Absolution Gap

TWENTY-EIGHT

Vasko and Scorpio handled the incubator, carrying it gently into the empty belly of the shuttle. The sky was darkening now, and the thermal matrix of the shuttle’s heating surface glowed an angry cherry red, the elements hissing and ticking. Khouri followed them warily, stooping against the oppressive blanket of warm air trapped beneath the shuttle’s downcurved wings. She had said nothing more since waking, moving in a dreamlike state of wary compliance. Valensin followed behind his patients, sullenly accepting the same state of affairs. His two medical servitors trundled after him, tied to their master by inviolable bonds of obedience.

“Why aren’t we going to the ship?” Valensin kept asking.

Scorpio hadn’t answered him. He was communicating with someone via the bracelet again, most likely Blood or one of his deputies. Scorpio shook his head and snarled out an oath. Whatever the news was, Vasko doubted it was welcome.

“I’m going up front,” Antoinette said, “see if the pilot needs any help.”

“Tell him to keep it slow and steady,” Scorpio ordered. “No risks. And be prepared to get us up and out if it comes to that.”

“Assuming this thing still has the legs to reach orbit.”

They took off. Vasko helped the doctor and his mechanical aides to secure the incubator, Valensin showing him how the shuttle’s interior walls could be persuaded to form outgrowths and niches with varying qualities of adhesion. The incubator was soon glued down, with the two servitors standing watch over its functions. Aura, visible as a wrinkled thing within the tinted plastic, bound up in monitors and tubes, appeared oblivious to all the fuss.

“Where are we going?” Khouri asked. “The ship?”

“Actually, there’s a bit of a problem with the ship,” Scorpio said. “C’mon, take a look. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

They circled the ship again, at the same altitude as before. Khouri stared at the view with wide, uncomprehending eyes. Vasko did not blame her in the slightest. When he had seen the ship himself, only thirty minutes earlier, it had been in the earliest stages of being consumed by the Juggler biomass. Because the process had only just begun, it had been easy enough to assimilate what was going on. But now the ship was gone. In its place was a towering, irregular fuzzy green spire. He knew that there was a ship under the mass, but he could only guess at how strange the view must look to someone who hadn’t seen the early stages of the Juggler envelopment.

But there was something else, wasn’t there? Something that Vasko had noticed almost immediately but had dismissed as an optical illusion, a trick of his own tilted vantage point within the shuttle. But now that he was able to see the horizon where it poked through rents in the sea mist, it was obvious that there was no illusion, and that what he saw had nothing to do with his position.

The ship was tilting. It was a slight lean, only a few degrees away from vertical, but it was enough to inspire terror. The edifice that had for so long been a solid fixture of the landscape, seemingly as ancient as geography itself, was leaning to one side.

It was being pulled over by the collective biomass of the Pattern Juggler organisms.

“This isn’t good,” Vasko said.

“Tell me what’s happening,” Khouri said, standing next to him.

“We don’t know,” Scorpio said. “It started an hour or so ago. The sea thickened around the base, and the ring of material started swallowing the ship. Now it looks as if the Jugglers are trying to topple it.”

“Could they?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. The ship must weigh a few million tonnes. But the mass of all that Juggler material isn’t exactly negligible. I wouldn’t worry about the ship toppling, though.”

“No?”

“I’d be more worried about it snapping. That’s a lighthugger. It’s designed to tolerate one or more gees of acceleration along its axis. Standing on the surface of a planet doesn’t impose any more stress on it than normal starflight. But they don’t build those ships to handle lateral stresses. They’re not designed to stay in one piece if the forces are acting sideways. A couple more degrees and I’ll start worrying. She might come down.”

Khouri said, “We need that ship, Scorp. It’s our only ticket out of here.”

“Thanks for the newsflash,” he said, “but right now I’d say there isn’t a lot I can do about it—unless you want me to start fighting the Pattern Jugglers.”

The very notion was extreme, almost absurd. The Pattern Jugglers were harmless to all but a few unfortunate individuals. Collectively, they had never indicated any malicious intentions towards humanity. They were archives of lost knowledge, lost minds. But if the Pattern Jugglers were trying to destroy the Nostalgia for Infinity, what else could the humans do but retaliate? That simply could not be allowed to happen.

“Do you have weapons on this shuttle?” Khouri asked.

“Some,” Scorpio said. “Light ship-to-ship stuff, mainly.”

“Anything you could use against that biomass?”

“Some particle beams which won’t work too well in Ararat’s atmosphere. The rest? Too likely to take chunks out of the ship as well. We could try the particle beams…”

“No!”

The voice had come from Khouri’s mouth. But it had emerged explosively, like a vomit of sound. It almost didn’t resemble her voice at all.

“You just said…” Scorpio began.

Khouri sat down suddenly, falling—as if exhausted—into one of the couches that the shuttle had provided. She pressed a hand to her brow.

“No,” she said again, less stridently this time. “No. Leave. Leave alone. Help us.”

Wordlessly, Vasko, Scorpio, Valensin—and Khouri too—turned to look at the incubator, where Aura lay entombed in the care of machines. The tiny red-pink form within was moving, writhing gently against those restraints.

“Help us?” Vasko asked.

Khouri answered, but again the words seemed to emerge without her volition. She had to catch her breath between them. “They. Help us. Want to.”

Vasko moved over to the incubator. He had one eye on Khouri, another on her daughter. Valensin’s machines shuffled agitatedly. They did not know what to do, and their jointed arms were jerking with nervous indecision.

“They?” Vasko asked. “They as in the Pattern Jugglers?”

The pink form kicked her little legs, the tiny, perfectly formed nub of a fist clenched in front of the miniature scowl of her face. Aura’s eyes were sealed slits.

“Yes. They. Pattern Jugglers,” Khouri said.

Vasko turned to Scorpio. “I think we’ve got this all wrong,” he said.

“You do?”

“Wait. I need to talk to Antoinette.”

He went forward to the bridge without waiting for the pig’s permission. In the shuttle’s cockpit he found Antoinette and the pilot strapped into their command couches. They had turned the entire cockpit transparent, so that they appeared to be floating in midair, accompanied only by various disembodied read-out panels and controls. Vasko took a dizzy step back and then collected himself.

“Can we hover?” he asked.

Antoinette looked at him over her shoulder. “Of course.”

“Then bring us to a stop. Do you have any ranging equipment? Anticollision sensors, that sort of thing?”

“Of course,” she said again, as if both questions were amongst the least intelligent she had heard in a long while.

“Then shine something on the ship.”

“Any particular reason, Vasko? We can all see that the damned thing’s tilting.”

“Just do it, all right?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. Her small hands, clinking with jewellery, worked the controls floating above her couch. Vasko felt the ship nudge to a halt. The view ahead rotated, bringing the leaning tower directly in front of them.

“Hold it there,” Vasko said. “Now get that ranging thing—whatever it is—on to the ship. Somewhere near the base if you can manage it.”

“That isn’t going to help us figure out the tilt angle,” Antoinette said.

“It’s not the tilt I’m interested in. I don’t think they’re really trying to topple it.”

“You don’t?”

Vasko smiled. “I think it’s just a by-product. They’re trying to move it.”

He waited for her to set up the ranging device. A pulsing spherical display floated in front of her, filled with smoky green structures and numbers. “There’s the ship,” she said, pointing to the thickest return in the radar plot.

“Good. Now tell me how far away it is.”

“Four hundred and forty metres,” she said, after a moment. “That’s an average. The green stuff is changing in thickness all the while.”

“All right. Keep an eye on that figure.”

“It’s increasing,” the pilot said.

Vasko felt hot breath on his neck. He turned around to see the pig looking over his shoulder.

“Vasko’s on to something,” Antoinette said. “Distance to the spire is now… four hundred and fifty metres.”

“You’re drifting,” Scorpio said.

“No, we’re not.” She sounded the tiniest bit affronted. “We’re rock steady, at least within the errors of measurement. Vasko’s right, Scorp—the ship’s moving. They’re dragging it out to sea.”

“How fast is it moving?” Scorpio asked.

“Too soon to say with any certainty. A metre, maybe two, per second.” Antoinette checked her own communicator bracelet. “The neutrino levels are still going up. I’m not sure exactly how long we have left, but I don’t think we’re looking at more than a few hours.”

“In which the case the ship isn’t going to be more than a few kilometres further away when it launches,” Scorpio said.

“That’s better than nothing,” Antoinette said. “If they can at least get it beyond the curve of the bay, so that we have some shelter from the tidal waves… that’s got to be better than nothing, surely?”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” the pig replied.

Vasko felt a thrilling sense of affirmation. “Aura was right. They don’t want to hurt us. They only want to save us, by getting the ship away from the bay. They’re on our side.“

“Nice theory,” Scorpio said, “but how did they know we were in this mess in the first place? It’s not as if anyone went down into the sea and explained it to them. Someone would have had to swim for that.”

“Maybe someone did,” Vasko said. “Does it matter now? The ship’s moving. That’s all that counts.”

“Yeah,” Scorpio said. “Let’s just hope it isn’t too late to make a difference.”

Antoinette turned to the pilot. “Think you can get us close to that thing? The green stuff doesn’t seem too thick near the top. It might still be possible to get into the usual landing bay.”

“You’re joking,” the pilot said, incredulously.

Antoinette shook her head. She was already assigning full control back to the regular pilot. ‘“Fraid not, fella. If we want John to hold his horses until the ship’s clear of the bay, someone’s going to have go down and talk to him. And guess who just drew that straw?”

“I think she’s serious,” Vasko said.

“Do it,” Scorpio said.

The caravan threaded cautiously through tunnels and inched along ridiculously narrow ledges. It twisted and turned, at points doubling back on itself so that the rear parts advanced while the lead machines retreated. Once, navigating a rising hairpin, engines and traction limbs labouring, part of the caravan passed over itself, letting Rashmika look down on the racked Observers.

All the while the bridge grew larger. When she had first seen it, the bridge had the appearance of something lacy and low-relief, painted on a flat black backdrop in glittering iridescent inks. Now, slowly, it was taking on a faintly threatening three-dimensional solidity. This was not some mirage, some peculiar trick of lighting and atmospherics, but a real object, and the caravan was really going to cross it.

The three-dimensionality both alarmed and comforted Rashmika. The bridge now appeared to be more than just an assemblage of infinitely thin lines, and although many of its structural parts were still very fine in cross section, now that she was seeing them at an oblique angle the structural components didn’t look quite so delicate. If the bridge could support itself, surely it could support the caravan. She hoped.

“Miss Els?”

She looked around. This time it really was Quaestor Jones. “Yes,” she said, unhappy at his attention.

“We’ll be over it before very long. I promised you that the experience would be spectacular, didn’t I?”

“You did,” she said, “but what you didn’t explain, Quaestor, was why everyone doesn’t take this short cut, if it’s as useful as you claim.”

“Superstition,” he said, “coupled with excessive caution.”

“Excessive caution sounds entirely appropriate to me where this bridge is involved.”

“Are you frightened, Miss Els? You shouldn’t be. This caravan weighs barely fifty thousand tonnes, all told. And by its very nature, the weight is distributed along a great length. It isn’t as if we’re taking a cathedral across the bridge. Now that would be folly.”

“No one would do that.”

“No one sane. And especially not after they saw what happened last time, But that needn’t concern us in the slightest. The bridge will hold the caravan. It has done so in the past. I would have no particular qualms about taking us across it during every expedition away from the Way, but the simple truth is that most of the time it wouldn’t help us. You’ve seen how laborious the approach is. More often than not, using the bridge would cost us more time than it would save. It was only a particular constellation of circumstances that made it otherwise on this occasion.” The quaestor clasped his hands decisively. “Now, to business. I believe I have secured you a position in a clearance gang attached to an Adventist cathedral.”

“The Lady Morwenna?”

“No. A somewhat smaller cathedral, the Catherine of Iron. Everyone has to start somewhere. And why are you in such a hurry to reach the Lady Morwenna? Dean Quaiche has his foibles. The Catherine’s dean is a good man. His safety record is very good, and those who serve under him are well looked after.”

“Thank you, Quaestor,” she said, hoping her disappointment was not too obvious. She had still been hoping he might be able to find her a solid clerical job, something well away from clearance work. “You’re right. Something is better than nothing.”

“The Catherine is amongst the main group of cathedrals, moving towards the Rift from the western side. We will join them when we have completed our crossing of the bridge, shortly before they begin their descent of the Devil’s Staircase. You are privileged, Miss Els: very few people get the chance to cross Absolution Gap twice in one year, let alone within a matter of days.”

“I’ll count myself lucky.”

“Nonetheless, I will repeat what I said before: the work is difficult, dangerous and poorly rewarded.”

“I’ll take what’s available.”

“In which case you will be transferred to the relevant gang as soon as we reach the Way. Keep your nose clean, and I am sure you will do very well.”

“I will certainly bear that in mind.”

He touched a finger to his lips and made to turn away, as if remembering some other errand, then halted. The eyes of his green pet—it had been on his shoulder the whole time-remained locked on to her, blank as gun barrels.

“One other matter, Miss Els,” the quaestor said, looking back at her over his shoulder.

“Yes?”

“The gentleman you were speaking to earlier?” His eyes narrowed as he studied her expression. “Well, I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

“You wouldn’t what?”

“Have anything to do with his sort.” The quaestor stared vaguely into the distance. “As a rule, it’s never wise to circu-late amongst Observers, or any other pilgrims of a similarly committed strain of faith. But in my general experience it is especially unwise to associate with those who are vacillating between faith and denial.”

“Surely, Quaestor, it is up to me who I talk to.”

“Of course, Miss Els, and please don’t take offence. I offer only advice, from the bottomless pit of goodness which is my heart.” He popped a morsel into the mouthpiece of his pet. “Don’t I, Peppermint?”

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” the creature observed.

The caravan surmounted the eastern approach to the bridge. A kilometre from the eastern abutment, the road had veered back into the side of the cliff, ascending a steep defile that—via scraping hairpins, treacherous gradients and brief interludes of tunnel and ledge—brought it to the level of the bridge deck. Behind them, the landscape was an apparently impassable chaos of ice boulders. Ahead, the road deck stretched away like a textbook example of perspective, straight as a rifle barrel, un-fenced on either side, gently cambered towards the middle, gleaming with the soft diamond lustre of starlit ice.

Gathering speed now that it was on a level surface with no immediate worry of obstructions, the caravan sped towards the point where the ground fell away on either side. The road beneath the procession became smoother and wider, no longer furrowed or interrupted by rock-falls or man-deep fissures. And here there were, finally, very few pilgrims to be avoided. Most of them did not take the bridge, and so there was minimal risk of any unfortunates being trundled to death beneath the machines.

Rashmika’s grasp of the scale of the structure underwent several ratchetting revisions. She recalled that, from a distance, the deck of the bridge had formed a shallow arc. From this approach, however, it appeared flat and straight, as if aligned by laser, until the point where it vanished into convergence, far ahead. She was trying to resolve this paradox when she realised—dizzyingly—that at that moment she must only be seeing a small fraction of the distance along the deck. It was like climbing a dome-shaped hill: the summit was always tan-talisingly out of reach.

She walked to another viewing point and looked back. The first half-dozen vehicles of this flank of the caravan were now on the bridge proper, and the sheer walls of the cliff were drop-ping back to the rear, offering her the first real opportunity to judge the depth of the Rift.

It fell away with indecent swiftness. The cliff walls were etched and gouged with titanic geological clawmarks, here vertical, there horizontal, elsewhere diagonal or curled and folded into each other in a display of obscene liquidity. The walls sparkled and spangled with blue-grey ice and murkier seams of darker sediment. The ledge that the caravan had traversed, visible now to the left, appeared far too narrow and hesitant to be used as a road, let alone by something weighing fifty thousand tonnes. Beneath the ledge, Rashmika now saw, the cliff often curved in to a worrying degree. She had never exactly felt safe during the traverse, but she had convinced herself that the ground beneath them continued down for more than a few dozen metres.

She did not see the quaestor again during the rest of the crossing. Within an hour she judged that the opposite wall of the Rift looked only slightly further away than the one that was receding behind them. They must be nearing the midpoint of the bridge. Quickly, therefore, but with the minimum of fuss, Rashmika put on her vacuum suit and stole up through the caravan to its roof.

From the top of the vehicle things looked very different from the sanitised, faintly unreal scene she had observed from the pressurised compartment. She now had a panoramic view of the entire Rift, and it was much easier to see the floor, which was a good dozen kilometres below. From this perspective, the Rift floor almost appeared to be creeping forwards as the flat ribbon of the road bed streaked backwards beneath the caravan. This contradiction made her feel immediately dizzy, and she was gripped by an urgent desire to flatten herself on the roof of the machine, spread-eagled so that she could not possibly topple over the edge. But although she bent her knees, lowering her centre of gravity, Rashmika managed to screw up the courage to remain standing.

The road bed appeared only slightly wider than the caravan. They were moving down the middle of it, only occasionally veering to one side or the other to avoid a patch of thickened ice or some other obstruction. There were rocks on the frozen surface of the road, deposited there from volcanic plumes else-where on Hela. Some of them were half as high as the caravan’s wheels. The fact that they had managed to smash on to the road without shattering the bridge gave her a tiny flicker of reassurance. And if the road bed was just wide enough to accommodate the two rows of vehicles that made up the caravan, then it was clearly absurd to think of a cathedral making the same journey.

That was when she noticed something down in the floor of the Rift. It was a huge smear of rubble, kilometres across. It was dark and star-shaped, and as far as she could tell the epicentre of the smear lay almost directly beneath the bridge. Near the centre of the star were vague suggestions of ruined structures. Rashmika saw what she thought might be the uppermost part of a spire, leaning to one side. She made out sketchy hints of smashed machinery, smothered in dust and debris.

So someone had tried to cross the bridge with a cathedral.

She moved between the vehicles, focusing dead ahead as she made her own personal crossing. The Observers were still on their racks, tilted towards the swollen sphere of Haldora. Their mirrored faceplates made her think of dozens of neatly packed titanium eggs.

Then she saw another suited figure waiting on the next vehicle along, resting against a railing on one side of the roof. It became aware of her presence at about the same time that she noticed it, for the figure turned to her and beckoned her onwards.

She moved past the Observers, then crossed another swaying connection. The caravan swerved alarmingly to negotiate the chicane between two rockfalls, then bounced and crunched its way over a series of smaller obstructions.

The other figure wore a vacuum suit of unremarkable design. She had no idea whether it was the same kind that the Observers wore, since she had never seen beneath their habits. The mirrored silver visor gave nothing away.

“Pietr?” she asked, on the general channel.

There was no response, but the figure still urged her on with increased urgency.

What if this was a trap of some kind? The quaestor had known about her conversation with the young man. It was quite likely that he also knew about her earlier assignation on the roof. Rashmika had little doubt that she would be making enemies during the course of her investigations, but she did not think she had made any yet, unless one counted the quaestor. But since he had now arranged work for her in the clearance gang, she imagined that he had a vested interest in seeing her safely delivered to the Permanent Way.

Rashmika approached the figure, weighing possibilities all the while. The figure’s suit was a hard-shelled model, closely fitting the anatomy of its wearer. The helmet and limb parts were olive green, the accordion joints gleaming silver. Unlike the suits she had seen being worn by the walking pilgrims, it was completely lacking in any ornamentation or religious frippery.

The faceplate turned to her. She saw highlights glance off a face behind the glass, the hard shadow beneath well-defined cheekbones.

Pietr extended an arm and with the other hand folded back a flap on the wrist of the outstretched arm. He unspooled a thin optical fibre and offered the other end to Rashmika.

Of course. Secure communication. She took the fibre and plugged it into the corresponding socket on her own suit. Such fibres were designed to allow suit-to-suit communications in the event of a radio or general network failure. They were also ideal for privacy.

“I’m glad you made it,” Pietr said.

“I wish I understood the reason for all the cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

“Better safe than sorry. I shouldn’t really have talked to you about the vanishings at all, at least not down in the caravan. Do you think anyone overheard us?”

“The quaestor came and had a quiet word with me when you had gone.”

“That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” Pietr said. “He’s not really a religious man, but he knows which side his bread’s buttered on. The churches pay his salary, so he doesn’t want anyone rocking the boat with unorthodox rumours.”

“You were hardly calling for the abolition of the churches,” Rashmika replied. “From what I remember, all we discussed was the vanishings.”

“Well, that’s dangerous enough, in some people’s views. Talking of which—views, I mean—isn’t this something else?” Pietr pivoted around on his heels, illustrating his point with an expansive sweep of his free hand.

Rashmika smiled at his enthusiasm. “I’m not sure. I’m not really one for heights.”

“Oh, c’mon. Forget all that stuff about the vanishings, forget your enquiry—whatever it is—just for now. Admire the view. Millions of people will never, ever see what you’re seeing now.”

“It feels as if we’re trespassing,” Rashmika said, “as if the scuttlers built this bridge to be admired, but never used.”

“I don’t know much about them. I’d say we haven’t a clue what they thought, if they even built this thing. But the bridge is here, isn’t it? It seems an awful shame not to make some use of it, even if it’s only once in a while.”

Rashmika looked down at the star-shaped smear. “Is it true what the quaestor told me? Did someone once try to take a cathedral across this thing?”

“So they say. Not that you’ll find any evidence of it in any ecumenical records.”

She grasped the railing tighter, still beguiled by the remoteness of the ground so far below. “But it did happen, all the same?”

“It was a splinter sect,” Pietr said. “A one-off church, with a small cathedral. They called themselves the Numericists. They weren’t affiliated to any of the ecumenical organisations, and they had very limited trading agreements with the other churches. Their belief system was… odd. It wasn’t just a question of being in doctrinal conflict with any of the other churches. They were polytheists, for a start. Most of the churches are strictly monotheistic, with strong ties to the old Abrahamic religions. Hellfire and brimstone churches, I call them. One God, one Heaven, one Hell. But the ones who made that mess down there… they were a lot stranger. They weren’t the only polytheists, but their entire world view—their entire cosmology—was so hopelessly unorthodox that there was no possibility of interecumenical dialogue. The Numericists were devout mathematicians. They viewed the study of numbers as the highest possible calling, the only valid way to approach the numinous. They believed there was one God for every class of number: a God of integers, a God of real numbers, a God of zero. They had subsidiary gods: a lesser god of irrational numbers, a lesser god of the Diophantine primes. The other churches couldn’t stomach that kind of weirdness. So the Numericists were frozen out, and in due course they became insular and paranoid.”

“Not surprising, under the circumstances.”

“But there’s something else. They were interested in a statistical interpretation of the vanishings, using some pretty arcane probability theories. It was tricky. There hadn’t been so many vanishings at that time, so the data was sparser—but their methods, they said, were robust enough to be able to cope. And what they came up with was devastating.”

“Go on,” Rashmika said. She finally understood why Pietr had wanted her to come up on to the roof midway through the crossing.

“They were the first to claim that the vanishings were increasing in frequency, but it was statistically difficult to prove. There, was already anecdotal evidence that they occurred in closely spaced clusters, but now, or so the Numericists claimed, the spaces between the clusters were growing shorter. They also claimed that the vanishings themselves were growing longer in duration, although they admitted that the evidence for that was much less ‘significant,’ in the statistical sense.”

“But they were right, weren’t they?”

Pietr nodded, the reflected landscape tilting in his helmet. “At least for the first part. Now even crude statistical methods will show the same result. The vanishings are definitely becoming more frequent.”

“And the second part?”

“Not proven. But all the new data hasn’t disproved it, either.”

Again Rashmika risked a glance down at the smear. “But what happened to them? Why did they end up down there?”

“No one really knows. As I said, the churches don’t even admit that an attempt at a crossing ever took place. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find grudging acknowledgement that the Numericists once existed—paperwork relating to rare trade dealings, for instance—but you won’t find anything about them ever crossing Absolution Gap.”

“It happened, though.”

“They tried it, yes. No one will ever know why, I think. Perhaps it was a last-ditch attempt to steal prestige from the churches that had frozen them out. Perhaps they’d worked out a short cut that would bring them ahead of the main procession without ever losing sight of Haldora. It doesn’t matter, really. They had a reason, they tried to make the crossing, and they failed. Why they failed, that’s something else.”

“The bridge didn’t give way,” Rashmika said.

“No—doesn’t look as if it did. Their cathedral was small, by the standards of the main ones. From the position of the impact point we can tell they made it a good way across the bridge before sliding off, so it wasn’t a question of the bridge buckling. My guess is it was always a delicate balancing act, with the cathedral extending either side of the road, and that midway over they lost navigational control just long enough to topple over. Who knows?”

“But you think there’s another possibility.”

“They hadn’t made themselves popular, what with all that statistical stuff about the vanishings. Remember what I said about the other churches not wanting to know about the increasing frequency?”

“They don’t want the world to change.”

“No, they don’t. They’ve got a nice arrangement as it stands. Keep circling Hela, keep monitoring Haldora, make a living exporting scuttler relics to the rest of human space. In the high church echelons, things are fine as they are, thank you very much. They don’t want any rumours of apocalypse upsetting their gravy train.”

“So you think someone destroyed the Numericists’ cathedral.”

“Like I said, don’t go trying to prove anything. Of course, it could have been an accident. No one has ever said that taking a cathedral across Absolution Gap was a wise course of action.”

“Despite all that, Pietr, you still have faith?” She saw his fist close tighter on the rail.

“I believe that the vanishings are a message in a time of crisis. Not just a mute statement of Godlike power, as the churches would have it—a miracle for a miracle’s sake—but something vastly more significant. I believe that they are a kind of clock, counting down, and that zero hour is much closer than anyone in authority will have us believe. The Numericists knew this. Do I believe that the churches are to be trusted? By and large, with one or two exceptions, no. I trust them about as far as I can piss in vacuum. But I still have my faith. That hasn’t changed.”

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 from 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.

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.