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.’<
br />
SEVEN
Approaching Hela, 2615
Like a golden snowflake, the Scavenger’s Daughter fell through the dusty vacuum of interplanetary space. Quaiche had left Morwenna three hours earlier; his message to the queen-commander of the Gnostic Ascension, a sinuous thread of photons snaking through interplanetary space, was still on its way. He thought of the lights of a distant train moving across a dark, dark continent: the enormous distance separating him from other sentient beings was enough to make him shudder.
But he had been in worse situations, and at least this time there was a distinct hope of success. The bridge on Hela was still there; it had not turned out to be a mirage of the sensors or his own desperate yearning to find something, and the closer he got the less likely it was that the bridge would turn out to be anything other than a genuine technological artefact. Quaiche had seen some deceptive things in his time - geology that looked as if it had been designed, lovingly sculpted or mass-produced - but he had never seen anything remotely like this. His instincts said that geology had not been the culprit, but he was having serious trouble with the question of who - or what - had created it, because the fact remained that 107 Piscium system appeared not to have been visited by anyone else. He shivered in awe, and fear, and reckless expectation.
He felt the indoctrinal virus awaken in his blood, a monster turning over in its sleep, opening one dreamy eye. It was always there, always within him, but for much of the time it slept, disturbing neither his dreams nor his waking moments. When it engorged him, when it roared in his veins like a distant report of thunder, he would see and hear things. He would glimpse stained-glass windows in the sky; he would hear organ music beneath the subsonic growl of each burst of correctional thrust from his tiny jewel-like exploration ship.
Quaiche forced calm. The last thing he needed now was the indoctrinal virus having its way with him. Let it come to him later, when he was safe and sound back aboard the Dominatrix. Then it could turn him into any kind of drooling, mumbling idiot it wished. But not here, not now. Not while he needed total clarity of mind.
The monster yawned, returned to sleep.
Quaiche was relieved. His faltering control over the virus was still there.
He let his thoughts creep back to the bridge, cautiously this time, trying to avoid succumbing to the reverential cosmic chill that had wakened the virus.
Could he really rule out human builders? Wherever they went, humans left junk. Their ships spewed out radioisotopes, leaving twinkling smears across the faces of moons and worlds. Their pressure suits and habitats leaked atoms, leaving ghost atmospheres around otherwise airless bodies. The partial pressures of the constituent gases were always a dead giveaway. They left navigation transponders, servitors, fuel cells and waste products. You found their frozen piss - little yellow snowballs - forming miniature ring systems around planets. You found corpses and, now and then - more often than Quaiche would have expected - they were murder victims.
It was not always easy, but Quaiche had developed a nose for the signs: he knew the right places to look. And he wasn’t finding much evidence for prior human presence around 107 Piscium.
But someone had built that bridge.
It might have been put there hundreds of years ago, he thought; some of the usual signs of human presence would have been erased by now. But something would have remained, unless the bridge builders had been extraordinarily careful to clean up after themselves. He had never heard of anyone doing such a thing on this scale. And why bury it so far from the usual centres of commerce? Even if people did occasionally visit the 107 Piscium system, it was definitely not on the usual trade routes. Didn’t these artists want anyone to see what they had created?
Perhaps that had always been the intention: just to leave it here, twinkling under the starlight of 107 Piscium until someone found it by accident. Perhaps even now Quaiche was an unwilling participant in a century-spanning cosmic jest.
But he didn’t think so.
What he was certain of was that it would have been a dreadful mistake to tell Jasmina more than he had. He had, fortunately, resisted the huge temptation to prove his worth. Now, when he did report back with something remarkable, he would appear to have behaved with the utmost restraint. No; his final message had been exquisite in its brevity. He was quite proud of himself.
The virus woke now, stirred perhaps by that fatal pride. He should have kept his emotions in check. But it was too late: it had simmered beyond the point where it would damp down naturally. However, it was too early to tell if this was going to be a major attack. Just to placate it, he mumbled a little Latin. Sometimes if he anticipated the virus’s demands the attack would be less serious.
He forced his attention back to Haldora, like a drunkard trying to maintain a clear line of thought. It was strange to be falling towards a world he had named himself.
Nomenclature was a difficult business in an interstellar culture limited by speed-of-light links. All major craft carried databases of the worlds and minor bodies orbiting different stars. In the core systems - those within a dozen or so light-years of Earth - it was easy enough to stick to the names assigned centuries earlier, during the first wave of interstellar exploration. But once you got further out into virgin territory the whole business became complicated and messy. The Dominatrix said the worlds around 107 Piscium had never been named, but all that meant was that there were no assigned names in the ship’s database. That database, however, might not have been seriously updated for decades; rather than relying on transmissions to and from some central authority, the anarchistic Ultras preferred direct ship-to-ship contact. When two or more of their lighthuggers met, they would compare and update their respective nomenclature tables. If the first ship had assigned names to a group of worlds and their associated geographical features, and the second ship had no current entries for those bodies, it was usual for the second ship to amend its database with the new names. They might be flagged as provisional, unless a third ship confirmed that they were still unallocated. If two ships had conflicting entries, their databases would be updated simultaneously, listing two equally likely names for each entry. If three or more ships had conflicting entries, the various entries would be compared in case two or more had precedence over a third. In that case, the deprecated entry would be erased or stored in a secondary field reserved for questionable or unofficial designations. If a system had truly been named for the first time, then the newly assigned names would gradually colonise the databases of most ships, though it might take decades for that to happen. Quaiche’s tables were only as accurate as the Gnostic Ascension’s; Jasmina was not a gregarious Ultra, so it was possible that this system had been named already. If that were the case, his own lovingly assigned names would be gradually weeded out of existence until they remained only as ghost entries at the lowest level of deprecation in ship databases - or were erased entirely.
But for now, and perhaps for years to come, the system was his. Haldora was the name he had given this world, and until he learned otherwise, it was as official as any other - except that, as Morwenna had pointed out, all he had really done was grab unallocated names from the nomenclature tables and flung them at anything that looked vaguely appropriate. If the system did indeed turn out to be important, did it not behove him to take a little more care over the process?
Who knew what pilgrimages might end here, if his bridge turned out to be real?
Quaiche smiled. The names were good enough for now; if he decided he wanted to change them, he still had plenty of time.
He checked his range to Hela: just over one hundred and fifty thousand kilometres. From a distance, the illuminated face of the moon had been a flat disc the colour of dirty ice, streaked here and there with pastel shades of pumice, ochre, pale blue and faint turquoise. Now that he was closer, the disc had taken on a distinct three-dimensionality, bulging out to meet him like a blind human eye.
Hela was small only by the standards of terrestri
al worlds. For a moon it was respectable enough: three thousand kilometres from pole to pole, with a mean density that put it at the upper range of the moons that Quaiche had encountered. It was spherical and largely devoid of impact craters. No atmosphere to speak of, but plenty of surface topology hinting at recent geological processes. At first glance it had appeared to be tidally locked to Haldora, always presenting the same face to its mother world, but the mapping software had quickly detected a tiny residual rotation. Had it been tidally locked, the moon’s rotation period would have been exactly the same as the time it took to make one orbit: forty hours. Earth’s moon was like that, and so were many of the moons Quaiche had spent time on: if you stood at a given spot on their surface, then the larger world around which they orbited - be it Earth or a gas giant like Haldora - always hung at about the same place in the sky.
But Hela wasn’t like that. Even if you found a spot on Hela’s equator where Haldora was sitting directly overhead, swallowing twenty degrees of sky, Haldora would drift. In one forty-hour orbit it would move by nearly two degrees. In eighty standard days - just over two standard months - Haldora would be sinking below Hela’s horizon. One hundred and sixty days later it would begin to peep over the opposite horizon. After three hundred and twenty days it would be back at the beginning of the cycle, directly overhead.
The error in Hela’s rotation - the deviation away from a true tidally locked period - was only one part in two hundred. Tidal locking was an inevitable result of frictional forces between two nearby orbiting bodies, but it was a grindingly slow process. It might be that Hela was still slowing down, not yet having reached its locked configuration. Or it might be that something had jolted it in the recent past - a glancing collision from another body, perhaps. Still another possibility was that the orbit had been perturbed by a gravitational interaction with a massive third body.
All these possibilities were reasonable, given Quaiche’s ignorance of the system’s history. But at the same time the imperfection affronted him. It was as annoying as a clock that kept almost perfect time. It was the kind of thing he would have imagined pointing to if anyone had ever argued that the cosmos must be the result of divine conception. Would a Creator have permitted such a thing, when all it would have taken was a tiny nudge to set the world to rights?
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