‘They don’t,’ he said. ‘Whichever they choose, there’ll always be a risk that it might be the wrong decision.’
Urton nodded emphatically. She had nearly finished her beer. ‘At least this way Scorpio gets to split the difference. Some people will end up in the ship, some will chose to stay at home. It’s the perfect solution, if you want to maximise the chances of some people surviving. ’
‘That sounds very heartless.’
‘It is.’
‘In which case I don’t think you need worry about Scorpio not being the callous leader you said we needed.’
‘No. He’s callous enough,’ Urton agreed. ‘Of course, we could be misreading this entirely. But assuming we aren’t, does it shock you?’
‘No, I suppose not. And I think you’re right. We do need someone strong, someone prepared to think the unthinkable.’ Vasko put down his glass. It was only half-empty, but his thirst had gone the same way as his appetite. ‘One question,’ he said. ‘Why are you being so nice to me all of a sudden?’
Urton inspected him the way a lepidopterist might examine a pinned specimen. ‘Because, Vasko, it occurred to me that you might be a useful ally, in the long run.’
The scrimshaw suit said, ‘We’ve heard the news, Quaiche.’
The sudden voice startled him, as it always did. He was alone. Grelier had just finished seeing to his eyes, swabbing an infected abscess under one retracted eyelid. The metal clamp of the eye-opener felt unusually cruel to him today, as if, while Quaiche was sleeping, the surgeon-general had covertly sharpened all its little hooks. Not while he was really sleeping, of course. Sleep was a luxury he remembered in only the vaguest terms.
‘I don’t know about any news,’ he said.
‘You made your little announcement to the congregation downstairs. We heard it. You’re taking the cathedral across Absolution Gap.’
‘And if I am, what business is it of yours?’
‘It’s insanity, Quaiche. And your mental health is very much our business.’
He saw the suit in blurred peripheral vision, around the sharp central image of Haldora. The world was half in shadow, bands of cream and ochre and subtle turquoise plunging into the sharp terminator of the nightside.
‘You don’t care about me,’ he said. ‘You only care about your own survival. You’re afraid I’ll destroy you when I destroy the Lady Morwenna.’
‘“When”, Quaiche? Frankly, that’s a little disturbing to us. We were hoping you still had some intention of actually succeeding.’
‘Perhaps I do,’ he conceded.
‘Where nobody has done so before?’
‘The Lady Morwenna isn’t any old cathedral.’
‘No. It’s the heaviest and tallest on the Way. Doesn’t that give you some slight pause for thought?’
‘It will make my triumph all the more spectacular.’
‘Or your disaster, should you topple off the bridge or bring the entire thing crashing down. But why now, Quaiche, after all these revolutions around Hela?’
‘Because I feel that the time is right,’ he said. ‘You can’t second-guess these things. Not the work of God.’
‘You truly are a lost cause,’ the scrimshaw suit said. Then the cheaply synthesised voice took on an urgency it had lacked before. ‘Quaiche, listen to us. Do what you will with the Lady Morwenna. We won’t stop you. But first let us out of this cage.’
‘You’re scared,’ he said, pulling the stiff tissue of his face into a smile. ‘I’ve really put the wind up you, haven’t I?’
‘It doesn’t have to be this way. Look at the evidence, Quaiche. The vanishings are increasing in frequency. You know what that means, don’t you?’
‘The work of God is moving towards its culmination.’
‘Or, alternatively, the concealment mechanism is failing. Take your pick. We know which interpretation we favour.’
‘I know all about your heresies,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to hear them again.’
‘You still think we are demons, Quaiche?’
‘You call yourselves shadows. Isn’t that a bit of a giveaway?’
‘We call ourselves shadows because that is what we are, just as you are all shadows to us. It’s a statement of fact, Quaiche, not a theological standpoint.’
‘I don’t want to hear any more of it.’
It was true: he had heard enough of their heresies. They were lies, engineered to undermine his faith. Time and again he had tried to purge them from his head, but always to no avail. As long as the scrimshaw suit remained with him — as long as the thing inside the scrimshaw suit remained — he would never be able to forget those untruths. In a moment of weakness, a lapse that had been every bit as unforgivable as the one twenty years earlier that had brought them here in the first place, he had even followed up some of their heretical claims. He had delved into the Lady Morwenna’s archives, following lines of enquiry.
The shadows spoke of a theory. It meant nothing to him, yet when he searched the deep archives — records carried across centuries in the shattered and corrupted data troves of Ultra trade ships — he found something, glints of lost knowledge, teasing hints from which his mind was able to suggest a whole.
Hints of something called brane theory.
It was a model of the universe, an antique cosmological theory that had enjoyed a brief interlude of popularity seven hundred years in the past. So far as Quaiche could tell, the theory had not been discredited so much as abandoned, put aside when newer and brighter toys came along. At the time there had been no easy way of testing any of these competing theories, so they had to stand and fall on their strict aesthetic merit and the ease with which they could be tamed and manipulated with the cudgels and barbs of mathematics.
Brane theory suggested that the universe the senses spoke of was but one sliver of something vaster, one laminate layer in a stacked ply of adjacent realities. There was, Quaiche thought, something alluringly theological in that model, the idea of heavens above and hells below, with the mundane substrate of perceived reality squeezed between them. As above, so below.
But brane theory had nothing to do with heaven and hell. It had originated as a response to something called string theory, and specifically a conundrum within string theory known as the hierarchy problem.
Heresy again. But he could not stop himself from delving deeper.
String theory posited that the fundamental building blocks of matter were, at the smallest conceivable scales, simply one-dimensional loops of mass-energy. Like a guitar string the loops were able to vibrate — to twang — in certain discrete modes, each of which corresponded to a recognisable particle at the classical scale. Quarks, electrons, neutrinos, even photons, were all just different vibrational modes of these fundamental strings. Even gravity turned out to be a manifestation of string behaviour.
But gravity was also the problem. On the classical scale — the familiar universe of people and buildings, ships and worlds — gravity was much weaker than anyone normally gave it credit for. Yes, it held planets in their orbits around stars. Yes, it held stars in their orbits around the centre of mass of the galaxy. But compared to the other forces of nature, it was barely there at all. When the Lady Morwenna lowered one of its electromagnetic grapples to lift some chunk of metal from a delivery tractor, the magnet was resisting the entire gravitational force of Hela — everything the world could muster. If gravity had been as strong as the other forces, the Lady Morwenna would have been crushed into an atom-thick pancake, a film of collapsed metal on the perfectly smooth spherical surface of a collapsed planet. It was only gravity’s extreme weakness on the classical scale that allowed life to exist in the first place.