Crozet narrowed his eyes. “And?”
“I knew he was lying.”
“You thought he was lying,” Crozet said, correcting her the way teachers did.
“No, I knew. I knew it with the kind of certainty I’d have had if he’d walked in with a sign around his neck saying ‘liar.’ There was no more doubt in my mind that he was lying than that he was breathing. It wasn’t open to debate. It was screamingly obvious.”
“But not to anyone else,” Linxe said.
“Not to my parents, not to Harbin, but I didn’t realise that at the time. When Harbin nodded and thanked the man, I thought they were playing out some kind of strange adult ritual. Harbin had asked him a vital question, and the man had given him the only answer that his office allowed—a diplomatic answer, but one which everyone present fully understood to be a lie. So in that respect it wasn’t really a lie at all… I thought that was clear. If it wasn’t, why did the man make it so obvious that he wasn’t telling the truth?”
“Did he really?” Crozet asked.
“It was as if he wanted me to know he was lying, as if he was smirking and winking at me the whole time… without actually smirking or winking, of course, but always being on the threshold of doing it. But only I saw that. I thought Harbin must have… that surely he’d seen it… but no, he hadn’t. He kept on acting as if he honestly thought the man was telling the truth. He was already making arrangements to stay with the caravan so that he could complete the rest of the journey to the Permanent Way. That was when I started making a scene. If this was a game, I didn’t like the way they were insisting on still playing it, without letting me in on the joke.”
“You thought Harbin was in danger,” Linxe said.
“Look, I didn’t understand everything that was at stake. Like I said, I was only nine. I didn’t really comprehend faiths and creeds and contracts. But I understood the one thing that mattered: that Harbin had asked the man the question that was most important to him, the one that was going to decide whether he joined the church or not, and the man had lied to him. Did I think that put him in mortal danger? No. I don’t think I had much idea of what ‘mortal danger’ meant then, to be honest. But I knew something was wrong, and I knew I was the only one who saw it.”
“The girl who never lies,” Crozet said.
“They’re wrong about me,” Rashmika answered. “I do lie. I lie as well as anyone, now. But for a long time I didn’t understand the point of it. I suppose that meeting with the man was the beginning of my realisation. I understood then that what had been obvious to me all my life was not obvious to everyone else.”
Linxe looked at her. “Which is?”
“I can always tell when people are lying. Always. Without fail. And I’m never wrong.”
Crozet smiled tolerantly. “You think you can.”
“I know I can,” Rashmika said. “It’s never failed me.”
Linxe knitted her fingers together in her lap. “Was that the last you heard of your brother?”
“No. We didn’t see him again, but he kept to his word. He sent letters back home, and every now and again there’d be some money. But the letters were vague, emotionally detached; they could have been written by anyone, really. He never came back to the badlands, and of course there was never any possibility of us visiting him. It was just too difficult. He’d always said he’d return, even in the letters… but the gaps between them grew longer, became months and then half a year… then perhaps a letter every revolution or so. The last was two years ago. There really wasn’t much in it. It didn’t even look like his handwriting.”
“And the money?” Linxe asked delicately.
“It kept coming in. Not much, but enough to keep the wolves away.”
“You think they got to him, don’t you?” Crozet asked.
“I know they got to him. I knew it from the moment we met the recruiting agent, even if no one else did. Bloodwork, whatever they called it.”
“And now?” Linxe said.
“I’m going to find out what happened to my brother,” Rashmika said. “What else did you expect?”
“The cathedrals won’t take kindly to someone poking around in that kind of business,” Linxe said.
Rashmika set her lips in a determined pout. “And I don’t take kindly to being lied to.”
“You know what I think?” Crozet said, smiling. “I think the cathedrals had better hope they’ve got God on their side. Because up against you they’re going to need all the help they can get.”
SEVEN
Like a golden snowflake, the Scavenger’s Daughter fell through the dusty vacuum of interplanetary space. Quaiche had left Morwenna three hours earlier; his message to the queen-commander of the Gnostic Ascension, a sinuous thread of photons snaking through interplanetary space, was still on its way. He thought of the lights of a distant train moving across a dark, dark continent: the enormous distance separating him from other sentient beings was enough to make him shudder.
But he had been in worse situations, and at least this time there was a distinct hope of success. The bridge on Hela was still there; it had not turned out to be a mirage of the sensors or his own desperate yearning to find something, and the closer he got the less likely it was that the bridge would turn out to be anything other than a genuine technological artefact. Quaiche had seen some deceptive things in his time—geology that looked as if it had been designed, lovingly sculpted or mass-produced—but he had never seen anything remotely like this. His instincts said that geology had not been the culprit, but he was having serious trouble with the question of who—or what—had created it, because the fact remained that 107 Piscium system appeared not to have been visited by anyone else. He shivered in awe, and fear, and reckless expectation.
He felt the indoctrinal virus awaken in his blood, a monster turning over in its sleep, opening one dreamy eye. It was always there, always within him, but for much of the time it slept, disturbing neither his dreams nor his waking moments. When it engorged him, when it roared in his veins like a distant report of thunder, he would see and hear things. He would glimpse stained-glass windows in the sky; he would hear organ music beneath the subsonic growl of each burst of correctional thrust from his tiny jewel-like exploration ship.
Quaiche forced calm. The last thing he needed now was the indoctrinal virus having its way with him. Let it come to him later, when he was safe and sound back aboard the Dominatrix. Then it could turn him into any kind of drooling, mumbling idiot it wished. But not here, not now. Not while he needed total clarity of mind.
The monster yawned, returned to sleep.
Quaiche was relieved. His faltering control over the virus was still there.
He let his thoughts creep back to the bridge, cautiously this time, trying to avoid succumbing to the reverential cosmic chill that had wakened the virus.
Could he really rule out human builders? Wherever they went, humans left junk. Their ships spewed out radioisotopes, leaving twinkling smears across the faces of moons and worlds. Their pressure suits and habitats leaked atoms, leaving ghost atmospheres around otherwise airless bodies. The partial pressures of the constituent gases were always a dead giveaway. They left navigation transponders, servitors, fuel cells and waste products. You found their frozen piss—little yellow snowballs—forming miniature ring systems around planets. You found corpses and, now and then—more often than Quaiche would have expected—they were murder victims.