Only five or six per cent. There had been times when the neutrino flux had jumped that much in only a few minutes.
“Take your time, John,” she said. “None of us are in that much of a hurry.”
The elevator was slowing. It arrived in a self-important flutter of clanking mechanisms. The doors opened, fluid sluicing down the shaft as Antoinette stepped into the waiting emptiness of the elevator car. Again, why had she forgotten to bring a light with her? She was getting sloppy, taking it as read that the Captain would usher her into his realm like a familiar house guest. Come on in. Put your feet up. How’re things?
What if, this time, he was not so enthusiastic about having company?
None of the elevator voice-control systems worked properly. With practised ease Antoinette unlatched an access panel, exposing the manual controls. Her fingers dithered over the options. They were annotated in antiquated script, but she was familiar enough with them by now. This elevator would only take her part of the way down to the Captain’s usual haunts. She would have to change to another at some point, which would mean a cross-ship trek of at least several hundred metres, assuming no blockades had materialised along the way since her last visit. Would it be better to go up first, and take a different spine track down? For a moment the possibilities branched, Antoinette acutely aware that this time, literally, a minute here or there might make all the difference.
But then the elevator started moving. She had done nothing to it.
“Hello, John,” she said.
TWENTY-NINE
The shuttle loitered over First Camp.
The sun was almost down. In the last, miserly light of the day, Vasko and his companions watched the green-clad spire slip beyond the headland. The towering thing had cast its own slanted shadow in the final minutes of daylight, a shadow that moved not just with the descent of the sun but also with the changing position and tilt of the ship. The movement was almost too slow to make out from moment to moment. It was like watching the hour hand of a clock: the movement was only really apparent when you looked away for a minute or two. But the ship was moving, being dragged along by that cloak of bio-mass, and now a tongue of land stood between the ship and the bay. It was not much of a tongue, just the last hundred metres of headland, and surely not enough to completely deflect the anticipated tidal waves; but it was bound to make some difference, and as the ship moved further along its course the sheltering effect would become larger and larger.
“Did she make it aboard?” Khouri asked, her eyes wide and unfocused. Aura seemed to be sleeping again, Khouri once more speaking for herself alone.
“Yes,” Vasko said.
“I hope she can talk some sense into him.”
“What happened back there…” Vasko said. He looked at her, waiting for her to say something, but nothing came. “When Aura spoke to us…?”
“Yes?”
“That was really her, right?”
Khouri looked at him, one eye slightly narrowed. “Does that bother you? Does my daughter disturb you?”
“I just want to know. She’s sleeping now, isn’t she?”
“She isn’t in my head, no.”
“But she” was?“
“Where are you going with this, Malinin?”
“I want to know how it works,” he said. “I think she might be useful to us. She’s already helped us, but that’s only the start, isn’t it?”
“I told you already,” Khouri said, “Aura knows stuff. We just have to listen.”
Rashmika sat alone in her room, the night after the caravan had crossed the bridge. She opened the little metal canister that Pietr had given her with trembling hands, fearing—despite herself—some deception or trick. But there was nothing in the canister except a rolled-up spool of thin yellow paper. It slid into her hands, the colour of tobacco. She flattened it carefully, and then inspected the faint sequences of grey marks on one side of the paper.
To the untrained eye they meant precisely nothing. At first they reminded her a little of something, and she had to think for a while before it came to her. The spaced vertical dashes—clustered and clumped, but sliding closer and closer together as her eye panned from left to right—brought to mind a diagram of the chemical absorption lines in a star’s spectrum, bunching closer and closer towards a smeared continuum of states. But these lines represented individual vanishings, and the smeared continuum lay in the future. But what exactly did it signify? Would the vanishings become the norm, with Haldora stuttering in and out of reality like a defective light fitting? Or would the planet just vanish, popping out of existence for evermore?
She examined the paper again. There was a second sequence of marks above the other. They agreed closely, except at one point where the lower sequence had an additional vertical mark where none was present above it.
Twenty-odd years ago, Pietr had said.
Twenty-odd years ago, Haldora had winked out of existence for one and one-fifth of a second. A long cosmic blink. Not just a moment of divine inattention, but a fully-fledged deific snooze.
And during that absence, something had happened that the churches did not like. Something that might even have been worth the life of a harmless old man.
She looked at the paper again, and for the first time it occurred to Rashmika to wonder why Pietr had given it to her, and what she was meant to do with it.
The elevator had been descending for several minutes when Antoinette felt a lurch as it shifted from its usual track. She cried out at first, thinking the elevator was about to crash, but the ride continued smoothly for a dozen seconds before she felt another series of jolts and swerves as the car switched routes again. There was no guessing where she was, only that she was deep inside the ship. Perhaps she was even below the water-line, in the last few hundred metres of the submerged hull. Any maps she might have brought along with her—not that she had, of course—would have been totally useless by now. It was not only that these dank levels were difficult to access from the upper decks, but that they were prone to convulsive and confusing changes of local architecture. For a long time it had been assumed that the elevator lines remained stable when all else changed, but Antoinette knew that this was not the case, and that it would be futile to attempt to navigate by apparently familiar reference points. If she’d brought an inertial compass and a gravitometer she might have been able to pinpoint her position to within a few dozen metres in three-dimensional space… but she hadn’t, and so she had no choice but to trust the Captain.
The elevator arrived at its destination. The door opened and the last dregs of fluid spilled out. She tapped her shoes dry, feeling the unpleasant wetness of her trouser hems against the skin of her calves. She was really not dressed for a meeting with the Captain. What would he think?
She looked out and had to suppress an involuntary gasp of surprise and delight. For all that she knew every moment was precious, it was impossible not to be moved by the view she was seeing. Deep in the ship as she was, she had been expecting another typically gloomy, damp enclosure. She had been assuming that the Captain would manifest via the manipulation of local junk or one of the distorting wall surfaces. Or something else, but qualitatively similar.
But the Captain had brought her somewhere else entirely. It was a huge chamber, a place that at first glance appeared not to have any limits at all. There was an endless sky above her, shaded a rich, heraldic blue. In all directions she saw only stepped tiers of trees reaching away into blue-green infinity. There was a lovely fragrant breeze and a cackle of animal life from the high branches of the nearest trees. Below her, accessed by a meandering rustic wooden staircase, was a marvellous little glade. There was a pool off to one side being fed by a hissing waterfall. The water in the pool, except where it was stirred into creamy whiteness under the waterfall, was the exquisite black of space. Rather than suggesting taintedness, the blackness of the water made it look wonderfully cool and inviting. A little way in from the water’s edge, resting on the perfectly tended lawn, was a wooden table. On either side of the table, forming benches, were long logs.