“So what did he discover?”
“He found out that the public and official records don’t quite match.”
Rashmika felt a wave of disappointment. She had expected more than that. “Big deal,” she said. “It doesn’t surprise me that the Observers might occasionally spot a vanishing when everyone else misses it, especially if it happened during some other distracting…”
“You misunderstand,” Pietr said sharply. For the first time she heard irritation in his voice. “It wasn’t a case of the churches claiming a vanishing that everyone else had missed. This was the other way around. Eight years earlier—which would make it twenty-odd years ago now—there was a vanishing which did not enter the official church records. Do you understand what I’m saying? A vanishing took place, and it was noted by public observers like Tempier, but according to the churches no such thing happened.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would the churches expunge knowledge of a vanishing?”
“Tempier wondered exactly the same thing.”
So perhaps her trip up on to the roof had not been entirely in vain after all. “Was there anything about this vanishing that might explain why it wasn’t admitted into the official record? Something that meant it didn’t quite meet the usual criteria?”
“Such as what?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Was it very brief, for instance?”
“As a matter of interest—if Tempier’s notes are correct—it was one of the longest vanishings ever recorded. Fully one and one-fifth of a second.”
“I don’t get it, in that case. What does Tempier have to say on the matter?”
“Good question,” Pietr said, “but not one likely to be answered any time soon. I’m afraid Saul Tempier is dead. He died seven years ago.”
“I’m sorry. I get the impression you liked him. But you said it yourself: he was getting old.”
“He was, but that didn’t have anything to do with his death. They found him electrocuted, killed while he was repairing one of his machines.”
“All right.” She hoped she did not sound too heartless. “Then he was getting careless.”
“Not Saul Tempier,” Pietr said. “He didn’t have a careless bone in his body. That was the bit they got wrong.”
Rashmika frowned. “They?”
“Whoever killed him,” he said.
They stood in silence for a while. The caravan surmounted the brow of the bridge, then began the long, shallow descent to the other side of the Rift. The far cliffs grew larger, the folds and seams of tortured geology becoming starkly obvious. To the left, on the south-western face of the Rift, Rashmika made out another winding ledge. It appeared to have been pencilled tentatively along the wall, a hesitant precursor for the proper job that was to follow. Yet that was the ledge. Very soon they would be on it, the crossing done. The bridge would have held, and all would be well with the world—or at least as well as when they had set out.
“Is that why you came here, in the end?” she asked Pietr. “To find out why they killed that old man?”
“That makes it sound like just another of your secular enquiries,” he replied.
“What is it, then, if it isn’t that?”
“I’d like to know why they murdered Saul, but more than that, I’d like to know why they feel the need to lie about the word of God.”
She had asked him about his beliefs already, but she still felt the need to probe the limits of his honesty. There had to be a chink, she thought: a crack of uncertainty in the shield of his faith. “So that’s what you believe the vanishings are?”
“As firmly as I believe anything.”
“In which case… if the true pattern of vanishings is different from the official story, then you believe that the true message is being suppressed, and the word of God isn’t being communicated to the people in its uncorrupted form.”
“Exactly.” He sounded very pleased with her, grateful that some vast chasm of understanding had now been spanned. She had the sense that a burden had been taken from him for the first time in ages. “And my mistake was to think I could silence those doubts by immersing myself in mindless observation. But it didn’t work. I saw you, standing there in all your fierce independence, and I realised I had to do this on my own.”
“That’s… something like the way I feel.”
“Tell me about your enquiry, Rashmika.”
She did. She told him about Harbin, and how she thought he had been taken away by one of the churches. More than likely, she said, he had been forcibly indoctrinated. This was not something she really wanted to consider, but the rational part of her could not ignore the possibility. She told him how the rest of her family had accepted Harbin’s faith some time ago, but that she had never been able to let him slip away that easily. “I had to do this,” she said. “I had to make this pilgrimage.”
“I thought you weren’t a pilgrim.”
“Slip of the tongue,” she said. But she wasn’t sure if she really meant it any more.
The upper decks of the Nostalgia for Infinity were crammed with evacuees. Antoinette wanted to avoid thinking of them as so many cattle, but as soon as she hit the main cloying mass of bodies and found her own progress blocked or impeded, frustration overwhelmed her. They were human beings, she kept reminding herself, ordinary people caught up as she was in the ebb of events they barely comprehended. In other circumstances she could easily have been one of them, just as frightened and dazed as they were. Her father had always emphasised how easy it was to find oneself on the wrong side of the fence. It wasn’t necessarily a question of who had the quickest wits or the firmest resolve. It wasn’t always about bravery or some shining inner goodness. It could just as easily be about the position of your name in the alphabet, the chemistry of your blood, or whether you were fortunate enough to be the daughter of a man who happened to own a ship.
She forced herself not to push through the crowds of people waiting to be processed, doing her best to ease forward politely, making eye contact and apologies, smiling at and tolerating those who did not immediately step out of her way. But the mot—she could not help but think of them as such in spite of her best intentions—was so large, so collectively stupid, that her patience only lasted for about two decks. Then something inside her snapped and she was pushing through with all her strength, teeth gritted, oblivious to the insults and the spitting that followed in her wake.
She finally made it through the crowds and descended three blissfully deserted levels using interdeck ladders and stairwells. She moved in near darkness, navigating from one erratic light source to the next, cursing herself for not bringing a torch. Then her shoes sloshed through an inch of something wet and sticky she was glad she couldn’t see.
Finally she found a functioning main-spine elevator and operated the control to summon it. The ship’s lean was disturbingly apparent—it was part of the problem for the continued processing of the immigrants—but so far main ship functions did not appear to have been affected. She heard the elevator thundering towards her, clattering against its inductance rails, and took a moment to check the neutrino levels on her wrist unit. Assuming that the planetwide monitors could still be trusted, the ship was now only five or six per cent from drive criticality. Once that threshold was reached, the ship would have enough bottled energy to lift itself from the surface of Ararat and into orbit.