It went on like that for two days. On the third, the buyers suddenly demanded that Crozet be alone during the negotiations. Rashmika had no idea if they had guessed her secret. There was, as far as she was aware, no law against being an adept judge of whether people were lying or not. Perhaps they had just taken a dislike to her, as people often did when they sensed her percipience.
Rashmika was fine with that. She had helped Crozet out, paid him back a little more in addition to the scuttler relics for the help he had given her. He had, after all, taken an extra, unforeseen risk when he found out about the constabulary pursuing her.
No: she had nothing bad on her conscience.
Khouri protested as they took her away from the capsule into the waiting infirmary. ‘I don’t need an examination,’ she said. ‘I just need a boat, some weapons, an incubator and someone good with a knife.’
‘Oh, I’m good with a knife,’ Clavain said.
‘Please take me seriously. You trusted Ilia, didn’t you?’
‘We came to an arrangement. Mutual trust never had much to do with it.’
‘You respected her judgement, though?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Well, she trusted me. Isn’t that good enough for you? I’m not making excessive demands here, Clavain. I’m not asking for the world.’
‘We’ll consider your requests in good time,’ he said, ‘but not before we’ve had you examined.’
‘There isn’t time,’ she said, but from her tone of voice it was clear she knew she had already lost the argument.
Within the infirmary, Dr Valensin waited with two aged medical servitors from the central machine pool. The swan-necked robots were a drab institutional green, riding on hissing air-cushion pedestals. Many specialised arms emerged from their slender chess-piece bodies. The physician would be keeping a careful eye on the machines while they did their work: left alone, their creaking circuits had a nasty habit of absent-mindedly switching into autopsy mode.
‘I don’t like robots,’ Khouri said, eyeing the servitors with evident disquiet.
‘That’s one thing we agree on,’ Clavain said, turning to Scorpio and lowering his voice. ‘Scorp, we’ll need to talk to the other seniors about the best course of action as soon as we have Valensin’s report. My guess is she’ll need some rest before she goes anywhere. But for now I suggest we keep as tight a lid on this as possible.’
‘Do you think she’s telling the truth?’ Scorpio asked. ‘All that stuff about Skade and her baby?’
Clavain studied the woman as Valensin helped her on to the examination couch. ‘I have a horrible feeling she might be.’
After the examination, Khouri fell into a state of deep and apparently dreamless sleep. She awakened only once, near dawn, when she summoned one of Valensin’s aides and again demanded the means to rescue her daughter. After that they administered more relaxant and she fell asleep for another four or five hours. Now and then she thrashed wildly and uttered fragments of speech. Whatever she was trying to say always sounded urgent, but the meaning never quite cohered. She was not properly awake and cognisant until the middle of the morning.
By the time Dr Valensin deemed that Khouri was ready for visitors, the latest storm had broken. The sky above the compound was a bleak powder-blue, marbled here and there by strands of feathered cirrus. Out to sea, the Nostalgia for Infinity gleamed shades of grey, like something freshly chiselled from dark rock.
They sat down on opposite sides of her bed — Clavain in one chair, Scorpio in another, but reversed so that he sat with his arms folded across the top of the backrest.
‘I’ve read Valensin’s report,’ Scorpio began. ‘We were all hoping he’d tell us you were insane. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘And that gives me a really bad headache.’
Khouri pushed herself up in the bed. ‘I’m sorry about your headache, but can we skip the formalities and get on with rescuing my daughter?’
‘We’ll discuss it when you’re up on your feet,’ Clavain said.
‘Why not now?’
‘Because we still need to know exactly what’s happened. We’ll also need an accurate tactical assessment of any scenario involving Skade and your daughter. Would you define it as a hostage situation?’ Clavain asked.
‘Yes,’ Khouri replied, grudgingly.
‘Then until we have concrete demands from Skade, Aura is in no immediate danger. Skade won’t risk hurting her one asset. She may be cold-hearted, but she’s not irrational.’
Guardedly, Scorpio observed the old man. He appeared as alert and quick-witted as ever, yet to the best of Scorpio’s knowledge Clavain had allowed himself no more than two hours of sleep since returning to the mainland. Scorpio had seen that kind of thing in other elderly human men: they needed little sleep and resented its imposition by those younger than themselves. It was not that they necessarily had more energy, but that the division between sleep and waking had become an indistinct, increasingly arbitrary thing. He wondered how that would feel, drifting through an endless succession of grey moments, rather than ordered intervals of day and night.
‘How much time are we talking about?’ Khouri said. ‘Hours or days, before you act?’
‘I’ve convened a meeting of colony seniors for later this morning,’ Clavain said. ‘If the situation merits it, a rescue operation could be underway before sunset.’
‘Can’t you just take my word that we need to act now?’
Clavain scratched his beard. ‘If your story made more sense, I might.’
‘I’m not lying.’ She gestured in the direction of one of the servitors. ‘The doctor gave me the all-clear, didn’t he?’
Scorpio smiled, tapping the medical report against the back of his chair. ‘He said you weren’t obviously delusional, but his examination raised as many questions as it answered.’
‘You talk about a baby,’ Clavain said before Khouri had a chance to interrupt, ‘but according to this report you’ve never given birth. Nor is there any obvious sign of Caesarean surgery having been performed.’
‘It wouldn’t be obvious — it was done by Conjoiner medics. They can sew you up so cleanly it’s as if it never happened.’ She looked at each of them in turn, her anger and fear equally clear. ‘Are you saying you don’t believe me?’
Clavain shook his head. ‘I’m saying we can’t verify your story, that’s all. According to Valensin there is womb distension consistent with you having very recently been pregnant, and there are hormonal changes in your blood that support the same conclusion. But Valensin admits that there could be other explanations.’
‘They don’t contradict my story, either.’
‘But we’ll need more convincing before we organise a military action,’ Clavain said.
‘Again: why can’t you just trust me?’
‘Because it’s not only the story about your baby that doesn’t make sense,’ Clavain replied. ‘How did you get here, Ana? Where’s the ship that should have brought you? You didn’t come all the way from the Resurgam system in that capsule, and yet there’s no sign of any other spacecraft having entered our system.’
‘And that makes me a liar?’
‘It makes us suspicious,’ Scorpio said. ‘It makes us wonder if you’re what you appear to be.’