‘I get that, Scorp.’
‘But you think the sea matters more. Is that it?’
‘I think none of us really has a clue what actually matters.’
‘Maybe we don’t. Me, I don’t really care about the bigger picture. It’s never been my strong point.’
‘Right now, Scorp, the bigger picture is all we have.’
‘So you think there are millions — billions — of people out there who are going to die? People we’ve never met, people we’ve never come within a light-year of in our lives?’
‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘Well, sorry, but that isn’t the way my head works. I just can’t process that kind of threat. I don’t do mass extinction. I’m a lot more locally focused than that. And right now I have a local problem.’
‘You think so?’
‘I have a hundred and seventy thousand people here that need worrying about. That’s a number I can just about get my head around. And when something drops out of the sky without warning, it keeps me from sleeping.’
‘But you didn’t actually see anything drop out of the sky, did you?’ Clavain did not wait for Scorpio’s answer. ‘And yet we have the immediate volume of space around Ararat covered with every passive sensor in our arsenal. How did we miss a re-entry capsule, let alone the ship that must have dropped it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Scorpio said. He couldn’t tell if he was losing the argument, or doing well just to be engaging Clavain in discussion about something concrete, something other than lost souls and the spectre of mass extinction. ‘But whatever it is must have come down recently. It’s not like any of the other artefacts we’ve pulled from the ocean. They were all half-dissolved, even the ones that must have been sitting on the seabed, where the organisms aren’t so thick. This thing didn’t look as though it had been under for more than a few days.’
Clavain turned away from the shore, and Scorpio took this as a welcome sign. The old Conjoiner moved with stiff, economical footsteps, never looking down, but navigating his way between pools and obstacles with practised ease.
They were returning to the tent.
‘I watch the skies a lot, Scorp,’ Clavain said. ‘At night, when there aren’t any clouds. Lately I’ve been seeing things up there. Flashes. Hints of things moving. Glimpses of something bigger, as if the curtain’s just been pulled back for an instant. I’m guessing you think that makes me mad, don’t you?’
Scorpio didn’t know what he thought. ‘Alone out here, anyone would see things,’ he said.
‘But it wasn’t cloudy last night,’ Clavain said, ‘or the night before, and I watched the sky on both occasions. I didn’t see anything. Certainly no indication of any ships orbiting us.’
‘We haven’t seen anything either.’
‘How about radio transmissions? Laser squirts?’
‘Not a peep. And you’re right: it doesn’t make very much sense. But like it or not, there’s still a capsule, and it isn’t going away. I want you to come and see it for yourself.’
Clavain shoved hair from his eyes. The lines and wrinkles in his face had become shadowed crevasses and gorges, like the contours of an improbably weathered landscape. Scorpio thought that he had aged ten or twenty years in the six months he had been on this island.
‘You said something about there being someone inside it.’
While they had been talking, the cloud cover had begun to break up in swathes. The sky beyond had the pale, crazed blue of a jackdaw’s eye.
‘It’s still a secret,’ Scorpio said. ‘Only a few of us know that the thing’s been found at all. That’s why I came here by boat. A shuttle would have been easier, but it wouldn’t have been low-key. If people find out we’ve brought you back they’ll think there’s a crisis coming. Besides which, it isn’t supposed to be this easy to bring you back. They still think you’re somewhere halfway around the world.’
‘You insisted on that lie?’
‘What do you think would have been more reassuring? To let the people think you’d gone on an expedition — a potentially hazardous one, admittedly — or to tell them you’d gone away to sit on an island and toy with the idea of committing suicide?’
‘They’ve been through worse. They could have taken it.’
‘It’s what they’ve been through that made me think they could do without the truth,’ Scorpio said.
‘Anyway, it isn’t suicide.’ He stopped and looked back out to sea. ‘I know she’s there, with her mother. I can feel it, Scorpio. Don’t ask me how or why, but I know she’s still here. I read about this sort of thing happening on other Juggler worlds, you know. Now and then they take swimmers, dismantle their bodies completely and incorporate them into the organic matrix of the sea. No one knows why. But swimmers who enter the oceans afterwards say that sometimes they feel the presence of the ones who vanished. It’s a much stronger impression than the usual stored memories and personalities. They say they experience something close to dialogue.’
Scorpio held back a sigh. He had listened to exactly the same speech before he had taken Clavain out to this island six months ago. Clearly the period of isolation had done nothing to lessen Clavain’s conviction that Felka had not simply drowned.
‘So hop in and find out for yourself,’ he said.
‘I would, but I’m scared.’
‘That the ocean might take you as well?’
‘No.’ Clavain turned to face Scorpio. He looked less surprised than affronted. ‘No, of course not. That doesn’t scare me at all. What does is the idea that it might leave me behind.’
Rashmika Els had spent much of her childhood being told not to look quite so serious. That was what they would have said if they could have seen her now: perched on her bed in the half-light, selecting the very few personal effects she could afford to carry on her mission. And she would have given them precisely the same look of pique she always mustered on those occasions. Except this time she would have known with a deeper conviction than usual that she was right and they were wrong. Because even though she was still only seventeen, she knew that she had every right to feel this serious, this frightened.
She had filled a small bag with three or four days’ worth of clothes, even though she expected her journey to take a lot longer than that. She had added a bundle of toiletries, carefully removed from the family bathroom without her parents noticing, and some dried-up biscuits and a small wedge of goat’s cheese, just in case there was nothing to eat (or, perhaps, nothing she would actually wish to eat) aboard Crozet’s icejammer. She had packed a bottle of purified water because she had heard that the water nearer the Way sometimes contained things that made you ill. The bottle would not last her very long, but it at least made her feel as if she was thinking ahead. And then there was a small plastic-wrapped bundle containing three tiny scuttler relics that she had stolen from the digs.
After all that, there was not much space left in the bag for anything else. It was already heavier than she had expected. She looked at the sorry little collection of items still spread on the bed before her, knowing that she only had room for one of them. What should she take?
There was a map of Hela, peeled from her bedroom wall, with the sinuous, equator-hugging trail of the Way marked in faded red ink. It wasn’t very accurate, but she had no better map in her compad. Did it matter, though? She had no means of reaching the Way without relying on other people to get her there, and if they didn’t know the direction, her map was unlikely to make very much difference.
She pushed the map aside.