She looked higher, straining to see the vehicle’s windows. The great hall of the cathedral reached far above the point where the articulated buttresses curved in to join it. Enormous stained-glass windows towered above her, pointing towards the face of Haldora. There were outflung prominences of masonry and metal capped by squatting gryphons or other heraldic creatures. And then there was the Clocktower itself, shaming even the hall, a tapering, teetering finger of iron thrusting higher than any structure Rashmika had ever seen. She could see the history of the cathedral in the tower, the strata of growth periods laid bare, showing how the vast structure had expanded to its present size. There were follies and abandoned schemes; out-jutting elbows that went nowhere. There were strange levellings-off where it looked as if the spire had been tapering towards a conclusion, before deciding to continue upwards for another hundred metres. And somewhere near the very top—difficult to see from this angle—was a cupola in which burned the unmistakable yellow lights of habitation.
The caravan vehicle swerved closer to the line of slowly stomping feet. There was a clang, and then they floated free of the ground, winched off the surface just as Crozet’s icejammer had been by the caravan.
The man in the vacuum suit began undoing his helmet clasp. He did it with a kind of manic patience, as if the act itself was a necessary penitence.
The helmet came off. The man riffled one gloved hand through the white shock of his hair, making it stand straight up from his scalp. The top was mathematically flat. He looked at her, his face long and flat-featured, making her think of a bulldog. She was certain, then, that she had seen the man somewhere before, but for now that was all she remembered.
“Welcome to the Lady Morwenna, Miss Els,” he said.
“I don’t know who you are, or why I’m here.”
“I’m Surgeon-General Grelier,” he said. “And you’re here because we want you to be here.”
Whatever that meant, he was telling the truth.
“Now come with me,” he said. “There is someone you need to see. Then we can discuss terms of employment.”
“Employment?”
“It’s work you came for, isn’t it?” She nodded meekly. “Yes.”
“Then we may have something right up your alley.”
THIRTY-THREE
Scorpio had hoped for some rest. But the days immediately following Antoinette’s departure were as tiring as any that had preceded them. He stayed awake nearly all the time, watching the arrival and departure of shuttles and tugs, supervising the processing of new evacuees and the comings and goings of Re-montoire’s technical personnel.
He felt stretched beyond breaking point, never certain that he was more than one or two breaths from collapsing. And yet he kept functioning, sustained by Antoinette’s words and his own stubborn refusal to show the slightest glimmer of weakness around the humans. It was becoming difficult. More and more it seemed to him that they had an energy that he lacked; that they were never as close to exhaustion or complete breakdown as he was. It had been different in his younger days. He had been the unstoppable powerhouse then, stronger not only than the humans who made up part of his coterie but also many of the pigs. He had been foolish to imagine that this would be the pattern for the whole of his life, that he would always have that edge. He had never quite noticed the moment when parity occurred; it might have happened months or years in the past, but now he was quite sure that the humans had pulled ahead of him. In the short term he still had a furious, impulsive strength that they lacked, but what use was thuggish immediacy now? What mattered were slow-burning, calculated strength, endurance and presence of mind. The humans were quicker-minded than he was, much less prone to making mistakes. Did they realise that? he wondered. Perhaps not immediately, for he was working hard to compensate for this intrinsic weaknesses. But sooner or later the effort would take its toll and then they would start to notice his failings. Many of them—the allies Antoinette had spoken of-—would do their best to ignore his increasing inadequacy, making excuses for his failings. But again, that process could only continue for so long. Inevitably there would come a time when his enemies would pick up on that creeping weakness and use it against him. He wondered if he would have the courage to step down first, before it became so obvious. He didn’t know. It was too hard to think about that, because it cut too close to the essence of what he was, and what he could never be.
Antoinette had not meant to be cruel when she had talked of their time on Ararat as being “good years.” She had meant it sincerely, and twenty-three years was no small chunk out of anyone’s life. But Antoinette was a human. True enough, she did not have access to all the life-extension procedures that had been commonplace a couple of hundred years earlier. Nobody did nowadays. But Antoinette still had advantages that Scorpio lacked. The genes she had inherited had been modified many hundreds of years earlier, weeding out many of the commoner causes of death. She could expect to live about twice as long as she would have had her ancestors never undergone those changes. A one-hundred-and-fifty-year lifespan was not unthinkable for her. Given exceptional luck, she might even see two hundred. Long enough, perhaps, to witness and maybe even benefit from a resurgence in the other kinds of life-extending medicine, the kinds that had been in short supply since the Melding Plague. Granted, the present crisis didn’t make that likely, but it was still a remote possibility, still something she could hope for.
Scorpio was fifty now. He would be lucky to see sixty. He had never heard of a pig living longer than seventy-five years, and the oldest pig he had ever met had been seventy-one years old. That pig had died one year later, as a constellation of time-bomb illnesses had ripped him apart over a period of a few months.
Even if, by some stroke of luck, he found a medical facility that still had access to the old rejuvenation and life-extension treatments, they would be useless to him, too finely tuned to human biochemistry. He had heard about pigs who had tried such things, and their efforts had invariably been unsuccessful. More often than not they had died prematurely, as the procedures triggered fatal iatrogenic side effects.
It wasn’t an option. The only option, really, was to die, in about ten to fifteen years’ time. Twenty if he was astonishingly lucky. Less time, even then, than he had already spent on Ararat.
“It was half my life,” he had told her. But he didn’t think she had understood exactly what that meant. Not just half the life he had lived to date, but a decent fraction of the life he could ever hope to live. The first twenty years of his life barely counted, anyway. He hadn’t really been born until he turned the laser on his shoulder and burned the green scorpion into scar tissue. The humans were making plans for decades to come. He was thinking in terms of years, and even then counting on nothing.
The question was, did he have the courage to acknowledge this? If he stepped down now and made it clear that it was be-cause of his genetic inheritance—because of the encroach-ment of premature death that was part and parcel of the pig package-r-no one would criticise him. They would understand, and he would have their sympathy. But what if he was wrong to relinquish power now, just because he felt the shadow on him? The shadow was still faint. He thought it likely that only he had seen it clearly. Surely it was a kind of cowardice to give up now, when he still had five or ten more years of useful service in him. Surely he owed Ararat—or Ararat’s refugees—more than that. He was many things—violent, stubborn, loyal—but he had never been a coward.