“That’s why our terms are so generous.”
“And the matter of Adventist delegates? You should know how unusual it is for anyone to be permitted aboard one of our ships. We could perhaps accommodate two or three hand-picked representatives, but only after they had undergone extensive screening…”
“That part isn’t negotiable,” Quaiche said abruptly. “Sorry, Triumvir, but it all boils down to one thing: how badly do you want that shield?”
“We’ll have to think about it,” the Ultra said.
Afterwards, Quaiche asked Rashmika for her observations. She told him what she had picked up, restricting her remarks to the things she was certain she had detected rather than vague intuitions.
“He was truthful,” she said, “right up to the point where you mentioned his weapons. Then he was hiding something. His expression changed, just for a moment. I couldn’t tell you what it was, exactly, but I do know what it means.”
“Probably a contraction of the zygomaticus major,” Grelier said, sitting with his fingers knitted together before his face. He had removed his vacuum suit while he was away and now wore a plain grey Adventist smock. “Coupled with a depressing of the corners of the lips, using the risorius. Some flexion of the mentalis—chin elevation.”
“You saw all that, Surgeon-General?” Rashmika asked.
“Only by slowing down the observation camera and running a tedious and somewhat unreliable interpretive routine on his face. For an Ultra he was rather expressive. But it wasn’t in real-time, and even when the routine detected it, I didn’t see it for myself. Not viscerally. Not the way you saw it, Rashmika: instantly, written there as if in glowing letters.”
“He was hiding something,” she said. “If you’d pushed him on the topic of the weapons, he’d have lied to your face.”
“So his weapons aren’t what he makes them out to be,” Quaiche said.
“Then he’s no use to us,” Grelier said. “Tick him off the list.”
“We’ll keep him on just in case. The ship’s the main thing. We can always augment his weapons if we decide we have to.”
Grelier looked up at his master, peering over the steeple of his fingers. “Doesn’t that rather defeat the purpose?”
“Perhaps.” Quaiche seemed irritated by his surgeon’s needling. “In any case, there are other candidates. I have two more waiting in the cathedral. I take it, Rashmika, that you’d be willing to sit through another couple of interviews?”
She poured herself some more tea. “Send them in,” she said. “It’s not as if I have anything else to do.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Scorpio had been walking through the ship for hours. It was still chaotic in the high levels, where the latest arrivals were being processed. There were smaller pockets of chaos at a dozen other locations. But the Nostalgia/or Infinity was a truly enormous spacecraft, and it was remarkable how little evidence there was of the seventeen thousand newcomers once he moved away from the tightly policed processing zones. Throughout much of the ship’s volume, things were as empty and echoing as they had ever been, as if all the newcomers had been imagined spectres.
But the ship was not completely deserted, even away from the processing zones. He paused now at a window that faced on to a deep vertical shaft. Red light bathed the interior, throwing a roseate tint on the metallic structure taking form within it. The structure was utterly unfamiliar. And yet it reminded him, forcefully, of something—one of the trees he had seen in the glade. Only this was a tree made from countless bladelike parts, foil-thin leaves arranged in spiralling ranks around a narrow core that ran the length of the shaft. There was too much detail to take in; too much geometry; too much perspective. His head hurt to look at the treelike object, as if the whole sculptural form was a weapon designed to shatter perception.
Servitors scuttled amongst the leaves like black bugs, their movements methodical and cautious, while black-suited human figures hung from harnesses at a safe distance from the delicate convolutions of the forming structure. The servitors carried metal-foil parts on their backs, slotting them into precisely machined apertures. The humans—they were Conjoin-ers—appeared to do very little except hang in their harnesses and observe the machines. But they were undoubtedly directing the action at a fundamental level, their concentration intense, their minds multitasking with parallel thought threads.
These were just some of the Conjoiners aboard the ship. There were dozens more. Hundreds, even. He could barely tell them apart. Except for minor variations in skin tone, bone structure and sex, they all appeared to have stepped from the same production line. They were of the crested kind, advanced specimens from Skade’s own taskforce. They said nothing to each other and were uncomfortable when forced to talk to the non-Conjoined. They stuttered and made elementary errors of pronunciation, grammar and syntax: things that would have shamed a pig. They functioned and communicated on an entirely nonverbal level, Scorpio knew. To them, verbal communication—even when speeded up by mind-to-mind linkage—was as primitive as communication by smoke signal. They made Clavain and Remontoire look like grunting stone-age relics. Even Skade must have felt some itch of inadequacy around these sleek new creatures.
If the wolves lost, Scorpio thought, but the only people left to celebrate were these silent Conjoiners, would it have been worth it?
He had no easy answer.
Beyond their silent strangeness, their stiffly economical movements and utter absence of expression, the thing that most chilled him about the Conjoiner technicians was the blithe ease with which they had shifted loyalty to Remontoire. At no point had they acknowledged that their obedience to Skade had been in error. They had, they said, only ever been following the path of least resistance when it came to the greater good of the Mother Nest. For a time, that path had involved co-operation with Skade’s plans. Now, however, they were content to align themselves with Remontoire. Scorpio wondered how much of that had to do with the pure demands of the situation and how much with respect for the traditions and history of the Nest. With Galiana and Clavain now dead, Remontoire was probably the oldest living Conjoiner.
Scorpio had no choice but to accept the Conjoiners. They were not a permanent fixture in any case; in fewer than eight days they would have to leave if they wanted to return home to the Zodiacal Light and their other remaining ships. There were already fewer of them than there had been at first.
They had helped to reinstall nanotechnological manufactories, plague-hardened so that they would continue to function even in the contagious environment of the Infinity. Primed with blueprints and raw matter, the forges spewed out gleaming new technologies of mostly unfamiliar function. The same blueprints showed how the newly minted components were to be assembled into even larger—yet equally unfamiliar—new shapes. In evacuated shafts running the length of the Nostalgia for Infinity— just like the one he was looking into now—these contraptions grew and grew. The thing that looked like an elongated silver tree—or a dizzyingly complicated turbine, or some weird alien take on DNA—was a hypometric weapon. Perhaps sensing their value, the Captain tolerated the activity, although at any moment he could have remade his interior architecture, crushing the shafts out of existence.
Elsewhere, Conjoiners crawled through the skin of the ship, installing a network of cryo-arithmetic engines. Tiny as hearts, each limpetlike engine was a sucking wound in the corpus of classical thermodynamics. Scorpio recalled what had happened to Skade’s corvette when the cryo-arithmetic engines had gone wrong. The runaway cooling must have begun with a tiny splinter of ice, smaller than a snowflake. But it had been growing all the while, as the engines locked into manic, spiralling feedback loops, destroying more heat with every computational cycle, the cold feeding the cold. In space, the ship would simply have cooled down to within quantum spitting distance of absolute zero. On Ararat, however, with an ocean at hand, it had grown an iceberg around itself.