InSec technicians had secured the scene, while Harry had accessed local security records, checking to see who had moved through the area. The wharf to the left was not in use. Aud Yamata had been working on the wharf to the right a few hours before. Apart from that there was nothing. A post-mortem confirmed that Penderville’s death was relatively recent, taking place just over an hour after Yamata had finished up and left. There was no record of anybody else in the area. The wharf’s camera nest was no help. It had been struck by a micro-meteorite two days before. Official eyes were blind.
A small choking sound pulled Jack out of his reverie. Looking over at Fist, Jack saw that the puppet’s shoulders were shaking. He was crying. Jack was still too angry with him to feel concern, but he was curious. It was very rare for Fist to show such vulnerability. His programming was meant to ensure that aggression was his response to any threatening situation. Grief only kicked in when all other avenues were exhausted. Jack wondered what had so frustrated him. Fist was whispering to himself, muttering the same phrase over and over again. ‘Stookie Bill, Stookie Bill, keep me safe, Stookie Bill.’
Jack tuned him out and focused on his own problems. He’d always found the silence of space conducive to deep thought. He sank back into himself, letting the swash and backwash of his own breathing soothe him. He was going to run over recent events, looking for any clues he might have missed – handholds and footholds that could help him move forward. But before he could fully drift away, he realised that something unusual was happening. Slowly but surely, without any fuss, the cold and silent world around him was starting to change.
The transformation began with the stars. They were mellowing to something a little yellower, a little creamier. As each one’s colour changed so did its shape, moving from being an empty dot to become a small rip and then a tear in the darkness that surrounded them. As the tears opened up the darkness fell away, no longer an eternal, unreachable absence but rather a shredded backdrop. Fist stopped sobbing. ‘Can you see this too?’ he asked. His wooden jaw hung down in amazement as the great change leapt down from the stars to infect the interior of Station.
There’s no sound in a vacuum. But Jack and Fist both heard a vast, glacial creaking as the circular world of Docklands, stippled across with the streets of a dozen districts, the leaping movement of trains, the firefly darting of flyers and the harsh glow of late afternoon spinelight, began to remake itself. Its round mouth stretched out to form an oval. Yellow-white spinelights became kilometres-long shards of primary colour. Tracery grew between them, infected with the ivory white that had replaced space – for the stars had now merged completely with each other, making the cosmos finite. The universe now ended in great walls that stretched away to the left and the right, above and below, swirling with the bright patterns that had once been the lights of Docklands.
Now it was the turn of the piers and wharves of the Spine to change. They flowed into place along the new walls, becoming a series of vertical columns. As they settled into their new shapes, they lost their metallic sheen – a last memory of what they had been. Between them, shining gouts of primary colours ran together, stretching up and down to mirrored arched points. At last, these new stained glass windows found their final shape, and the universe stopped changing.
Jack was standing in the nave of a cathedral, an open space carved from soft limestone that stretched before and behind him, to his left and to his right. He looked up. There was a great open tower above him. Looking down, he saw himself looking curiously back up. He was no longer wearing a vacuum suit. Two Fists hovered nearby, one right side up above him, one upside down beneath him.
Jack took a step. Ripples rolled out from his feet, shuddering through the perfect, liquid mirror that was the whole floor of the cathedral. They died down as Jack looked down past the two small human bodies, down into the great gulf of cathedral space beneath him, down at pilasters running down walls, down at great illuminated windows, emblazoned with great luminous images of men and women and gods; down for a hundred kilometres towards fan vaulting that could span moons. He shuddered with vertigo.
‘Pantheon,’ breathed Fist.
‘Oh yes,’ said Jack, awed.
Only one part of the world remained unchanged. Snowflakes gleamed in the cathedral space like stars, each duplicated in its liquid mercury floor. A moment of surprise, as Jack realised that they must be interfacing with this great Pantheon illusion. They were either strong enough to break through the image that had been thrown over the world, or somehow complicit in its creation. Then anything but an astonished awe left him as a thousand voices leapt into being and an invisible choir started to sing.
There was a soft, high keening drifting over a deeper bass rumble, the two alternately twining around then leaping away from each other. Deep beneath them an organ droned, its long, slow chords lending weight to the sadness emerging from their great pulses of harmony. The reflection below Jack shimmered in time with the music, until the voices fell silent and the mirror-floor stilled. Then one vast chord came crashing in as the organ and all the voices howled in unison, filling the nave and its reflection with a great, tectonic grief. All that had gone before had only been an introduction. The full choir was an infinity of voices, beating at the air with note after note as the organ raged on beneath them.
A figure glowed into being high up in the distance, hanging before the single great round window that burnt at the heart of the cathedral’s apse. ‘She must be kilometres high,’ thought Jack. White fabrics drifted around her. Her face was covered. She carried a pale, dead weight in her arms. Limbs hung down from it. There was a head, tipped all the way back. The woman and her burden started moving towards Jack, falling into human scale as they came. The music subsided into one endlessly sustained note. Cries of grief cut through it, hacking away at its simple purity like so many blunted knives.
‘What does this mean?’ whispered Fist.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
The woman reached Jack. As she came to a halt her robes began to fold themselves away, wings that were no longer needed. She drifted down, delicate feet extended. When she landed she staggered slightly and Jack understood how heavy her burden was. She walked the last few paces, rippling circles spinning away from her feet, until she stood before him. The last of the white fabric rippled away, revealing her face. It was East. Her eyes were rimmed with red. Tears had pulled makeup down her cheeks in long black tracks.
‘You involved her,’ she spat, her voice harsh with grief and rage. ‘It’s because of you.’
For the first time, Jack looked down at the body. Out of uniform, it took him a second to recognise it. He wanted to be mistaken. Fist hovered in closer and peered at the corpse. When he spoke, it was the first time in days that he’d sounded cheerful.
‘Well, Jackie boy, you’ve missed your chance with her for good.’
A bullet had punched a small neat hole in the corpse’s forehead.
There could be no doubt that Corazon was dead.
Chapter 22
East called a rectangular stone block into being and gently laid Corazon’s corpse on to it. Reaching up, she softened their surroundings, making it seem that sheets of gauze hung between the little group and the cathedral’s great empty spaces. There was a sudden sense of intimacy.
‘Where is she?’ asked Jack.
‘InSec broke into her apartment a few minutes ago. She hadn’t turned up for her shift.’