‘You have years ahead of you, sir.’
‘Oh, I may live to see Journey’s End, but I’ll be in no position to oversee the difficult early years of the settlement. Even you will no longer be a young man when that happens, Haussmann… but you will be much younger than some of us. Importantly, I see you have nerve as well as vision…’ Ramirez glanced at Sky oddly. ‘Something’s troubling you, isn’t it?’
Sky was watching the dots of the executed men dissolve into darkness, like two tiny spots of cream dropped into the blackest coffee imaginable. The ship was not under thrust, of course — it had been drifting for Sky’s entire life — which meant that the men were taking an eternity to fall away.
‘Nothing, sir. I was just thinking. Now that those two men have been ejected, and we don’t have to carry them with us any more, we’ll be able to decelerate just that little bit harder when it comes time to initiate the slow-down burn. That means we can stay in cruise mode a little longer, at our current speed. It means we’ll reach our destination sooner. Which means those men have, in some small, barely sufficient way, paid us back for their crimes.’
‘You do come out with the oddest things, Haussmann.’ Ramirez tapped him on the nose and leaned closer. There had never been any danger of the other officers overhearing the conversation, but now he was whispering. ‘Word of advice. I wasn’t joking when I said your name had been bandied about — but you aren’t the only candidate, and one wrong word from you could have a disastrous effect on your chances. Am I making myself clear?’
‘Crystal, sir.’
‘Good. Then watch your step, keep your head about you at all times, and you may be in with a chance.’
Sky nodded. He imagined that Ramirez expected him to feel grateful for this titbit of confidentiality, but what Sky actually felt — and did his level best to hide — was unmitigated contempt. As if the wishes of Ramirez and his cronies in any way influenced him! As if they actually had any say in whether he became Captain or not. The poor, blind fools.
‘He’s nothing,’ Sky breathed. ‘But I’ve got to let him feel he is useful to us.’
‘Of course,’ Clown said, for Clown had never been far away. ‘It’s what I would do.’
TWENTY-FIVE
After the episode had happened, I walked around the concourse until I found a tent where I could rent the use of a telephone for a few minutes. Everyone relied on phones now that the city’s original elegantly swift data networks had stopped working. It was something of a comedown for a society whose machines had once elevated the art of communication into an effortless form of near-telepathy, but the phones had become a minor fashion accessory in their own right. The poor didn’t have them and so the rich flaunted them, the larger and more conspicuous the better. The phone I rented looked like a crude, military-hardened walkie-talkie: a bulky black handheld unit with a popup two-d screen and a matrix of scuffed push-buttons marked with Canasian characters.
I asked the man renting the phone what I needed to do to reach both an orbital number and someone in the Canopy. He gave me a long and involved explanation about both, the details of which I struggled to hold in my head. The orbital number was easier since I already knew it — engraved onto the Mendicant business card which Sister Amelia had left me — but I had to get through four or five temperamental network layers before I reached it.
The Mendicants conducted their business in an interesting manner. They maintained ties with many of their clients long after they had left Hospice Idlewild. Some of those clients, on ascending to positions of power in the system, returned favours to the Mendicants — donations which allowed them to keep their habitat solvent. But it went beyond that. The Mendicants relied on their clients returning to them for additional services — information and the something which could only be described as the politest kind of espionage, so it was always in their interests to be in easy reach.
I had to walk out of the station, into the rain, before the phone was able to hook into any of the city’s surviving data systems. Even then it took many seconds of stuttering attempts before an informational route was established to the Hospice, and once our conversation began it was punctuated by significant timelags and dropouts as data packets ricocheted around near-Yellowstone space, occasionally arcing off on parabolas which never returned.
‘Brother Alexei of the Ice Mendicants, how may I serve God through you?’
The face which had appeared on the screen was gaunt and lantern-jawed, the man’s eyes gleaming with calm benevolence, like an owl. One of the eyes, I noticed, was surrounded by a deep purple bruise.
‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘Brother Alexei. How nice. What happened? Fell on your trowel?’
‘I’m not sure I follow you, friend.’
‘Well, I’ll jog your memory for you. My name is Tanner Mirabel. I came through the Hospice a few days ago, from the Orvieto.’
‘I’m… not sure I recall you, brother.’
‘Funny. Don’t you remember how we exchanged vows in the cave?’
He gritted his teeth, all the while maintaining that benevolent half-smile. ‘No… sorry. Drawing a blank there. But please continue. ’
He was wearing an Ice Mendicant smock, hands clasped across his stomach. Behind him, I was afforded a view of climbing stepped vineyards which rose up and up until they curved overhead, bathed in the mirrored light of the habitat’s sunscreens. Little chalets and rest places dotted the steps, blocks of cool white amidst the overwhelmingly florid green, like icebergs on a briny sea.
‘I need to speak to Sister Amelia,’ I said. ‘She was very kind to me during our stay and she dealt with my personal affairs. I seem to remember you and she are acquainted?’
The look of placidity did not diminish. ‘Sister Amelia is one of our kindest souls. It does not surprise me that you wish to show your gratitude. But I am afraid she is indisposed in the cryocrypts. Perhaps I can — in my own way — at least be of service, even if my own ministerings can not even begin to approximate the degree of devotion tended you by the divine Sister Amelia?’
‘Have you hurt her, Alexei?’
‘God forgive you.’
‘Cut the pious act. I’ll break your spine if you’ve hurt her. You realise that, don’t you? I should have done it while I had the chance.’
He chewed on that for a few moments before responding, ‘No, Tanner… I haven’t hurt her. Does that satisfy you?’
‘Then get me Amelia.’
‘Why is it so urgent that you speak to her, and not me?’
‘I know from the conversations we had that Sister Amelia dealt with a lot of newcomers coming through the Hospice, and I’d like to know if she ever remembered dealing with a Mister…’ I started saying Quirrenbach, then bit my tongue.
‘Sorry, didn’t quite catch the name.’
‘Never mind. Just put me through to Amelia.’
He hesitated, then asked me to repeat my own name again. ‘Tanner,’ I said, gritting my teeth.
It was like we had only just been introduced. ‘Just a moment of your — um — patience, brother.’ The look was still in place, but his voice had an edge of strain to it now. He lifted one sleeve of his frock, exposing a bronze bracelet into which he spoke, very softly and possibly in a tongue specific only to the Mendicants. I watched an image appear on the bracelet, but it was far too small for me to identify anything other than a pink blur which might have been a human face, and which might also have been Sister Amelia. There was a pause of five or six seconds before Alexei lowered the sleeve of his smock.
‘Well?’
‘I cannot reach her immediately, brother. She is tending to the slush… to the sick, and one would be sorely inadvised to interrupt her when she is so engaged. But I have been informed that she has been seeking you as much as you seek her.’
