Zima Blue and Other Stories (48 page)

Authors: Alastair Reynolds

Tags: #02 Science-Fiction

BOOK: Zima Blue and Other Stories

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'That was when they made the offer.'

'Yes. They'd already dropped hints here and there along the line that our - how shall I say it? That our existence wasn't quite as we imagined it to be; that there was some fundamental aspect of our nature that we just weren't aware of.' Ivan held his hand up to the candlelight, as if appalled at some new translucence in his flesh. 'You humans, they'd say, you just don't
get
it, do you? That was what it was like. They said that we could spend our remaining time asking them little questions, and not even chipping at this one fundamental misapprehension - or we could arrange for one person to be, shall I say,
enlightened
?'

'And you were selected,' Sergio said.

'Put my name forward, didn't I? Ivan Pashenkov: effluent disposal technician from Smolensk. Didn't think I had a chance in hell - or Perdition, huh? Don't laugh so much, son.'

'How did you feel when they selected you, out of all the millions who applied?'

'Very drunk. Or was that the day afterwards? Hell, I don't know. How was I meant to feel? Privileged? It wasn't as if they picked me on my merit. It was sheer luck.'

After his selection, the Kiwidinok had taken him aboard their ship, along with a handful of permitted recording devices small enough to be worn about his person. Preparing to depart, the ship had encased itself in a field of polarised inertia, defining a preferred axis along which resistance to acceleration was essentially zero, essentially infinite in all directions perpendicular to that axis. For interstellar travel, this was hardly an inconvenience.

'They immobilised me,' Ivan said. 'Locked me in a pod, and pumped me full of drugs.'

'How was it?'

He reached up with one hand and traced a line along the occipital crown of his skull, fingertips skating through the veil-like hair that still haloed his scalp. 'The brain's divided into two hemispheres; certain mental tasks assigned to one or the other half, like language, or appreciating a good wine, or making love to a woman.' The remark hung in the air, like an accusing finger. Then he resumed: 'There's a tangle of nerves bridging the hemispheres: the commissure or corpus callosum. They're the means by which we synthesise the different models of the world constructed in either hemisphere; the analytic and the emotional, for instance. But the Kiwidinok drive did something to my head. Nerve impulses found it difficult to cross the commissure, because it required movement against the preferred axis of the polarisation field. I found my thoughts - my conscious experience - stagnating in one or the other hemisphere. I'd think of things, but I couldn't assign names to any of the mental symbols I was imagining, because the requisite neural paths were obstructed.'

'But it didn't last long.'

He waved his hand. 'Longer than you think. We got there, eventually. They showed me the sun and it was faint, but not nearly as faint as the brightest stars, which meant they couldn't have carried me very far beyond the system.'

'Just beyond the cometary halo.'

'Mm. To within a few light-minutes of Perdition, except of course we didn't even know it existed.'

'Everything that you've told me,' Sergio said, 'accords exactly with what we were told in the seminary. If you now reveal that the object in question was a neutron star, I don't see how your account can differ in any significant way from the standard teachings. I mean, the mere existence of--'

'It exists,' Ivan said. 'And it's everything I ever said it was. But where it
differs
. . .' Then he paused, and allowed Sergio to bring another beaker of water to his lips, from which he drank sparingly, as if the fluid was rationed. Sergio recalled his own thirst much earlier, in the Juggernaut of the clanfolk caravan, after the ornithopter crash, then purged the thought. 'Listen,' the old man said. 'Before we continue, there's something I have to ask you. Do you mind?'

'If I can help.'

'Tell me about Indrani, if you'd be so kind.'

Her name was like a penance. 'I'm sorry?' And then, before he could even hear Ivan's answer, he felt the fear uncoil inside him, like a python waking. He dashed from the room, cupping a hand to his mouth. Retracing his steps, he reached the bridge, leaned over the railinged side and was sick. For a moment, it was a thing of fascination to watch his vomit paint the pristine lower levels of the alabaster spire. Then, when the retching was over, he wiped the tears from his eyes and drew calming breaths, accessing soothing mandalas from his catechist. One of the gargoyles loomed above, large as a naval cannon, the faint curve of its jaw seeming to mock him.

'You seem perturbed,' Bellarmine said, appearing at the bridge's end. 'I read it in the salinity of your skin. It modifies your bioelectric aura.'

'What do you want?'

The cloaked figure moved to his side, the rust-coloured, softly undulating landscape reflected in Bellarmine's mirror-like ovoid face. For an instant, Sergio thought he saw something: a scurry of silver or chrome, something darting between dunetops. But if it was real, it was gone now, and he saw no reason to trouble Bellarmine with his observation. 'Was there another presence, Menendez?'

'Another what?'

'In the room. Another such as I.'

Sergio stared deeply into the mirror before answering. 'I think I would have noticed. Why? Ought there to have been another?'

The Apparent leaned closer to him, as if to whisper some confidence. After a moment Bellarmine said: 'Put the question from your mind and answer this instead. What has he told you?' The armed gargoyle was reflected in the mirror now, its ugliness magnified by distortion. 'What has he told you? It is a matter of security for the Order. Silence could be considered perfidy.'

'If the Founder wished you to know, he would not have called me from the Diocese.'

'You are in a position of some vulnerability, Menendez.'

'I assure you, I'll hear what he has to say,' Sergio said. 'And whatever message he has for us, I'll ensure that it returns to Vikingville.'

He navigated to the bedside, between the monitors, and resumed his station next to Ivan. 'When you first mentioned her,' he said quietly, with more calm than he believed himself capable of, 'I dared to imagine I'd misheard you.'

'Tell me what happened,' Ivan said, the recorder still conspicuously running. 'I'll then reciprocate by telling you what I
really
experienced around Perdition.'

'Bellarmine knows about her, doesn't he?'

'I guarantee his knowledge of events arrived via a different route than mine. I suggest you start where I did - at the beginning. You'd only recently been consecrated, hadn't you?'

'A few days after the catechist was installed.' Sergio touched the weal on his scalp. 'It was my first mission for the Diocese - a trip north of Vikingville, to visit clanfolk. They were using consecrated servitors supplied by the Order, so there was a pretext for me to arrive with little or no notice.'

It was not difficult to fall into the telling of what had happened. The scavenger clan's caravan had hoved into view below: a long, strung-out procession of beetle-backed machines, some barely larger than dogs, others huge as houses. The largest was the Juggernaut, the command vehicle of the caravan, in which the clan would spend months during their foraging sojourns north of Vikingville, winnowing the desert for technological relics left behind by the wars that had been waged across Mars before and after the Ecumenical Synthesis.

Although it was decades since the last iceteroid had crashed onto the Martian surface, spilling atmosphere across the world, the climate was still roiling in search of an equilibrium it hadn't known for four billion years. Occasionally, squalls would slam into the flight path of an ornithopter, unleashing twisting vortices of separated laminar flow, too sudden and vicious to be smoothed out by the thopter's adaptive flight surfaces.

He hadn't seen it, of course - and when it did hit, it seemed as if the adaptive flight surfaces accommodated the squall even more sluggishly than usual. One of the thopter's wings daggered into the dunes. Sergio saw the other wing buckling like crushed origami. Then - blood sucked from his head by the whiplash - he began to black out, retaining consciousness just long enough to observe the monstrous wheels of the Juggernaut rolling towards him.

And then he woke inside the machine.

'She was like an angel to me,' Sergio said, grateful now that he could unburden himself. 'I wasn't badly injured, really - I felt a lot worse than I had any right to. Indrani fetched me water, which tasted dusty, but was at least drinkable, and then I started to feel a little better. Naturally, I had questions.'

'You wondered why she was alone, a girl like that, in charge of a whole foraging caravan. Was there anyone else?'

'Oh, a brother - Haidar, eight or nine years old. I remember him because I gave him toys.'

'Other than Haidar, though . . .'

'She was alone, yes. I asked her, of course. She told me her parents were both dead; that they'd been killed by the Taoist Militia.' Now that he was doing most of the talking, Sergio found his mouth quickly parched, helping himself to the Founder's water. 'I could have called up the catechist's demographics database to check on her story, but I hadn't been ordained long enough to think of that. Anyway, the squall wasn't going anywhere, and neither was my ornithopter - we were stuck in the Juggernaut for a few days at the least. I was--'

'You're about to say that you were weak, traumatised, not fully in control - not really yourself?'

'Except it wouldn't be true, would it? I knew what I was doing. I was weak in my adherence to the Order. But strong enough to make love to Indrani. I had some toys in the ornithopter; trinkets we always carried, to pacify children and make them think favourably of the Order when they grow up. Indrani fetched them for Haidar, to keep him occupied. Then we made love.'

'Your first time, right?'

'There hasn't been another, either.'

'Was it worth it?'

'There's never been a day when I haven't thought of her, if that answers your question. I occasionally delude myself that she might have felt similarly.'

'I'm glad. You're going to sin, at least have some fun.'

But when the storm had died, and all that remained of his ornithopter was a pair of glistening wingtips protruding from a moraine of red dust, two lightweight surface vehicles scudded from the south. They were tricycles, bouncing on obese tyres, their riders cocooned in filigreed cockpits, enfoliated by fuel cells and comms modules.

Indrani's parents.

'I never understood why she'd lied to me, manufactured the whole story about running the caravan on her own; about her parents being murdered by the Taoists. Perhaps she initiated everything that happened, with that lie.'

'That would be convenient.'

'In any case, I never had a chance to find out. Her parents still had to dock their tricycles in the Juggernaut's vehicle bay, which gave us time to fall into our old roles. If her parents suspected anything, I never saw it. No; they shamed me with their humility and hospitality. It was another three days before we could meet with a transporter that was returning to Vikingville. And when I arrived at the seminary, they treated me as a hero. Except for some of the other priests, who seemed to guess what had happened.'

'Yet it didn't destroy you.'

'No,' Sergio said. 'But I always feared I'd hear her name again. I was right to fear, wasn't I?'

'You probably imagine that she lodged a complaint with the Diocese, or that her family somehow learned the truth and did it themselves. But that's not how it happened. Not at all.'

'How did Bellarmine find out?'

'I'll tell you, but first I have to reciprocate my side of the bargain.' Sergio took a deep breath, oddly aware now that the room seemed more claustrophobic than earlier; darker and more oppressive, as if it was physically trying to squeeze the life out of the man dying within it.

'All right,' he said. 'I'm not sure why you wanted to know about Indrani, but you're right. I should hear about Perdition. Although I don't see how anything you can say can really--'

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