The garret was hexagonal in plan, with high armoured windows on all six sides. The slats of metal jalousies were ready to tilt into position at a command from Quaiche, blocking light in any direction. For now the room was fully illuminated, with stripes of light and shade falling on every object and person within it. There were many mirrors in the room, arranged on pedestals, sight-lines and angles of reflection carefully chosen. When Grelier entered, he saw his own shattered reflection arriving from a thousand directions.
He placed the cane into a wooden rack by the door.
Aside from Grelier, the room contained two people. Quaiche, as usual, reclined in the baroque enclosure of his medical support couch. He was a shrivelled, spectral thing, seemingly less substantial in the full glare of daylight than in the half-shuttered darkness that prevailed in the garret. He wore oversized black sunglasses that accentuated the morbid pallor and thinness of his face. The couch ruminated to itself with thoughtful hums and clicks and gurgles, occasionally delivering a dose of medicine into its client. Most of the distasteful medical business was tucked away under the scarlet blanket that covered his recumbent form to the ribcage, but now and then something pulsed along one of the feedlines running into his forearms or the base of his skulclass="underline" something chemical-green or electric-blue, something that could never be mistaken for blood. He did not look a well man. Appearances, in this case, were not deceptive.
But, Grelier reminded himself, this was how Quaiche had looked for decades. He was a very old man, pushing the envelope of available life-prolongation therapies, testing them to their limit. But the limit was always slightly out of reach. Dying seemed to be a threshold that he lacked the energy to cross.
They had both, Grelier reflected, been more or less the same physiological age when they had served under Jasmina aboard the Gnostic Ascension. Now Quaiche was by far the older man, having lived through all of the last hundred and twelve years of planetary time. Grelier, by contrast, had experienced only thirty of those years. The arrangement had been simple enough, with generous benefits where Grelier was concerned.
‘I don’t really like you,’ Quaiche had told him, back aboard the Gnostic Ascension. ‘If that wasn’t already obvious.’
‘I think I got the message,’ Grelier said.
‘But I need you. You’re useful to me. I don’t want to die here. Not just now.’
‘What about Jasmina?’
‘I’m sure you’ll think of something. She relies on you for her clones, after all.’
It had been shortly after Quaiche’s rescue from the bridge on Hela. As soon as she received data on the structure, Jasmina had turned the Gnostic Ascension around and brought it into the 107 Piscium system, swinging into orbit around Hela. There had been no more booby traps on the surface: later investigation showed that Quaiche had triggered the only three sentries on the entire moon, and that they had been placed there and forgotten at least a century before by an earlier and now unremembered discoverer of the bridge.
Except that was almost but not quite true. There was another sentry, but only Quaiche knew about it.
Fixated by what he had seen, and stunned by what had happened to him — the miraculous nature of his rescue combined inseparably and punishingly with the horror of losing Morwenna — Quaiche had gone mad. That was Grelier’s view, at least, and nothing in the last hundred and twelve years had done anything to reverse his opinion. Given what had happened, and given the perception-altering presence of the virus in Quaiche’s blood, he thought Quaiche had got off lightly with only a mild kind of insanity. He still had some kind of grip on reality, still understood — with a manipulative brilliance — all that was going on around him. It was just that he saw the world through a gauze of piety. He had sanctified himself.
Rationally, Quaiche knew that his faith had something to do with the virus in his blood. But he also knew that he had been rescued because of a genuinely miraculous event. Telemetry records from the Dominatrix were clear on this: his distress signal had only been intercepted because, for a fraction of a second, Haldora had ceased to exist. Responding to that signal, the Dominatrix had raced to Hela, desperate to save him before his air ran out.
The ship had only been doing its duty by racing at maximum thrust to reach Hela as quickly as possible. The acceleration limits that would have applied had Quaiche been aboard were ignored. But the dull intelligence of the ship’s mind had neglected to take Morwenna into consideration.
When Quaiche found his way back aboard, the scrimshaw suit was silent. Later, in desperation — part of him already knowing that Morwenna was dead — he had cut through the thick metal of the suit. He had reached inside, caressing the pulped red atrocity within, weeping even as she flowed through his fingers.
Even the metal parts of her had been mangled.
Quaiche had lived, therefore, but at a terrible cost. His options, at that point, had seemed simple enough. He could find a way to discard his faith, some flushing therapy that would blast all traces of the virus from his blood. He would then have to find a rational, secular explanation for what had happened to him. And he would have to accept that although he had been saved by what appeared to be a miracle, Morwenna — the only woman he had truly loved — was gone for ever, and that she had died so that he might live.
The other choice — the path that he had eventually chosen — was one of acceptance. He would submit himself to faith, acknowledging that a miracle had indeed occurred. The presence of the virus would, in this case, simply be a catalyst. It had pushed him towards faith, made him experience the feelings of Holy presence. But on Hela, with time running out, he had experienced emotions that felt deeper and stronger than any the virus had ever given him. Was it possible that the virus had merely made him more receptive to what was already there? That, as artificial as it had been, it had enabled him to tune in to a real, albeit faint, signal?
If that was the case, then everything had meaning. The bridge meant something. He had witnessed a miracle, had called out for salvation and been granted it. And the death of Morwenna must have had some inexplicable but ultimately benign function in the greater plan of which Quaiche was himself only a tiny, ticking, barely conscious part.
‘I have to stay here,’ he had told Grelier. ‘I have to stay on Hela until I know the answer. Until it is revealed unto me.’
That was what he had said: ‘revealed unto me.’
Grelier had smiled. ‘You can’t stay here.’
‘I’ll find a way.’
‘She won’t let you.’
But Quaiche had made a proposal to Grelier then, one that the surgeon-general had found difficult to dismiss. Queen Jasmina was an unpredictable mistress. Her moods, even after years of service, were largely opaque to him. His relationship with her was characterised by intense fear of disapproval.
‘In the long run, she’ll get you,’ Quaiche had said. ‘She’s an Ultra. You can’t read her, can’t second-guess her. To her, you’re just furniture. You serve a need, but you’ll always be replaceable. But look at me — I’m a baseline human like yourself, an outcast from mainstream society. She said it herself: we have much in common.’
‘Less than you think.’
‘We don’t have to worship each other,’ Quaiche had said. ‘We just have to work together.’
‘What’s in it for me?’ Grelier had asked.
‘Me not telling her your little secret, for one. Oh, I know all about it. It was one of the last things Morwenna found out before Jasmina put her in the suit.’