In my absence, Scorpio thought: as if he had walked out on them, leaving them in the lurch when they most needed him; making him feel as if he was the one at fault, the one who had shirked his responsibilities.
“I’m sure you managed,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. He had woken up with a headache. It was still there.
“We arrived here in 2717,” Vasko said, “after a nineteen-year flight from the Yellowstone system.”
The back of Scorpio’s neck prickled. “That’s not the date Valensin just gave me.”
“Valensin didn’t lie,” Urton said. “The local system date is 2727. We arrived around Hela nearly ten years ago. We’d have woken you then, but the time wasn’t right. Valensin told us we’d only get one shot. If we woke you then, you’d either be dead now or frozen again with only a small chance of revival.”
“This is the way it had to happen, Scorp,” Vasko said. “You were a resource we couldn’t afford to squander.”
“You’ve no idea how good that makes me feel.”
“What I mean is, we had to think seriously about when would be the best time to wake you. You always told us to wait until we’d arrived around Hela.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Well, think of this as our proper arrival. As far as the system authorities are concerned—the Adventists—we’ve only shown up in the last few weeks. We left and came back again, making a loop through local interstellar space.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because of what had to happen,” Vasko said. “When we got here ten years ago, we realised that the situation in this system was vastly more complex than we’d anticipated. The Adventists controlled access to Haldora, the planet that keeps vanishing. You had to deal with the church to get near Hela, and even then you weren’t allowed to send any probes anywhere near the gas giant.”
“You could have shot your way in, taken what you wanted by force.”
“And risked a bloodbath? There are a million innocent civilians on Hela, not to mention all the tens of thousands of sleepers in the ships parked in this system. And it’s not as if we knew exactly what we were looking for. If we’d come in with guns blazing, we might have destroyed the very thing we needed, or at the very least made sure that we’d never get our hands on it. But if we could get close to Quaiche, then we could get at the problem from the inside.”
“Quaiche is still alive?” Scorpio asked.
“We know that for sure now—Khouri and I met him today,” Vasko said. “But he’s a recluse, kept alive with faltering longevity therapies. He never leaves the Lady Morwenna, his cathedral. He doesn’t sleep. He’s had his brain altered so that he doesn’t need to. He doesn’t even blink. He spends every waking instant of his life staring at Haldora, waiting for it to blink instead.”
“He’s insane, then.”
“In his situation, wouldn’t you be? Something awful happened to him down there. It pushed him over the edge.”
“He has an indoctrinal virus,” Cruz said. “It’s always been in his blood, since before he came to Hela. Now there’s a whole industry down there, fractioning it off, splicing it into different grades, mixing it with other viruses brought in by the evacuees. They say he has moments of doubt, when he realises that everything he’s created here is a sham. That deep down inside he knows the vanishings are a rational phenomenon, not a miracle. That’s when he has a new strain of the indoctrinal virus pumped back into his blood.”
“Difficult man to get to know, sounds like,” Scorpio observed.
“More difficult than we anticipated,” Vasko said. “But Aura saw the way. It was her plan, Scorp, not ours.”
“And the plan was?”
“She went down there nine years ago,” Khouri said, looking straight at him, as if the two of them were alone in the room. “She was eight years old, Scorp. I couldn’t stop her. She knew what she’d been sent out into the world to do, and it was to find Quaiche.“
He shook his head. “You didn’t send an eight-year-old girl down there alone. Tell me you didn’t do it.”
“We had no choice,” Khouri said. “Trust me. I’m her mother. Trying to stop her from going down there was like trying to stop a salmon Swimming upriver. It was going to happen whether we liked it or not.”
“We found a family,” Vasko said. “Good people, living in the Vigrid badlands.
They had a son, but they’d lost their only daughter in an accident a couple of years earlier. They didn’t know who or what Aura was, only that they weren’t to ask too many questions. They were also told to treat her exactly as if she’d always been with them. They fell into the role very easily, telling her stories of things that their other daughter had done when she was younger. They loved her very much.“
“Why the pretence?”
“Because she didn’t remember who she really was,” Khouri said. “She buried her own memories, suppressing them. She’s halfway to being a Conjoiner. She can arrange her own head the way the rest of us arrange furniture. It wasn’t all that difficult for her to do, once she realised it had to happen.”
“Why?” he asked.
“So that she’d fit in without her whole life becoming an act. If she believed she’d been born on Hela, so would the people she met.”
“That’s horrific.”
“You think it was any easier for me, Scorp? I’m her mother. I was with her the day she decided to forget me. I walked into the same room as her and she barely noticed me.”
He gradually learned the rest of the story, doing his best to ignore the sense of unreality he felt. More than once he had to examine his surroundings, convincing himself that this was not just another revival nightmare. He felt foolish, having slept through all these machinations. But their story, or at least what he had been told of it, was seamless. It also had, he was forced to admit, a brutal inevitability. It had taken the Nostalgia for Infinity decades to reach Hela: more than forty years just trav-elling from Ararat via the Yellowstone system. But Aura’s mission had begun long before that, when she was hatched within the matrix of the Hades neutron star. Given all the time that she had been on her way, an extra nine years was really not all that serious an addition. Yes:now that he put it like that, it all made a horrid kind of sense. But only if you chose not to view the universe through the eyes of a pig close to the end of his life.
“She didn’t really forget anything,” Vasko said. “It was just buried subconsciously, planted there to bubble up as she grew older. We knew that sooner or later she would start to be compelled by those hidderf memories, even if she didn’t know exactly what was going on herself.”
“And?” Scorpio asked.
“She sent us a signal. It was to warn us that she was on her way to meet Quaiche. That was our cue to start making approaches to the Adventists. By the time we got through to him, Aura had already worked her way into his confidence.”
The leather of Scorpio’s jacket creaked as he folded his arms across his chest. “She just strolled into his life?”
“She’s his advisor,” Vasko said. “Sits in on his dealings with Ultras. We don’t know exactly what she’s doing there, but we can guess. Aura had—has—a gift. We saw it even when she was a baby.”
“She can read our faces better than we can,” Khouri said, “can tell if we’re lying, if we’re sad when we say we’re happy. It doesn’t have anything to do with her implants, and it won’t have gone away just because she hid those memories of herself.”
“She must have drawn attention to herself,” Vasko said, “made herself irresistible to Quaiche. But that was really just a short cut to his attention. Sooner or later she’d have found her way there, no matter what the obstacles. It was what she was born to do.”