Vasko slipped an anonymous brown coat over his Security Arm uniform, descended the High Conch and walked unobserved into the night.
As he stepped outside he felt a tension in the air, like the nervous stillness that presaged an electrical storm. The crowds moved through the narrow, twisting defiles of the streets in boisterous surges. There was a macabre carnival atmosphere about the lantern-lit assembly, but no one was shouting or laughing; all that he heard was the low hum of a thousand voices, seldom raised above a normal speaking level.
He did not much blame them for their reaction. Towards the end of the afternoon there had been only one curt official statement on the matter of Clavain’s death, and it now seemed unlikely that there was any part of the colony that hadn’t heard that news. The surge of people into the streets had begun even before sundown and the arrival of the lights in the sky. Rightly, they sensed that there was something missing from the official statement. There had been no mention of Khouri or the child, no mention of the battle taking place in near-Ararat space, merely a promise that more information would be circulated in the fullness of time.
The ragtag procession of boats had begun shortly afterwards. Now there was a small braid of bobbing lights at the very base of the ship, and more boats were continually leaving the shore. Security Arm officers were doing their best to keep the boats from leaving the colony, but it was a battle they could not hope to win. The Arm had never been intended to cope with massive civil disobedience, and the best that Vasko’s col-leagues could do was impede the exodus. Elsewhere, there were reports of disturbances, fires and looting, with the Arm regulars having to make arrests. The Juggler activity—whatever it signified—continued unabated.
Vasko was grateful to find himself relieved of any scheduled duties. Wandering through the crowds, his own part in the day’s events not yet revealed, he listened to the rumours that were already in circulation. The simple kernel of truth—that Clavain had been killed in an ultimately successful action to safeguard a vital colonial asset—had accreted many layers of speculation and untruth. Some of the rumours were extraordinary in their ingenuity, in the details they posited for the circumstances of the old man’s death.
Pretending ignorance, Vasko stopped little groups of people at random and asked them what was going on. He made sure no one saw his uniform and also that none of the groups contained people likely to recognise him from work or his social circles.
What he heard disgusted him. He listened earnestly to graphic descriptions of gunfights and bomb plots, subterfuge and sabotage. It amazed and appalled him to discover how easily these stories had been spun out of nothing more than the fact of Clavain’s death. It was as if the crowd itself was manifesting a sly, sick collective imagination.
Equally distressing was the eagerness of those listening to accept the stories, bolstering the accounts with their own interjected suggestions for how events had probably proceeded. Later, eavesdropping elsewhere, Vasko observed that these embellishments had been seamlessly embroidered into the main account. It did not seem to bother anyone that many of the stories were contradictory, or at best difficult to reconcile with the same set of events. More than once, with incredulity, he heard that Scorpio or some other colony senior had died alongside Clavain. The fact that some of those individuals had already appeared in public to make short, calming speeches counted for nothing. With a sinking feeling, a cavernous resignation, Vasko realised that even if he were to start recounting events exactly as they had happened, his own version would have no more immediate currency than any of the lies now doing the rounds. He hadn’t actually witnessed the death himself, so even if he told the truth of things it would still only be from his point of view, and his story would of necessity have a damning taint of second-hand reportage about it. It would be dismissed, its content unpalatable, the details too vague.
Tonight, the people wanted an unequivocal hero. By some mysterious self-organising process of story creation, that was precisely what they were going to get.
He was shouldering his way through the lantern-carrying mob when he heard his own name called out.
“Malinin.”
It took him a moment to locate the source of the voice in the crowd. A woman was standing in a little circle of stillness. The rabble flowed around her, never once violating the immediate volume of private space she had defined. She wore a long-hemmed black coat, the collar an explosion of black fur, the black peak of an unmarked cap obscuring the upper part of her face.
“Urton?” he asked, doubtfully.
“It’s me,” she said, stepping nearer to him. “I guess you got the night off as well. Why aren’t you at home resting?”
There was something in her tone that made him defensive. In her presence he still felt that he was continually being measured and found wanting.
“I could ask you the same question.”
“Because I know there wouldn’t be any point. Not after what happened out there.”
Provisionally, he decided to go along with this pretence at civility. He wondered where it was going to lead him. “I did try to sleep this afternoon,” he said, “but all I heard were screams. All I saw was blood and ice.”
“You weren’t even in there when it happened.”
“I know. So imagine what it must be like for Scorpio.”
Now that Urton was next to him he shared the same little pocket of quiet that she had defined. He wondered how she did it. He did not think it very likely that the people flowing around them had any idea who Urton was. They must have sensed something about her: an electric prickle of foreboding.
“I feel sorry for what he had to do,” Urton said.
“I’m not sure how he’s going to take it, in the long run. They were very close friends.”
“I know that.”
“It wasn’t just any old friendship,” Vasko replied. “Clavain saved Scorpio’s life once, when he was due to be executed. There was a bond between them that went right back to Chasm City. I don’t think there was anyone else on this planet that Clavain respected quite as much as Scorpio. And Scorpio also knew that. I went with him to the island where Clavain was waiting. I saw them talking together. It wasn’t the way I’d imagined it to be. They were more like two old adventurers who’d seen a lot of the same things, and knew no one else quite understood them.”
“Scorpio isn’t that old.”
“He is,” Vasko said. “For a pig, anyway.”
Urton led him through the crowd, towards the shore. The crowd began to thin out, and a warm night breeze salted with brine made his eyes tingle. Overhead, the strange lights etched arcane motifs from horizon to horizon. It was less like a firework display or aurora and more like a vast, painstaking geometry lesson.
“You’re worried it’ll have done something to him, aren’t you?” Urton asked.
“How would you take it if you had to murder your best friend in cold blood? And slowly, with an audience?”
“I don’t think I’d take it too well. But then I’m not Scorpio.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He’s led us competently while Clavain was away, Vasko, and I know that you think well of him, but that doesn’t make him an angel. You already said that the pig and Clavain went all the way back to Chasm City.”
Vasko watched lights slide across the zenith, trailing annular rings like the pattern he sometimes saw when he pressed his fingertips against his own closed eyelids. “Yes,” he said, grudgingly.
“Well, what do you think Scorpio was doing in Chasm City in the first place? It wasn’t feeding the needy and the poor. He was a criminal, a murderer.”
“He broke the law in a time when the law was brutal and inhuman,” Vasko said. “That’s not quite the same thing, is it?”
“So there was a war on. I’ve studied the same history books as you have. Yes, the emergency rule verged on the Draconian, but does that excuse murder? We’re not just talking about self-preservation or self-interest here. Scorpio killed for sport.”
“He was enslaved and tortured by humans,” Vasko said. “And humans made him what he is: a genetic dead end.”
“So that lets him off the hook?”
“I don’t quite see where you’re going with this, Urton.”
“All I’m saying is, Scorpio isn’t the thin-skinned individual you like to think. Yes, I’m sure he’s upset by what he did to Clavain…”
“What he was made to do,” Vasko corrected.
“Whatever. The point is the same: he’ll get over it, just like he got over every other atrocity he perpetrated.” She lifted the peak of her cap, scrutinising him, her eyes flicking from point to point as if alert for any betraying facial tics. “You believe that, don’t you?”
“Right now I’m not sure.”
“You have to believe it, Vasko.” He noticed that she had stopped calling him Malinin. “Because the alternative is to doubt his fitness for leadership. You wouldn’t go that far, would you?”
“No, of course not. I’ve got total faith in his leadership. Ask anyone here tonight and you’ll get the same answer. And guess what? We’re all right.”
“Of course we are.”
“What about you, Urton? Do you doubt him?”
“Not in the slightest,” she said. “Frankly, I doubt that he’ll have lost much sleep at all over anything that happened today.”
“That sounds incredibly callous.”
“I want it to be callous. I want him to be callous. That’s the point. It’s exactly what we want—what we need—in a leader now. Don’t you agree?”
“I don’t know,” he said, feeling a huge weariness begin to slide over him. “All I know is that I didn’t come out here tonight to talk about what happened today. I came out here to clear my head and try to forget some of it.”
“So did I,” Urton said. Her voice had softened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to rake over what happened. I suppose talking about it is my way of coping with it. It was pretty harrowing for all of us.”
“Yes, it was. Are you done now?” He felt his temper rising, a scarlet tide lapping against the defences of civility. “For most of yesterday and today you looked as if you couldn’t stand to be in the same hemisphere as me, let alone the same room. Why the sudden change of heart?”
“Because I regret the way I acted,” she said.
“If you don’t mind my saying, it’s a little late in the day for second thoughts.”
“It’s the way I cope, Vasko. Cut me some slack, all right? There was nothing personal about it.”
“Well, that makes me feel a lot better.”
“We were going into a dangerous situation. We were all trained for it. We all knew each other, and we all knew we could count on each other. And then you show up at the last minute, someone I don’t know, yet whom I’m suddenly expected to trust with my life. I can name a dozen SA officers who could have taken your position in that boat, any one of whom I’d have felt happier about covering my back.”
Vasko saw that she was leading him towards the shore, where the crowd thinned out. The dark shapes of boats blocked the gloom between land and water. Some were moored ready for departure, some were aground.
“Scorpio chose to include me in the mission,” Vasko said. “Once that decision was taken, you should have had the guts to live with it. Or didn’t you trust his judgement?”
“One day you’ll be in my shoes, Vasko, and you won’t like it any more than I did. Come and give me a lecture about trusting judgement then, and see how convincing it sounds.” Urton paused, watching the sky as a thin scarlet line transacted it from horizon to horizon. She had evaded his question. “This is all coming out wrong. I didn’t pick you out of the crowd to start another fight. I wanted to say I was sorry. I also wanted you to understand why I’d acted the way I did.”
He kept the lid on his anger. “All right.”
“And I admit I was wrong.”
“You weren’t to know what was about to happen,” he said.
She shrugged and sighed. “No, I don’t suppose I was. No matter what they say, he walked the walk, didn’t he? When it came to putting his life on the line, he went and did it.”
They had reached the line of boats. Most of those still left on land were wrecks: their hulls had gaping holes in them near the waterline, where they had been consumed by seaborne organisms. Sooner or later they would have been hauled away to the smelting plant, to be remade into new craft. The metalworkers were fastidious about reusing every possible scrap of recyclable metal. But the amount recovered would never have been equal to that in the original boats.
“Look,” Urton said, pointing across the bay.
Vasko nodded. “I know. They’ve already encircled the base of the ship.”
“That’s not what I mean. Look a bit higher, Hawkeye. Can you see them?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment. “Yes. My God. They’ll never make it.”
They were tiny sparks of light around the base of the ship, slightly higher than the bobbing ring of boats Vasko had already noticed. He estimated that they could not have climbed more than a few dozen metres above the sea. There were thousands of metres of the ship above them.
“How are they climbing?” Vasko said.
“Hand over hand, I guess. You’ve seen what that thing looks like close-up, haven’t you? It’s like a crumbling cliff wall, full of handholds and ledges. It’s probably not that difficult.”
“But the nearest way in must be hundreds of metres above the sea, maybe more. When the planes come and go they always land near the top.” Again he said, “They’ll never make it. They’re insane.”
“They’re not insane,” Urton said. “They’re just scared. Really, really scared. The question is, should we be joining them?”
Vasko said nothing. He was watching one of the tiny sparks of light fall back towards the sea.
They stood and watched the spectacle for many minutes. Nobody else appeared to fall, but the other climbers continued their relentless slow ascent undaunted by the failure that many of them had doubtless witnessed. Around the sheer footslopes, where the boats must have been rocking and crashing against the hull, new climbers were beginning their ascent. Boats were returning from the ship, scudding slowly back across the bay, but progress was slow and tension was rising amongst those waiting on the shoreline. The Security Arm officials were increasingly outnumbered by the angry and frightened people who were waiting for passage to the ship. Vasko saw one of the SA men speaking urgently into his wrist communicator, obviously calling for assistance. He had almost finished talking when someone shoved him to the ground.
“We should do something,” Vasko said.
“We’re off duty, and two of us aren’t enough to make a difference. They’ll have to think of something different. It’s not as if they’re going to be able to contain this for much longer. I don’t think I want to be here any more.” She meant the shoreline. “I checked the reports before I came out. Things aren’t so bad east of the High Conch. I’m hungry and I could use a drink. Do you want to join me?”
“I don’t have much of an appetite,” Vasko said. He had actually been starting to feel hungry again until he saw the person fall into the sea. “But a drink wouldn’t go amiss. Are you sure there’ll be somewhere still open?”
“I know a few places we can try,” Urton said.
“You know the area better than me, in that case.”
“Your problem is you don’t get out enough,” she said. She pulled up the collar of her coat, then crunched down her hat. “Come on. Let’s get out of here before things turn nasty.”
She turned out to be right about the zone of the settlement east of the Conch. Many Arm members lodged there, so the area had always had a tradition of loyalty to the administration. Now there was a sullen, reproachful calm about the place. The streets were no busier than they usually were at this time of night, and although many premises were closed, the bar Urton had in mind was still open.
Urton led him through the main room to an alcove containing two chairs and a table poached from Central Amenities. Above the alcove a screen was tuned to the administration news service, but at the moment all it was showing was a picture of Clavain’s face. The picture had been taken only a few years earlier, but it might as well have been centuries ago. The man Vasko had known in the last couple of days had looked twice as old, twice as eroded by time and circumstance. Beneath Clavain’s face was a pair of calendar dates about five hundred years apart.
“I’ll fetch us some beers,” Urton said, not giving him a chance to argue. She had removed her coat and hat, piling them on the chair opposite his.
Vasko watched her recede into the gloom of the bar. He supposed she was a regular here. On their way to the alcove he had seen several faces he thought he half-recognised from SA training. Some of them had been smoking seaweed—the particular variety which when dried and prepared in a certain way induced mild narcotic effects. Vasko remembered the stuff from his training. It was illegal, but easier to get hold of than the black market cigarettes which were said to originate from some dwindling cache in the belly of the Nostalgia for Infinity.
By the time Urton returned, Vasko had removed his coat. She put the beers down in front of him. Cautiously Vasko tasted his. The stuff in the glass had an unpleasant urinal tint. Produced from another variety of seaweed, it was only beer in the very loosest sense of the word.
“I talked to Draygo,” she said, “the man who runs this place. He says the Security Arm officers on duty just went and punched holes in all the boats on the shore. No one else is being allowed to leave, and as soon as a boat returns, they impound it and arrest anyone on board.”
Vasko sipped at his beer. “Nice to see they haven’t resorted to heavy-handed tactics, then.”
“You can’t really blame them. They say three people have already drowned just crossing the bay. Another two have fallen off the ship while climbing.”
“I suppose you’re right, but it seems to me that the people should have a right to do what they like, even if it kills him.”
“They’re worried about mass panic. Sooner or later someone is bound to try swimming it, and then you might have hundreds of people following after. How many do you think would make it?”
“Let them,” Vasko said. “So what if they drown? So what if they contaminate the Jugglers? Does anyone honestly think it makes a shred of difference now?”
“We’ve maintained social order on Ararat for more than twenty years,” Urton said. “We can’t let it go to hell in a handcart in one night. Those people using the boats are taking irre-placeable colony property without authorisation. It’s unfair on the citizens who don’t want to flee to the ship.”
“But we’re not giving them an alternative. They’ve been told Clavain’s dead, but no one’s told them what those lights in the sky are all about. Is it any wonder they’re scared?”
“You think telling them about the war would make things any better?”
Vasko wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, where the seaweed beer had left a white rime. “I don’t know, but I’m fed up with everyone being lied to just because the administration thinks it’s in our best interests not to know all the facts. The same thing happened with Clavain when he disappeared. Scorpio and the others decided we couldn’t deal with the fact that Clavain was suicidal, so they made up some story about him going around the world. Now they don’t think the people can deal with knowing how he died, or what it was all for in the first place, so they’re not telling anyone anything.”
“You think Scorpio should be taking a firmer lead?”
“I respect Scorpio,” Vasko said, “but where is he now, when we need him?”
“You’re not the only one wondering that,” Urton said.
Something caught Vasko’s eye. The picture on the screen had changed. Clavain’s face was gone, replaced for a moment by the administration logo. Urton turned around in her seat, still drinking her beer.
“Something’s happening,” she said.
The logo flickered and vanished. They were looking at Scorpio, surrounded by the curved rose-pink interior of the High Conch. The pig wore his usual unofficial uniform of padded black leather, the squat dome of his head a largely neckless outgrowth of his massive barrelled torso.
“You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?” Vasko asked.
“Draygo told me he’d heard that there was an announcement scheduled for around this time. But I don’t know what it’ll be about and I didn’t know Scorpio was going to show his face.”
The pig was speaking. Vasko was about to find a way to make the screen louder when Scorpio’s voice rang out loudly throughout the maze of alcoves, piped through on some general-address system.
“Your attention, please,” he said. “You all know who I am. I speak now as the acting leader of this colony. With regret, I must again report that Nevil Clavain was killed today while on a mission of maximum importance for the strategic security of Ararat. Having participated in the same operation, I can assure you that without Clavain’s bravery and self-sacrifice the current situation would be enormously more grave than is the case. As things stand, and despite Clavain’s death, the mission was successful. It is my intention to inform you of what was accomplished in that operation in due course. But first I must speak about the current disturbances in all sectors of First Camp, and the actions that the Security Arm is taking to restore social order. Please listen carefully, because all our lives depend on it. There will be no more unauthorised crossings to the
Nostalgia for Infinity. Finite colony resources cannot be risked in this manner. All unofficial attempts to reach the ship will therefore be punished by immediate execution.”
Vasko glanced at Urton, but he couldn’t tell if her expression was one of disgust or quiet approval.
The pig waited a breath before continuing. Something was wrong with the transmission, for the earlier image of Clavain had begun to reappear, overlaying Scorpio’s face like a faint nimbus. “There will, however, be an alternative. The administration recommends that all citizens go about their business as usual and do not attempt to leave the island. Nonetheless it recognises that a minority wish to relocate to the Nostalgia for Infinity. Beginning at noon tomorrow, therefore, and continuing for as long as necessary, the administration will provide safe authorised transportation to the ship. Designated aircraft will take groups of one hundred people at a time to the Infinity. As of six a.m. tomorrow, rules of conveyance, including personal effects allocations, will be available from the High Conch and all other administrative centres, or from uniformed Security Arm personnel. There is no need to panic about being on the first available transport, since—to repeat—the flights will continue until demand is exhausted.”
“They had no choice,” Vasko said quietly. “Scorp’s doing the right thing.”
But the pig was still talking. “For those who wish to board the Infinity, understand die following: conditions aboard the ship will be atrocious. For the last twenty-three years, there have seldom been more than a few dozen people aboard it at any one time. Much of me ship is now uninhabitable or simply unmapped. In order to accommodate an influx of hundreds, possibly even thousands, of refugees, me Security Arm will have to enforce strict emergency rule. If you think the crisis measures in the First Camp are Draconian, you have no idea how much worse tilings will be on the ship. Your sole right will be the right of survival, and we will dictate how that is interpreted.”
“What does he mean by that?” Vasko asked, while Scorpio continued with the arrangements for the transportation.
“He means they’ll have to freeze people,” Urton said. “Squeeze them into those sleep coffins, like they did when the ship came here in the first place.”
“He should tell them, in that case.”
“Obviously he doesn’t want to.”
“Those reefersleep caskets aren’t safe,” Vasko said. “I know what happened the last time they used them. A lot of people didn’t make it out alive.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” Urton said. “He’s still giving them better odds than if they try to make the journey themselves—even without that execution order.”
“I still don’t understand. Why provide that option at all, if the administration doesn’t think it’s the right thing to do?”
Urton shrugged. “Because maybe the administration isn’t sure what to do. If they declare a general evacuation to the ship, they’ll really have a panic on their hands. Looking at it from their point of view, how do they know whether it’s better for the people to evacuate to the ship or remain on the ground?”
“They don’t,” he said. “Whichever they choose, there’ll always be a risk that it might be the wrong decision.”
Urton nodded emphatically. She had nearly finished her beer. “At least this way Scorpio gets to split the difference. Some people will end up in the ship, some will chose to stay at home. It’s the perfect solution, if you want to maximise the chances of some people surviving.”
“That sounds very heartless.”
“It is.”
“In which case I don’t think you need worry about Scorpio not being the callous leader you said we needed.”
“No. He’s callous enough,” Urton agreed. “Of course, we could be misreading this entirely. But assuming we aren’t, does it shock you?”
“No, I suppose not. And I think you’re right. We do need someone strong, someone prepared to think the unthinkable.” Vasko put down his glass. It was only half-empty, but his thirst had gone the same way as his appetite. “One question,” he said. “Why are you being so nice to me all of a sudden?”
Urton inspected him the way a lepidopterist might examine a pinned specimen. “Because, Vasko, it occurred to me that you might be a useful ally, in the long run.”
The scrimshaw suit said, “We’ve heard the news, Quaiche.”
The sudden voice startled him, as it always did. He was alone. Grelier had just finished seeing to his eyes, swabbing an infected abscess under one retracted eyelid. The metal clamp of the eye-opener felt unusually cruel to him today, as if, while Quaiche was sleeping, the surgeon-general had covertly sharpened all its little hooks. Not while he was really sleeping, of course. Sleep was a luxury he remembered in only the vaguest terms.
“I don’t know about any news,” he said.
“You made your little announcement to the congregation downstairs. We heard it. You’re taking the cathedral across Absolution Gap.”
“And if I am, what business is it of yours?”
“It’s insanity, Quaiche. And your mental health is very much our business.”
He saw the suit in blurred peripheral vision, around the sharp central image of Haldora. The world was half in shadow, bands of cream and ochre and subtle turquoise plunging into the sharp terminator of the nightside.
“You don’t care about me,” he said. “You only care about your own survival. You’re afraid I’ll destroy you when I destroy the Lady Morwenna.”
“‘When,’ Quaiche? Frankly, that’s a little disturbing to us. We were hoping you still had some intention of actually succeeding.”
“Perhaps I do,” he conceded.
“Where nobody has done so before?”
“The Lady Morwenna isn’t any old cathedral.”
“No. It’s the heaviest and tallest on the Way. Doesn’t that give you some slight pause for thought?”
“It will make my triumph all the more spectacular.”
“Or your disaster, should you topple off the bridge or bring the entire thing crashing down. But why now, Quaiche, after all these revolutions around Hela?”
“Because I feel that the time is right,” he said. “You can’t second-guess these things. Not the work of God.”
“You truly are a lost cause,” the scrimshaw suit said. Then the cheaply synthesised voice took on an urgency it had lacked before. “Quaiche, listen to us. Do what you will with the Lady Morwenna. We won’t stop you. But first let us out of this cage.”
“You’re scared,” he said, pulling the stiff tissue of his face into a smile. “I’ve really put the wind up you, haven’t I?”
“It doesn’t have to be this way. Look at the evidence, Quaiche. The vanishings are increasing in frequency. You know what mat means, don’t you?”
“The work of God is moving towards its culmination.”
“Or, alternatively, the concealment mechanism is failing. Take your pick. We know which interpretation we favour.”
“I know all about your heresies,” he said. “I don’t need to hear them again.”
“You still think we are demons, Quaiche?”
“You call yourselves shadows. Isn’t that a bit of a giveaway?”
“We call ourselves shadows because that is what we are, just as you are all shadows to us. It’s a statement of fact, Quaiche, not a theological standpoint.”
“I don’t want to hear any more of it.”
It was true: he had heard enough of their heresies. They were lies, engineered to undermine his faith. Time and again he had tried to purge them from his head, but always to no avail. As long as the scrimshaw suit remained with him—as long as the thing inside the scrimshaw suit remained—he would never be able to forget those untruths. In a moment of weakness, a lapse that had been every bit as unforgivable as the one twenty years earlier that had brought them here in the first place, he had even followed up some of their heretical claims. He had delved into the Lady Morwenna’s archives, following lines of enquiry.
The shadows spoke of a theory. It meant nothing to him, yet when he searched the deep archives—records carried across centuries in the shattered and corrupted data troves of Ultra trade ships—he found something, glints of lost knowledge, teasing hints from which his mind was able to suggest a whole.
Hints of something called brane theory.
It was a model of the universe, an antique cosmological theory that had enjoyed a brief interlude of popularity seven hundred years in the past. So far as Quaiche could tell, the theory had not been discredited so much as abandoned, put aside when newer and brighter toys came along. At the time there had been no easy way of testing any of these competing theories, so they had to stand and fall on their strict aesthetic merit and the ease with which they could be tamed and manipulated with the cudgels and barbs of mathematics.
Brane theory suggested that the universe the senses spoke of was but one sliver of something vaster, one laminate layer in a stacked ply of adjacent realities. There was, Quaiche thought, something alluringly theological in that model, the idea of heavens above and hells below, with the mundane substrate of perceived reality squeezed between them. As above, so below.
But brane theory had nothing to do with heaven and hell. It had originated as a response to something called string theory, and specifically a conundrum within string theory known as the hierarchy problem.
Heresy again. But he could not stop himself from delving deeper.
String theory posited that the fundamental building blocks of matter were, at the smallest conceivable scales, simply one-dimensional loops of mass-energy. Like a guitar string the loops were able to vibrate—to twang —in certain discrete modes, each of which corresponded to a recognisable particle at the classical scale. Quarks, electrons, neutrinos, even photons, were all just different vibrational modes of these fundamental strings. Even gravity turned out to be a manifestation of string behaviour.
But gravity was also the problem. On the classical scale—the familiar universe of people and buildings, ships and worlds-gravity was much weaker than anyone normally gave it credit for. Yes, it held planets in their orbits around stars. Yes, it held stars in their orbits around the centre of mass of the galaxy. But compared to the other forces of nature, it was barely there at all. When the Lady Morwenna lowered one of its electromagnetic grapples to lift some chunk of metal from a delivery tractor, the magnet was resisting me entire gravitational force of Hela—everything the world could muster. If gravity had been as strong as the other forces, the Lady Morwenna would have been crushed into an atom-thick pancake, a film of collapsed metal on the perfectly smooth spherical surface of a collapsed planet. It was only gravity’s extreme weakness on the classical scale that allowed life to exist in the first place.
But string theory went on to suggest that gravity was really very strong, if only one looked closely enough. At the Planck scale, the smallest possible increment of measurement, string theory predicted that gravity ramped up to equivalence with the other forces. Indeed, at that scale reality looked rather different in other respects as well: curled up like dead woodlice were seven additional dimensions—hyperspaces accessible only on the microscopic scale of quantum interactions.
There was an aesthetic problem with this view, however. The other forces—bundled together as a single unified electroweak force—manifested themselves at a certain characteristic energy. But the strong gravity of string theory would only reveal itself at energies ten million billion times greater than for the electroweak forces. Such energies were far beyond the grasp of experimental procedure. This was the hierarchy problem, and it was considered deeply offensive. Brane theory was one attempt to resolve this glaring schism.
Brane theory—as far as Quaiche understood it—proposed that gravity was really as strong as the electroweak force, even on the classical scale. But what happened to gravity was that it leaked away before it had a chance to show its teeth. What was left—the gravity that was experienced in day-to-day life—was only a thin residue of something much stronger. Most of the force of gravity had dissipated sideways, into adjoining branes or dimensions. The particles that made up most of the universe were glued to a particular braneworld, a particular slice of the laminate of branes that the theory referred to as the bulk. That was why the ordinary matter of the universe only ever saw the one braneworld within which it happened to exist: it was not free to drift off into the bulk. But gravitons, the messenger particles of gravity, suffered no such constraint. They were free to drift between branes, sailing through the bulk with impunity. The best analogy Quaiche had been able to come up with was the printed words on the pages of a book, each confined for all eternity to one particular page, knowing nothing of the words printed on the next page, only a fraction of a millimetre away. And then think of bookworms, gnawing at right angles to the text.
But what of the shadows? This was where Quaiche had to fill in the details for himself. What the shadows appeared to be hinting at—the heart of the heresy—was that they were messengers or some form of communication from an adjacent braneworld. That braneworld might have been completely disconnected from our own, so that the only possible means of communication between the two was through the bulk. There was another possibility, however: the two apparently separate braneworlds might have been distant portions of a single brane, one that was folded back on itself like a hairpin. If that were the case—and the shadows had said nothing on the matter either way—then they were messengers not from another reality but merely from a distant corner of the familiar universe, unthinkably remote in both space and time. The light and energy from their region of space could only travel along the brane, unable to slip across the tiny gap between the folded surfaces. But gravity slipped effortlessly across the bulk, carrying a message from brane to brane. The stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies in the shadow brane cast a gravitational shadow on our local universe, influencing the motions of our stars and galaxies. By the same token, the gravity caused by the matter in the local part of the brane leaked through the bulk, into the realm of the shadows.
But the shadows were clever. They had decided to communicate across the bulk using gravity as their signalling medium.
There were a thousand ways they might have done it. The specifics didn’t matter. They might have manipulated the orbits of a pair of degenerate stars to produce a ripple of gravitational waves, or learned how to make miniature black holes on demand. The only important thing was that it could be done. And—equally importantly—that someone would be able to pick up the signals on this side of the bulk.
Someone like the scuttlers, for instance.
Quaiche laughed to himself. The heresy made a repulsive kind of sense. But then what else would he have expected? Where there was the work of God, would there not also be the work of the Devil, insinuating himself into the schemes of the Creator, trying to robe the miraculous in the mundane?
“Quaiche?” the suit asked. “Are you still here?”
“I’m still here,” he said. “But I’m not listening to you. I don’t believe what you say to me.”
“If you don’t, someone else will.”
He pointed at the scrimshaw suit, his own bony-fingered hand hovering in his peripheral vision like some detached phantasm. “I won’t let anyone else be poisoned by your lies.”
“Unless they have something you want very badly,” the scrimshaw suit said. “Then, of course, you might change your mind.”
His hand wavered. He felt cold suddenly. He was in the presence of evil. And it knew more about his schemes than it had any right to.
He pressed the intercom control on his couch. “Grelier,” he snapped. “Grelier, come here this instant. I need new bloods.