If there was a God, he thought, then there wouldn’t be wolves. They weren’t part of anyone’s idea of heaven and hell.
The shuttle banked away from the cathedral. He could see the rough, ungraded surface of the Permanent Way stretching ahead of the Lady Morwenna. But it did not stretch very far before meeting the dark, shadowed absence of Ginnungagap Rift. Vasko knew exactly what the locals called it.
The Way appeared to end at the edge of Absolution Gap. On the far side of the Rift, forty kilometres from the near side, the road continued. There appeared to be nothing in between but forty kilometres of empty space. It was only when the shuttle had climbed a little higher that a particular angle of the light picked out the absurdly delicate filigree of the bridge, as if it had been breathed into being just at that moment.
Vasko looked at the bridge, then back to the cathedral. It still appeared to be stationary, but he could see that the landmarks that had been next to it a few minutes earlier were now just behind it. The crawl was slug-slow, but there was also an inevitability about it.
And the bridge did not look remotely capable of carrying the cathedral to the other side of the rift.
He opened the secure channel to the larger shuttle waiting in orbit, the one that would relay his signal to the Nostalgia for Infinity, which was still waiting in the parking swarm.
“This is Vasko,” he said. “We’ve made contact with Aura.”
“Did you get anything?” asked Orca Cruz.
He looked at Khouri. She nodded, but said nothing.
“We got something,” Vasko said.
Scorpio came to consciousness knowing that this sleep had been even longer than the one before. He could feel the messages of chemical protestation from his cells flooding his system as they were cajoled back towards the grudging labour of metabolism. They were picking up tools like disgruntled workers, ready to down them for good at the slightest provocation. They had had enough mistreatment for one lifetime. Join the club, Scorpio thought. It was not as if the management was enjoying it, either.
He groped back into memory. He recalled, clearly enough, the episode of waking in the Yellowstone system. He remembered seeing the evidence of the wolves’ handiwofk, Yellowstone and its habitats reduced to ruins, the system gutted. He remembered also the part he had played in the dispute over the evacuees. He had won that particular battle—the shuttle had been allowed aboard—but it seemed-that he had lost the war. The choice had been his: surrender command and submit to a passive role as an observer, or go into the freezer again. Practically, the two amounted to the same thing: he would be out of the picture, leaving the running of the ship to Vasko and his allies. But at least if frozen he would not have to stand there watching it happen. It was a small compensation, but at his point in life it was the small compensations that mattered.
And now at last he was being awoken. His position aboard the ship might be just as compromised as before he went under, but at least he would have the benefit of some different scenery.
“Well?” he asked Valensin, while the doctor ran his usual battery of tests. “Ducked the odds again, didn’t I?”
“You always had an even chance of surviving it, Scorpio, but that doesn’t make you immortal. You go into that thing again, you won’t come out of it.”
“You said I had a ten per cent chance of survival the next time.”
“I was trying to cheer you up.”
“It’s worse than that?”
Valensin pointed at the reefersleep casket. “You climb into that box one more time, we might as well paint it black and put handles on it.”
But the true state of his current health, even when he filtered out Valensin’s usual tendency to put a positive spin on things, was still bad. In some respects it was as if he had not been in the casket at all; as if the flow of time had operated on him with stealthy disregard for the supposed effects of cryogenic stasis. His vision and hearing had degenerated further. He could barely see anything in his peripheral vision now, and even in full view, things that had been sharp before now appeared granular and milky. He kept having to ask Valensin to speak up above the churn of the room’s air conditioners. He had never had to do that before. When he walked around he found himself tiring quickly, always looking for somewhere to rest and catch his breath. His heart and lung capacities had weakened. Pig cardiovascular systems had been engineered by commercial interests for maximum ease of transgenic transplantation. The same interests hadn’t been overly concerned about the longevity of their products. Planned obsolescence, they called it.
He had been fifty when he left Ararat. To all intents and purposes he was still fifty: he had lived through only a few subjective weeks of additional time. But the transitions to and from reefersleep had put another seven or eight years on the clock, purely because of the battering his cells had taken. It would have been worse if he had stayed awake, living through all those years of shiptime, but not by very much.
Still, he was alive. He had lived through more years of worldtime than most pigs. So what if he was pushing the envelope of pig longevity? He was weakened, but he wasn’t on his back just yet.
“So where are we?” he asked Valensin. “I take it we’re around 107 Piscium. Or did you just wake me up to tell me how bad an idea it was to wake me up?”
“We’re around 107 Piscium, yes, but you still need to do a little catching up.” Valensin helped him off the examination couch, Scorpio noticing that the two old servitors had finally broken down and been consigned to new roles as coat racks, standing guard on either side of the door.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Scorpio said. “How long has it been? What’s the year?”
“Twenty-seven twenty-seven,” Valensin said. “And no, I don’t like the sound of that any more than you do. One other thing, Scorpio.”
“Yes?”
Valensin handed him a curved white shard, like a flake of ice. “You were holding this when you went under. I presumed it had some significance.”
Scorpio took the piece of conch material from the doctor.
There was something wrong, something that no one was telling him. Scorpio looked at the faces around the conference table, trying to see it for himself. Everyone that he would have expected to be there was present: Cruz, Urton, Vasko, as well as a good number of seniors he did not know so well. Khouri was also there. But now that he saw her he realised the obvious, screaming absence. There was no sign of Aura.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“She’s all right, Scorp,” Vasko said. “She’s safe and well. I know because I’ve just seen her.”
“Someone tell him,” Khouri said. She looked older than last time, Scorpio thought. There were more lines on her face, more grey in her hair. She wore it short now, combed across her brow. He could see the shape of her skull shining through the skin.
“Tell me what?” he asked.
“How much did Valensin explain?” Vasko asked him.
“He told me the date. That was about it.”
“We had to take some difficult decisions, Scorp. In your absence, we did the best we could.”