“She didn’t say we shouldn’t go to Yellowstone,” Cruz interjected. “She just said we should go to Hela.”
Vasko’s expression was severe. “You think there’s a difference?”
“Yellowstone could be our first priority, as I said. It doesn’t preclude a visit to Hela once the evacuation is complete.”
“It will take decades to do that,” Vasko said.
“It’ll take decades whatever we do,” Cruz said, smiling slightly. “That’s the nature of the game, kid. Get used to it.”
“I know the nature of the game,” Vasko told her, his voice low, letting her know that she had made a mistake in addressing him that way. “I’m also aware that we’ve been given a clear instruction about reaching Hela. If Yellowstone formed part of Aura’s plans, don’t you think she’d have told us?”
They all looked at the child. Sometimes Aura spoke: by now they had all become accustomed to her small, half-formed, liquid croak. Yet there were still days when she said nothing at all, or made only childlike noises. Then, as now, she appeared to have switched into some mode of extreme receptivity, taking in rather than giving out. Her development was accelerated, but it was not progressing smoothly: there were leaps and bounds, but there were also plateaux and unaccountable reversals.
“She means for us to go to Hela,” Khouri said. “That’s all I know.”
“What about the other part?” Scorpio asked. “The bit about negotiating with shadows?”
“It was something that came through. Maybe a memory that came loose, but which she couldn’t interpret.”
“What else came through at the same time?”
She looked at him, hesitating on the edge of answering. It was a lucky guess, but his question had worked. “I sensed something that frightened me,” she said.
“Something about these shadows?”
“Yes. It was like the chill from an open door, like a draught of terror.” Khouri looked down at the hair on her baby’s head. “She felt it as well.”
“And that’s all you can tell me?” Scorpio asked. “We have to go to Hela and negotiate with something that frightens both of you to death?”
“It was just that the message carried a warning,” Khouri said. “It said proceed with caution. But it also said it’s what we have to do.”
“You’re sure of that?” Scorpio persisted.
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Maybe you interpreted the message wrongly. Maybe the ‘draught of terror’ was there for a different reason. Maybe it was there to indicate that on no account should we have anything to do with… whatever these shadows are.“
“Maybe, Scorp,” Khouri said, “but in that case, why mention the shadows at all?”
“Or Hela, for that matter,” Vasko added.
Scorpio looked at him, drawing out the moment. “You done?” he asked.
“I guess so,” Vasko said.
“Then I think the decision needs to be taken,” the pig said. “We’ve heard all the arguments, either way. We can go to Hela on the off chance that there might be something there worth our effort. Or we can take this ship to Yellowstone and save some lives, guaranteed. I think you all know my feelings on the matter.” He nodded at the letters he had gouged into the table using Clavain’s old knife. “I think you also know what Clavain would have done, under the same circumstances.”
No one said anything.
“But there’s a problem,” Scorpio said. “And the problem is that it isn’t our choice to make. This isn’t a democracy. All we can do is present our arguments and let Captain John Branni-gan make up his mind.”
He reached into a pocket in his leather tunic and pulled out the small handful of red dust he had carried there for days.
It was finely graded iron oxide, collected from one of the machine shops—as close to Martian soil as it was possible to get, twenty-seven light-years from Mars. It trailed between the short stubs of his fingers even as he stood up and held it over the centre of the table, between the Y and the H.
This was it, he knew: the crux moment. If nothing happened—if the ship did not immediately signal its intentions by making the dust point unambiguously to one letter or other, he was over. No matter how much he wanted to see things through, he would have made a mockery of himself. But Clavain had never shirked from these moments. His whole life had lurched from one point of maximum crisis to another.
Scorpio looked up. The dust was beginning to run out.
“Your call, John.” At night, in her room, the voice returned. It always waited until Rashmika was alone, until she was away from the garret. She had hoped, the first time, that it might turn out to be some temporary delusion, the effect, perhaps, of Quaicheist viral agents somehow entering her system and playing havoc with her sanity. But the voice was too rational for that, entirely too quiet and calm, and what it said was specifically directed at Rashmika and her predicament, rather than some ill-defined generic host.
[Rashmika,] it said, [listen to us, please. The time of crisis grows near, in more ways than one.]
“Go away,” she said, burying her head in the pillow.
[We need your help now,] the voice said.
She knew that if she did not answer the voice it would keep pestering her, its patience endless. “My help?”
[We know what Quaiche intends to do with this cathedral, how he plans to drive it over the bridge. He won’t succeed, Rashmika. The bridge won’t take the Lady Morwenna. It wasn’t ever meant to take something like a cathedral.]
“And you’d know, would you?”
[The bridge wasn’t made by the scuttlers. It’s a lot more recent than that. And it won’t withstand the Lady Mor.]
She sat up in her narrow cot of a bed and turned the shutters to admit stained-glass light. She felt the rumble and sway of the cathedral’s progress, the distant churning of engines. She thought of the bridge, shining somewhere ahead, delicate as a dream, oblivious to the vast mass sliding slowly towards it.
What did the voice mean, that it was a lot more recent?
“I can’t stop it,” she said.
[You don’t have to stop it. You just have to get us to safety, before it’s too late.]
“Ask Quaiche.”
[Don’t you think we’ve tried, Rashmika? Don’t you think we’ve spent hours trying to persuade him? But he doesn’t care about us. He’d rather we didn’t exist. Sometimes, he even manages to convince himself that we don’t. When the cathedral falls from the bridge, or the bridge collapses, we’ll be destroyed. He’ll let that happen, because then he doesn’t have to think about us any more.]
“I can’t help you,” she said. “I don’t want to help you. You scare me. I don’t even know what you are, or where you’ve come from.”
[You know more than you imagine,“ the voice said. ”You came here to find us, not Quaiche.]
“Don’t be silly.”
[We know who you are, Rashmika, or rather we know who you aren’t. That machinery in your head, remember? Where did all that come from?]
“I don’t know about any machinery.”
[And your memories—don’t they sometimes seem to belong to someone else? We heard you talking to the dean. We heard you talk about the Amarantin, and your memories of Resurgam.]
“It was a slip,” she said. “I didn’t mean…”
[You meant every word of it, but you just don’t realise it yet. You are vastly more than you think, Rashmika. How far back do your memories of life on Hela really stretch? Nine years? Not much more, we suspect. So what came before?]