“I brought the incubator, sir. Is the child…”
“Aura’s all right. She’s with her mother.”
“And Skade, sir?”
“Skade is dead,” Scorpio told him. “She knew she couldn’t survive much longer.” The pig’s voice sounded dull, void of feeling. “She’d diverted her own bodily resources to keep Aura alive. There wasn’t much of Skade left when we opened her up.”
“She wanted Aura to live,” Vasko said.
“Or she wanted a bargaining position when we came with Clavain.”
Vasko held up the light plastic box, as if Scorpio had not heard him properly. “The incubator, sir. We should get the child into it immediately.”
Scorpio leaned down, wiping the blade of the scalpel against the ice. The red smear bled away into the frost in patterns that made Vasko think of irises. He thought Scorpio might discard the knife, but instead the pig slipped it into a pocket.
“Jaccottet and Khouri will put the child into the incubator,” he said. “Meanwhile, you and I can take care of Clavain.”
“Sir?”
“His last wish. He wanted to be buried at sea.” Scorpio turned to step back into the ship. “I think we owe him that much.”
“Was that the last thing he said, sir?”
Scorpio turned slowly back to face Vasko and studied him for a long moment, his head tilted. Vasko felt as if he was being measured again, just as the old man had measured him, and the experience induced exactly the same feeling of inadequacy. What did these monsters from the past want of him? What did they expect him to live up to?
“It wasn’t the last thing he said, no,” Scorpio replied quietly.
They laid the body bag down on the fringe of ice surrounding the iceberg. Vasko had to keep reminding himself that it was still only the middle of the morning: the sky was a wet grey, clouds jammed in from horizon to horizon, like a ceiling scraping the top of the iceberg. A few kilometres out to sea was a distinct and threatening smudge of wet ink in that same ceiling, like a black eye. It seemed to move against the wind, as if looking for something below. On the horizon, lightning scribed chrome lines against the tarnished silver of the sky. Distant rain came down in slow sooty streams.
Around the iceberg, the sea roiled in sullen grey shapes. In all directions, the surface of the water was being constantly interrupted by slick, moving phantasms of an oily turquoise-green colour. Vasko had seen them earlier: they broke the surface, lingered and then vanished almost before the eye had time to focus. The impression was that a vast shoal of vague whale-like things was in the process of surrounding the iceberg. The phantasms bellied and gyred between waves and spume. They merged and split, orbited and submerged, and their precise shape and size was impossible to determine. But they were not animals. They were vast aggregations of microorganisms acting in a coherent manner.
Vasko saw Scorpio looking at the sea. There was an expression on the pig’s face that he hadn’t seen before. Vasko wondered if it was apprehension.
“Something’s happening, isn’t it?” Vasko asked.
“We have to carry him beyond the ice,” Scorpio said. “The boat’s still good for a few hours. Help me get him into it.”
“We shouldn’t take too long over it, sir.”
“You think it makes the slightest difference how long it takes?”
“From what you’ve said, sir, it made a difference to Clavain.”
They heaved the bag into the black carcass of the nearest boat. In daylight the hull already looked far rougher than Vasko remembered it, the smooth metal surface pocked and pitted with spots of local corrosion. Some of them were deep enough to put his thumb into. Even as they lifted the bag over the side, bits of the boat came off in metallic scabs where Vasko’s knee touched it.
The two of them climbed aboard. Urton, who was to remain on the iceberg’s ledge, helped them on their way with a shove. Scorpio turned on the motor. The water fizzed and the boat inched back towards the sea, retreating along the channel it had cut into the fringe.
“Wait.”
Vasko followed the voice. It was Jaccottet, emerging from the iceberg. The incubator hung from his wrist, obviously heavier than when Vasko had carried it in.
“What is it?” Scorpio called, idling the engine.
“You can’t leave without us.”
“No one’s leaving.”
“The child needs medical attention. We must get her back to the mainland as soon as possible.”
“That’s just what’s going to happen. Didn’t you hear what Vasko said? There’s a plane on its way. Sit tight here and everything will be all right.“
“In this weather the plane might take hours, and we don’t know how stable this iceberg is.”
Vasko felt Scorpio’s anger. It made his skin tingle, the way static electricity did. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying we should leave now, sir, in both boats, just as we came in. Head south. The plane will pick us up by transponder. We’re bound to save time that way, and we don’t have to worry about this thing collapsing under us.”
“He’s right, sir, I think,” Vasko said.
“Who asked you?” Scorpio snapped.
“No one, sir, but I’d say we all have a stake in this now, don’t we?”
“You have no stake in anything, Malinin.”
“Clavain seemed to think I did.”
He expected the pig to kill him there and then. The possibility loomed in his mind even as his gaze drifted to that deep black eye in the clouds. It was closer now—no more than a kilometre from the iceberg—and it was bellying down, beginning to reach something nublike towards the sea. It was a tornado, Vasko realised: just what they needed.
But Scorpio only snarled and powered up the engine again. “Are you with me or not? If not, get out and wait on the ice with the others.”
“I’m with you, sir,” Vasko said. “I just don’t see why we can’t do it the way Jaccottet says. We can leave with both boats and bury Clavain on the way.”
“Get out.”
“Sir?”
“I said get out. It isn’t up for negotiation.”
Vasko started to say something. Time and again, when he replayed the incident in his mind, it would never be clear to him just what he intended to say to the pig at that moment. Perhaps he already knew he had crossed the line at that point, and that nothing he could say or do would ever unmake that crossing.
Scorpio moved with lightning speed. He let go of the engine control, seized Vasko with both trotters and then levered him over the side. Vasko felt the top inch of the metal side of the boat crumble under his thigh, like brittle chocolate. Then his back hit a thin and equally brittle skein of ice, and finally he sank into water colder than anything he had ever imagined, the bitter chill ramming up his spine like a gleaming piston of shock and pain. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t cry out or reach for anything solid. He could hardly remember his name, or why drowning was such a bad thing after all.
He saw the boat slide away into the sea. He saw Jaccottet place the incubator on the ground, Khouri stepping up behind him, and start walking quickly but carefully towards him.
Above, the sky was a blank cerebral grey, except for the shadowy focus of the stormy eye. The nub of blackness had almost reached the surface of the water. It was curling to one side, towards the iceberg.
Scorpio brought the boat to a standstill. It rocked in a metre-high swell, not so much floating in water now as resting on a moving raft of blue-green organic matter. The raft reached away in all directions for many dozens of metres, but it was thickest at its epicentre, which appeared to be precisely where the boat had come to rest. Surrounding it was a dark charcoal band of relatively uncontaminated water, and beyond that lay several other distinct islands of Juggler matter. Beneath the surface of the water, glimpsed intermittently between waves and foam, were suggestions of frondlike tentacular structures, thick as pipelines. They bobbed and swayed, and occasionally moved with the slow, eerie deliberation of prehensile tails.