‘Concerning Aura?’
‘No. Concerning me, actually. You weren’t there, but I hurt a man today.’ Scorpio looked down at his small, childlike shoes. He had misjudged the height of the seat slightly, so that his toes did not quite reach the floor.
‘I’m sure you had your reasons,’ Khouri said.
‘That’s the problem: I didn’t. I hurt him out of blind rage. Something inside me snapped, something I’d kidded myself that I had under control for the last twenty-three years.’
‘We all have days like that,’ she said.
‘I try not to. For twenty-three years, all I’ve ever tried to do is get through the day without making that kind of mistake. And today I failed. Today I threw it all away, in one moment of weakness.’
She said nothing. He took that as permission to continue.
‘I used to hate humans. I thought I had good enough reasons.’ Scorpio reached up and undid the fastenings on his leather tunic, exposing his right shoulder. Three decades of ageing — not to mention the slow accretion of later, fresher wounds — had made the scar less obvious now. But still it made Khouri avert her eyes for an instant, before she looked back unflinchingly.
‘They did that to you?’
‘No. I did it to myself, using a laser.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I was burning away something else.’ He traced the coastline of the scar, obedient to every inlet and peninsula of raised flesh. ‘There was a tattoo there, a green scorpion. It was a mark of ownership. I didn’t realise that at first. I thought it was a badge of honour, something to be proud of.’
‘I’m sorry, Scorp.’
‘I hated them for that, and for what I was. But I paid them back, Ana. God knows, I paid them back.’
He began to do up the tunic again. Khouri leaned over and helped with the fastenings. They were large, designed for clumsy fingers.
‘You had every right,’ she said.
‘I thought I was over it. I thought I’d got it out of my system.’
She shook her head. ‘That won’t ever happen, Scorp. Take it from me, you won’t ever lose that rage. What happened to me can’t compare with what they did to you — I’m not saying that. But I do know what it’s like to hate something you can’t ever destroy, something that’s always out of reach. They took my husband from me, Scorp. Faceless army clerks screwed up and ripped him away from me.’
‘Dead?’ he asked.
‘No. Just out of reach, at the wrong fucking end of a thirty-year starship crossing. Same thing, really. Except worse, I suppose.’
‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘That’s as bad as anything they did to me.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. It isn’t for me to make those comparisons. But all I know is this: I’ve tried to forgive and forget. I’ve accepted that Fazil and I will never see each other again. I’ve even accepted that Fazil’s probably long dead, wherever he really ended up. I have a daughter by another man. I suppose that counts as moving on.’
He knew that the father of her child was dead as well, but that was not obvious in the tone of her voice when she mentioned him.
‘Not moving on, Ana. Just staying alive.’
‘I knew you’d understand, Scorp. But you also understand what I’m saying about forgiving and forgetting, don’t you?’
‘That it ain’t gonna happen,’ he said.
‘Never in a million years. If one of those people came into this room — one of those fools who screwed up my life with one moment of inattention — I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself. What I’m saying is, the rage doesn’t go away. It gets smaller, but it also gets brighter. We just pack it deep down and kindle it, like a little fire we’re never going to let die. It’s what keeps us going, Scorp.’
‘I still failed.’
‘No, you didn’t. You did damn well to keep it bottled up for twenty-three years. So you lost it today.’ Suddenly she was angry. ‘So what? So fucking what? You went through something in that iceberg that I wouldn’t wish on any one of those clerks, Scorp. I know what Clavain meant to you. You went through hell on Earth. The wonder of it isn’t that you’ve lost it once, but that you’ve managed to keep your shit together at all. Honestly, Scorp.’ Her anger shifted to insistence.
‘You’ve got to go easy on yourself, man. What happened out there? It wasn’t a walk in the park. You earned the right to throw a few punches, OK?’
‘It was a bit more than a punch.’
‘Is the guy going to pull through?’
‘Yes,’ he said, grudgingly.
Khouri shrugged. ‘Then chill out. What these people need now is a leader. What they don’t need is someone moping around with a guilty conscience.’
He stood up. ‘Thank you, Ana. Thank you.’
‘Did I help, or did I just screw things up even more?’
‘You helped.’
The seat melted back into the wall.
‘Good. Because, you know, I’m not the most eloquent of people. I’m just a grunt at heart, Scorp. A long way from home, with some weird stuff in my head, and a daughter I’m not sure I’ll ever understand. But really, I’m still just a grunt.’
‘It’s never been my policy to underestimate grunts,’ he said. Now, inevitably, it was his turn to feel ineloquent. ‘I’m sorry about what happened to you. I hope one day…’ He looked around, noticing that Vasko was moving down the opaque line of the floor towards Aura’s niche. ‘Well, I don’t know. Just that you find something to make that rage a little smaller and brighter. Maybe when it gets small and bright enough it will just pop away.’
‘Would that be a good thing?’
‘I don’t know.’
She smiled. ‘Me neither. But I guess you and I are the ones who’ll find out.’
‘Scorpio?’ Vasko said.
‘Yes?’
‘You should see this. You, too, Ana.’
They woke Valensin. Vasko ushered them to a different part of the shuttle, then made some modifications to the hull to increase the visibility of the night sky, calling bulkheads into existence and enhancing the brightness of the transmitted light to compensate for the reflected glare from the shuttle’s wings. He did so with an ease that suggested he had been working with such systems for half his life, rather than the few days that was actually the case.
Above, Scorpio saw only the same appearing and fading scratches of light that he had noticed earlier. The nagging feeling that they meant something still troubled him, but the scratches made no more sense to him now than they had before.
‘I’m not seeing it, Vasko.’
‘I’ll have the hull add a latency, so that the marks take longer to fade out.’
Scorpio frowned. ‘Can you do that?’
‘It’s easy.’ Vasko patted the cold, smooth surface of the inner fuselage. ‘There’s almost nothing these old machines won’t do, if you know the right way to ask.’
‘So do it,’ Scorpio said.
All four of them looked up. Even Valensin was fully awake now, his eyes slits behind his spectacles.
Above, the scratches of light took longer to fade. Before, only two or three had ever been visible at the same time. Now dozens lingered, bright as the images scorched on to the retina by the setting sun.
And now they most definitely meant something.
‘My God,’ Khouri said.
THIRTY
In the glade, everything changed. The sky above had turned midnight-black; no birds moved from tree to tree now, and the trees themselves formed only a darker frame to the night sky, looming in on all sides like encroaching thunder clouds. The animals had fallen silent, and Antoinette could no longer hear the simmering hiss of the waterfall. Perhaps it had never been real.