“Big piles of shoring lumber in front of a parking ramp that never needed to be shored up,” Yul said.
“Yeah. And it’s not that this is physically impossible. Obviously it is possible to have a pile of wood in front of a parking ramp, or some pieces of paper in a filing cabinet. But the problem—the issue it raises—is that the overall state of affairs just doesn’t add up any more.” I was remembering the pink dragon dialog with Orolo—realizing, all these months later, that his choice of a dragon to illustrate the point had been no accident. He’d been trying to remind us of the very incident Yul was talking about.
We heard a braying engine behind us and turned around to see Ganelial Crade headed our way on the three-wheeler. Yul and I exchanged a look that meant let’s not discuss this around him. Yul bent down, scooped up a double handful of snow, and tried to pack it into a ball to throw at his cousin. It was too cold to pack though.
We reached the sledge port at Eighty-three North at two in the morning, which only meant that the sun was slightly lower in the sky than usual. The slit-road debouched into a plateau of pack ice a mile or two wide, and somewhat lower than the surrounding ice, so that it felt like being on the floor of a large meteorite crater. Here and there, housing modules rose on stilts that could be moved and adjusted when the ice flowed under them. The drummons tended to congregate around these. Each was the headquarters of a different scrap dealer, and the drivers would hustle from one to the next trying to get the best prices for their loads. Other structures served as hostels, eateries, or bordellos.
The place was dominated by the sledge train itself. The first time I saw this, with the low sun behind it, I mistook it for a factory. The locomotive looked like one of those city-eating scrap processors: a power plant and a village of housing modules built on a bridge that spanned the interval between two colossal tracks. In the train behind it were half a dozen sledges, each built on parallel runners that rode in the ruts of packed snow laid down by the locomotive’s treads. The first of these was built to carry shipping containers. They were stacked four high, and an ungainly crane on wheels was laboring to begin a fifth layer. Behind it were a few sledges that simply consisted of great open boxes. Another crane, equipped with pincers easily big enough to snatch both of our vehicles at the same time, was clawing tangles of scrap metal from a pile on the snow and dropping them into these with heart-stopping crashes. The last sledge in the train was a flatbed: a mobile parking lot about half full of loaded drummons.
We spent a while blundering around, but from having talked to drummon operators at roadside stops we had a general notion of how the place worked and some good suggestions on how not to behave. From Sammann’s research we already knew that another sledge train had departed two days earlier and that the one we were looking at would continue loading for another few days.
Getting about was a hazard because there were no established rights-of-way. Drummons and fetches just moved in straight lines toward whatever their jumped-up drivers wanted to reach. So we tended to use our vehicles even for short movements. We found the office-on-stilts that booked places on the flatbed, and arranged to have both of our vehicles loaded upon it. But we paid a little extra to get Gnel’s fetch situated at the edge, rather than in the middle; that way, by deploying planks as ramps, we were able to get the three-wheeler on and off at will. It then became our means of moving around the sledge port, though it could only take two at a time and so at any given moment three of us would be marooned. So we rented one of the housing modules on the locomotive and marooned ourselves there. It was cheap. The toilet was a hole in the floor covered, when not used, by a trapdoor weighed down with slugs of scrap iron so that arctic gales wouldn’t blow it open. A few trips up and down the sledge train in the three-wheeler sufficed to stock our little house with the rations and other goods we’d packed into the fetches, as well as a surprisingly comprehensive arsenal of projectile and edged weapons. Yulassetar and Ganelial Crade might disagree about religion, but in their relationship to arms they were the same mind in two different bodies. They even used the same types of cases to store their guns, and the same boxes for ammunition. Many at the sledge port carried weapons openly, and there was a place at the edge of “town” where people would go out and discharge weapons into the encircling ice-wall just to pass the time. On the whole, though, the place was more orderly and predictable than the territory we’d spent the last week driving though. As I was coming to understand, it had to be thus because it was a place of commerce.
Once we were settled in, Sammann and I took the three-wheeler and made the rounds of bars and brothels just to confirm that Orolo wasn’t in any of them. Cord clambered around on the locomotive, admiring its workings, and Yul followed her. He claimed to be as interested in such things as Cord, but to me it was obvious that he expected she’d be raped if she went out alone.
We killed time for several days. I tried to read some theorics books I’d brought, but couldn’t concentrate, and ended up sleeping for unreasonable amounts of time. Sammann had found a place near an office-module where he could get patchy connections to the Reticulum. He went there once a day, then came back to scan through the information he had acquired. Yul and Cord watched speelies on a tiny jeejah screen when they weren’t “gathering firewood.” Ganelial Crade read his scriptures in Old Bazian and began to signal interest in something that he had been polite enough to avoid and that I had been dreading: religion.
Sammann once saved me from a near brush with that by looking up suddenly from his jeejah, finding my face at the other end of the room, then dropping his gaze again to the screen. He’d recently come back from one of his data-foraging expeditions; there were still a few clots of ice dangling from his whiskers. I went over and squatted next to his chair.
“After we left Samble I began trying to obtain access to certain reticules,” Sammann explained. “Normally these would have been closed to me, but I thought I might be able to get in if I explained what I was doing. It took a little while for my request to be considered. The people who control these were probably searching the Reticulum to obtain corroboration for my story.”
“How would that work?” I asked.
Sammann was not happy that I’d inquired. Maybe he was tired of explaining such things to me; or maybe he still wished to preserve a little bit of respect for the Discipline that we had so flagrantly been violating. “Let’s suppose there’s a speelycaptor at the mess hall in that hellhole town where we bought snow tires.”
“Norslof,” I said.
“Whatever. This speelycaptor is there as a security measure. It sees us walking to the till to pay for our terrible food. That information goes on some reticule or other. Someone who studies the images can see that I was there on such-and-such a date with three other people. Then they can use other such techniques to figure out who those people are. One turns out to be Fraa Erasmas from Saunt Edhar. Thus the story I’m telling is corroborated.”
“Okay, but how—”
“Never mind.” Then, as if he’d grown weary of using that phrase, he caught himself short, closed his eyes for a moment, and tried again. “If you must know, they probably ran an asamocra on me.”
“Asamocra?”
“Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry repute auction. Don’t even bother trying to parse that. The acronym is pre-Reconstitution. There hasn’t been a true asamocra for 3600 years. Instead we do other things that serve the same purpose and we call them by the old name. In most cases, it takes a few days for a provably irreversible phase transition to occur in the reputon glass—never mind—and another day after that to make sure you aren’t just being spoofed by ephemeral stochastic nucleation. The point being, I was not granted the access I wanted until recently.” He smiled and a hunk of ice fell off his whiskers and landed on the control panel of his jeejah. “I was going to say ‘until today’ but this damned day never ends.”
“Fine. I don’t really understand anything you said but may
be we can save that for later.”
“That would be good. The point is that I was trying to get information about that rocket launch you glimpsed on the speely.”
“Ah. And have you succeeded?”
“I’d say yes. You might say no because you avout like your information tidily written down in a book and cross-checked by other avout. The information we trade in is noisy and ambiguous and suggestive. Often it’s images or acoustical signatures instead of words.”
“I accept your rebuke. What have you got?”
“Eight went up on that rocket.”
“So the official statement was a lie as we suspected.”
“Yes.”
“Who were they?”
“I don’t know. That’s where things get noisy and ambiguous. This thing was very hush-hush. Military secrets and so forth. There is no passenger manifest that I can read to you. No stack of dossiers. All I have is ten seconds of really bad images from the collision-avoidance speelycaptor on the windscreen of some janitor’s fetch, taken while he was parallel-parking in a tight spot a quarter of a mile away. Motion artifacts have been removed, of course.”
Sammann caused the jeejah to begin playing back a snippet of—as advertised—terrible speely data. It showed a coach, with military markings, parked next to a large building. A door in the side of the building opened. Eight people in white coveralls came out and climbed into the coach. They were followed by others who looked like doctors and technicians. The interval between the building and the coach was about twenty feet, so we got to see them walk that far. Sammann made the thing run on infinite loop. The first couple of dozen times through, we focused all of our attention on the first four people in the white suits. Faces were impossible to make out, but it was surprising how much could be inferred from how people moved. Three of the white-suited people moved in an ever-shifting triangle around a fourth, who was bigger than all of them, with prepossessing hair. He carried himself erect and moved in a heedless line; the others scurried and weaved. His coverall was subtly different from the others’: it had a pattern of stripes or markings crisscrossed over it, almost as if he’d been draped in a few yards of—
“Rope,” I said, freezing the image and pointing to it. “I’ve seen something like that before—at Apert. There was an extra wearing something like that. He was a Warden of Heaven priest. That is their ceremonial garb.”
By this point Cord had come over to watch the speely with us. She was standing behind Sammann’s chair looking over his shoulder. “Those four who are bringing up the rear,” she said, “they are avout.”
Until now we’d only had eyes for the high priest and his three acolytes. The other half of the crew didn’t do much: just walked in single file from the building to the coach. “What makes you say that?” I asked. “That is, other than the fact that they show zero interest in the guy with the rope. There is nothing to mark them as avout.”
“Yes there is,” Cord said. “The way they walk.”
“What are you talking about!? We’re all bipeds! We all walk the same way!” I protested. But Sammann had twisted around in his chair to grin up at Cord. He nodded enthusiastically.
“You two are nuts,” I said.
“Cord is right,” Sammann insisted.
“It couldn’t have been more obvious at Apert,” Cord said. “Extras swagger and slouch. They walk like they own the place.” She got out from behind the chair and strode down the middle of the room in a rolling, easy gait. “Avout—and Ita—are more self-contained.” She drew herself up and walked back to us with quick steps, not moving any air.
As crazy as this sounded, I had to admit that during Apert I’d been able to tell extras apart from fraas and suurs at a distance, partly based on how they moved. I turned my attention back to the screen. “Okay, I’ll give you that one,” I said. “The more I look at them, the more familiar that gait seems to me. Especially the tall one bringing up the rear. He is a dead ringer for—”
I couldn’t get a word out for a few moments. Everyone looked at me to see if I was okay. I couldn’t take my eyes off that speely. I watched it four more times, and each time I grew more certain of what—of who—I was seeing.
“Jesry,” I said.
“Oh, my god!” Cord exclaimed.
“His blessings and mercy upon you,” hissed Ganelial Crade, as was his custom when anyone used that word in an oath.
“That is absolutely your friend,” Cord said.
“Fraa Jesry is in space with the Warden of Heaven!” I shouted, just to hear it.
“I’m sure they are having some fascinating discussions,” said Sammann.
A couple of hours later, after we’d covered the windows and tried to sleep, the place began to hum and rumble, and there came a jerk that made half of our stuff fall to the floor. Gnel and I unzipped the legs of our suitsacks and ran out to the catwalk and looked down to see rimes of ice exploding into sparkling clouds as they were crushed by imperceptible shifting of the tread segments. We scurried to the end of the catwalk where a stair led down to near snow level, jumped off, got the three-wheeler started, and buzzed back to the flatbed. Explosive bangs resonated up and down the train as the locomotive budged forward and began to draw up slack. A couple of the flatbed’s boarding-ramps were dragging on the ice so that last-minute loading could proceed—it would be half an hour before the train was really moving. We blasted up one of these, veered around a drummon that was back-and-forthing into a tight slot, and found our way to Gnel’s fetch. We ran the three-wheeler up the plank ramps and stowed the planks under the fetch. Then we spent a while draining the coolants from all three vehicles’ engines and storing it in poly jugs. By the time we were finished, the train was moving faster than we could walk in snowshoes, so we made our way forward along the system of catwalks that skirted the sledges and linked them together. Cord and Yul had pulled up the window-coverings to let the sun in, and were cooking a big celebratory breakfast. We were on our way to the North Pole. I was glad of that. But when I thought of Fraa Jesry in orbit I couldn’t have felt more in the wrong place.
“Bastard!” I said. “That bastard!”
Everyone looked at me. We had pushed back from what, in these circumstances, counted as a huge breakfast.
Yulassetar Crade looked at Cord as if to say, Your sib…your problem.
“Who? What?” Cord asked.
“Jesry!”
“A few hours ago you were about to start weeping over Jesry. Now he’s a bastard?”
“This is so typical,” I said.
“He gets launched into space frequently?” Sammann asked.
“No. It’s hard to explain, but…of all of us, he is the one they would pick.”
“Who’s they?” Cord asked. “Obviously this was not a Convox operation.”
“True. But the Saecular Power must have gone to the hierarchs at Tredegarh and said ‘give us four of your best’ and this is what they came up with.” I shook my head.
“You must be proud…a little bit,” Cord tried.
I put my hands over my face and sighed. “He gets to go meet aliens. I get to ride on a junk train.” Then I uncovered my face and looked at Gnel. “What do you know about the Warden of Heaven?”
Gnel blinked. He froze for a moment. I had been avoiding religion for so long, and now I’d asked him a direct question about it! His cousin exhaled sharply and looked away, as if he were about to witness a traffic accident.
“They are heretics,” he said mildly.
“Yes, but almost everyone is to you, aren’t they?” I said. “Can you be any more specific?”
“You don’t understand,” Gnel said. “They aren’t just any heretics. They are an offshoot of my faith.” He looked at Yul. “Of our faith.” Cord elbowed Yul just in case he’d missed this.
“Really?” I asked. “An offshoot of the Samblites?” This was news to the rest of us.
“Our faith was founded by Saunt Bly,” Gnel claimed.
“Before or afte
r you ate his—”
“That,” said Gnel, “is an ancient lie invented to make us seem like a bunch of savages!”
“It’s almost impossible to sauté a human liver without bruising it,” Yul put in.
“Are you saying that Saunt Bly turned into a Deolater? Like Estemard?”
Gnel shook his head. “It’s a shame you didn’t have an opportunity to talk more with Estemard. He isn’t a Deolater as you would define it—or as I would. Neither was Saunt Bly. And that’s where we differ from the Warden of Heaven people.”
“They think Bly was a Deolater?”
“Yes. Sort of a prophet, according to them, who found a proof of the existence of God and was Thrown Back because of it.”
“That’s funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we’d just tell him ‘nice proof, Fraa Bly’ and start believing in God,” I said.
Gnel gave me a cool stare, letting me know he didn’t believe a word of it. “Be that as it may,” he said levelly, “it’s not the version put out by the Warden of Heaven.”
My mind went back to Apert Eve and the discussion of iconographies with Grandsuur Tamura. “This is an instance of the Brumasian Iconography,” I said.
“What?”
“The Warden of Heaven is putting out the story that there is a secret conspiracy in the mathic world.”
“Yes,” Gnel said.
“Something of great import—in this instance, the existence of God—has been discovered. Most of the avout are pure of heart and want to spread the news. But they are cruelly oppressed by this conspiracy which will stop at nothing to preserve the secret.”
Gnel was getting ready to say something cautious but Yul spoke first: “You nailed it.”
“That is disheartening,” I said, “because of all the iconographies, the ones based on conspiracy theories are the hardest to root out.”
“You don’t say,” Sammann said, looking me in the eye.
I got embarrassed and shut up for a bit. Cord broke the ice: “The Cousins’ ship is still being kept secret. So we don’t know what the Warden thinks about it. But we can guess. They’ll see it as—”