She thought he sounded as if he was telling the truth, but without a clear view of his face, her guess was as good as anyone’s.
“There’s something else though, isn’t there? You said the churches couldn’t possibly conceal all evidence of the changing vanishings.”
“They can’t. But there is an anomaly.” Pietr let go of the railing long enough to pass something to Rashmika. It was little metal cylinder with a screw top. “You should see this,” he said. “I think you will find it interesting. Inside is a piece of paper with some markings on it. They’re not annotated, since that would make them more dangerous should anyone in authority recognise them for what they are.”
“You’re going to have to give me a little more to go on than that.”
“In Skull Cliff, where I come from, there was a man named Saul Tempier. I knew him. He was an old hermit who lived in an abandoned scuttler shaft on the outskirts of the town. He fixed digging machines for a living. He wasn’t mad or violent, or even particularly antisocial; he just didn’t get on well with the other villagers and kept out of their way most of the time. He had an obsessive, methodical streak that made other people feel slightly ill at ease. He wasn’t interested in wives or lovers or friends.”
“And you don’t think he was particularly antisocial?”
“Well, he wasn’t actually rude or inhospitable. He kept himself clean and didn’t—as far as I am aware—have any genuinely unpleasant habits. If you visited him, he’d always make you tea from a big old samovar. He had an ancient neural lute which he played now and then. He’d always want to know what you thought of his playing.” She caught the flash of his smile through the faceplate. “Actually, it was pretty dreadful, but I never had the heart to tell him.”
“How did you come to know him?”
“It was my job to keep our stock of digging machinery in good order. We’d do most of the repairs ourselves, but when-ever there was a backlog or something we just couldn’t get to work properly, one of us would haul it over to Tempier’s grotto. I suppose I visited him two or three times a year. I never minded it, really. I actually quite liked the old coot, bad lute playing and all. Anyway, Tempier was getting old. On one of our last meetings—this would have been eleven or twelve years ago—he told me there was something he wanted to show me. I was surprised that he trusted me that much.”
“I don’t know,” Rashmika said. “You strike me as the kind of person someone would find it quite easy to trust, Pietr.”
“Is that intended as a compliment?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, I’ll take it as one, in that case. Where was I?”
“Tempier said there was something he wanted to show you.”
“It’s actually the piece of paper I’ve just given you, or, rather, the paper is a careful copy of the original. Tempier, it turned out, had been keeping a record of the vanishings for most of his life. He had done a lot of background work—comparing and contrasting the public records of the main churches, even making visits to the Way to inspect those archives that were not usually accessible. He was a very diligent and obsessive sort, as I’ve said, and when I saw his notes I realised that they were easily the best personal record of the vanishings I’d ever seen. Frankly, I doubt there’s a better amateur compilation anywhere on Hela. Alongside each vanishing was a huge set of associated material—notes on witnesses, the quality of those witnesses, and any other corroborative data sets. If there was a volcanic eruption the day before, he’d note that as well. Anything unusual—no matter how irrelevant it appeared.”
“He found something, I take it. Was it the same thing that the Numericists discovered?”
“No,” Pietr said. “It was more than that. Tempier was well aware of what the Numericists had claimed. His own data didn’t contradict theirs in the slightest. In fact, he regarded it as rather obvious that the vanishings were growing more frequent.”
“So what did he discover?”
“He found out that the public and official records don’t quite match.”
Rashmika felt a wave of disappointment. She had expected more than that. “Big deal,” she said. “It doesn’t surprise me that the Observers might occasionally spot a vanishing when everyone else misses it, especially if it happened during some other distracting…”
“You misunderstand,” Pietr said sharply. For the first time she heard irritation in his voice. “It wasn’t a case of the churches claiming a vanishing that everyone else had missed. This was the other way around. Eight years earlier—which would make it twenty-odd years ago now—there was a vanishing which did not enter the official church records. Do you understand what I’m saying? A vanishing took place, and it was noted by public observers like Tempier, but according to the churches no such thing happened.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would the churches expunge knowledge of a vanishing?”
“Tempier wondered exactly the same thing.”
So perhaps her trip up on to the roof had not been entirely in vain after all. “Was there anything about this vanishing that might explain why it wasn’t admitted into the official record? Something that meant it didn’t quite meet the usual criteria?”
“Such as what?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Was it very brief, for instance?”
“As a matter of interest—if Tempier’s notes are correct—it was one of the longest vanishings ever recorded. Fully one and one-fifth of a second.”
“I don’t get it, in that case. What does Tempier have to say on the matter?”
“Good question,” Pietr said, “but not one likely to be answered any time soon. I’m afraid Saul Tempier is dead. He died seven years ago.”
“I’m sorry. I get the impression you liked him. But you said it yourself: he was getting old.”
“He was, but that didn’t have anything to do with his death. They found him electrocuted, killed while he was repairing one of his machines.”
“All right.” She hoped she did not sound too heartless. “Then he was getting careless.”
“Not Saul Tempier,” Pietr said. “He didn’t have a careless bone in his body. That was the bit they got wrong.”
Rashmika frowned. “They?”
“Whoever killed him,” he said.
* * *
THEY STOOD IN silence for a while. The caravan surmounted the brow of the bridge, then began the long, shallow descent to the other side of the Rift. The far cliffs grew larger, the folds and seams of tortured geology becoming starkly obvious. To the left, on the south-western face of the Rift, Rashmika made out another winding ledge. It appeared to have been pencilled tentatively along the wall, a hesitant precursor for the proper job that was to follow. Yet that was the ledge. Very soon they would be on it, the crossing done. The bridge would have held, and all would be well with the world—or at least as well as when they had set out.
“Is that why you came here, in the end?” she asked Pietr. “To find out why they killed that old man?”
“That makes it sound like just another of your secular enquiries,” he replied.
“What is it, then, if it isn’t that?”
“I’d like to know why they murdered Saul, but more than that, I’d like to know why they feel the need to lie about the word of God.”
She had asked him about his beliefs already, but she still felt the need to probe the limits of his honesty. There had to be a chink, she thought: a crack of uncertainty in the shield of his faith. “So that’s what you believe the vanishings are?”
“As firmly as I believe anything.”
“In which case… if the true pattern of vanishings is different from the official story, then you believe that the true message is being suppressed, and the word of God isn’t being communicated to the people in its uncorrupted form.”
“Exactly.” He sounded very pleased with her, grateful that some vast chasm of understanding had now been spanned. She had the sense that a burden had been taken f
rom him for the first time in ages. “And my mistake was to think I could silence those doubts by immersing myself in mindless observation. But it didn’t work. I saw you, standing there in all your fierce independence, and I realised I had to do this on my own.”
“That’s… something like the way I feel.”
“Tell me about your enquiry, Rashmika.”
She did. She told him about Harbin, and how she thought he had been taken away by one of the churches. More than likely, she said, he had been forcibly indoctrinated. This was not something she really wanted to consider, but the rational part of her could not ignore the possibility. She told him how the rest of her family had accepted Harbin’s faith some time ago, but that she had never been able to let him slip away that easily. “I had to do this,” she said. “I had to make this pilgrimage.”
“I thought you weren’t a pilgrim.”
“Slip of the tongue,” she said. But she wasn’t sure if she really meant it any more.
Ararat, 2675
THE UPPER DECKS of the Nostalgia for Infinity were crammed with evacuees. Antoinette wanted to avoid thinking of them as so many cattle, but as soon as she hit the main cloying mass of bodies and found her own progress blocked or impeded, frustration overwhelmed her. They were human beings, she kept reminding herself, ordinary people caught up as she was in the ebb of events they barely comprehended. In other circumstances she could easily have been one of them, just as frightened and dazed as they were. Her father had always emphasised how easy it was to find oneself on the wrong side of the fence. It wasn’t necessarily a question of who had the quickest wits or the firmest resolve. It wasn’t always about bravery or some shining inner goodness. It could just as easily be about the position of your name in the alphabet, the chemistry of your blood, or whether you were fortunate enough to be the daughter of a man who happened to own a ship.
She forced herself not to push through the crowds of people waiting to be processed, doing her best to ease forward politely, making eye contact and apologies, smiling at and tolerating those who did not immediately step out of her way. But the mot—she could not help but think of them as such in spite of her best intentions—was so large, so collectively stupid, that her patience only lasted for about two decks. Then something inside her snapped and she was pushing through with all her strength, teeth gritted, oblivious to the insults and the spitting that followed in her wake.
She finally made it through the crowds and descended three blissfully deserted levels using interdeck ladders and stairwells. She moved in near darkness, navigating from one erratic light source to the next, cursing herself for not bringing a torch. Then her shoes sloshed through an inch of something wet and sticky she was glad she couldn’t see.
Finally she found a functioning main-spine elevator and operated the control to summon it. The ship’s lean was disturbingly apparent—it was part of the problem for the continued processing of the immigrants—but so far main ship functions did not appear to have been affected. She heard the elevator thundering towards her, clattering against its inductance rails, and took a moment to check the neutrino levels on her wrist unit. Assuming that the planetwide monitors could still be trusted, the ship was now only five or six per cent from drive criticality. Once that threshold was reached, the ship would have enough bottled energy to lift itself from the surface of Ararat and into orbit.
Only five or six per cent. There had been times when the neutrino flux had jumped that much in only a few minutes.
“Take your time, John,” she said. “None of us are in that much of a hurry.”
The elevator was slowing. It arrived in a self-important flutter of clanking mechanisms. The doors opened, fluid sluicing down the shaft as Antoinette stepped into the waiting emptiness of the elevator car. Again, why had she forgotten to bring a light with her? She was getting sloppy, taking it as read that the Captain would usher her into his realm like a familiar house guest. Come on in. Put your feet up. How’re things?
What if, this time, he was not so enthusiastic about having company?
None of the elevator voice-control systems worked properly. With practised ease Antoinette unlatched an access panel, exposing the manual controls. Her fingers dithered over the options. They were annotated in antiquated script, but she was familiar enough with them by now. This elevator would only take her part of the way down to the Captain’s usual haunts. She would have to change to another at some point, which would mean a cross-ship trek of at least several hundred metres, assuming no blockades had materialised along the way since her last visit. Would it be better to go up first, and take a different spine track down? For a moment the possibilities branched, Antoinette acutely aware that this time, literally, a minute here or there might make all the difference.
But then the elevator started moving. She had done nothing to it.
“Hello, John,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ararat, 2675
THE SHUTTLE LOITERED over First Camp.
The sun was almost down. In the last, miserly light of the day, Vasko and his companions watched the green-clad spire slip beyond the headland. The towering thing had cast its own slanted shadow in the final minutes of daylight, a shadow that moved not just with the descent of the sun but also with the changing position and tilt of the ship. The movement was almost too slow to make out from moment to moment. It was like watching the hour hand of a clock: the movement was only really apparent when you looked away for a minute or two. But the ship was moving, being dragged along by that cloak of bio-mass, and now a tongue of land stood between the ship and the bay. It was not much of a tongue, just the last hundred metres of headland, and surely not enough to completely deflect the anticipated tidal waves; but it was bound to make some difference, and as the ship moved further along its course the sheltering effect would become larger and larger.
“Did she make it aboard?” Khouri asked, her eyes wide and unfocused. Aura seemed to be sleeping again, Khouri once more speaking for herself alone.
“Yes,” Vasko said.
“I hope she can talk some sense into him.”
“What happened back there…” Vasko said. He looked at her, waiting for her to say something, but nothing came. “When Aura spoke to us…?”
“Yes?”
“That was really her, right?”
Khouri looked at him, one eye slightly narrowed. “Does that bother you? Does my daughter disturb you?”
“I just want to know. She’s sleeping now, isn’t she?”
“She isn’t in my head, no.”
“But she” was?“
“Where are you going with this, Malinin?”
“I want to know how it works,” he said. “I think she might be useful to us. She’s already helped us, but that’s only the start, isn’t it?”
“I told you already,” Khouri said, “Aura knows stuff. We just have to listen.”
Hela, 2727
RASHMIKA SAT ALONE in her room, the night after the caravan had crossed the bridge. She opened the little metal canister that Pietr had given her with trembling hands, fearing—despite herself—some deception or trick. But there was nothing in the canister except a rolled-up spool of thin yellow paper. It slid into her hands, the colour of tobacco. She flattened it carefully, and then inspected the faint sequences of grey marks on one side of the paper.
To the untrained eye they meant precisely nothing. At first they reminded her a little of something, and she had to think for a while before it came to her. The spaced vertical dashes—clustered and clumped, but sliding closer and closer together as her eye panned from left to right—brought to mind a diagram of the chemical absorption lines in a star’s spectrum, bunching closer and closer towards a smeared continuum of states. But these lines represented individual vanishings, and the smeared continuum lay in the future. But what exactly did it signify? Would the vanishings become the norm, with Haldora stuttering in and out of reality like a defective light fitting? Or would
the planet just vanish, popping out of existence for evermore?
She examined the paper again. There was a second sequence of marks above the other. They agreed closely, except at one point where the lower sequence had an additional vertical mark where none was present above it.
Twenty-odd years ago, Pietr had said.
Twenty-odd years ago, Haldora had winked out of existence for one and one-fifth of a second. A long cosmic blink. Not just a moment of divine inattention, but a fully-fledged deific snooze.
And during that absence, something had happened that the churches did not like. Something that might even have been worth the life of a harmless old man.
She looked at the paper again, and for the first time it occurred to Rashmika to wonder why Pietr had given it to her, and what she was meant to do with it.
Ararat, 2675
THE ELEVATOR HAD been descending for several minutes when Antoinette felt a lurch as it shifted from its usual track. She cried out at first, thinking the elevator was about to crash, but the ride continued smoothly for a dozen seconds before she felt another series of jolts and swerves as the car switched routes again. There was no guessing where she was, only that she was deep inside the ship. Perhaps she was even below the water-line, in the last few hundred metres of the submerged hull. Any maps she might have brought along with her—not that she had, of course—would have been totally useless by now. It was not only that these dank levels were difficult to access from the upper decks, but that they were prone to convulsive and confusing changes of local architecture. For a long time it had been assumed that the elevator lines remained stable when all else changed, but Antoinette knew that this was not the case, and that it would be futile to attempt to navigate by apparently familiar reference points. If she’d brought an inertial compass and a gravitometer she might have been able to pinpoint her position to within a few dozen metres in three-dimensional space… but she hadn’t, and so she had no choice but to trust the Captain.