two rear legs in a fixed configuration and began to move by itself, as if pushed along by an invisible hand. Rashmika had heard enough about icejammers to know that the trick was down to a layer of material on the soles of the skis that was programmed with a rapid microscopic ripple. It was the same way slugs moved, scaled up a few thousand times in both size and speed. The ride became smoother and quieter then; there was still the occasional lurch or veer, but for the most part it was tolerable.

“That’s better,” Rashmika said, now sitting up front with just Crozet and his wife Linxe. “I thought I was going to…”

“Throw up, dear?” Linxe asked. “There’s no shame in that. We’ve all thrown up around here.”

“She can’t do this on anything other than smooth ground,” Crozet said. “Trouble is, she doesn’t walk properly either. Servo’s fucked on one of the legs. That’s why it was so rough back there. It’s also the reason we’re making this trip. The caravans carry the kind of high-tech shit we can’t make or repair back in the badlands.”

“Language,” Linxe said, smacking her husband sharply on the wrist. “We’ve a young lady present, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Don’t mind me,” Rashmika said. She was beginning to relax: they were safely beyond the village now, and there was no sign that anyone had tried to stop or pursue them.

“He’s not talking sense in any case,” Linxe said. “The caravans might have the kinds of things we need, but they won’t be giving any of it away for free.” She turned to Crozet. “Will they, love?”

Linxe was a well-fed woman with red hair that she wore swept across one side of her face, hiding a birthmark. She had known Rashmika since Rashmika was much smaller, when Linxe had helped out at the communal nursery in the next village along.

She had always been kind and attentive to Rashmika, but there had been some kind of minor scandal a few years later and Linxe had been dismissed from the nursery. She had married Crozet not long afterwards. The village gossips said it was just desserts, that the two deserved each other, but in Rashmika’s view Crozet was all right. A bit of an oddball, kept him-self to himself, that was all. When Linxe had been ostracised he would have been one of the few villagers prepared to give her the time of day. Regardless, Rashmika still liked Linxe, and consequently found it difficult to hold any great animosity towards her husband.

Crozet steered the icejammer with two joysticks set one on either side of his seat. He had permanent blue stubble and oily black hair. Just looking at him always made Rashmika want to have a wash.

“I’m not expecting sod all for free,” Crozet said. “We may not make the same profit we did last year, but show me the bastard who will.”

“Would you think about relocating closer to the Way?” Rashmika asked.

Crozet wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I’d rather chew my own leg off.”

“Crozet’s not exactly a church-going man,” Linxe explained.

“I’m not the most spiritual person in the badlands, either,” Rashmika said, “but if it was a choice between that and starving, I’m not sure how long my convictions would last.”

“How old are you again?” Linxe asked.

“Seventeen. Nearly eighteen.”

“Got many friends in the village?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“Somehow I’m not surprised.” Linxe patted Rashmika on the knee. “You’re like us. Don’t fit in, never have done and never will.”

“I do try. But I can’t stand the idea of spending the rest of my life here.”

“Plenty of your generation feel the same way,” Linxe said. “They’re angry. That sabotage last week…” She meant the store of demolition charges that had blown up. “Well, you can’t blame them for wanting to hit out at something, can you?”

“They’re just talking about getting out of the badlands,” Rashmika said. “They all think they can make it rich in the caravans, or even in the cathedrals. And maybe they’re right. There are good opportunities, if you know the right people. But that isn’t enough for me.”

“You want off Hela,” Crozet said.

Rashmika remembered the mental calculation she had made earlier and expanded on it. “I’m a fifth of the way into my life. Barring something unlikely happening, another sixty-odd years is about all I have left. I’d like to do something with it. I don’t want to die without having seen something more interesting than this place.”

Crozet flashed yellow teeth. “People come light-years to visit Hela, Rash.”

“For the wrong reasons,” she said. She paused, marshalling her thoughts carefully. She had very firmly held opinions and she had always believed in stating them, but at the same time she did not want to offend her hosts. “Look, I’m not saying those people are fools. But what matters here is the digs, not the cathedrals, not the Permanent Way, not the miracles.”

“Right,” Crozet agreed, “but no one gives a monkey’s about the digs.”

“We care,” Linxe said. “Anyone who makes a living in the badlands has to care.”

“But the churches would rather we didn’t dig too deeply,” Rashmika countered. “The digs are a distraction. They worry that sooner or later we’ll find something that will make the miracle look a lot less miraculous.”

“You’re talking as if the churches speak with one voice,” Linxe said.

“I’m not saying they do,” Rashmika replied, “but everyone knows that they have certain interests in common. And we happen not to be amongst those interests.”

“The scuttler excavations play a vital role in Hela’s economy,” Linxe said, as if reciting a line from one of the duller ecclesiastical brochures.

“And I’m not saying they don’t,” Crozet interjected. “But who already controls the sale of dig relics? The churches. They’re halfway to having a complete monopoly. From their point of view the next logical step would be complete control of the excavations as well. That way, the bastards can sit on anything awkward.”

“You’re a cynical old fool,” Linxe said.

“That’s why you married me, dear.”

“What about you, Rashmika?” Linxe asked. “Do you think the churches want to wipe us out?”

She had a feeling they were only asking her out of courtesy. “I don’t know. But I’m sure the churches wouldn’t complain if we all went bankrupt and they had to move in to control the digs.”

“Yeah,” Crozet agreed. “I don’t think complaining would be very high on their list of priorities in that situation either.”

“Given all that you’ve said…” Linxe began.

“I know what you’re going to ask,” Rashmika interrupted. “And I don’t blame you for asking, either. But you have to understand that I have no interest in the churches in a religious sense. I just need to know what happened.”

“It needn’t have been anything sinister,” Linxe said.

“I only know they lied to him.”

Crozet dabbed at the corner of his eye with the tip of one little finger. “One of you buggers mind filling me in on what you’re talking about? Because I haven’t a clue.”

“It’s about her brother,” Linxe said. “Didn’t you listen to anything I told you?”

“Didn’t know you had a brother,” Crozet said.

“He was a lot older than me,” Rashmika told him. “And it was eight years ago, anyway.”

“What was eight years ago?”

“When he went to the Permanent Way.”

“To the cathedrals?”

“That was the idea. He wouldn’t have considered it if it hadn’t been easier that year. But it was the same as now—the caravans were travelling further north than usual, so they were in easy range of the badlands. Two or three days’ travel by jammer to reach the caravans, rather than twenty or thirty days overland to reach the Way.”

“Religious man, was he, your brother?”

“No, Crozet. No more than me, anyway. Look, I was nine at the time. What happened back then isn’t exactly ingrained in my memory. But I understand that times were difficult. The existing digs had been just about tapped out. There’d been blowouts and collapses. The villages were feeling the pinch.”

“She’s right,” Linxe said to Crozet. “I remember what it was like back then, even if you don’t.”

Crozet worked the joysticks, skilfully steering the jammer around an elbow-like outcropping. “Oh, I remember all right.”

“My brother’s name was Harbin Els,” Rashmika said. “Harbin worked the digs. When the caravans came he was nineteen, but he’d been working underground almost half his life. He was good at a lot of things, and explosives was one of them—laying charges, calculating yields, that sort of thing. He knew how to place them to get almost any effect he wanted. He had a reputation for doing the job properly and not taking any short cuts.”

“I’d have thought that kind of work would have been in demand in the digs,” Crozet said.

“It was. Until the digs faltered. Then it got tougher. The villages couldn’t afford to open up new caverns. It wasn’t just the explosives that were too expensive. Shoring up the new caverns, putting in power and air, laying in auxiliary tunnels… all that was too costly. So the villages concentrated their efforts in the existing chambers, hoping for a lucky strike.”

“And your brother?”

“He wasn’t going to wait around until his skills were needed. He’d heard of a couple of other explosives experts who had made the overland crossing—took them months, but they’d made it to the Way and entered the service of one of the major churches. The churches need people with explosives knowledge, or so he’d been told. They have to keep blasting ahead of the cathedrals, to keep the Way open.”

“It isn’t called the Permanent Way for nothing,” Crozet said.

“Well, Harbin thought that sounded like the kind of work he could do. It didn’t mean that he had to buy into the church’s particular worldview. It just meant that they’d have an arrangement. They’d pay him for his demolition skills. There were even rumours of jobs in the technical bureau of Way maintenance. He was good with numbers. He thought he stood a chance of getting that kind of position, as someone who planned where to put the charges rather than doing it himself. It sounded good. He’d keep some of the money, enough to live on, and send the rest of it back to the badlands.”

“Your parents were happy with that?” Crozet asked.

“They don’t talk about it much. Reading between the lines, they didn’t really want Harbin to have anything to do with the churches. But at the same time they could see the sense. Times were hard. And Harbin made it sound so mercenary, almost as if he’d be taking advantage of the church, not the other way around. Our parents didn’t exactly encourage him, but on the other hand they didn’t say no. Not that it would have done much good if they had.”

“So Harbin packed his bags…”

She shook her head at Crozet. “No, we made a family outing of it, to see him off. It was just like now—almost the whole village rode out to meet the caravans. We went out in someone’s jammer, two or three days’ journey. Seemed like a lot longer at the time, but then I was only nine. And then we met the caravan, somewhere out near the flats. And aboard the caravan was a man, a kind of… ” Rashmika faltered. It was not that she had trouble with the details, but it was emotionally wrenching to have to go over this again, even at a distance of eight years. “A recruiting agent, I suppose you’d call him. Working for one of the churches. The main one, actually. The First Adventists. Harbin had been told that this was the man he had to talk to about the work. So we all went for a meeting with him, as a family. Harbin did most of the talking, and the rest of us sat in the same room, listening. There was another man there who said nothing at all; he just kept looking at us—me mainly—and he had a walking stick that he kept pressing to his lips, as if he was kissing it. I didn’t like him, but he wasn’t the man Harbin was dealing with, so I didn’t pay him as much attention as I did the recruiting agent. Now and then Mum or Dad would ask something, and the agent would answer politely. But mainly it was just him and Harbin doing the talking. He asked Harbin what skills he had, and Harbin told him about his explosives work. The man seemed to know a little about it. He asked difficult questions. They meant nothing to me, but I could tell from the way Harbin answered—carefully, not too glibly—that they were not stupid or trivial. But whatever Harbin said, it seemed to satisfy the recruiting agent. He told Harbin that, yes, the church did have a need for demolition specialists, especially in the technical bureau. He said it was a never-ending task, keeping the Way clear, and that it was one of the few areas in which the churches co-operated. He admitted also that the bureau had need of a new engineer with Harbin’s background.”

“Smiles all around, then,” Crozet said.

Linxe slapped him again. “Let her finish.”

“Well, we were smiling,” said Rashmika. “To start with. After all, this was just what Harbin had been hoping for. The terms were good and the work was interesting. The way Harbin figured, he only had to put up with it until they started opening new caverns again back in the badlands. Of course, he didn’t tell the recruiting agent that he had no plans to stick around for more than a revolution or two. But he did ask one critical question.”

“Which was?” Linxe asked.

“He’d heard that some of the churches used methods on those that worked for them to bring them around to the churches’ way of thinking. Made them believe that what they were doing was of more than material significance, that their work was holy.”

“Made them swallow the creed, you mean?” Crozet said.

“More than that: made them accept it. They have ways. And from the churches’ point of view, you can’t really blame them. They want to keep their hard-won expertise. Of course, my brother didn’t like the sound of that at all.”

“So what was the recruiter’s reaction to the question?” Crozet asked.

“The man said Harbin need have no fears on that score. Some churches, he admitted, did practise methods of… well, I forget exactly what he said. Something about Bloodwork and Clocktowers. But he made it clear that the Quaicheist church was not one of them. And he pointed out that there were workers of many beliefs amongst their Permanent Way gangs, and there’d never been any efforts to convert any of them to the Quaicheist faith.”

Crozet narrowed his eyes. “And?”

“I knew he was lying.”

“You thought he was lying,” Crozet said, correcting her the way teachers did.

“No, I knew. I knew it with the kind of certainty I’d have had if he’d walked in with a sign around his neck saying ‘liar.’ There was no more doubt in my mind that he was lying than that he was breathing. It wasn’t open to debate. It was screamingly obvious.”

“But not to anyone else,” Linxe said.

“Not to my parents, not to Harbin, but I didn’t realise that at the time. When Harbin nodded and thanked the man, I thought they were playing out some kind of strange adult ritual. Harbin had asked him a vital question, and the man had given him the only answer that his office allowed—a diplomatic answer, but one which everyone present fully understood to be a lie. So in that respect it wasn’t really a lie at all… I thought that was clear. If it wasn’t, why did the man make it so obvious that he wasn’t telling the truth?”

“Did he really?” Crozet asked.

“It was as if he wanted me to know he was lying, as if he was smirking and winking at me the whole time… without actually smirking or winking, of course, but always being on the threshold of doing it. But only I saw that. I thought Harbin must have… that surely he’d seen it… but no, he hadn’t. He kept on acting as if he honestly thought the man was telling the truth. He was already making arrangements to stay with the caravan so that he could complete the rest of the journey to the Permanent Way. That was when I started making a scene. If this was a game, I didn’t like the way they were insisting on still playing it, without letting me in on the joke.”

“You thought Harbin was in danger,” Linxe said.

“Look, I didn’t understand everything that was at stake. Like I said, I was only nine. I didn’t really comprehend faiths and creeds and contracts. But I understood the one thing that mattered: that Harbin had asked the man the question that was most important to him, the one that was going to decide whether he joined the church or not, and the man had lied to him. Did I think that put him in mortal danger? No. I don’t think I had much idea of what ‘mortal danger’ meant then, to be honest. But I knew something was wrong, and I knew I was the only one who saw it.”

“The girl who never lies,” Crozet said.

“They’re wrong about me,” Rashmika answered. “I do lie. I lie as well as anyone, now. But for a long time I didn’t understand the point of it. I suppose that meeting with the man was the beginning of my realisation. I understood then that what had been obvious to me all my life was not obvious to everyone else.”

Linxe looked at her. “Which is?”

“I can always tell when people are lying. Always. Without fail. And I’m never wrong.”

Crozet smiled tolerantly. “You think you can.”

“I know I can,” Rashmika said. “It’s never failed me.”

Linxe knitted her fingers together in her lap. “Was that the last you heard of your brother?”

“No. We didn’t see him again, but he kept to his word. He sent letters back home, and every now and again there’d be some money. But the letters were vague, emotionally detached; they could have been written by anyone, really. He never came back to the badlands, and of course there was never any possibility of us visiting him. It was just too difficult. He’d always said he’d return, even in the letters… but the gaps between them grew longer, became months and then half a year… then perhaps a letter every revolution or so. The last was two years ago. There really wasn’t much in it. It didn’t even look like his handwriting.”

“And the money?” Linxe asked delicately.

“It kept coming in. Not much, but enough to keep the wolves away.”

“You think they got to him, don’t you?” Crozet asked.

“I know they got to him. I knew it from the moment we met the recruiting agent, even if no one else did. Bloodwork, whatever they called it.”

“And now?” Linxe said.

“I’m going to find out what happened to my brother,” Rashmika said. “What else did you expect?”

“The cathedrals won’t take kindly to someone poking around in that kind of business,” Linxe said.

Rashmika set her lips in a determined pout. “And I don’t take kindly to being lied to.”

“You know what I think?” Crozet said, smiling. “I think the cathedrals had better hope they’ve got God on their side. Because up against you they’re going to need all the help they can get.”