“It needn’t have been anything sinister,” Linxe said.
“I only know they lied to him.”
Crozet dabbed at the corner of his eye with the tip of one little finger. “One of you buggers mind filling me in on what you’re talking about? Because I haven’t a clue.”
“It’s about her brother,” Linxe said. “Didn’t you listen to anything I told you?”
“Didn’t know you had a brother,” Crozet said.
“He was a lot older than me,” Rashmika told him. “And it was eight years ago, anyway.”
“What was eight years ago?”
“When he went to the Permanent Way.”
“To the cathedrals?”
“That was the idea. He wouldn’t have considered it if it hadn’t been easier that year. But it was the same as now—the caravans were travelling further north than usual, so they were in easy range of the badlands. Two or three days’ travel by jammer to reach the caravans, rather than twenty or thirty days overland to reach the Way.”
“Religious man, was he, your brother?”
“No, Crozet. No more than me, anyway. Look, I was nine at the time. What happened back then isn’t exactly ingrained in my memory. But I understand that times were difficult. The existing digs had been just about tapped out. There’d been blowouts and collapses. The villages were feeling the pinch.”
“She’s right,” Linxe said to Crozet. “I remember what it was like back then, even if you don’t.”
Crozet worked the joysticks, skilfully steering the jammer around an elbow-like outcropping. “Oh, I remember all right.”
“My brother’s name was Harbin Els,” Rashmika said. “Harbin worked the digs. When the caravans came he was nineteen, but he’d been working underground almost half his life. He was good at a lot of things, and explosives was one of them—laying charges, calculating yields, that sort of thing. He knew how to place them to get almost any effect he wanted. He had a reputation for doing the job properly and not taking any short cuts.”
“I’d have thought that kind of work would have been in demand in the digs,” Crozet said.
“It was. Until the digs faltered. Then it got tougher. The villages couldn’t afford to open up new caverns. It wasn’t just the explosives that were too expensive. Shoring up the new caverns, putting in power and air, laying in auxiliary tunnels… all that was too costly. So the villages concentrated their efforts in the existing chambers, hoping for a lucky strike.”
“And your brother?”
“He wasn’t going to wait around until his skills were needed. He’d heard of a couple of other explosives experts who had made the overland crossing—took them months, but they’d made it to the Way and entered the service of one of the major churches. The churches need people with explosives knowledge, or so he’d been told. They have to keep blasting ahead of the cathedrals, to keep the Way open.”
“It isn’t called the Permanent Way for nothing,” Crozet said.
“Well, Harbin thought that sounded like the kind of work he could do. It didn’t mean that he had to buy into the church’s particular worldview. It just meant that they’d have an arrangement. They’d pay him for his demolition skills. There were even rumours of jobs in the technical bureau of Way maintenance. He was good with numbers. He thought he stood a chance of getting that kind of position, as someone who planned where to put the charges rather than doing it himself. It sounded good. He’d keep some of the money, enough to live on, and send the rest of it back to the badlands.”
“Your parents were happy with that?” Crozet asked.
“They don’t talk about it much. Reading between the lines, they didn’t really want Harbin to have anything to do with the churches. But at the same time they could see the sense. Times were hard. And Harbin made it sound so mercenary, almost as if he’d be taking advantage of the church, not the other way around. Our parents didn’t exactly encourage him, but on the other hand they didn’t say no. Not that it would have done much good if they had.”
“So Harbin packed his bags…”
She shook her head at Crozet. “No, we made a family outing of it, to see him off. It was just like now—almost the whole village rode out to meet the caravans. We went out in someone’s jammer, two or three days’ journey. Seemed like a lot longer at the time, but then I was only nine. And then we met the caravan, somewhere out near the flats. And aboard the caravan was a man, a kind of… ” Rashmika faltered. It was not that she had trouble with the details, but it was emotionally wrenching to have to go over this again, even at a distance of eight years. “A recruiting agent, I suppose you’d call him. Working for one of the churches. The main one, actually. The First Adventists. Harbin had been told that this was the man he had to talk to about the work. So we all went for a meeting with him, as a family. Harbin did most of the talking, and the rest of us sat in the same room, listening. There was another man there who said nothing at all; he just kept looking at us—me mainly—and he had a walking stick that he kept pressing to his lips, as if he was kissing it. I didn’t like him, but he wasn’t the man Harbin was dealing with, so I didn’t pay him as much attention as I did the recruiting agent. Now and then Mum or Dad would ask something, and the agent would answer politely. But mainly it was just him and Harbin doing the talking. He asked Harbin what skills he had, and Harbin told him about his explosives work. The man seemed to know a little about it. He asked difficult questions. They meant nothing to me, but I could tell from the way Harbin answered—carefully, not too glibly—that they were not stupid or trivial. But whatever Harbin said, it seemed to satisfy the recruiting agent. He told Harbin that, yes, the church did have a need for demolition specialists, especially in the technical bureau. He said it was a never-ending task, keeping the Way clear, and that it was one of the few areas in which the churches co-operated. He admitted also that the bureau had need of a new engineer with Harbin’s background.”
“Smiles all around, then,” Crozet said.
Linxe slapped him again. “Let her finish.”
“Well, we were smiling,” said Rashmika. “To start with. After all, this was just what Harbin had been hoping for. The terms were good and the work was interesting. The way Harbin figured, he only had to put up with it until they started opening new caverns again back in the badlands. Of course, he didn’t tell the recruiting agent that he had no plans to stick around for more than a revolution or two. But he did ask one critical question.”
“Which was?” Linxe asked.
“He’d heard that some of the churches used methods on those that worked for them to bring them around to the churches’ way of thinking. Made them believe that what they were doing was of more than material significance, that their work was holy.”
“Made them swallow the creed, you mean?” Crozet said.
“More than that: made them accept it. They have ways. And from the churches’ point of view, you can’t really blame them. They want to keep their hard-won expertise. Of course, my brother didn’t like the sound of that at all.”
“So what was the recruiter’s reaction to the question?” Crozet asked.
“The man said Harbin need have no fears on that score. Some churches, he admitted, did practise methods of… well, I forget exactly what he said. Something about Bloodwork and Clocktowers. But he made it clear that the Quaicheist church was not one of them. And he pointed out that there were workers of many beliefs amongst their Permanent Way gangs, and there’d never been any efforts to convert any of them to the Quaicheist faith.”