She laughed. It was good to hear someone laugh. Khouri was the last one he’d have expected it from. Before the trip to the iceberg she had struck him as monomanically driven, like a purposeful preprogrammed weapon sent down from the heavens. But he understood now that she was as fragile and human as the rest of them. Whatever “human” meant for a pig.
“Mind if I ask you something?” he said. “If you’re sleepy, I can come back in a little while.”
“Fetch me that water, will you?”
He brought her the beaker of water she’d indicated. She drank half of it down, then wiped the white scurf from her moistened lips. “Go on, Scorp.”
“You have a link to Aura, don’t you? A mental connection, via the implants Remontoire put in both of you?”
“Yes,” she said, guardedly.
“Do you understand everything that comes through it?”
“How do you mean?”
“You said that Aura speaks through you. Fine, I think I understand that. But do you ever pick up unintentional stuff?”
“Like what?”
“You know the leakage we have from the wolf war? Stuff slipping through the defences? Do you ever get leakage from Aura, things that cross over the gap between you, but which you can’t process?”
“I wouldn’t know.” She sounded less happy now than she had a minute earlier. She was frowning. The windows had slammed shut again. “What sort of thing were you thinking of, exactly?”
“Not sure,” he said. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s just a shot in the dark. When we pulled you out of that capsule, Valensin hit you with sedatives because you wouldn’t let us examine you. Knocked you out good and cold. But in your sleep you still kept saying something.”
“I did, did I?”
“The word was ‘Hella,’ or something like that. It appeared to mean something to you, but when we asked you about it, you gave me what I’d call a plausible denial. I’m inclined to believe you were telling the truth, that the word doesn’t mean anything to you. But I’m wondering if it might mean something to Aura.”
She looked at him with suspicion and interest. “Does it mean anything to you?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Certainly doesn’t mean anything to anyone on Ararat. But in the wider sphere of human culture? Could mean almost anything. Lot of languages out there. Lot of people, lot of places.”
“Still can’t help you.”
“I understand. But the thing is, while I was sitting here waiting for you to wake up, you said something else.”
“What did I say?”
“Quaiche.”
She lifted the beaker to her lips and finished what remained of the water. “Still doesn’t mean anything to me,” she said.
“Pity. I was hoping it might ring some bells.”
“Well, maybe it means something to Aura. I don’t know, all right? I’m just her mother. Remontoire wasn’t a miracle worker. He linked us together, but it’s not as if everything she thinks is accessible to me. I’d go mad if that was the case.” Khouri paused. “You’ve got databases and things. Why don’t you query them?”
“I will, when things quieten down.” Scorpio pushed himself up from the seat. “One other thing: I understand you communicated a particular desire to Doctor Valensin?”
“Yeah, I talked to the doc.” She said it in a lilting voice, parodying his earlier tone.
“I understand why you want that to happen. I respect your wish and sympathise with you. If there was a safe way . . . ”
She closed her eyes. “She’s my baby. They stole her from me. Now I want to give birth to her, the way it was meant to happen.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I just can’t allow it.”
“There’s no room for argument, is there?”
“None at all, I’m afraid.”
She did not reply, did not even turn away from him, but there was a withdrawal and the sliding down of a barrier he didn’t have to see to feel.
Scorpio turned from the bed and walked slowly out of the room. He had expected her to weep when he broke the news. If not weeping, then hysterics or insults or pleading. But she remained still, silent, as if she had always known it would happen this way. As he walked away, the force of her dignity made the back of his neck tingle. But it changed nothing.
Aura was a child. But she was also a tactical asset.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Ararat, 2675
In the deep cloisters of the ship, Antoinette halted. “John?” she said. “It’s me again. I’ve come down to talk to you.”
Antoinette knew he was nearby. She knew that he was watching her, alert to her every gesture. When the wall moved, pushing itself into the bas-relief image of a spacesuited figure, she controlled her natural instinct to flinch. It was not quite what she had been expecting, but it was still an apparition.
“Thanks,” she said. “Good to see you again.”
The figure was a suggestion rather than an accurate sketch. The image shimmered, the wall’s deformations undergoing constant and rapid change, fluttering and rippling like a flag in a stiff gale. When the image occasionally broke up, fading back into the rough texture of the wall, it was as if the figure was being hidden by scarves of windblown Martian dust cutting horizontally across the field of view.
The figure gestured to her, raising an arm, touching one gloved hand to the narrow visor of its space helmet.
Antoinette raised her own hand in greeting, but the figure on the wall merely repeated the gesture, more emphatically this time.
Then she remembered the goggles that the Captain had given her the time before. She slipped them from her pocket and settled them over her eyes. Again the view through the goggles was synthetic, but this time—for now, at least—nothing was being edited out of her visual field. This reassured her. She had not enjoyed the feeling that large and possibly dangerous elements in her vicinity were being masked from her perception. It was shocking to think that for centuries people had accepted such manipulation of their environment as a perfectly normal aspect of life, regarding such perceptual filtering as no more remarkable than the wearing of sunglasses or earmuffs. It was even more shocking to think that they had allowed the machinery controlling that filtering to creep into their skulls, where it could make the trickery even more seamless. The Demarchists—and, for that matter, the Conjoiners—truly were strange people. She was sad about many things, but not the fact that she had been born too late to participate in such reality-modifying games. She liked to reach out for something and know it was really there.
But the goggles were a necessary evil. In the Captain’s realm, she had to consent to his rules.
The bas-relief image took a definite step towards her and then emerged from the wall, solid now, taking on form and detail, exactly as if a physical person had stepped out of a highly localised sandstorm.
Now she did flinch, for the illusion of presence was striking. She could not help but take a step backwards.
There was something different about the manifestation this time. The space helmet was not quite as ancient as the one she remembered, and it was covered in different symbols. The suit, while still of an old design, was not as utterly archaic as the first he had worn. The chest-pack was more streamlined, and the whole suit fitted its wearer more tightly. Antoinette was no expert, but she judged that the new suit must be fifty-odd years ahead of the one he had worn last time.
She wondered what
that
meant.
She was on the point of taking another step backwards when the Captain halted his approach and again raised a gloved hand. The gesture served to calm her, which was probably the intention. Then he began to work the mechanism of his visor, sliding it up with a conspicuous hiss of equalising air pressure.
The face inside the helmet was instantly recognisable, but it was also the face of an older man. There were lines where there had been none before, grey in the stubble that still shadowed his cheeks. There were wrinkles around his eyes, which appeared more deeply set. The cast of his mouth was different, too, curving downwards at the corners.
His voice, when he spoke, was both deeper and more ragged. “You don’t give up easily, do you?”
“As a rule, no. Do you remember the last chat we had, John?”
“Adequately.” With one hand he punched a matrix of controls set into the upper surface of the chest-pack, keying in a chain of commands. “How long ago was it?”
“Do you mind if I ask you how long ago you think it was?”
“No.”
She waited. The Captain looked at her, his expression blank.
“How long ago do you think it was?” she asked, eventually.
“A couple of months. Several years of shiptime. Two days. Three minutes. One point one eight milliseconds. Fifty-four years.”
“Two days is about right,” she said.
“I’ll take your word for it. As you’ll have gathered, my memory isn’t quite the razor-sharp faculty it once was.”
“Still, you did remember that I’d come before. That counts for something, doesn’t it?”
“You’re a very charitable person, Antoinette.”
“I’m not surprised that your memory works in funny ways, John. But it’s enough for me that you remembered my name. Do you remember anything else we talked about?”
“Give me a clue.”
“The visitors, John? The presences in the system?”
“They’re still here,” he said. For a moment he was again distracted by the functions of his chest-pack. He looked more vigilant than concerned. She saw him tap the little bracelet of controls that encircled one wrist, then nod as if satisfied with some subtle change in the suit’s parameter settings.
“Yes,” she said.
“They’re also closer. Aren’t they?”
“We think so, John. That’s what Khouri told us was happening, and everything she’s said has checked out so far.”
“I’d listen to her, if I were you.”
“It’s not just a question of listening to Khouri now. We have her daughter. Her daughter knows things, or so we’ve been led to believe. We think we may have to start listening to what she tells us to do.”
“Clavain will guide you. Like me, he understands the reach of historical time. We’re both phantoms from the past, hurtling into futures neither of us expected to see.”
Antoinette bit her lower lip. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got some bad news. Clavain’s dead. He was killed saving Khouri’s daughter. We have Scorpio, but . . .”
The Captain was a long time answering. She wondered if the news of Clavain’s death had affected him more than she had anticipated. She had never thought of Clavain and the Captain as having any kinship, but now that the Captain put it like that, the two had a lot more in common with each other than with most of their peers.
“You don’t have absolute faith in Scorpio’s leadership?” he asked.
“Scorpio’s served us well. In a crisis, you couldn’t ask for a better leader. But he’d be the first to admit that he doesn’t think strategically.”
“Then find another leader.”
Something happened then that surprised her. Unbidden, she had a flashback to the earlier meeting in the High Conch. She saw Blood swaggering in at the start of it and then she saw Vasko Malinin arriving late for the same meeting. She saw Blood reprimanding him for his lateness and Vasko shrugging off that same reprimand as an irrelevance. And she realised, with hindsight, that she had accepted the young man’s insouciance as a necessary correlative to what he was and what he would become, and that she had, on some level, found it admirable.
She had seen a gleam of something shining through, like steel.
“This isn’t about leaders,” Antoinette said hastily. “It’s about you, John. Are you intending to leave?”
“You suggested I should give the matter some thought.”
She recalled those elevating neutrino levels. “You seem to be giving it a bit more than thought.”
“Perhaps.”
“We need to be careful,” she said. “We may well need to get into space at short notice, but we have to think about the consequences for those around us. It will take days to get everyone loaded aboard, even if everything goes without a hitch.”
“There are thousands aboard now. Their survival will have to be my main priority. I’m sorry about the others, but if they don’t get here in time they may have to be left behind. Does that sound callous to you?”
“I’m not the one to judge. Look, some people will choose to stay behind anyway. We may even encourage them, just in case leaving Ararat turns out to be a mistake. But if you leave now, you’ll kill everyone not already aboard.”
“Have you considered moving them aboard faster?”
“We’re doing what we can, and we’ve begun to make plans to relocate a limited number of people away from the bay. But by this time tomorrow there’ll still be at least a hundred thousand people we haven’t moved.”
For a moment the Captain faded back into the dust storm. Antoinette stared at the rough leathery texture of the wall. She thought she had lost him and was about to turn away. Then he emerged again, stooping against an imagined wind.
He raised his voice over something only he could hear. “I’m sorry, Antoinette. I understand your concerns.”
“Does that mean you’ve listened to a word I said, or are you just going to leave when it suits you, regardless?”
He reached up to lower his visor. “You should do all that you can to get the others to safety, whether it’s aboard the ship or further from the bay.”
“That’s it, then, is it? Those that we haven’t moved will just have to take their chances?”
“None of this is easy for me.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to wait until we can get everyone to safety.”
“But it might, Antoinette. It might do exactly that.”
Antoinette turned away in disgust. “Remember what I told you last time? I was wrong. I see it now, even if I didn’t then.”
“What was that exactly?”
She looked back at him. She felt spiteful and reckless. “I said you’d paid for your crimes. I said you’d done it a hundred thousand times over. Nice dream, John, but it wasn’t true, was it? You didn’t care a damn about those people. It was only ever about saving yourself.”