Absolution Gap rs-4 Page 11

  “Seventeen. Nearly eighteen.”

  “Got many friends in the village?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “Somehow I’m not surprised.” Linxe patted Rashmika on the knee. “You’re like us. Don’t fit in, never have done and never will.”

  “I do try. But I can’t stand the idea of spending the rest of my life here.”

  “Plenty of your generation feel the same way,” Linxe said. “They’re angry. That sabotage last week…” She meant the store of demolition charges that had blown up. “Well, you can’t blame them for wanting to hit out at something, can you?”

  “They’re just talking about getting out of the badlands,” Rashmika said. “They all think they can make it rich in the caravans, or even in the cathedrals. And maybe they’re right. There are good opportunities, if you know the right people. But that isn’t enough for me.”

  “You want off Hela,” Crozet said.

  Rashmika remembered the mental calculation she had made earlier and expanded on it. “I’m a fifth of the way into my life. Barring something unlikely happening, another sixty-odd years is about all I have left. I’d like to do something with it. I don’t want to die without having seen something more interesting than this place.”

  Crozet flashed yellow teeth. “People come light-years to visit Hela, Rash.”

  “For the wrong reasons,” she said. She paused, marshalling her thoughts carefully. She had very firmly held opinions and she had always believed in stating them, but at the same time she did not want to offend her hosts. “Look, I’m not saying those people are fools. But what matters here is the digs, not the cathedrals, not the Permanent Way, not the miracles.”

  “Right,” Crozet agreed, “but no one gives a monkey’s about the digs.”

  “We care,” Linxe said. “Anyone who makes a living in the badlands has to care.”

  “But the churches would rather we didn’t dig too deeply,” Rashmika countered. “The digs are a distraction. They worry that sooner or later we’ll find something that will make the miracle look a lot less miraculous.”

  “You’re talking as if the churches speak with one voice,” Linxe said.

  “I’m not saying they do,” Rashmika replied, “but everyone knows that they have certain interests in common. And we happen not to be amongst those interests.”

  “The scuttler excavations play a vital role in Hela’s economy,” Linxe said, as if reciting a line from one of the duller ecclesiastical brochures.

  “And I’m not saying they don’t,” Crozet interjected. “But who already controls the sale of dig relics? The churches. They’re halfway to having a complete monopoly. From their point of view the next logical step would be complete control of the excavations as well. That way, the bastards can sit on anything awkward.”

  “You’re a cynical old fool,” Linxe said.

  “That’s why you married me, dear.”

  “What about you, Rashmika?” Linxe asked. “Do you think the churches want to wipe us out?”

  She had a feeling they were only asking her out of courtesy. “I don’t know. But I’m sure the churches wouldn’t complain if we all went bankrupt and they had to move in to control the digs.”

  “Yeah,” Crozet agreed. “I don’t think complaining would be very high on their list of priorities in that situation either.”

  “Given all that you’ve said…” Linxe began.

  “I know what you’re going to ask,” Rashmika interrupted. “And I don’t blame you for asking, either. But you have to understand that I have no interest in the churches in a religious sense. I just need to know what happened.”

  “It needn’t have been anything sinister,” Linxe said.

  “I only know they lied to him.”

  Crozet dabbed at the corner of his eye with the tip of one little finger. “One of you buggers mind filling me in on what you’re talking about? Because I haven’t a clue.”

  “It’s about her brother,” Linxe said. “Didn’t you listen to anything I told you?”

  “Didn’t know you had a brother,” Crozet said.

  “He was a lot older than me,” Rashmika told him. “And it was eight years ago, anyway.”

  “What was eight years ago?”

  “When he went to the Permanent Way.”

  “To the cathedrals?”

  “That was the idea. He wouldn’t have considered it if it hadn’t been easier that year. But it was the same as now—the caravans were travelling further north than usual, so they were in easy range of the badlands. Two or three days’ travel by jammer to reach the caravans, rather than twenty or thirty days overland to reach the Way.”

  “Religious man, was he, your brother?”

  “No, Crozet. No more than me, anyway. Look, I was nine at the time. What happened back then isn’t exactly ingrained in my memory. But I understand that times were difficult. The existing digs had been just about tapped out. There’d been blowouts and collapses. The villages were feeling the pinch.”

  “She’s right,” Linxe said to Crozet. “I remember what it was like back then, even if you don’t.”

  Crozet worked the joysticks, skilfully steering the jammer around an elbow-like outcropping. “Oh, I remember all right.”

  “My brother’s name was Harbin Els,” Rashmika said. “Harbin worked the digs. When the caravans came he was nineteen, but he’d been working underground almost half his life. He was good at a lot of things, and explosives was one of them—laying charges, calculating yields, that sort of thing. He knew how to place them to get almost any effect he wanted. He had a reputation for doing the job properly and not taking any short cuts.”

  “I’d have thought that kind of work would have been in demand in the digs,” Crozet said.

  “It was. Until the digs faltered. Then it got tougher. The villages couldn’t afford to open up new caverns. It wasn’t just the explosives that were too expensive. Shoring up the new caverns, putting in power and air, laying in auxiliary tunnels… all that was too costly. So the villages concentrated their efforts in the existing chambers, hoping for a lucky strike.”

  “And your brother?”

  “He wasn’t going to wait around until his skills were needed. He’d heard of a couple of other explosives experts who had made the overland crossing—took them months, but they’d made it to the Way and entered the service of one of the major churches. The churches need people with explosives knowledge, or so he’d been told. They have to keep blasting ahead of the cathedrals, to keep the Way open.”

  “It isn’t called the Permanent Way for nothing,” Crozet said.

  “Well, Harbin thought that sounded like the kind of work he could do. It didn’t mean that he had to buy into the church’s particular worldview. It just meant that they’d have an arrangement. They’d pay him for his demolition skills. There were even rumours of jobs in the technical bureau of Way maintenance. He was good with numbers. He thought he stood a chance of getting that kind of position, as someone who planned where to put the charges rather than doing it himself. It sounded good. He’d keep some of the money, enough to live on, and send the rest of it back to the badlands.”

  “Your parents were happy with that?” Crozet asked.

  “They don’t talk about it much. Reading between the lines, they didn’t really want Harbin to have anything to do with the churches. But at the same time they could see the sense. Times were hard. And Harbin made it sound so mercenary, almost as if he’d be taking advantage of the church, not the other way around. Our parents didn’t exactly encourage him, but on the other hand they didn’t say no. Not that it would have done much good if they had.”

  “So Harbin packed his bags…”

  She shook her head at Crozet. “No, we made a family outing of it, to see him off. It was just like now—almost the whole village rode out to meet the caravans. We went out in someone’s jammer, two or three days’ journey. Seemed like a lot longer at the time, but then I was only nine. And then
we met the caravan, somewhere out near the flats. And aboard the caravan was a man, a kind of… ” Rashmika faltered. It was not that she had trouble with the details, but it was emotionally wrenching to have to go over this again, even at a distance of eight years. “A recruiting agent, I suppose you’d call him. Working for one of the churches. The main one, actually. The First Adventists. Harbin had been told that this was the man he had to talk to about the work. So we all went for a meeting with him, as a family. Harbin did most of the talking, and the rest of us sat in the same room, listening. There was another man there who said nothing at all; he just kept looking at us—me mainly—and he had a walking stick that he kept pressing to his lips, as if he was kissing it. I didn’t like him, but he wasn’t the man Harbin was dealing with, so I didn’t pay him as much attention as I did the recruiting agent. Now and then Mum or Dad would ask something, and the agent would answer politely. But mainly it was just him and Harbin doing the talking. He asked Harbin what skills he had, and Harbin told him about his explosives work. The man seemed to know a little about it. He asked difficult questions. They meant nothing to me, but I could tell from the way Harbin answered—carefully, not too glibly—that they were not stupid or trivial. But whatever Harbin said, it seemed to satisfy the recruiting agent. He told Harbin that, yes, the church did have a need for demolition specialists, especially in the technical bureau. He said it was a never-ending task, keeping the Way clear, and that it was one of the few areas in which the churches co-operated. He admitted also that the bureau had need of a new engineer with Harbin’s background.”

  “Smiles all around, then,” Crozet said.

  Linxe slapped him again. “Let her finish.”

  “Well, we were smiling,” said Rashmika. “To start with. After all, this was just what Harbin had been hoping for. The terms were good and the work was interesting. The way Harbin figured, he only had to put up with it until they started opening new caverns again back in the badlands. Of course, he didn’t tell the recruiting agent that he had no plans to stick around for more than a revolution or two. But he did ask one critical question.”

  “Which was?” Linxe asked.

  “He’d heard that some of the churches used methods on those that worked for them to bring them around to the churches’ way of thinking. Made them believe that what they were doing was of more than material significance, that their work was holy.”

  “Made them swallow the creed, you mean?” Crozet said.

  “More than that: made them accept it. They have ways. And from the churches’ point of view, you can’t really blame them. They want to keep their hard-won expertise. Of course, my brother didn’t like the sound of that at all.”

  “So what was the recruiter’s reaction to the question?” Crozet asked.

  “The man said Harbin need have no fears on that score. Some churches, he admitted, did practise methods of… well, I forget exactly what he said. Something about Bloodwork and Clocktowers. But he made it clear that the Quaicheist church was not one of them. And he pointed out that there were workers of many beliefs amongst their Permanent Way gangs, and there’d never been any efforts to convert any of them to the Quaicheist faith.”

  Crozet narrowed his eyes. “And?”

  “I knew he was lying.”

  “You thought he was lying,” Crozet said, correcting her the way teachers did.

  “No, I knew. I knew it with the kind of certainty I’d have had if he’d walked in with a sign around his neck saying ‘liar.’ There was no more doubt in my mind that he was lying than that he was breathing. It wasn’t open to debate. It was screamingly obvious.”

  “But not to anyone else,” Linxe said.

  “Not to my parents, not to Harbin, but I didn’t realise that at the time. When Harbin nodded and thanked the man, I thought they were playing out some kind of strange adult ritual. Harbin had asked him a vital question, and the man had given him the only answer that his office allowed—a diplomatic answer, but one which everyone present fully understood to be a lie. So in that respect it wasn’t really a lie at all… I thought that was clear. If it wasn’t, why did the man make it so obvious that he wasn’t telling the truth?”

  “Did he really?” Crozet asked.

  “It was as if he wanted me to know he was lying, as if he was smirking and winking at me the whole time… without actually smirking or winking, of course, but always being on the threshold of doing it. But only I saw that. I thought Harbin must have… that surely he’d seen it… but no, he hadn’t. He kept on acting as if he honestly thought the man was telling the truth. He was already making arrangements to stay with the caravan so that he could complete the rest of the journey to the Permanent Way. That was when I started making a scene. If this was a game, I didn’t like the way they were insisting on still playing it, without letting me in on the joke.”

  “You thought Harbin was in danger,” Linxe said.

  “Look, I didn’t understand everything that was at stake. Like I said, I was only nine. I didn’t really comprehend faiths and creeds and contracts. But I understood the one thing that mattered: that Harbin had asked the man the question that was most important to him, the one that was going to decide whether he joined the church or not, and the man had lied to him. Did I think that put him in mortal danger? No. I don’t think I had much idea of what ‘mortal danger’ meant then, to be honest. But I knew something was wrong, and I knew I was the only one who saw it.”

  “The girl who never lies,” Crozet said.

  “They’re wrong about me,” Rashmika answered. “I do lie. I lie as well as anyone, now. But for a long time I didn’t understand the point of it. I suppose that meeting with the man was the beginning of my realisation. I understood then that what had been obvious to me all my life was not obvious to everyone else.”

  Linxe looked at her. “Which is?”

  “I can always tell when people are lying. Always. Without fail. And I’m never wrong.”

  Crozet smiled tolerantly. “You think you can.”

  “I know I can,” Rashmika said. “It’s never failed me.”

  Linxe knitted her fingers together in her lap. “Was that the last you heard of your brother?”

  “No. We didn’t see him again, but he kept to his word. He sent letters back home, and every now and again there’d be some money. But the letters were vague, emotionally detached; they could have been written by anyone, really. He never came back to the badlands, and of course there was never any possibility of us visiting him. It was just too difficult. He’d always said he’d return, even in the letters… but the gaps between them grew longer, became months and then half a year… then perhaps a letter every revolution or so. The last was two years ago. There really wasn’t much in it. It didn’t even look like his handwriting.”

  “And the money?” Linxe asked delicately.

  “It kept coming in. Not much, but enough to keep the wolves away.”

  “You think they got to him, don’t you?” Crozet asked.

  “I know they got to him. I knew it from the moment we met the recruiting agent, even if no one else did. Bloodwork, whatever they called it.”

  “And now?” Linxe said.

  “I’m going to find out what happened to my brother,” Rashmika said. “What else did you expect?”

  “The cathedrals won’t take kindly to someone poking around in that kind of business,” Linxe said.

  Rashmika set her lips in a determined pout. “And I don’t take kindly to being lied to.”

  “You know what I think?” Crozet said, smiling. “I think the cathedrals had better hope they’ve got God on their side. Because up against you they’re going to need all the help they can get.”

  SEVEN

  Approaching Hela, 2615

  Like a golden snowflake, the Scavenger’s Daughter fell through the dusty vacuum of interplanetary space. Quaiche had left Morwenna three hours earlier; his message to the queen-commander of the Gnostic Ascension, a sinuous thread of phot
ons snaking through interplanetary space, was still on its way. He thought of the lights of a distant train moving across a dark, dark continent: the enormous distance separating him from other sentient beings was enough to make him shudder.

  But he had been in worse situations, and at least this time there was a distinct hope of success. The bridge on Hela was still there; it had not turned out to be a mirage of the sensors or his own desperate yearning to find something, and the closer he got the less likely it was that the bridge would turn out to be anything other than a genuine technological artefact. Quaiche had seen some deceptive things in his time—geology that looked as if it had been designed, lovingly sculpted or mass-produced—but he had never seen anything remotely like this. His instincts said that geology had not been the culprit, but he was having serious trouble with the question of who—or what—had created it, because the fact remained that 107 Piscium system appeared not to have been visited by anyone else. He shivered in awe, and fear, and reckless expectation.

  He felt the indoctrinal virus awaken in his blood, a monster turning over in its sleep, opening one dreamy eye. It was always there, always within him, but for much of the time it slept, disturbing neither his dreams nor his waking moments. When it engorged him, when it roared in his veins like a distant report of thunder, he would see and hear things. He would glimpse stained-glass windows in the sky; he would hear organ music beneath the subsonic growl of each burst of correctional thrust from his tiny jewel-like exploration ship.

  Quaiche forced calm. The last thing he needed now was the indoctrinal virus having its way with him. Let it come to him later, when he was safe and sound back aboard the Dominatrix. Then it could turn him into any kind of drooling, mumbling idiot it wished. But not here, not now. Not while he needed total clarity of mind.

  The monster yawned, returned to sleep.

  Quaiche was relieved. His faltering control over the virus was still there.

  He let his thoughts creep back to the bridge, cautiously this time, trying to avoid succumbing to the reverential cosmic chill that had wakened the virus.