Scorpio was certain he had been staring out to sea for hours.
‘Nevil,’ Scorpio said.
He said something back, his lips moving, but his words were masked by the hiss of the surf.
Scorpio called out again. ‘It’s me — Scorpio.’
Clavain’s mouth moved a second time. His voice was a croak that barely made it above a whisper. ‘I said, I told you not to come here.’
‘I know.’ Scorpio had approached closer now. Clavain’s white hair flicked in and out of his deeply recessed old-man’s eyes. They appeared to be focused on something very distant and bleak. ‘I know, and for six months we honoured that request, didn’t we?’
‘Six months?’ Clavain almost smiled. ‘Is that how long it’s been?’
‘Six months and a week, if you want to be finicky about it.’
‘It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like no time at all.’ Clavain looked back out to sea again, the back of his head turned towards Scorpio. Between thin strands of white hair his scalp had the same raw pink colour as Scorpio’s skin.
‘Sometimes it feels like a lot longer, as well,’ Clavain continued, ‘as if all I’ve ever done was spend each day here. Sometimes I feel as if there isn’t another soul on this planet.’
‘We’re all still here,’ Scorpio said, ‘all one hundred and seventy thousand of us. We still need you.’
‘I expressly asked not to be disturbed.’
‘Unless it was important. That was always the arrangement, Nevil.’
Clavain stood up with painful slowness. He had always been taller than Scorpio, but now his thinness gave him the appearance of something sketched in a hurry. His limbs were quick cursive scratches against the sky.
Scorpio looked at Clavain’s hands. They were the fine-boned hands of a surgeon. Or, perhaps, an interrogator. The rasp of his long fingernails against the damp black fabric of his trousers made Scorpio wince.
‘Well?’
‘We’ve found something,’ Scorpio said. ‘We don’t know exactly what it is, or who sent it, but we think it came from space. We also think there might be someone in it.’
TWO
Surgeon-General Grelier strode through the circular green-lit corridors of the body factory.
He hummed and whistled, happy in his element, happy to be surrounded by humming machines and half-formed people. With a shiver of anticipation he thought about the solar system that lay ahead of them and the great many things that depended on it. Not necessarily for him, it was true, but certainly for his rival in the matter of the queen’s affection. Grelier wondered how she would take another of Quaiche’s failures. Knowing Queen Jasmina, he did not think she would take it awfully well.
Grelier smiled at that. The odd thing was that for a system on which so much hung, the place was still nameless; no one had ever bothered with the remote star and its uninteresting clutch of planets. There had never been any reason to. There would be an obscure catalogue entry for the system in the astrogation database of the Gnostic Ascension, and indeed of almost every other starship, along with brief notes on the major characteristics of its sun and worlds, likely hazards and so forth. But these databases had never been intended for human eyes; they existed only to be interrogated and updated by other machines as they went about their silent, swift business executing those shipboard tasks considered too dull or too difficult for humans. The entry was just a string of binary digits, a few thousand ones and zeroes. It was a measure of the system’s unimportance that the entry had only been queried three times in the entire operational lifetime of the Gnostic Ascension. It had been updated once.
Grelier knew: he had checked, out of curiosity.
Yet now, perhaps for the first time in history, the system was of more than passing interest. It still had no name, but now at least the absence of one had become vaguely troubling, to the point where Queen Jasmina sounded a trifle more irritated every time she was forced to refer to the place as ‘the system ahead’ or ‘the system we are approaching’. But Grelier knew that she would not deign to give the place a name until it had proved valuable. And the system’s value was entirely in the hands of the queen’s fading favourite, Quaiche.
Grelier paused a while near one of the bodies. It was suspended in translucent support gel behind the green glass of its vivification tank. Around the base of the tank were rows of nutrient controls like so many organ stops, some pushed in and some pulled out. The stops controlled the delicate biochemical environment of the nutrient matrix. Bronze valve wheels set into the side of the tank adjusted the delivery of bulk chemicals like water or saline.
Appended to the tank was a log showing the body’s clonal history. Grelier flicked through the plastic-laminated pages of the log, satisfying himself that all was well. Although most of the bodies in the factory had never been decanted, this specimen — an adult female — had been warmed and used once before. The evidence of the injuries inflicted on it was fading under the regenerative procedures, abdominal scars healing invisibly, the new leg now only slightly smaller than its undamaged counterpart. Jasmina did not approve of these patch-up jobs, but her demand for bodies had outstripped the production capacity of the factory.
Grelier patted the glass affectionately. ‘Coming along nicely.’
He walked on, making random checks on the other bodies. Sometimes a glance was sufficient, though more often than not Grelier would thumb through the log and pause to make some small adjustment to the settings. He took a great deal of pride in the quiet competence of his work. He never boasted of his abilities or promised anything he was not absolutely certain of being able to deliver — utterly unlike Quaiche, who had been full of exaggerated promises from the moment he stepped aboard the Gnostic Ascension.
For a while it had worked, too. Grelier, long the queen’s closest confidant, had found himself temporarily usurped by the flashy newcomer. All he heard while he was working on her was how Quaiche was going to change all their fortunes: Quaiche this, Quaiche that. The queen had even started complaining about Grelier’s duties, moaning that the factory was too slow in delivering bodies and that the attention-deficit therapies were losing their effectiveness. Grelier had been briefly tempted to try something seriously attention-grabbing, something that would catapult him back into her good graces.
Now he was profoundly glad that he had done no such thing; he had needed only to bide his time. It was simply a question of letting Quaiche dig his own grave by setting up expectations that he could not possibly meet. Sadly — for Quaiche, if not for Grelier — Jasmina had taken him exactly at his word. If Grelier judged the queen’s mood, poor old Quaiche was about this close to getting the figurehead treatment.
Grelier stopped at an adult male that had begun to show developmental anomalies during his last examination. He had adjusted the tank settings, but his tinkering had apparently been to no avail. To the untrained eye the body looked normal enough, but it lacked the unmarred symmetry that Jasmina craved. Grelier shook his head and placed a hand on one of the polished brass valve wheels. Always a difficult call, this. The body wasn’t up to scratch by the usual standards of the factory, but then again neither were the patch-up jobs. Was it time to make Jasmina accept a lowering of quality? It was she who was pushing the factory to its limit, after all.