Absolution Gap (79 page)

Now that she thought she could explain the suit’s power she felt less disturbed by it. All the same, she was glad when she reached the other side of the garret, into full view of the dean. At first she thought he was dead. He was lying back on his couch, hands clasped across his blanketed chest like a man in the repose of the recently deceased. But then the chest moved. And the eyes—splayed open for examination—were horribly alive within their sockets. They trembled like little warm eggs about to hatch.

“Miss Els,” the dean said. “I hope your trip here was an enjoyable one.”

She couldn’t believe she was in his presence. “Dean Quaiche,” she said. “I heard . . . I thought . . .”

“That I was dead?” His voice was a rasp, the kind of sound an insect might have manufactured by the deft rubbing of chitinous surfaces. “I have never made any secret of my continued existence, Miss Els . . . for all these years. The congregation has seen me regularly.”

“The rumours are understandable,” Grelier said. The surgeon-general had opened a medical cabinet on the wall and was now fishing through its innards. “You don’t show your face outside of the Lady Morwenna, so how are the rest of the population expected to know?”

“Travel is difficult for me.” Quaiche pointed with one hand towards a small hexagonal table set amid the mirrors. “Have some tea, Miss Els. And sit down, take the weight off your feet. We have much to talk about.”

“I have no idea why I am here, Dean.”

“Didn’t Grelier tell you anything? I told you to brief the young lady, Grelier. I told you not to keep her in the dark.”

Grelier turned from the wall and walked towards Quaiche, carrying bottles and swabs. “I told her precisely what you asked me to tell her: that her services were required, and that our use for her depended critically on her sensitivity to facial microexpressions.”

“What else did you tell her?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

Rashmika sat down and poured herself some tea. There appeared little point in refusing. And now that she was being offered a drink she realised that she was very thirsty.

“I presume you want me to help you,” she ventured. “You need my skill, for some reason or other. There is someone you’re not sure if you trust or not.” She sipped at the tea: whatever she thought of her hosts, it tasted decent enough. “Am I warm?”

“You’re more than warm, Miss Els,” Quaiche remarked. “Have you always been this astute?”

“Were I truly astute, I’m not sure I’d be sitting here.”

Grelier leant over the Dean and began dabbing at the exposed whites of his eyes. She could see neither of their faces.

“You sound as if you have misgivings,” the dean said. “And yet all the evidence suggests you were rather keen on reaching the Lady Morwenna.”

“That was before I found out where it was going. How close are we to the bridge, Dean? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Two hundred and fifty-six kilometres distant,” he said.

Rashmika allowed herself a moment of relief. She sipped another mouthful of the tea. At the crawling pace the cathedrals maintained, that was sufficiently far away not to be of immediate concern. But even as she enjoyed that solace, another part of her mind quietly informed her that it was really much closer than she feared. A third of a metre a second did not sound very fast, but there were a lot of seconds in a day.

“We’ll be there in ten days,” the dean added.

Rashmika put down her tea. “Ten days isn’t very long, Dean. Is it true what they say, that you’ll be taking the Lady Morwenna over Absolution Gap?”

“God willing.”

That was the last thing she wanted to hear. “Forgive me, Dean, but the one thing I didn’t have in mind when I came here was dying in some suicidal folly.”

“No one’s going to die,” he told her. “The bridge has been proven able to take the weight of an entire supply caravan. Measurements have never detected an ångström of deflection under any load.”

“But no cathedral has ever crossed it.”

“Only one has ever tried, and it failed because of guidance control, not any structural problem with the bridge.”

“You think you’ll be more successful, I take it?”

“I have the finest cathedral engineers on the Way. And the finest cathedral, too. Yes, we’ll make it, Miss Els. We’ll make it and one day you’ll tell your children how fortunate you were to enter my employment at such an auspicious time.”

“I sincerely hope you’re right.”

“Did Grelier tell you that you could leave at any time?”

“Yes,” she said, hesitantly.

“It was the truth. Go now, Miss Els. Finish your tea and go. No one will stop you, and I will make arrangements for your employment in the Catherine. Good work, too.”

She was about to ask: the same good work you promised my brother? But she stopped herself. It was too soon to go barging in with another question about Harbin. She had come this far, and either extraordinary luck or extraordinary misfortune had propelled her into the heart of Quaiche’s order. She still did not know exactly what they wanted of her, but she knew she had been granted a chance that she must not throw away with one idle, ill-tempered question. Besides, there was another reason not to ask: she was frightened of what the answer might be.

“I’ll stay,” she said, adding quickly, “For now. Until we’ve talked things over properly.”

“Very wise, Miss Els,” Quaiche said. “Now, would you do me a small favour?”

“That would depend,” she said.

“I only want you to sit there and drink your tea. A gentleman is going to come into this room and he and I are going to have a little chat. I want you to observe the gentleman in question—carefully, but not obtrusively—and report your observations to me when the gentleman has departed. It won’t take long, and there’s no need for you to say anything while the man is present. In fact, it would be better if you didn’t.”

“Is that what you want me for?”

“That is part of it, yes. We can discuss terms of employment later. Consider this part of your interview.”

“And if I fail?”

“It isn’t a test. You’ve already been tested on your basic skills, Miss Els. You came through with flying colours. In this instance, I just want honest observation. Grelier, are you done yet? Stop fussing around. You’re like a little girl playing with her dolly.”

Grelier began to put away his swabs and ointments. “I’m done,” he said curtly. “That abscess has nearly stopped weeping pus.”

“Would you care for more tea before the gentleman arrives, Miss Els?”

“I’m fine with this,” she said, holding on to her empty cup.

“Grelier, make yourself scarce, then have the Ultra representative shown in.”

The surgeon-general locked the medical cabinet, said goodbye to Rashmika and walked out of the room by a different door than the one through which they had entered. His cane tapped into the distance.

Rashmika waited. Now that Grelier had gone she felt uncomfortable in Quaiche’s presence. She did not know what to say. She had never wanted to reach him specifically. She found the very idea distasteful. It was his order she had wanted to infiltrate, and then only to the point necessary to find Harbin. It was true that she did not care how much damage she did along the way, but Quaiche himself had never been of interest to her. Her mission was selfish, concerned only with the fate of her brother. If the Adventist church continued to inflict misery and hardship on the population of Hela, that was their problem, not hers. They were complicit in it, as much a part of the problem as Quaiche. And she had not come to change any of that, unless it stood in her way.

Eventually the representative arrived. Rashmika observed his entry, remembering that she had been told to say nothing. She presumed that extended to not even greeting the Ultra.

“Come in, Triumvir,” Quaiche said, his couch elevating to something approximating a normal sitting position. “Come in and don’t be alarmed. Triumvir, this is Rashmika Els, my assistant. Rashmika, this is Triumvir Guro Harlake of the lighthugger
That Which Passes,
recently arrived from Sky’s Edge.”

The Ultra arrived in a shuffling red mobility contraption. His skin had the smooth whiteness of a baby reptile’s, faintly tattooed with scales, and his eyes were partially concealed behind slitted yellow contacts. His short white hair fell over his face in a stiff, foppish fringe. His fingernails were long, green, vicious as scythes, and they kept clicking against the armature of his mobility device.

“We were the last ship out during the evacuation,” the Triumvir said. “There were ships behind us, but they didn’t make it.”

“How many systems have fallen so far?” Quaiche asked.

“Eight . . . nine. Maybe more by now. News takes decades to reach us. They say Earth is still intact, but there have been confirmed attacks against Mars and the Jovian polities, including the Europan Demarchy and Gilgamesh Isis. No one has heard anything from Zion or Prospekt. They say every system will fall eventually. It’ll just be a matter of time until they find us all.”

“In which case, why did you stop here? Wouldn’t it have been better to keep moving outwards, away from the threat?”

“We had no choice,” the Ultra said. His voice was deeper than Rashmika had expected. “Our contract required that we bring our passengers to Hela. Contracts mean a great deal to us.”

“An honest Ultra? What is the world coming to?”

“We’re not all vampires. Anyway, we had to stop for another reason, not just because our sleepers wanted to come here as pilgrims. We had shield difficulties. We can’t make another interstellar transit without major repairs.”

“Costly ones, I’d imagine,” Quaiche said.

The Triumvir bowed his head. “That is why we are having this conversation, Dean Quaiche. We heard that you had need of the services of a good ship. A matter of protection. You feel yourself threatened.”

“It’s not a question of feeling threatened,” he said. “It’s just that in these times . . . we’d be foolish not to want to protect our assets, wouldn’t we?”

“Wolves at the door,” the Ultra said.

“Wolves?”

“That’s what the Conjoiners named the Inhibitor machines, just before they evacuated human space. That was a century ago. If we’d had any sense we’d all have followed them.”

“God will protect us,” Quaiche said. “You believe that, don’t you? Even if you don’t, your passengers do, otherwise they wouldn’t have embarked upon this pilgrimage. They know something is going to happen, Triumvir. The series of vanishings we have witnessed here is merely the precursor—the countdown—to something truly miraculous.”

“Or something truly cataclysmic,” the Ultra said. “Dean, we are not here to discuss the interpretation of an anomalous astronomical phenomenon. We are strict positivists. We believe only in our ship and its running costs. And we need a new shield very badly. What are your terms of employment?”

“You will bring your ship into close orbit around Hela. Your weapons will be inspected for operational effectiveness. Naturally, a party of Adventist delegates will be stationed aboard your ship for the term of the contract. They will have complete control of the weapons, deciding who and what constitutes a threat to the security of Hela. In other respects, they won’t get in your way at all. And as our protectors, you will be in a very advantageous position when it comes to matters of trade.” Quaiche waved his hand, as if brushing away an insect. “You could walk away from here with a lot more than a new shield if you play your cards right.”

“You make it sound very tempting.” The Ultra drummed his fingernails against the chest-plate of his mobility device. “But don’t underestimate the risk that we perceive in bringing our ship close to Hela. We all know what happened to the . . .” He paused. “The
Gnostic Ascension.
”

“That’s why our terms are so generous.”

“And the matter of Adventist delegates? You should know how unusual it is for anyone to be permitted aboard one of our ships. We could perhaps accommodate two or three hand-picked representatives, but only after they had undergone extensive screening . . .”

“That part isn’t negotiable,” Quaiche said abruptly. “Sorry, Triumvir, but it all boils down to one thing: how badly do you want that shield?”

“We’ll have to think about it,” the Ultra said.

 

Afterwards, Quaiche asked Rashmika for her observations. She told him what she had picked up, restricting her remarks to the things she was certain she had detected rather than vague intuitions.

“He was truthful,” she said, “right up to the point where you mentioned his weapons. Then he was hiding something. His expression changed, just for a moment. I couldn’t tell you what it was, exactly, but I do know what it means.”

“Probably a contraction of the zygomaticus major,” Grelier said, sitting with his fingers knitted together before his face. He had removed his vacuum suit while he was away and now wore a plain grey Adventist smock. “Coupled with a depressing of the corners of the lips, using the risorius. Some flexion of the mentalis—chin elevation.”

“You saw all that, Surgeon-General?” Rashmika asked.

“Only by slowing down the observation camera and running a tedious and somewhat unreliable interpretive routine on his face. For an Ultra he was rather expressive. But it wasn’t in real-time, and even when the routine detected it, I didn’t see it for myself. Not viscerally. Not the way you saw it, Rashmika: instantly, written there as if in glowing letters.”

“He was hiding something,” she said. “If you’d pushed him on the topic of the weapons, he’d have lied to your face.”

“So his weapons aren’t what he makes them out to be,” Quaiche said.

“Then he’s no use to us,” Grelier said. “Tick him off the list.”

“We’ll keep him on just in case. The ship’s the main thing. We can always augment his weapons if we decide we have to.”