The Revelation Space Collection (386 page)

All around the cathedral, now that she noticed it, was more such activity; traceries of scaffolding covered much of the superstructure. Small figures were working everywhere she looked. The way they popped in and out of hatches, high above ground, made her think of clockwork automata.

Above the flat base, the cathedral conformed more or less to the traditional architectural expectations. Seen from above, the cathedral was an approximate cruciform shape, made up of a long nave with two stubbier transepts jutting out on either side and a smaller chapel at the head of the cross. Rising from the intersection of the nave and its transepts was a square-based tower. It rose for one hundred metres - about equal to the length of the cathedral -- before tapering into a four-sided spire which was another fifty metres higher. The ridges of the spire were serrated, and at the very top of the spire was an assemblage of communications dishes and semaphoric signalling mirrors. Rising from the traction base and angling inwards to connect with the top part of the nave were a dozen or so flying buttresses formed from skeletal girderwork. One or two were obviously missing or incomplete. Much of the cathedral, in fact, had a haphazard look, with various parts of the architecture sitting in only approximate harmony with each other. There were whole sections that appeared to have been replaced in great haste, or at minimal expense, or some combination of the two. The spire appeared to lean at a small angle away from the true vertical. It was propped up on one side by scaffolding.

She didn’t know whether to be saddened or relieved. At this point, knowing what she now knew about Dean Quaiche’s plans for the Lady Morwenna, she was glad not to have been assigned to it. She could entertain all the fantasies she liked, but there was no chance of rescuing her brother before the Lady Morwenna reached the bridge. She would be lucky to have infiltrated any level of the cathedral’s hierarchy by then.

The notion of infiltration chimed in her head. It was as if it had resonated with something intimate and personal, something that ran as deep within her as bone marrow. Why did the idea suddenly have such grave and immediate potency? She supposed that her entire mission had been a form of infiltration, from the moment she left her village and set about joining the caravan. The work of ascending through the cathedral until she located Harbin was only a later, more dangerous aspect of an enterprise upon which she had already embarked. She had taken the first step weeks ago, when she first heard of the caravan passing so close to the badlands.

But it had begun earlier than that, really.

Very much earlier.

Rashmika felt dizzy. She had glimpsed something there, a moment of clarity that had opened and closed in an instant. She herself had jammed it shut, the way one slammed a door on a loud noise or a bright light. She had glimpsed a plan - a scheme of infiltration - which stood outside the one she thought she knew. Outside and beyond, enveloping it in its entirety. A scheme of infiltration so huge, so ambitious, that even this trek across Hela was but one chapter in something much longer.

A scheme in which she was not simply a puppet, but also the puppeteer. One thought shone through with painful clarity:
you brought this on yourself.

You wanted it to happen this way.

She tore her mind away from that line of thinking. With an effort of will she forced it back on to the immediate business of the cathedrals. A lapse now, a moment of inattention, could make all the difference.

A shadow fell on the vehicle. It was under the Catherine of Iron, moving between those great rows of crawler tracks. Wheels and treads moved with an unstoppable, inexorable slowness. Never mind her own lapses: it was the driver she had to trust now.

She moved to the other side of the cabin. Ahead, folding down from the underside of the cathedral, was a ramp, its edges marked with pulsing red lights. The lower end of the ramp scraped against the ground, leaving a smooth trail in its wake. The sub-caravan pushed itself on to the slope, wheels spinning for a moment to gain traction, and then its whole length surmounted the ramp. Rashmika grabbed for a handhold as the vehicle began to climb the steep slope. She could feel the labouring grind of the transmission through the metal framing of the cabin.

Soon they reached the top. The sub-caravan righted itself, emerging in a barely lit reception area. There were a couple of other vehicles parked there, as well as a great amount of unfathomable and elderly-looking equipment. Figures moved around wearing vacuum suits. Three of them were fixing an airlock umbilical to the side of the sub-caravan, puzzling over the interconnectors as if this was something they had never had to do before.

Presently Rashmika heard thumps and hisses, then voices. Her companions began to gather themselves and their possessions, edging towards the airlock. She collected her own bundle of belongings and stood ready to join them. For a while nothing happened. She heard the voices getting louder, as if some dispute was taking place. Standing by the window, she had a better view of what was going on outside. Within the depressurised part of the chamber was a figure, standing, doing nothing. She caught a glimpse of a man’s face through the visor of his rococo helmet: the expression was blank, but the face was not entirely unfamiliar.

Whoever it was stood watching the proceedings, with one hand resting on a cane.

The commotion continued unabated for a few more moments. Finally it died down and Rashmika’s companions began to shuffle out through the airlock, donning the helmets of their vacuum suits as they entered it. They all looked a lot less lively than they had five minutes ago. The actuality of arriving at the Catherine of Iron had brought them to the end of their journey. Judging by their expressions, this dim, grimy-looking enclosure filled with derelict junk and bored-looking workers was not quite what they had imagined when they had set out. She remembered what the quaestor had said, however: that the dean of the Iron Katy was a fair man who treated his workers and pilgrims well. They should all count themselves lucky, in that case. Better a down-at-heel cathedral run by a good man than the doomed madhouse of the Lady Morwenna, even if she did have to get to the Lady Mor eventually.

She had reached the door when a hand touched her chest, preventing her from going any further. She looked into the eyes of a fat-faced Adventist official.

‘Rashmika Els?’ the man said.

‘Yes.’

‘There’s been a change of plan,’ he said. ‘You’re to stay on the caravan, I’m afraid.’

They took her away from the Catherine of Iron, away from the smooth road of the Permanent Way. She was the only passenger in the sub-caravan apart from the suited man with the cane. He just sat there, his helmet still on, tapping the cane against the heel of his boot. Most of the time she could not see his face.

The vehicle bounced over ruts of ice for many minutes, the main gathering of cathedrals falling into the distance.

‘We’re going to the Lady Morwenna, aren’t we?’ Rashmika asked, not really expecting an answer.

None arrived. The man merely tightened the grip on his cane, tilting his head just so, the reflected lighting making a perfect blank mask of his visor. Rashmika felt sick by the time they hit smoother ground and drew alongside the cathedral. It was not only the motion of the caravan sub-unit that made her feel ill, but also a nauseating sense of entrapment. She had wanted to come to the Lady Morwenna. She had not wanted the Lady Morwenna to draw her into it, against her will.

The vehicle pulled alongside the slowly moving mountain of the cathedral. Whereas the Catherine of Iron crawled around Hela on caterpillar tracks, the Lady Morwenna actually walked, shuffling along on twenty vast trapedozoidal feet. There were two parallel rows of ten of them, each row two hundred metres long. The entire mass of the main structure, towering far above, was connected to the feet by the huge telescoping columns of the cathedral’s flying buttresses. They were not really buttresses at all, but rather the legs of the feet: complex, brutishly mechanical things, sinewy with pistons and articulation points, veined by thick segmented cables and power lines. They were driven by moving shafts thrusting through the walls of the main structure like the horizontal oars of a slave-powered galleon. In turn, each foot was elevated three or four metres from the surface of the Way, allowed to move forwards slightly, and then lowered back down to the ground. The result was that the entire structure slid smoothly along at a rate of one-third of a metre per second.

It was, she knew, very old. It had grown from a tiny seed sown in the earliest days of Hela’s human settlement. Everywhere Rashmika looked she saw indications of damage and repair, redesign and expansion. It was less like a building than a city, one that had been subjected to grandiose civic projects and urban improvement schemes, each throwing out the blueprint of the old. In amongst the machinery, coexisting with it, was a crawling population of sculptural forms: gargoyles and gryphons, dragons and demons, visages of carved masonry or welded metal. Some of these were animated, drawing their motion from the moving mechanisms of the legs, so that the jaws of the carved figures gaped wide and snapped closed with each step taken by the cathedral.

She looked higher, straining to see the vehicle’s windows. The great hall of the cathedral reached far above the point where the articulated buttresses curved in to join it. Enormous stained-glass windows towered above her, pointing towards the face of Haldora. There were outflung prominences of masonry and metal capped by squatting gryphons or other heraldic creatures. And then there was the Clocktower itself, shaming even the hall, a tapering, teetering finger of iron thrusting higher than any structure Rashmika had ever seen. She could see the history of the cathedral in the tower, the strata of growth periods laid bare, showing how the vast structure had expanded to its present size. There were follies and abandoned schemes; out-jutting elbows that went nowhere. There were strange levellings-off where it looked as if the spire had been tapering towards a conclusion, before deciding to continue upwards for another hundred metres. And somewhere near the very top - difficult to see from this angle - was a cupola in which burned the unmistakable yellow lights of habitation.

The caravan vehicle swerved closer to the line of slowly stomping feet. There was a clang, and then they floated free of the ground, winched off the surface just as Crozet’s icejammer had been by the caravan.

The man in the vacuum suit began undoing his helmet clasp. He did it with a kind of manic patience, as if the act itself was a necessary penitence.

The helmet came off. The man riffled one gloved hand through the white shock of his hair, making it stand straight up from his scalp. The top was mathematically flat. He looked at her, his face long and flat-featured, making her think of a bulldog. She was certain, then, that she had seen the man somewhere before, but for now that was all she remembered.

‘Welcome to the Lady Morwenna, Miss Els,’ he said.

‘I don’t know who you are, or why I’m here.’

‘I’m Surgeon-General Grelier,’ he said. ‘And you’re here because we want you to be here.’

Whatever that meant, he was telling the truth.

‘Now come with me,’ he said. ‘There is someone you need to see. Then we can discuss terms of employment.’

‘Employment?’

‘It’s work you came for, isn’t it?’

She nodded meekly. ‘Yes.’

‘Then we may have something right up your alley.’

THIRTY-THREE

Near Ararat, 2675

Scorpio had hoped for some rest. But the days immediately following Antoinette’s departure were as tiring as any that had preceded them. He stayed awake nearly all the time, watching the arrival and departure of shuttles and tugs, supervising the processing of new evacuees and the comings and goings of Remontoire’s technical personnel.

He felt stretched beyond breaking point, never certain that he was more than one or two breaths from collapsing. And yet he kept functioning, sustained by Antoinette’s words and his own stubborn refusal to show the slightest glimmer of weakness around the humans. It was becoming difficult. More and more it seemed to him that they had an energy that he lacked; that they were never as close to exhaustion or complete breakdown as he was. It had been different in his younger days. He had been the unstoppable powerhouse then, stronger not only than the humans who made up part of his coterie but also many of the pigs. He had been foolish to imagine that this would be the pattern for the whole of his life, that he would always have that edge. He had never quite noticed the moment when parity occurred; it might have happened months or years in the past, but now he was quite sure that the humans had pulled ahead of him. In the short term he still had a furious, impulsive strength that they lacked, but what use was thuggish immediacy now? What mattered were slow-burning, calculated strength, endurance and presence of mind. The humans were quicker-minded than he was, much less prone to making mistakes. Did they realise that? he wondered. Perhaps not immediately, for he was working hard to compensate for this intrinsic weakness. But sooner or later the effort would take its toll and then they would start to notice his failings. Many of them - the allies Antoinette had spoken of - would do their best to ignore his increasing inadequacy, making excuses for his failings. But again, that process could only continue for so long. Inevitably there would come a time when his enemies would pick up on that creeping weakness and use it against him. He wondered if he would have the courage to step down first, before it became so obvious. He didn’t know. It was too hard to think about that, because it cut too close to the essence of what he was, and what he could never be.