The curator robot pricked Moko’s skin. Blood budded on the tip of his thumb. Moko pressed it to the rock face and the curator etched his name and the date around it. Arlyana offered her hand to the curator. She pressed her blood to the wall next to Moko’s and watched as the curator finished etching.
As they rode the train back, Arlyana fell asleep on Moko’s shoulder. Now that he had time to think, he could see that Arlyana had been too quick to agree with his guess, and had been far too blithe about it. It bothered him that Arlyana had spun some more mist about herself. For someone who wanted to share terminal intimacies, she seemed paradoxically reluctant to let him understand her.
He ran through the names and dates in his mind, trying to reconstruct from memory Arlyana’s family tree and the sequence of events. Something was amiss with the story he had intuited.
Moko brushed Arlyana’s hair with his hand while she slept and wondered why she kept so many things to herself.
Moko said, “This looks terrible.”
“Should I care how it looks?”
“People will say I only wanted you for the time you gave me.”
“I want this more than I care what people think,” said Arlyana.
So they went to the registry and signed away the difference in their ballots. Moko gained time and Arlyana lost time, but they would both live long enough for Moko to learn to climb.
They started with training walls, then worked their way up to boulders, then spouts, and finally to sheer walls. She taught him about ropes and anchors and how to belay, and over the following weeks he built up his strength and endurance.
Signing at the registry had another, quite unexpected, effect: Moko, who had more or less disappeared from his life, became traceable. Consequently, Arlyana was woken early one morning by a message marked maximum urgency.
She opened the message. A man with a shaved scalp and a slightly pinched mouth appeared on screen; he wore a Brethren tunic.
“My dear lady,” said the man. “I apologize for sending a recorded message, but I am fifty light-hours away and cannot engage in responsive conversation. My name is Tarroux, and as you have may have guessed I am Moko’s brother. I found you through the registry, and I apologize for intruding on you, but I have been trying to reach Moko with an extremely urgent message. It is imperative that he view the attachment as soon as possible. Before I finish, please allow me thank you. When you signed your time over to Moko, you may have given him just enough to save himself from the ballot. I can’t tell you how much this means.” There the message ended.
Arlyana shook Moko awake and dragged his grogginess out of bed.
“You have to see this,” she said. Once the message finished, she touched the attachment and went to leave the room.
“Stay,” said Moko.
“But it’s private!”
“Stay!”
So they watched together as Tarroux, brother to Moko, spoke again.
“Moko,” he said, “there is a place for you on the last Brethren mission ship. You know this will be the last ship to leave Musca. The sun is becoming too wild even for missionaries.
“I know we’ve been through this before, but I am hoping that the approaching ballot date will have changed how you feel about joining the Brethren.
“Please, brother, I love you and it breaks my heart knowing how easily you could be saved.”
There was a stark jump-cut in the video stream. Tarroux had come back to the message and added a coda. The quality of the light had changed, the background was darker, and Tarroux looked as if he was being eaten from inside.
“Brother, I know I’ve asked you many times before and you’ve refused many times before, but please, please join the Brethren. I… I have never said this before, but I beg you to join the mission. Even if you don’t believe, just say that you do. That’s all you have to do. Just say you believe. I know, I know. It may be a lie. But with time spent among us, maybe you will come to see our truth. Even if you don’t change, even if you never accept the Tenets, I will still have my brother.”
At the end of the message, Arlyana turned off the screen.
“You turned down a place with the Brethren?” she asked, astonished. “You could have avoided the ballot?”
“Yes, I could have gone to the Brethren and lived a life that means nothing to me, full of empty rituals and prayers to forces I do not believe exist.”
“You would be alive,” she said.
“Just like you, eh?”
The sudden non sequitur jarred Arlyana. “What do you mean by that?” she asked.
“You think I wouldn’t figure out the story with you and your family? I know what happened. I know it was your sister who was balloted, not you. I know that you took over her ballot because she was pregnant. And I know that your sister fell pregnant after she was balloted, which means that your unborn niece is not just a reminder of your impending mortality, she is the reason for it. And it’s not your fetal niece you resent; it’s your manipulative sister.”
“You can’t possibly know all that,” Arlyana said angrily.
“All right, I don’t know all that; I inferred it. Tell me I’m wrong and I’ll take it all back.”
“You can’t possibly understand—”
“Tell me I’m wrong, then.”
Arlyana said nothing, she just glared at him while an accusatory aura radiated from her.
Canterbury Hollow was one of the great chambers that crowned their civilization: a wonder of engineering and of art, it had been carved in the shape of a cathedral window. Everyone came there when they died, for recycling. Here the bodies of the dead were committed to the huge bacterial vats that broke down flesh and bone and returned organics to the community.
It was their last day together. The train brought Arlyana and Moko to the base of the Sepulchral Tower, a bowed memorial to everyone who had ever lived and died in that underworld. Few visitors ever went deeper than the memorial park, but Arlyana and Moko were not there to mourn and so they walked past the Sepulchre and into the darker Hollow. The light dimmed as they went deeper: Here the brightness was only to be found where it was needed for the workers and machines of the Hollow to perform their daily tasks.
Arlyana took him to a ladder at the base of the western wall that stretched up into the gloom overhead.
“I did all that training to climb a ladder?” said Moko.
“This service ladder rises two hundred metres. After that, it’s all our own work.”
By the time they reached the top of the ladder, Moko’s arms were aching. He wondered how he would manage the rest of the climb. Arlyana reassured him that it would be harder work from here, but slower and with plenty of time for his muscles to recover between exertions.
“The route we’re taking is called Little Freya. It’s long but easy, and it has plenty of anchor points that previous climbers have left behind. Over to the right there—” and she pointed to a series of vertical ridges forty metres away “—is Big Freya. It’s a much, much harder climb. The record for free-climbing Big Freya is seven hours. I’ve free-climbed it in ten. Believe me, what we’re doing is a cinch.”
They took a rest break, then Arlyana looped a rope through a nearby anchor and started climbing. They took turns climbing, then belaying, climbing, then belaying. Their progress was slow but safe, and Moko found that the longer they climbed the more he became focussed on each motion, on balancing the needs of work and rest, on finding the most efficient body position to keep a hold without exhausting a muscle group. Arlyana watched over him, taking care not to push him too hard, nor to let him pause when they needed to push on.