‘You must have something else.’
‘Not a hell of a lot.’ He made as if to leave at that point, as he did in every subsequent session. ‘Best be on my way, I think — wouldn’t want to be wasting anyone’s time, would I?’
‘You’ve absolutely nothing else?’
‘Nothing that you’d be interested in. Of course, I have some scuttler relics, but like you said…’ Crozet’s voice accurately parodied the dismissive tones of the buyer. ‘No market for alien junk these days.’
The buyers sighed and exchanged glances; the quaestor leaned in and whispered something to them.
‘You may as well show us what you have,’ one of the buyers said, reluctantly, ‘but don’t raise your hopes. More than likely we won’t be interested. In fact, you can more or less guarantee it.’
But this was a game and Crozet knew he had to abide by its rules, no matter how pointless or childish they were. He reached under his chair and emerged with something wrapped in protective film, like a small mummified animal.
The buyers’ faces wrinkled in distaste.
He placed the package on the table and unwrapped it solemnly, taking a maddening time to remove all the layers. All the while he maintained a spiel about the extreme rarity of the object, how it had been excavated under exceptional circumstances, weaving a dubious human-interest story into the vague chain of provenance.
‘Get on with it, Crozet.’
‘Just setting the scene,’ he said.
Inevitably he came to the final layer of wrapping. He spread this layer wide on the table, revealing the scuttler relic cocooned within.
Rashmika had seen this one before: it was one of the objects she had used to buy her passage aboard the icejammer.
They were never very much to look at. Rashmika had seen thousands of relics unearthed from the Vigrid digs, had even been allowed to examine them before they passed into the hands of the trading families, but in all that time she had never seen anything that made her gasp in admiration or delight. For while the relics were undoubtedly artificial, they were in general fashioned from dull, tarnished metals or grubby unglazed ceramics. There was seldom any hint of surface ornamentation — no trace of paint, plating or inscription. Once in a thousand finds they uncovered something with a string of symbols on it, and there were even researchers who believed they understood what some of those symbols meant. But most scuttler relics were blank, dull, crude-looking. They resembled the dug-up leftovers of an inept bronze-age culture rather than the gleaming products of a starfaring civilisation — one that had certainly not evolved in the 107 Piscium system.
Yet for much of the last century there had been a market for the relics. Partly this was because none of the other extinct cultures — the Amarantin, for instance — had left behind a comparable haul of day-to-day objects. Those cultures had been so thoroughly exterminated that almost nothing had survived, and the objects that had were so valuable that they remained in the care of large scientific organisations like the Sylveste Institute. Only the scuttlers had left behind enough objects to permit private collectors to acquire artefacts of genuine alien origin. It didn’t matter that they were small and unglamorous: they were still very old, and still very alien. And they were still tainted by the tragedy of extinction.
No two relics were ever quite alike, either. Scuttler furniture, even scuttler dwellings, exhibited the same horror of similarity as their makers. What had begun with their anatomies had now spread into their material environment. They had mass production, but it was a necessary end-stage of that process that every object be worked on by a scuttler artisan, until it was unique.
The churches controlled the sale of these relics to the outside universe. But the churches themselves had always been uncomfortable with the deeper question of what the scuttlers represented, or how they slotted into the mystery of the Quaiche miracle. The churches needed to keep up the drip-feed supply of relics so that they had something to offer the Ultra traders who visited the system. But at the same time there was always the fear that the next scuttler relic to be unearthed would be the one that threw a spanner into the midst of Quaicheist doctrine.
It was now the view of almost all the churches that the Haldoran vanishings were a message from God, a countdown to some event of apocalyptic finality. But what if the scuttlers had also observed the vanishings? It was difficult enough to decipher their symbols at the best of times, and so far nothing had been found that appeared to relate directly to the Haldora phenomenon. But there were a lot of relics still under Hela’s ice, and even those that had been unearthed to date had never been subjected to rigorous scientific study. The church-sponsored archaeologists were the only ones who had any kind of overview of the entire haul of relics, and they were under intense pressure to ignore any evidence that conflicted with Quaicheist scripture. That was why Rashmika wrote them so many letters, and why their infrequent replies were always so evasive. She wanted an argument; she wanted to question the entire accepted view of the scuttlers. They wanted her to go away.
Thus it was that the buyers in the caravan affected an air of tolerant disapproval while Crozet turned on the hard sell.
‘It’s a plate cleaner,’ Crozet said, turning a grey, cleft-tipped, bone-like object this way and that. ‘They used it to scrape dead organic matter out of the gaps between their carapacial sections. We think they did it communally, the way monkeys pick ticks out of each other’s hair. Must have been very relaxing for them.’
‘Filthy creatures.’
‘Monkeys or scuttlers?’
‘Both.’
‘I wouldn’t be too harsh, mate. Scuttlers are paying your wages.’
‘We’ll give you fifty ecumenical credit units for it, Crozet. No more.’
‘Fifty ecus? Now you’re taking the piss.’
‘It’s a revolting object serving a revolting function. Fifty ecus is… quite excessively generous.’
Crozet looked at Rashmika. It was only a glance, but she was ready for it when it came. The system they had arranged was very simple: if the man was telling the truth — if this really was the best offer he was prepared to make — then she would push the sheet of paper a fraction closer to the middle of the table. Otherwise, she would pull it towards her by the same tiny distance. If the man’s reaction was ambiguous, she did nothing. This did not happen very often.
Crozet always took her judgement seriously. If the offer on the table was as good as it was going to get, he did not waste his energies trying to talk them up. On the other hand, if there was some leeway, he haggled the hell out of them.
In that first negotiating session, the buyer was lying. After a rapid-fire back and forth of offer and counter-offer, they reached an agreement.
‘Your tenacity does you credit,’ the buyer said with visible bad grace, before writing him out a chit for seventy ecus that was only redeemable within the caravan itself.
Crozet folded it neatly and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. ‘Pleasure doing business, mate.’
He had other scuttler plate cleaners, as well as several things that might have served some entirely different function. Now and then he came back to the negotiation sessions with something that Linxe or Culver had to help him carry. It might be an item of furniture, or some kind of heavy-duty domestic tool. Scuttler weapons were rare, appearing to have had only ceremonial value, but they sold the best of all. Once, he sold them what appeared to be a kind of scuttler toilet seat. He only got thirty-five ecus for that: barely enough, Crozet said, for a single servo-motor.
But Rashmika tried not to feel too sorry for him. If Crozet wanted the best pickings from the digs, the kinds of relics that picked up three- or four-figure payments, then he needed to rethink his attitude towards the rest of the Vigrid communities. The truth of the matter was that he liked scabbing around on the perimeter.