The Revelation Space Collection (346 page)

Quaiche and Grelier had been stranded.

But they were not doomed. They’d had all they needed to survive on Hela for years to come, courtesy of the surface camp already established. They had begun to explore, riding out in the surface rovers. They had collected scuttler parts, trying to fit the weird alien fossils together into some kind of coherent whole, always failing. To Quaiche it had become an obsessive enterprise. Above him, the puzzle of Haldora. Below, the maddening taxonomic jigsaw of the scuttlers. He had thrown himself into both mysteries, knowing that somehow they were linked, knowing that in finding the answer he would understand why he had been saved and Morwenna sacrificed. He had believed that the puzzles were tests from God. He had also believed that only he was truly capable of solving them.

A year had passed, then another. They circumnavigated Hela, using the rovers to carve out a rough trail. With each circumnavigation, the trail became better defined. They had made excursions to the north and south, veering away from the equator to where the heaviest concentrations of scuttler relics were to be found. Here they had mined and tunnelled, gathering more pieces of the jigsaw. Always, however, they had returned to the equator to mull over what they had found.

And one day, in the second or third year, Quaiche had realised something critical: that he must witness another vanishing.

‘If it happens again, I have to see it,’ he had told Grelier.

‘But if it does happen again - for no particular reason - then you’ll know it isn’t a miracle.’

‘No,’ Quaiche had said, emphatically. ‘If it happens twice, I’ll know that God wanted to show it to me again for a reason, that he wanted to make sure there could be no doubt in my mind that such a thing had already happened.’

Grelier had decided to play along. ‘But you have the telemetry from the
Dominatrix
. It confirms that Haldora vanished. Isn’t that enough for you?’

Quaiche had dismissed this point with a wave of his hand. ‘Numbers in electronic registers. I didn’t see it with my own eyes. This means something to me.’

‘Then you’ll have to watch Haldora for ever.’ Hastily, Grelier had corrected himself. ‘I mean, until it vanishes again. But how long did it disappear for last time? Less than a second? Less than an eyeblink? What if you miss it?’

‘I’ll have to try not to.’

‘For half a year you can’t even see Haldora.’ Grelier had pointed out, sweeping his arm overhead. ‘It rises and falls.’

‘Only if you don’t follow it. We circled Hela in under three months the first time we tried; under two the second time. It would be easier still to travel slowly, keeping pace with Haldora. One-third of a metre a second, that’s all it would take. Keep up that pace, stay close to the equator, and Haldora will always be overhead. It’ll just be the landscape that changes.’

Grelier had shaken his head in wonderment. ‘You’ve already thought this through.’

‘It wasn’t difficult. We’ll lash together the rovers, make a travelling observation platform.’

‘And sleep? And blinking?’

‘You’re the physician,’ Quaiche had said. ‘You figure it out.’ And figure it out he had. Sleep could be banished with drugs and neurosurgery, coupled with a little dialysis to mop up fatigue poisons. He had taken care of the blinking as well.

‘Ironic, really,’ Grelier had observed to Quaiche. ‘This is what she threatened you with in the scrimshaw suit: no sleep and an unchanging view of reality. Yet now you welcome it.’

‘Things changed,’ Quaiche had said.

Now, standing in the garret, the years collapsed away. For Grelier, time had passed in a series of episodic snapshots, for he was only revived from reefersleep when Quaiche had some immediate need of him. He remembered that first slow circumnavigation, keeping pace with Haldora, the rovers lashed together like a raft. A year or two later another ship had arrived: more Ultras, drawn by the faint flash of energy from the dying
Gnostic Ascension
. They were curious, naturally cautious. They kept their ship at a safe distance and sent down emissaries in expendable vehicles. Quaiche traded with them for parts and services, offering scuttler relics in return.

A decade or two later, following trade exchanges with the first ship, another had arrived. They were just as wary, just as keen to trade. The scuttler relics were exactly what the market wanted. And this time the ship was willing to offer more than components: there were sleepers in its belly, disaffected émigrés from some colony neither Quaiche nor Grelier had ever heard of. The mystery of Hela - the rumours of miracle - had drawn them across the light-years.

Quaiche had his first disciples.

Thousands more had arrived. Tens of thousands, then hundreds. For the Ultras, Hela was now a lucrative stopover on the strung-out, fragile web of interstellar commerce. The core worlds, the old places of trade, were now out of bounds, touched by plague and war. Lately, perhaps, by something worse than either. It was difficult to tell: very few ships were making it out to Hela from those places now. When they did, they brought with them confused stories of things emerging from interstellar space, fiercely mechanical things, implacable and old, that ripped through worlds, engorging themselves on organic life, but which were themselves no more alive than clocks or orreries. Those who came to Hela now came not only to witness the miraculous vanishings, but because they believed that they lived near the end of time and that Hela was a point of culmination, a place of final pilgrimage.

The Ultras brought them as paid cargo in their ships and pretended to have no interest in the local situation beyond its immediate commercial value. For some, this was probably true, but Grelier knew Ultras better than most and he believed that lately he had seen something in their eyes - a fear that had nothing to do with the size of their profit margins and everything to do with their own survival. They had seen things as well, he presumed. Glimpses, perhaps: phantoms stalking the edge of human space. For years they must have dismissed these as travellers’ tales, but now, as news from the core colonies stopped arriving, they were beginning to wonder.

There were Ultras on Hela now. Under the terms of trade, their lighthugger starships were not permitted to come close to either Haldora or its inhabited moon. They congregated in a parking swarm on the edge of the system, dispatching smaller shuttles to Hela. Representatives of the churches inspected these shuttles, ensuring that they carried no recording or scanning equipment pointed at Haldora. It was a gesture more than anything, one that could have been easily circumvented, but the Ultras were surprisingly pliant. They wanted to play along, for they needed the business.

Quaiche was completing his dealings with an Ultra when Grelier arrived in the garret. ‘Thank you, Captain, for your time,’ he said, his ghost of a voice rising in grey spirals from the life-support couch.

‘I’m sorry we weren’t able to come to an agreement,’ the Ultra replied, ‘but you appreciate that the safety of my ship must be my first priority. We are all aware of what happened to the
Gnostic Ascension
.’

Quaiche spread his thin-boned fingers by way of sympathy. ‘Awful business. I was lucky to survive.’

‘So we gather.’

The couch angled towards Grelier. ‘Surgeon-General Grelier . . . might I introduce Captain Basquiat of the lighthugger
Bride of the Wind
?’

Grelier bowed his head politely at Quaiche’s new guest. The Ultra was not as extreme as some that Grelier had encountered, but still odd and unsettling by baseline standards. He was very thin and colourless, like some desiccated weather-bleached insect, but propped upright in a blood-red support skeleton ornamented with silver lilies. A very large moth accompanied the Ultra: it fluttered before his face, fanning it.

‘My pleasure,’ Grelier said, placing down the medical kit with its cargo of blood-filled syringes. ‘I hope you had a nice time on Hela.’

‘Our visit was fruitful, Surgeon-General. It wasn’t possible to accommodate the last of Dean Quaiche’s wishes, but otherwise, I believe both parties are satisfied with proceedings.’

‘And the other small matter we discussed?’ Quaiche asked.

‘The reefersleep fatalities? Yes, we have around two dozen brain-dead cases. In better times we might have been able to restore neural structure with the right sort of medichine intervention. Not now, however.’

‘We’d be happy to take them off your hands,’ Grelier said. ‘Free up the casket slots for the living.’

The Ultra flicked the moth away from his lips. ‘You have a particular use for these vegetables?’

‘The surgeon-general takes an interest in their cases,’ Quaiche said, interrupting before Grelier had a chance to say anything. ‘He likes to attempt experimental neural rescripting procedures, don’t you, Grelier?’ He looked away sharply, not waiting for an answer. ‘Now, Captain - do you need any special assistance in returning to your ship?’

‘None that I am aware of, thank you.’

Grelier looked out of the east-facing window of the garret. At the other end of the ridged roof of the main hall was a landing pad, on which a small shuttle was parked. It was the bright yellow-green of a stick insect.

‘Godspeed back to the parking swarm, Captain. We await transhipment of those unfortunate casket victims. And I look forward to doing business with you on another occasion.’

The captain turned to walk out, but paused before leaving. He had noticed the scrimshaw suit for the first time, Grelier thought. It was always there, standing in the corner of the room like a silent extra guest. The captain stared at it, his moth fluttering orbits around his head, then continued on his way. He could have no idea of the dreadful significance it represented to Quaiche: the final resting place of Morwenna and an ever-present reminder of what the first vanishing had cost him.

Grelier waited until he was certain the Ultra was not coming back. ‘What was all that about?’ he asked. ‘The extra stuff he “couldn’t accommodate”?’

‘The usual negotiations,’ Quaiche said, as if the matter was beneath him. ‘Count yourself lucky that you’ll get your vegetables. Now - Bloodwork, eh? How did it go?’

‘Wait a moment.’ Grelier moved to one wall and worked a brass-handled lever. The jalousies folded shut, admitting only narrow wedges of light. Then he bent down over Quaiche and removed the sunglasses. Quaiche normally kept them on during his negotiations: partly to protect his eyes against glare, but also because without them he was not a pretty sight. Of course, that was precisely the reason he sometimes chose not to wear them, as well.

Beneath the eyeshades, hugging the skin like a second pair of glasses, was a skeletal framework. Around each eye were two circles from which radiated hooks, thrusting inwards to keep the eyelids from closing. There were little sprays built into the frames, blasting Quaiche’s eyes with moisture every few minutes. It would have been simpler, Grelier said, to have removed the eyelids in the first place, but Quaiche had a penitential streak as wide as the Way, and the discomfort of the frame suited him. It was a constant reminder of the need for vigilance, lest he miss a vanishing.

Grelier took a small swab from the garret’s medical locker and cleaned away the residue around Quaiche’s eyes.

‘Bloodwork, Grelier?’

‘I’ll come to that. Just tell me what that business with the Ultra was all about. Why did you want him to bring his ship closer to Hela?’

Visibly, Quaiche’s pupils dilated. ‘Why do you think that’s what I wanted of him?’

‘Isn’t it? Why else would he have said that it was too dangerous?’

‘You presume a great deal, Grelier.’

The surgeon-general finished cleaning up, then slotted the top pair of glasses back into place. ‘Why do you want the Ultras closer, all of a sudden? For years you’ve worked hard to keep the bastards at arm’s-reach. Now you want one of their ships on your doorstep?’

The figure in the couch sighed. He had more substance in the darkness. Grelier opened the slats again, observing that the yellow-green shuttle had departed from the landing pad.

‘It was just an idea,’ Quaiche said.

‘What kind of idea?’

‘You’ve seen how nervous the Ultras are lately. I trust them less and less. Basquiat seemed like a man I could do business with. I was hoping we might come to an arrangement.’

‘What sort of arrangement?’ Grelier returned the swabs to the cabinet.

‘Protection,’ Quaiche said. ‘Bring one group of Ultras here to keep the rest of them away.’

‘Madness,’ Grelier said.

‘Insurance,’ his master corrected. ‘Well, what does it matter? They weren’t interested. Too worried about bringing their ship near to Hela. This place scares them as much as it tantalises them, Grelier.’

‘There’ll always be others.’

‘Perhaps . . .’ Quaiche sounded as if the whole business was already boring him, a mid-morning fancy he now regretted.

‘You asked about Bloodwork,’ Grelier said. He knelt down and picked up the case. ‘It didn’t go swimmingly, but I collected from Vaustad.’

‘The choirmaster? Weren’t you supposed to be administering?’

‘Wee change of plan.’

Bloodwork: the Office of the Clocktower dedicated to the preservation, enrichment and dissemination of the countless viral strains spun off from Quaiche’s original infection. Almost everyone who worked in the cathedral carried some of Quaiche in their blood now. It had reached across generations, mutating and mingling with other types of virus brought to Hela. The result was a chaotic profusion of possible effects. Many of the other churches were based on, or had in some sense even been caused by, subtle doctrinal variants of the original strain. Bloodwork operated to tame the chaos, isolating effective and doctrinally pure strains and damping out others. Individuals like Vaustad were often used as test cases for newly isolated viruses. If they showed psychotic or otherwise undesirable side-effects, the strains would be eliminated. Vaustad had earned his role as guinea pig after a series of regrettable indiscretions, but had grown increasingly fearful of the results of each new test jab.