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A Boy and His Dog	Harlan Ellison	[ "scifi", "post-apocalyptic" ]	[]	Chapter 10	We came up a mile from the access dropshaft. I shot off the filter covers and the hatch bolts, and we climbed out. They should have known better down there. You don't fuck around with Jimmy Cagney. They never had a chance. Quilla June was exhausted. I didn't blame her. But I didn't want to spend the night out in the open; there were things out there I didn't like to think about meeting even in daylight. It was getting on toward dusk. We walked toward the access dropshaft. Blood was waiting. He looked weak. But he'd waited. I stooped down and lifted his head. He opened his eyes, and very softly he said, "Hey." I smiled at him. Jesus, it was good to see him. "We made it back, man." He tried to get up, but he couldn't. The wounds on him were in ugly shape. "Have you eaten?" I asked. "No. Grabbed a lizard yesterday… or maybe it was day before. I'm hungry, Vic." Quilla June came up then, and Blood saw her. He closed his eyes. "We'd better hurry, Vic," she said. "Please. They might come up from the dropshaft." I tried to lift Blood. He was dead weight. "Listen, Blood, I'll leg it into the city and get some food. I'll come back quick. You just wait here." "Don't go in there, Vic," he said. "I did a recon the day after you went down. They found out we weren't fried in that gym. I don't know how. Maybe mutts smelled our track. I've been keeping watch, and they haven't tried to come out after us. I don't blame them. You don't know what it's like out here at night, man… you don't know…" He shivered. "Take it easy, Blood." "But they've got us marked lousy in the city, Vic. We can't go back there. We'll have to make it someplace else." That put it on a different stick. We couldn't go back, and with Blood in that condition we couldn't go forward. And I knew, good as I was solo, I couldn't make it without him. And there wasn't anything out here to eat. He had to have food, at once, and some medical care. I had to do something. Something good, something fast. "Vic," Quilla June's voice was high and whining, "come on! He'll be all right. We have to hurry." I looked up at her. The sun was going down. Blood trembled in my arms. She got a pouty look on her face. "If you love me, you'll come on!" I couldn't make it alone out there without him. I knew it. If I loved her. She asked me, in the boiler, do you know what love is? It was a small fire, not nearly big enough for any roverpak to spot from the outskirts of the city. No smoke. And after Blood had eaten his fill, I carried him to the air-duct a mile away, and we spent the night inside, on a little ledge. I held him all night. He slept good. In the morning, I fixed him up pretty good. He'd make it; he was strong. He ate again. There was plenty left from the night before. I didn't eat. I wasn't hungry. We started off across the blast wasteland that morning. We'd find another city, and make it. We had to move slow, because Blood was still limping. It took a long time before I stopped hearing her calling in my head. Asking me, asking me: do you know what love is? Sure I know. A boy loves his dog.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	Chapter 1	Many people have helped me in writing this book. My scientific colleagues have without exception been inspiring. Over the years my principal associates and collaborators were Roger Penrose, Robert Geroch, Brandon Carter, George Ellis, Gary Gibbons, Don Page and Jim Hartle. I owe a lot to them, and to my research students, who have always given me help when needed. One of my students, Brian Whitt, gave me a lot of help writing the first edition of this book. My editor at Bantam Books, Peter Guzzardi, made innumerable comments which improved the book considerably. In addition, for this edition, I would like to thank Andrew Dunn, who helped me revise the text. I could not have written this book without my communication system. The software, called Equalizer, was donated by Walt Waltosz of Words Plus Inc., in Lancaster, California. My speech synthesizer was donated by Speech Plus, of Sunnyvale, California. The synthesiser and laptop computer were mounted on my wheelchair by David Mason, of Cambridge Adaptive Communication Ltd. With this system I can communicate better now than before I lost my voice. I have had a number of secretaries and assistants over the years in which I wrote and revised this book. On the secretarial side, I'm very grateful to Judy Fella, Ann Ralph, Laura Gentry, Cheryl Billington and Sue Masey. My assistants have been Colin Williams, David Thomas, Raymond Laflamme, Nick Phillips, Andrew Dunn, Stuart Jamieson, Jonathan Brenchley, Tim Hunt, Simon Gill, Jon Rogers and Tom Kendall. They, my nurses, colleagues, friends and family have enabled me to live a very full life and to pursue my research despite my disability. —Stephen Hawking
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	FOREWORD	I didn't write a foreword to the original edition of A Brief History of Time. That was done by Carl Sagan. Instead, I wrote a short piece titled 'Acknowledgments' in which I was advised to thank everyone. Some of the foundations that had given me support weren't too pleased to have been mentioned, however, because it led to a great increase in applications. I don't think anyone, my publishers, my agent, or myself, expected the book to do anything like as well as it did. It was in the London Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks, longer than any other book (apparently, the Bible and Shakespeare aren't counted). It has been translated into something like forty languages and has sold about one copy for every 750 men, women, and children in the world. As Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft (a former post-doc of mine) remarked: I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex. The success of A Brief History indicates that there is widespread interest in the big questions like: where did we come from? And why is the universe the way it is? I have taken the opportunity to update the book and include new theoretical and observational results obtained since the book was first published (on April Fools' Day, 1988). I have included a new chapter on wormholes and time travel. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity seems to offer the possibility that we could create and maintain wormholes, little tubes that connect different regions of space-time. If so, we might be able to use them for rapid travel around the galaxy or travel back in time. Of course, we have not seen anyone from the future (or have we?) but I discuss a possible explanation for this. I also describe the progress that has been made recently in finding 'dualities' or correspondences between apparently different theories of physics. These correspondences are a strong indication that there is a complete unified theory of physics, but they also suggest that it may not be possible to express this theory in a single fundamental formulation. Instead, we may have to use different reflections of the underlying theory in different situations. It might be like our being unable to represent the surface of the earth on a single map and having to use different maps in different regions. This would be a revolution in our view of the unification of the laws of science but it would not change the most important point: that the universe is governed by a set of rational laws that we can discover and understand. On the observational side, by far the most important development has been the measurement of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation by COBE (the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite) and other collaborations. These fluctuations are the fingerprints of creation, tiny initial irregularities in the otherwise smooth and uniform early universe that later grew into galaxies, stars, and all the structures we see around us. Their form agrees with the predictions of the proposal that the universe has no boundaries or edges in the imaginary time direction; but further observations will be necessary to distinguish this proposal from other possible explanations for the fluctuations in the background. However, within a few years we should know whether we can believe that we live in a universe that is completely self-contained and without beginning or end. —Stephen Hawking, Cambridge, May 1996
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	OUR PICTURE OF THE UNIVERSE	A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.' The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?' 'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down!' Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better? What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Can we go back in time? Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these longstanding questions. Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the earth orbiting the sun – or perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises. Only time (whatever that may be) will tell. As long ago as 340 BC the Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his book On the Heavens, was able to put forward two good arguments for believing that the earth was a round sphere rather than a flat plate. First, he realized that eclipses of the moon were caused by the earth coming between the sun and the moon. The earth's shadow on the moon was always round, which would be true only if the earth was spherical. If the earth had been a flat disk, the shadow would have been elongated and elliptical, unless the eclipse always occurred at a time when the sun was directly under the center of the disk. Second, the Greeks knew from their travels that the North Star appeared lower in the sky when viewed in the south than it did in more northerly regions. (Since the North Star lies over the North Pole, it appears to be directly above an observer at the North Pole, but to someone looking from the equator, it appears to lie just at the horizon.) From the difference in the apparent position of the North Star in Egypt and Greece, Aristotle even quoted an estimate that the distance around the earth was 400,000 stadia. It is not known exactly what length a stadium was, but it may have been about 200 yards, which would make Aristotle's estimate about twice the currently accepted figure. The Greeks even had a third argument that the earth must be round, for why else does one first see the sails of a ship coming over the horizon, and only later see the hull? Aristotle thought the earth was stationary and that the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars moved in circular orbits about the earth. He believed this because he felt, for mystical reasons, that the earth was the center of the universe, and that circular motion was the most perfect. This idea was elaborated by Ptolemy in the second century AD into a complete cosmological model. The earth stood at the center, surrounded by eight spheres that carried the moon, the sun, the stars, and the five planets known at the time, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The planets themselves moved on smaller circles attached to their respective spheres in order to account for their rather complicated observed paths in the sky. The outermost sphere carried the so-called fixed stars, which always stay in the same positions relative to each other but which rotate together across the sky. What lay beyond the last sphere was never made very clear, but it certainly was not part of mankind's observable universe. Ptolemy's model provided a reasonably accurate system for predicting the positions of heavenly bodies in the sky. But in order to predict these positions correctly, Ptolemy had to make an assumption that the moon followed a path that sometimes brought it twice as close to the earth as at other times. And that meant that the moon ought sometimes to appear twice as big as at other times! Ptolemy recognized this flaw, but nevertheless his model was generally, although not universally, accepted. It was adopted by the Christian church as the picture of the universe that was in accordance with Scripture, for it had the great advantage that it left lots of room outside the sphere of fixed stars for heaven and hell. A simpler model, however, was proposed in 1514 by a Polish priest, Nicholas Copernicus. (At first, perhaps for fear of being branded a heretic by his church, Copernicus circulated his model anonymously.) His idea was that the sun was stationary at the center and that the earth and the planets moved in circular orbits around the sun. Nearly a century passed before this idea was taken seriously. Then two astronomers – the German, Johannes Kepler, and the Italian, Galileo Galilei – started publicly to support the Copernican theory, despite the fact that the orbits it predicted did not quite match the ones observed. The death blow to the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic theory came in 1609. In that year, Galileo started observing the night sky with a telescope, which had just been invented. When he looked at the planet Jupiter, Galileo found that it was accompanied by several small satellites or moons that orbited around it. This implied that everything did not have to orbit directly around the earth, as Aristotle and Ptolemy had thought. (It was, of course, still possible to believe that the earth was stationary at the center of the universe and that the moons of Jupiter moved on extremely complicated paths around the earth, giving the appearance that they orbited Jupiter. However, Copernicus's theory was much simpler.) At the same time, Johannes Kepler had modified Copernicus's theory, suggesting that the planets moved not in circles but in ellipses (an ellipse is an elongated circle). The predictions now finally matched the observations. As far as Kepler was concerned, elliptical orbits were merely an ad hoc hypothesis, and a rather repugnant one at that, because ellipses were clearly less perfect than circles. Having discovered almost by accident that elliptical orbits fit the observations well, he could not reconcile them with his idea that the planets were made to orbit the sun by magnetic forces. An explanation was provided only much later, in 1687, when Sir Isaac Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, probably the most important single work ever published in the physical sciences. In it Newton not only put forward a theory of how bodies move in space and time, but he also developed the complicated mathematics needed to analyze those motions. In addition, Newton postulated a law of universal gravitation according to which each body in the universe was attracted toward every other body by a force that was stronger the more massive the bodies and the closer they were to each other. It was this same force that caused objects to fall to the ground. (The story that Newton was inspired by an apple hitting his head is almost certainly apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea of gravity came to him as he sat 'in a contemplative mood' and 'was occasioned by the fall of an apple.') Newton went on to show that, according to his law, gravity causes the moon to move in an elliptical orbit around the earth and causes the earth and the planets to follow elliptical paths around the sun. The Copernican model got rid of Ptolemy's celestial spheres, and with them, the idea that the universe had a natural boundary. Since 'fixed stars' did not appear to change their positions apart from a rotation across the sky caused by the earth spinning on its axis, it became natural to suppose that the fixed stars were objects like our sun but very much farther away. Newton realized that, according to his theory of gravity, the stars should attract each other, so it seemed they could not remain essentially motionless. Would they not all fall together at some point? In a letter in 1691 to Richard Bentley, another leading thinker of his day, Newton argued that this would indeed happen if there were only a finite number of stars distributed over a finite region of space. But he reasoned that if, on the other hand, there were an infinite number of stars, distributed more or less uniformly over infinite space, this would not happen, because there would not be any central point for them to fall to. This argument is an instance of the pitfalls that you can encounter in talking about infinity. In an infinite universe, every point can be regarded as the center, because every point has an infinite number of stars on each side of it. The correct approach, it was realized only much later, is to consider the finite situation, in which the stars all fall in on each other, and then to ask how things change if one adds more stars roughly uniformly distributed outside this region. According to Newton's law, the extra stars would make no difference at all to the original ones on average, so the stars would fall in just as fast. We can add as many stars as we like, but they will still always collapse in on themselves. We now know it is impossible to have an infinite static model of the universe in which gravity is always attractive. It is an interesting reflection on the general climate of thought before the twentieth century that no one had suggested that the universe was expanding or contracting. It was generally accepted either that the universe had existed forever in an unchanging state, or that it had been created at a finite time in the past more or less as we observe it today. In part this may have been due to people's tendency to believe in eternal truths, as well as the comfort they found in the thought that even though they may grow old and die, the universe is eternal and unchanging. Even those who realized that Newton's theory of gravity showed that the universe could not be static did not think to suggest that it might be expanding. Instead, they attempted to modify the theory by making the gravitational force repulsive at very large distances. This did not significantly affect their predictions of the motions of the planets, but it allowed an infinite distribution of stars to remain in equilibrium – with the attractive forces between nearby stars balanced by the repulsive forces from those that were farther away. However, we now believe such an equilibrium would be unstable: if the stars in some region got only slightly nearer each other, the attractive forces between them would become stronger and dominate over the repulsive forces so that the stars would continue to fall toward each other. On the other hand, if the stars got a bit farther away from each other, the repulsive forces would dominate and drive them farther apart. Another objection to an infinite static universe is normally ascribed to the German philosopher Heinrich Olbers, who wrote about this theory in 1823. In fact, various contemporaries of Newton had raised the problem, and the Olbers article was not even the first to contain plausible arguments against it. It was, however, the first to be widely noted. The difficulty is that in an infinite static universe nearly every line of sight would end on the surface of a star. Thus one would expect that the whole sky would be as bright as the sun, even at night. Olbers's counterargument was that the light from distant stars would be dimmed by absorption by intervening matter. However, if that happened the intervening matter would eventually heat up until it glowed as brightly as the stars. The only way of avoiding the conclusion that the whole of the night sky should be as bright as the surface of the sun would be to assume that the stars had not been shining forever but had turned on at some finite time in the past. In that case the absorbing matter might not have heated up yet or the light from distant stars might not yet have reached us. And that brings us to the question of what could have caused the stars to have turned on in the first place. The beginning of the universe had, of course, been discussed long before this. According to a number of early cosmologies and the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition, the universe started at a finite, and not very distant, time in the past. One argument for such a beginning was the feeling that it was necessary to have 'First Cause' to explain the existence of the universe. (Within the universe, you always explained one event as being caused by some earlier event, but the existence of the universe itself could be explained in this way only if it had some beginning.) Another argument was put forward by St Augustine in his book The City of God. He pointed out that civilization is progressing and we remember who performed this deed or developed that technique. Thus man, and so also perhaps the universe, could not have been around all that long. St Augustine accepted a date of about 5000 BC for the creation of the universe according to the book of Genesis. (It is interesting that this is not so far from the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 BC, which is when archaeologists tell us that civilization really began.) Aristotle, and most of the other Greek philosophers, on the other hand, did not like the idea of a creation because it smacked too much of divine intervention. They believed, therefore, that the human race and the world around it had existed, and would exist, forever. The ancients had already considered the argument about progress described above, and answered it by saying that there had been periodic floods or other disasters that repeatedly set the human race right back to the beginning of civilization. The questions of whether the universe had a beginning in time and whether it is limited in space were later extensively examined by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his monumental (and very obscure) work, Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781. He called these questions antinomies (that is, contradictions) of pure reason because he felt that there were equally compelling arguments for believing the thesis, that the universe had a beginning, and the antithesis, that it had existed forever. His argument for the thesis was that if the universe did not have a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before any event, which he considered absurd. The argument for the antithesis was that if the universe had a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before it, so why should the universe begin at any one particular time? In fact, his cases for both the thesis and the antithesis are really the same argument. They are both based on his unspoken assumption that time continues back forever, whether or not the universe had existed forever. As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St Augustine. When asked: 'What did God do before he created the universe?' Augustine didn't reply: 'He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions.' Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe. When most people believed in an essentially static and unchanging universe, the question of whether or not it had a beginning was really one of metaphysics or theology. One could account for what was observed equally well on the theory that the universe had existed forever or on the theory that it was set in motion at some finite time in such a manner as to look as though it had existed forever. But in 1929, Edwin Hubble made the landmark observation that wherever you look, distant galaxies are moving rapidly away from us. In other words, the universe is expanding. This means that at earlier times objects would have been closer together. In fact, it seemed that there was a time, about ten or twenty thousand million years ago, when they were all at exactly the same place and when, therefore, the density of the universe was infinite. This discovery finally brought the question of the beginning of the universe into the realm of science. Hubble's observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability to predict the future, would break down. If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined. It should be emphasized that this beginning in time is very different from those that had been considered previously. In an unchanging universe a beginning in time is something that has to be imposed by some being outside the universe; there is no physical necessity for a beginning. One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could still imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job! In order to talk about the nature of the universe and to discuss questions such as whether it has a beginning or an end, you have to be clear about what a scientific theory is. I shall take the simpleminded view that a theory is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make. It exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality (whatever that might mean). A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations. For example, Aristotle's theory that everything was made out of four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, was simple enough to qualify, but it did not make any definite predictions. On the other hand, Newton's theory of gravity was based on an even simpler model, in which bodies attracted each other with a force that was proportional to a quantity called their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Yet it predicts the motions of the sun, the moon, and the planets to a high degree of accuracy. Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions, the theory survives and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory. At least that is what is supposed to happen, but you can always question the competence of the person who carried out the observation. In practice, what often happens is that a new theory is devised that is really an extension of the previous theory. For example, very accurate observations of the planet Mercury revealed a small difference between its motion and the predictions of Newton's theory of gravity. Einstein's general theory of relativity predicted a slightly different motion from Newton's theory. The fact that Einstein's predictions matched what was seen, while Newton's did not, was one of the crucial confirmations of the new theory. However, we still use Newton's theory for all practical purposes because the difference between its predictions and those of general relativity is very small in the situations that we normally deal with. (Newton's theory also has the great advantage that it is much simpler to work with than Einstein's!) The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe. However, the approach most scientists actually follow is to separate the problem into two parts. First, there are the laws that tell us how the universe changes with time. (If we know what the universe is like at any one time, these physical laws tell us how it will look at any later time.) Second, there is the question of the initial state of the universe. Some people feel that science should be concerned with only the first part; they regard the question of the initial situation as a matter for metaphysics or religion. They would say that God, being omnipotent, could have started the universe off any way he wanted. That may be so, but in that case he also could have made it develop in a completely arbitrary way. Yet it appears that he chose to make it evolve in a very regular way according to certain laws. It therefore seems equally reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the initial state. It turns out to be very difficult to devise a theory to describe the universe all in one go. Instead, we break the problem up into bits and invent a number of partial theories. Each of these partial theories describes and predicts a certain limited class of observations, neglecting the effects of other quantities, or representing them by simple sets of numbers. It may be that this approach is completely wrong. If everything in the universe depends on everything else in a fundamental way, it might be impossible to get close to a full solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation. Nevertheless, it is certainly the way that we have made progress in the past. The classic example again is the Newtonian theory of gravity, which tells us that the gravitational force between two bodies depends only on one number associated with each body, its mass, but is otherwise independent of what the bodies are made of. Thus one does not need to have a theory of the structure and constitution of the sun and the planets in order to calculate their orbits. Today scientists describe the universe in terms of two basic partial theories – the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. They are the great intellectual achievements of the first half of this century. The general theory of relativity describes the force of gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe, that is, the structure on scales from only a few miles to as large as a million million million million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, deals with phenomena on extremely small scales, such as a millionth of a millionth of an inch. Unfortunately, however, these two theories are known to be inconsistent with each other – they cannot both be correct. One of the major endeavors in physics today, and the major theme of this book, is the search for a new theory that will incorporate them both – a quantum theory of gravity. We do not yet have such a theory, and we may still be a long way from having one, but we do already know many of the properties that it must have. And we shall see, in later chapters, that we already know a fair amount about the predictions a quantum theory of gravity must make. Now, if you believe that the universe is not arbitrary, but is governed by definite laws, you ultimately have to combine the partial theories into a complete unified theory that will describe everything in the universe. But there is a fundamental paradox in the search for such a complete unified theory. The ideas about scientific theories outlined above assume we are rational beings who are free to observe the universe as we want and to draw logical deductions from what we see. In such a scheme it is reasonable to suppose that we might progress ever closer toward the laws that govern our universe. Yet if there really is a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions. And so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And why should it determine that we come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusion? Or no conclusion at all? The only answer that I can give to this problem is based on Darwin's principle of natural selection. The idea is that in any population of self-reproducing organisms, there will be variations in the genetic material and upbringing that different individuals have. These differences will mean that some individuals are better able than others to draw the right conclusions about the world around them and to act accordingly. These individuals will be more likely to survive and reproduce and so their pattern of behavior and thought will come to dominate. It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all, and even if they don't, a complete unified theory may not make much difference to our chances of survival. However, provided the universe has evolved in a regular way, we might expect that the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us would be valid also in our search for a complete unified theory, and so would not lead us to the wrong conclusions. Because the partial theories that we already have are sufficient to make accurate predictions in all but the most extreme situations, the search for the ultimate theory of the universe seems difficult to justify on practical grounds. (It is worth noting, though, that similar arguments could have been used against both relativity and quantum mechanics, and these theories have given us both nuclear energy and the microelectronics revolution!) The discovery of a complete unified theory, therefore, may not aid the survival of our species. It may not even affect our life-style. But ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	SPACE AND TIME	Our present ideas about the motion of bodies date back to Galileo and Newton. Before them people believed Aristotle, who said that the natural state of a body was to be at rest and that it moved only if driven by a force or impulse. It followed that a heavy body should fall faster than a light one, because it would have a greater pull toward the earth. The Aristotelian tradition also held that one could work out all the laws that govern the universe by pure thought: it was not necessary to check by observation. So no one until Galileo bothered to see whether bodies of different weights did in fact fall at different speeds. It is said that Galileo demonstrated that Aristotle's belief was false by dropping weights from the leaning tower of Pisa. The story is almost certainly untrue, but Galileo did do something equivalent: he rolled balls of different weights down a smooth slope. The situation is similar to that of heavy bodies falling vertically, but it is easier to observe because the speeds are smaller. Galileo's measurements indicated that each body increased its speed at the same rate, no matter what its weight. For example, if you let go of a ball on a slope that drops by one meter for every ten meters you go along, the ball will be traveling down the slope at a speed of about one meter per second after one second, two meters per second after two seconds, and so on, however heavy the ball. Of course a lead weight would fall faster than a feather, but that is only because a feather is slowed down by air resistance. If one drops two bodies that don't have much air resistance, such as two different lead weights, they fall at the same rate. On the moon, where there is no air to slow things down, the astronaut David R. Scott performed the feather and lead weight experiment and found that indeed they did hit the ground at the same time. Galileo's measurements were used by Newton as the basis of his laws of motion. In Galileo's experiments, as a body rolled down the slope it was always acted on by the same force (its weight), and the effect was to make it constantly speed up. This showed that the real effect of a force is always to change the speed of a body, rather than just to set it moving, as was previously thought. It also meant that whenever a body is not acted on by any force, it will keep on moving in a straight line at the same speed. This idea was first stated explicitly in Newton's Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, and is known as Newton's first law. What happens to a body when a force does act on it is given by Newton's second law. This states that the body will accelerate, or change its speed, at a rate that is proportional to the force. (For example, the acceleration is twice as great if the force is twice as great.) The acceleration is also smaller the greater the mass (or quantity of matter) of the body. (The same force acting on a body of twice the mass will produce half the acceleration.) A familiar example is provided by a car: the more powerful the engine, the greater the acceleration, but the heavier the car, the smaller the acceleration for the same engine. In addition to his laws of motion, Newton discovered a law to describe the force of gravity, which states that every body attracts every other body with a force that is proportional to the mass of each body. Thus the force between two bodies would be twice as strong if one of the bodies (say, body A) had its mass doubled. This is what you might expect because one could think of the new body A as being made of two bodies with the original mass. Each would attract body B with the original force. Thus the total force between A and B would be twice the original force. And if, say, one of the bodies had twice the mass, and the other had three times the mass, then the force would be six times as strong. One can now see why all bodies fall at the same rate: a body of twice the weight will have twice the force of gravity pulling it down, but it will also have twice the mass. According to Newton's second law, these two effects will exactly cancel each other, so the acceleration will be the same in all cases. Newton's law of gravity also tells us that the farther apart the bodies, the smaller the force. Newton's law of gravity says that the gravitational attraction of a star is exactly one quarter that of a similar star at half the distance. This law predicts the orbits of the earth, the moon, and the planets with great accuracy. If the law were that the gravitational attraction of a star went down faster or increased more rapidly with distance, the orbits of the planets would not be elliptical, they would either spiral in to the sun or escape from the sun. The big difference between the ideas of Aristotle and those of Galileo and Newton is that Aristotle believed in a preferred state of rest, which any body would take up if it were not driven by some force or impulse. In particular, he thought that the earth was at rest. But it follows from Newton's laws that there is no unique standard of rest. One could equally well say that body A was at rest and body B was moving at constant speed with respect to body A, or that body B was at rest and body A was moving. For example, if one sets aside for a moment the rotation of the earth and its orbit round the sun, one could say that the earth was at rest and that a tram on it was traveling east at thirty miles per hour or that the tram was at rest and the earth was moving west at thirty miles per hour. If one carried out experiments with moving bodies on the tram, all Newton's laws would still hold. For instance, playing Ping-Pong on the tram, one would find that the ball obeyed Newton's laws just like a ball on a table by the track. So there is no way to tell whether it is the tram or the earth that is moving. The lack of an absolute standard of rest meant that one could not determine whether two events that took place at different times occurred in the same position in space. For example, suppose our Ping-Pong ball on the train bounces straight up and down, hitting the table twice on the same spot one second apart. To someone on the track, the two bounces would seem to take place about thirteen meters apart, because the tram would have traveled that far down the track between the bounces. The nonexistence of absolute rest therefore meant that one could not give an event an absolute position in space, as Aristotle had believed. The positions of events and the distances between them would be different for a person on the tram and one on the track, and there would be no reason to prefer one person's positions to the other's. Newton was very worried by this lack of absolute position, or absolute space, as it was called, because it did not accord with his idea of an absolute God. In fact, he refused to accept lack of absolute space, even though it was implied by his laws. He was severely criticized for this irrational belief by many people, most notably by Bishop Berkeley, a philosopher who believed that all material objects and space and time are an illusion. When the famous Dr Johnson was told of Berkeley's opinion, he cried, 'I refute it thus!' and stubbed his toe on a large stone. Both Aristotle and Newton believed in absolute time. That is, they believed that one could unambiguously measure the interval of time between two events, and that this time would be the same whoever measured it, provided they used a good clock. Time was completely separate from and independent of space. This is what most people would take to be the commonsense view. However, we have had to change our ideas about space and time. Although our apparently commonsense notions work well when dealing with things like apples, or planets that travel comparatively slowly, they don't work at all for things moving at or near the speed of light. The fact that light travels at a finite, but very high, speed was first discovered in 1676 by the Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Roemer. He observed that the times at which the moons of Jupiter appeared to pass behind Jupiter were not evenly spaced, as one would expect if the moons went round Jupiter at a constant rate. As the earth and Jupiter orbit around the sun, the distance between them varies. Roemer noticed that eclipses of Jupiter's moons appeared later the farther we were from Jupiter. He argued that this was because the light from the moons took longer to reach us when we were farther away. His measurements of the variations in the distance of the earth from Jupiter were, however, not very accurate, and so his value for the speed of light was 140,000 miles per second, compared to the modern value of 186,000 miles per second. Nevertheless, Roemer's achievement, in not only proving that light travels at a finite speed, but also in measuring that speed, was remarkable – coming as it did eleven years before Newton's publication of Principia Mathematica. A proper theory of the propagation of light didn't come until 1865, when the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell succeeded in unifying the partial theories that up to then had been used to describe the forces of electricity and magnetism. Maxwell's equations predicted that there could be wavelike disturbances in the combined electromagnetic field, and that these would travel at a fixed speed, like ripples on a pond. If the wavelength of these waves (the distance between one wave crest and the next) is a meter or more, they are what we now call radio waves. Shorter wavelengths are known as microwaves (a few centimeters) or infrared (more than a ten thousandth of a centimeter). Visible light has a wavelength of between only forty and eighty millionths of a centimeter. Even shorter wavelengths are known as ultraviolet, X rays, and gamma rays. Maxwell's theory predicted that radio or light waves should travel at a certain fixed speed. But Newton's theory had got rid of the idea of absolute rest, so if light was supposed to travel at a fixed speed, one would have to say what that fixed speed was to be measured relative to. It was therefore suggested that there was a substance called the 'ether' that was present everywhere, even in 'empty' space. Light waves should travel through the ether as sound waves travel through air, and their speed should therefore be relative to the ether. Different observers, moving relative to the ether, would see light coming toward them at different speeds, but light's speed relative to the ether would remain fixed. In particular, as the earth was moving through the ether on its orbit round the sun, the speed of light measured in the direction of the earth's motion through the ether (when we were moving toward the source of the light) should be higher than the speed of light at right angles to that motion (when we are not moving toward the source). In 1887 Albert Michelson (who later became the first American to receive the Nobel prize for physics) and Edward Morley carried out a very careful experiment at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland. They compared the speed of light in the direction of the earth's motion with that at right angles to the earth's motion. To their great surprise, they found they were exactly the same! Between 1887 and 1905 there were several attempts, most notably by the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, to explain the result of the Michelson–Morley experiment in terms of objects contracting and clocks slowing down when they moved through the ether. However, in a famous paper in 1905, a hitherto unknown clerk in the Swiss patent office, Albert Einstein, pointed out that the whole idea of an ether was unnecessary, providing one was willing to abandon the idea of absolute time. A similar point was made a few weeks later by a leading French mathematician, Henri Poincaré. Einstein's arguments were closer to physics than those of Poincaré, who regarded this problem as mathematical. Einstein is usually given the credit for the new theory, but Poincaré is remembered by having his name attached to an important part of it. The fundamental postulate of the theory of relativity, as it was called, was that the laws of science should be the same for all freely moving observers, no matter what their speed. This was true for Newton's laws of motion, but now the idea was extended to include Maxwell's theory and the speed of light: all observers should measure the same speed of light, no matter how fast they are moving. This simple idea has some remarkable consequences. Perhaps the best known are the equivalence of mass and energy, summed up in Einstein's famous equation E = mc2 (where E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light), and the law that nothing may travel faster than the speed of light. Because of the equivalence of energy and mass, the energy which an object has due to its motion will add to its mass. In other words, it will make it harder to increase its speed. This effect is only really significant for objects moving at speeds close to the speed of light. For example, at 10 percent of the speed of light an object's mass is only 0.5 percent more than normal, while at 90 percent of the speed of light it would be more than twice its normal mass. As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass rises ever more quickly, so it takes more and more energy to speed it up further. It can in fact never reach the speed of light, because by then its mass would have become infinite, and by the equivalence of mass and energy, it would have taken an infinite amount of energy to get it there. For this reason, any normal object is forever confined by relativity to move at speeds slower than the speed of light. Only light, or other waves that have no intrinsic mass, can move at the speed of light. An equally remarkable consequence of relativity is the way it has revolutionized our ideas of space and time. In Newton's theory, if a pulse of light is sent from one place to another, different observers would agree on the time that the journey took (since time is absolute), but will not always agree on how far the light traveled (since space is not absolute). Since the speed of the light is just the distance it has traveled divided by the time it has taken, different observers would measure different speeds for the light. In relativity, on the other hand, all observers must agree on how fast light travels. They still, however, do not agree on the distance the light has traveled, so they must therefore now also disagree over the time it has taken. (The time taken is the distance the light has traveled – which the observers do not agree on – divided by the light's speed – which they do agree on.) In other words, the theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time! It appeared that each observer must have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree. FIGURE 2.1 Time is measured vertically, and the distance from the observer is measured horizontally. The observer's path through space and time is shown as the vertical line on the left. The paths of light rays to and from the event are the diagonal lines. Each observer could use radar to say where and when an event took place by sending out a pulse of light or radio waves. Part of the pulse is reflected back at the event and the observer measures the time at which he receives the echo. The time of the event is then said to be the time halfway between when the pulse was sent and the time when the reflection was received back: the distance of the event is half the time taken for this round trip, multiplied by the speed of light. (An event, in this sense, is something that takes place at a single point in space, at a specified point in time.) This idea is shown in Fig. 2.1, which is an example of a space-time diagram. Using this procedure, observers who are moving relative to each other will assign different times and positions to the same event. No particular observer's measurements are any more correct than any other observer's, but all the measurements are related. Any observer can work out precisely what time and position any other observer will assign to an event, provided he knows the other observer's relative velocity. Nowadays we use just this method to measure distances precisely, because we can measure time more accurately than length. In effect, the meter is defined to be the distance traveled by light in 0.000000003335640952 seconds, as measured by a cesium clock. (The reason for that particular number is that it corresponds to the historical definition of the meter – in terms of two marks on a particular platinum bar kept in Paris.) Equally, we can use a more convenient, new unit of length called a light-second. This is simply defined as the distance that light travels in one second. In the theory of relativity, we now define distance in terms of time and the speed of light, so it follows automatically that every observer will measure light to have the same speed (by definition, 1 meter per 0.000000003335640952 seconds). There is no need to introduce the idea of an ether, whose presence anyway cannot be detected, as the Michelson–Morley experiment showed. The theory of relativity does, however, force us to change fundamentally our ideas of space and time. We must accept that time is not completely separate from and independent of space, but is combined with it to form an object called space-time. It is a matter of common experience that one can describe the position of a point in space by three numbers, or coordinates. For instance, one can say that a point in a room is seven feet from one wall, three feet from another, and five feet above the floor. Or one could specify that a point was at a certain latitude and longitude and a certain height above sea level. One is free to use any three suitable coordinates, although they have only a limited range of validity. One would not specify the position of the moon in terms of miles north and miles west of Piccadilly Circus and feet above sea level. Instead, one might describe it in terms of distance from the sun, distance from the plane of the orbits of the planets, and the angle between the line joining the moon to the sun and the line joining the sun to a nearby star such as Alpha Centauri. Even these coordinates would not be of much use in describing the position of the sun in our galaxy or the position of our galaxy in the local group of galaxies. In fact, one may describe the whole universe in terms of a collection of overlapping patches. In each patch, one can use a different set of three coordinates to specify the position of a point. An event is something that happens at a particular point in space and at a particular time. So one can specify it by four numbers or coordinates. Again, the choice of coordinates is arbitrary; one can use any three well-defined spatial coordinates and any measure of time. In relativity, there is no real distinction between the space and time coordinates, just as there is no real difference between any two space coordinates. One could choose a new set of coordinates in which, say, the first space coordinate was a combination of the old first and second space coordinates. For instance, instead of measuring the position of a point on the earth in miles north of Piccadilly and miles west of Piccadilly, one could use miles northeast of Piccadilly, and miles northwest of Piccadilly. Similarly, in relativity, one could use a new time coordinate that was the old time (in seconds) plus the distance (in light-seconds) north of Piccadilly. It is often helpful to think of the four coordinates of an event as specifying its position in a four-dimensional space called space-time. It is impossible to imagine a four-dimensional space. I personally find it hard enough to visualize three-dimensional space! However, it is easy to draw diagrams of two-dimensional spaces, such as the surface of the earth. (The surface of the earth is two-dimensional because the position of a point can be specified by two coordinates, latitude and longitude.) I shall generally use diagrams in which time increases upward and one of the spatial dimensions is shown horizontally. The other two spatial dimensions are ignored or, sometimes, one of them is indicated by perspective. (These are called space-time diagrams, like Fig. 2.1.) For example, in Fig. 2.2 time is measured upwards in years and the distance along the line from the sun to Alpha Centauri is measured horizontally in miles. The paths of the sun and of Alpha Centauri through space-time are shown as the vertical lines on the left and right of the diagram. A ray of light from the sun follows the diagonal line, and takes four years to get from the sun to Alpha Centauri. As we have seen, Maxwell's equations predicted that the speed of light should be the same whatever the speed of the source, and this has been confirmed by accurate measurements. It follows from this that if a pulse of light is emitted at a particular time at a particular point in space, then as time goes on it will spread out as a sphere of light whose size and position are independent of the speed of the source. After one millionth of a second the light will have spread out to form a sphere with a radius of 300 meters; after two millionths of a second, the radius will be 600 meters; and so on. It will be like the ripples that spread out on the surface of a pond when a stone is thrown in. The ripples spread out as a circle that gets bigger as time goes on. If one stacks snapshots of the ripples at different times one above the other, the expanding circle of ripples will mark out a cone whose tip is at the place and time at which the stone hit the water (Fig. 2.3). Similarly, the light spreading out from an event forms a (three-dimensional) cone in (the four-dimensional) space-time. This cone is called the future light cone of the event. In the same way we can draw another cone, called the past light cone, which is the set of events from which a pulse of light is able to reach the given event (Fig. 2.4). Given an event P, one can divide the other events in the universe into three classes. Those events that can be reached from the event P by a particle or wave traveling at or below the speed of light are said to be in the future of P. They will lie within or on the expanding sphere of light emitted from the event P. Thus they will lie within or on the future light cone of P in the space-time diagram. Only events in the future of P can be affected by what happens at P because nothing can travel faster than light. Similarly, the past of P can be defined as the set of all events from which it is possible to reach the event P traveling at or below the speed of light. It is thus the set of events that can affect what happens at P. The events that do not lie in the future or past of P are said to lie in the elsewhere of P. What happens at such events can neither affect nor be affected by what happens at P. For example, if the sun were to cease to shine at this very moment, it would not affect things on earth at the present time because they would be in the elsewhere of the event when the sun went out (Fig. 2.5). We would know about it only after eight minutes, the time it takes light to reach us from the sun. Only then would events on earth lie in the future light cone of the event at which the sun went out. Similarly, we do not know what is happening at the moment farther away in the universe: the light that we see from distant galaxies left them millions of years ago, and in the case of the most distant object that we have seen, the light left some eight thousand million years ago. Thus, when we look at the universe, we are seeing it as it was in the past. If one neglects gravitational effects, as Einstein and Poincaré did in 1905, one has what is called the special theory of relativity. For every event in space-time we may construct a light cone (the set of all possible paths of light in space-time emitted at that event), and since the speed of light is the same at every event and in every direction, all the light cones will be identical and will all point in the same direction. The theory also tells us that nothing can travel faster than light. This means that the path of any object through space and time must be represented by a line that lies within the light cone at each event on it (Fig. 2.6). The special theory of relativity was very successful in explaining that the speed of light appears the same to all observers (as shown by the Michelson–Morley experiment) and in describing what happens when things move at speeds close to the speed of light. However, it was inconsistent with the Newtonian theory of gravity, which said that objects attracted each other with a force that depended on the distance between them. This meant that if one moved one of the objects, the force on the other one would change instantaneously. Or in other words, gravitational effects should travel with infinite velocity, instead of at or below the speed of light, as the special theory of relativity required. Einstein made a number of unsuccessful attempts between 1908 and 1914 to find a theory of gravity that was consistent with special relativity. Finally, in 1915, he proposed what we now call the general theory of relativity. Einstein made the revolutionary suggestion that gravity is not a force like other forces, but is a consequence of the fact that space-time is not flat, as had been previously assumed: it is curved, or 'warped,' by the distribution of mass and energy in it. Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity; instead, they follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, which is called a geodesic. A geodesic is the shortest (or longest) path between two nearby points. For example, the surface of the earth is a two-dimensional curved space. A geodesic on the earth is called a great circle, and is the shortest route between two points (Fig. 2.7). As the geodesic is the shortest path between any two airports, this is the route an airline navigator will tell the pilot to fly along. In general relativity, bodies always follow straight lines in four-dimensional space-time, but they nevertheless appear to us to move along curved paths in our three-dimensional space. (This is rather like watching an airplane flying over hilly ground. Although it follows a straight line in three-dimensional space, its shadow follows a curved path on the two-dimensional ground.) The mass of the sun curves space-time in such a way that although the earth follows a straight path in four-dimensional space-time, it appears to us to move along a circular orbit in three-dimensional space. In fact, the orbits of the planets predicted by general relativity are almost exactly the same as those predicted by the Newtonian theory of gravity. However, in the case of Mercury, which, being the nearest planet to the sun, feels the strongest gravitational effects, and has a rather elongated orbit, general relativity predicts that the long axis of the ellipse should rotate about the sun at a rate of about one degree in ten thousand years. Small though this effect is, it had been noticed before 1915 and served as one of the first confirmations of Einstein's theory. In recent years the even smaller deviations of the orbits of the other planets from the Newtonian predictions have been measured by radar and found to agree with the predictions of general relativity. Light rays too must follow geodesics in space-time. Again, the fact that space is curved means that light no longer appears to travel in straight lines in space. So general relativity predicts that light should be bent by gravitational fields. For example, the theory predicts that the light cones of points near the sun would be slightly bent inward, on account of the mass of the sun. This means that light from a distant star that happened to pass near the sun would be deflected through a small angle, causing the star to appear in a different position to an observer on the earth (Fig. 2.8). Of course, if the light from the star always passed close to the sun, we would not be able to tell whether the light was being deflected or if instead the star was really where we see it. However, as the earth orbits around the sun, different stars appear to pass behind the sun and have their light deflected. They therefore change their apparent position relative to other stars. It is normally very difficult to see this effect, because the light from the sun makes it impossible to observe stars that appear near to the sun in the sky. However, it is possible to do so during an eclipse of the sun, when the sun's light is blocked out by the moon. Einstein's prediction of light deflection could not be tested immediately in 1915, because the First World War was in progress, and it was not until 1919 that a British expedition, observing an eclipse from West Africa, showed that light was indeed deflected by the sun, just as predicted by the theory. This proof of a German theory by British scientists was hailed as a great act of reconciliation between the two countries after the war. It is ironic, therefore, that later examination of the photographs taken on that expedition showed the errors were as great as the effect they were trying to measure. Their measurement had been sheer luck, or a case of knowing the result they wanted to get, not an uncommon occurrence in science. The light deflection has, however, been accurately confirmed by a number of later observations. Another prediction of general relativity is that time should appear to run slower near a massive body like the earth. This is because there is a relation between the energy of light and its frequency (that is, the number of waves of light per second): the greater the energy, the higher the frequency. As light travels upward in the earth's gravitational field, it loses energy, and so its frequency goes down. (This means that the length of time between one wave crest and the next goes up.) To someone high up, it would appear that everything down below was taking longer to happen. This prediction was tested in 1962, using a pair of very accurate clocks mounted at the top and bottom of a water tower. The clock at the bottom, which was nearer the earth, was found to run slower, in exact agreement with general relativity. The difference in the speed of clocks at different heights above the earth is now of considerable practical importance, with the advent of very accurate navigation systems based on signals from satellites. If one ignored the predictions of general relativity, the position that one calculated would be wrong by several miles! Newton's laws of motion put an end to the idea of absolute position in space. The theory of relativity gets rid of absolute time. Consider a pair of twins. Suppose that one twin goes to live on the top of a mountain while the other stays at sea level. The first twin would age faster than the second. Thus, if they met again, one would be older than the other. In this case, the difference in ages would be very small, but it would be much larger if one of the twins went for a long trip in a spaceship at nearly the speed of light. When he returned, he would be much younger than the one who stayed on earth. This is known as the twins paradox, but it is a paradox only if one has the idea of absolute time at the back of one's mind. In the theory of relativity there is no unique absolute time, but instead each individual has his own personal measure of time that depends on where he is and how he is moving. Before 1915, space and time were thought of as a fixed arena in which events took place, but which was not affected by what happened in it. This was true even of the special theory of relativity. Bodies moved, forces attracted and repelled, but time and space simply continued, unaffected. It was natural to think that space and time went on forever. The situation, however, is quite different in the general theory of relativity. Space and time are now dynamic quantities: when a body moves, or a force acts, it affects the curvature of space and time – and in turn the structure of space-time affects the way in which bodies move and forces act. Space and time not only affect but also are affected by everything that happens in the universe. Just as one cannot talk about events in the universe without the notions of space and time, so in general relativity it became meaningless to talk about space and time outside the limits of the universe. In the following decades this new understanding of space and time was to revolutionize our view of the universe. The old idea of an essentially unchanging universe that could have existed, and could continue to exist, forever was replaced by the notion of a dynamic, expanding universe that seemed to have begun a finite time ago, and that might end at a finite time in the future. That revolution forms the subject of the next chapter. And years later, it was also to be the starting point for my work in theoretical physics. Roger Penrose and I showed that Einstein's general theory of relativity implied that the universe must have a beginning and, possibly, an end.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE	If one looks at the sky on a clear, moonless night, the brightest objects one sees are likely to be the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. There will also be a very large number of stars, which are just like our own sun but much farther from us. Some of these fixed stars do, in fact, appear to change very slightly their positions relative to each other as the earth orbits around the sun: they are not really fixed at all! This is because they are comparatively near to us. As the earth goes round the sun, we see them from different positions against the background of more distant stars. This is fortunate, because it enables us to measure directly the distance of these stars from us: the nearer they are, the more they appear to move. The nearest star, called Proxima Centauri, is found to be about four light-years away (the light from it takes about four years to reach earth), or about twenty-three million million miles. Most of the other stars that are visible to the naked eye lie within a few hundred light-years of us. Our sun, for comparison, is a mere eight light-minutes away! The visible stars appear spread all over the night sky, but are particularly concentrated in one band, which we call the Milky Way. As long ago as 1750, some astronomers were suggesting that the appearance of the Milky Way could be explained if most of the visible stars lie in a single disklike configuration, one example of what we now call a spiral galaxy. Only a few decades later, the astronomer Sir William Herschel confirmed this idea by painstakingly cataloging the positions and distances of vast numbers of stars. Even so, the idea gained complete acceptance only early this century. Our modern picture of the universe dates back to only 1924, when the American astronomer Edwin Hubble demonstrated that ours was not the only galaxy. There were in fact many others, with vast tracts of empty space between them. In order to prove this, he needed to determine the distances to these other galaxies, which are so far away that, unlike nearby stars, they really do appear fixed. Hubble was forced, therefore, to use indirect methods to measure the distances. Now, the apparent brightness of a star depends on two factors: how much light it radiates (its luminosity), and how far it is from us. For nearby stars, we can measure their apparent brightness and their distance, and so we can work out their luminosity. Conversely, if we knew the luminosity of stars in other galaxies, we could work out their distance by measuring their apparent brightness. Hubble noted that certain types of stars always have the same luminosity when they are near enough for us to measure; therefore, he argued, if we found such stars in another galaxy, we could assume that they had the same luminosity – and so calculate the distance to that galaxy. If we could do this for a number of stars in the same galaxy, and our calculations always gave the same distance, we could be fairly confident of our estimate. In this way, Edwin Hubble worked out the distances to nine different galaxies. We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars. Fig. 3.1 shows a picture of one spiral galaxy that is similar to what we think ours must look like to someone living in another galaxy. We live in a galaxy that is about one hundred thousand light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its spiral arms orbit around its center about once every several hundred million years. Our sun is just an ordinary, average-sized, yellow star, near the inner edge of one of the spiral arms. We have certainly come a long way since Aristotle and Ptolemy, when we thought that the earth was the center of the universe! Stars are so far away that they appear to us to be just pinpoints of light. We cannot see their size or shape. So how can we tell different types of stars apart? For the vast majority of stars, there is only one characteristic feature that we can observe – the color of their light. Newton discovered that if light from the sun passes through a triangular-shaped piece of glass, called a prism, it breaks up into its component colors (its spectrum) as in a rainbow. By focusing a telescope on an individual star or galaxy, one can similarly observe the spectrum of the light from that star or galaxy. Different stars have different spectra, but the relative brightness of the different colors is always exactly what one would expect to find in the light emitted by an object that is glowing red hot. (In fact, the light emitted by any opaque object that is glowing red hot has a characteristic spectrum that depends only on its temperature – a thermal spectrum. This means that we can tell a star's temperature from the spectrum of its light.) Moreover, we find that certain very specific colors are missing from stars' spectra, and these missing colors may vary from star to star. Since we know that each chemical element absorbs a characteristic set of very specific colors, by matching these to those that are missing from a star's spectrum, we can determine exactly which elements are present in the star's atmosphere. In the 1920s, when astronomers began to look at the spectra of stars in other galaxies, they found something most peculiar: there were the same characteristic sets of missing colors as for stars in our own galaxy, but they were all shifted by the same relative amount toward the red end of the spectrum. To understand the implications of this, we must first understand the Doppler effect. As we have seen, visible light consists of fluctuations, or waves, in the electromagnetic field. The wavelength (or distance from one wave crest to the next) of light is extremely small, ranging from four to seven ten-millionths of a meter. The different wavelengths of light are what the human eye sees as different colors, with the longest wavelengths appearing at the red end of the spectrum and the shortest wavelengths at the blue end. Now imagine a source of light at a constant distance from us, such as a star, emitting waves of light at a constant wavelength. Obviously the wavelength of the waves we receive will be the same as the wavelength at which they are emitted (the gravitational field of the galaxy will not be large enough to have a significant effect). Suppose now that the source starts moving toward us. When the source emits the next wave crest it will be nearer to us, so the distance between wave crests will be smaller than when the star was stationary. This means that the wavelength of the waves we receive is shorter, than when the star was stationary. Correspondingly, if the source is moving away from us, the wavelength of the waves we receive will be longer. In the case of light, therefore, this means that stars moving away from us will have their spectra shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (red-shifted) and those moving toward us will have their spectra blue-shifted. This relationship between wavelength and speed, which is called the Doppler effect, is an everyday experience. Listen to a car passing on the road: as the car is approaching, its engine sounds at a higher pitch (corresponding to a shorter wavelength and higher frequency of sound waves), and when it passes and goes away, it sounds at a lower pitch. The behavior of light or radio waves is similar. Indeed, the police make use of the Doppler effect to measure the speed of cars by measuring the wavelength of pulses of radio waves reflected off them. In the years following his proof of the existence of other galaxies, Hubble spent his time cataloging their distances and observing their spectra. At that time most people expected the galaxies to be moving around quite randomly, and so expected to find as many blue-shifted spectra as red-shifted ones. It was quite a surprise, therefore, to find that most galaxies appeared red-shifted: nearly all were moving away from us! More surprising still was the finding that Hubble published in 1929: even the size of a galaxy's red shift is not random, but is directly proportional to the galaxy's distance from us. Or, in other words, the farther a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away! And that meant that the universe could not be static, as everyone previously had thought, but is in fact expanding; the distance between the different galaxies is growing all the time. The discovery that the universe is expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century. With hindsight, it is easy to wonder why no one had thought of it before. Newton, and others, should have realized that a static universe would soon start to contract under the influence of gravity. But suppose instead that the universe is expanding. If it was expanding fairly slowly, the force of gravity would cause it eventually to stop expanding and then to start contracting. However, if it was expanding at more than a certain critical rate, gravity would never be strong enough to stop it, and the universe would continue to expand forever. This is a bit like what happens when one fires a rocket upward from the surface of the earth. If it has a fairly low speed, gravity will eventually stop the rocket and it will start falling back. On the other hand, if the rocket has more than a certain critical speed (about seven miles per second) gravity will not be strong enough to pull it back, so it will keep going away from the earth forever. This behavior of the universe could have been predicted from Newton's theory of gravity at any time in the nineteenth, the eighteenth, or even the late seventeenth centuries. Yet so strong was the belief in a static universe that it persisted into the early twentieth century. Even Einstein, when he formulated the general theory of relativity in 1915, was so sure that the universe had to be static that he modified his theory to make this possible, introducing a so-called cosmological constant into his equations. Einstein introduced a new 'antigravity' force, which, unlike other forces, did not come from any particular source but was built into the very fabric of space-time. He claimed that space-time had an inbuilt tendency to expand, and this could be made to balance exactly the attraction of all the matter in the universe, so that a static universe would result. Only one man, it seems, was willing to take general relativity at face value, and while Einstein and other physicists were looking for ways of avoiding general relativity's prediction of a non-static universe, the Russian physicist and mathematician Alexander Friedmann instead set about explaining it. Friedmann made two very simple assumptions about the universe: that the universe looks identical in whichever direction we look, and that this would also be true if we were observing the universe from anywhere else. From these two ideas alone, Friedmann showed that we should not expect the universe to be static. In fact, in 1922, several years before Edwin Hubble's discovery, Friedmann predicted exactly what Hubble found! The assumption that the universe looks the same in every direction is clearly not true in reality. For example, as we have seen, the other stars in our galaxy form a distinct band of light across the night sky, called the Milky Way. But if we look at distant galaxies, there seems to be more or less the same number of them. So the universe does seem to be roughly the same in every direction, provided one views it on a large scale compared to the distance between galaxies, and ignores the differences on small scales. For a long time, this was sufficient justification for Friedmann's assumption – as a rough approximation to the real universe. But more recently a lucky accident uncovered the fact that Friedmann's assumption is in fact a remarkably accurate description of our universe. In 1965 two American physicists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were testing a very sensitive microwave detector. (Microwaves are just like light waves, but with a wavelength of around a centimetre.) Penzias and Wilson were worried when they found that their detector was picking up more noise than it ought to. The noise did not appear to be coming from any particular direction. First they discovered bird droppings in their detector and checked for other possible malfunctions, but soon ruled these out. They knew that any noise from within the atmosphere would be stronger when the detector was not pointing straight up than when it was, because light rays travel through much more atmosphere when received from near the horizon than when received from directly overhead. The extra noise was the same whichever direction the detector was pointed, so it must come from outside the atmosphere. It was also the same day and night and throughout the year, even though the earth was rotating on its axis and orbiting around the sun. This showed that the radiation must come from beyond the Solar System, and even from beyond the galaxy, as otherwise it would vary as the movement of earth pointed the detector in different directions. In fact, we know that the radiation must have traveled to us across most of the observable universe, and since it appears to be the same in different directions, the universe must also be the same in every direction, if only on a large scale. We now know that whichever direction we look, this noise never varies by more than a tiny fraction: so Penzias and Wilson had unwittingly stumbled across a remarkably accurate confirmation of Friedmann's first assumption. However, because the universe is not exactly the same in every direction, but only on average on a large scale, the microwaves cannot be exactly the same in every direction either. There have to be slight variations between different directions. These were first detected in 1992 by the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, or COBE, at a level of about one part in a hundred thousand. Small though these variations are, they are very important. At roughly the same time as Penzias and Wilson were investigating noise in their detector, two American physicists at nearby Princeton University, Bob Dicke and Jim Peebles, were also taking an interest in microwaves. They were working on a suggestion, made by George Gamow (once a student of Alexander Friedmann), that the early universe should have been very hot and dense, glowing white hot. Dicke and Peebles argued that we should still be able to see the glow of the early universe, because light from very distant parts of it would only just be reaching us now. However, the expansion of the universe meant that this light should be so greatly red-shifted that it would appear to us now as microwave radiation. Dicke and Peebles were preparing to look for this radiation when Penzias and Wilson heard about their work and realized that they had already found it. For this, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel prize in 1978 (which seems a bit hard on Dicke and Peebles, not to mention Gamow!). Now at first sight, all this evidence that the universe looks the same whichever direction we look in might seem to suggest there is something special about our place in the universe. In particular, it might seem that if we observe all other galaxies to be moving away from us, then we must be at the center of the universe. There is, however, an alternate explanation: the universe might look the same in every direction as seen from any other galaxy, too. This, as we have seen, was Friedmann's second assumption. We have no scientific evidence for, or against, this assumption. We believe it only on grounds of modesty: it would be most remarkable if the universe looked the same in every direction around us, but not around other points in the universe! In Friedmann's model, all the galaxies are moving directly away from each other. The situation is rather like a balloon with a number of spots painted on it being steadily blown up. As the balloon expands, the distance between any two spots increases, but there is no spot that can be said to be the center of the expansion. Moreover, the farther apart the spots are, the faster they will be moving apart. Similarly, in Friedmann's model the speed at which any two galaxies are moving apart is proportional to the distance between them. So it predicted that the red shift of a galaxy should be directly proportional to its distance from us, exactly as Hubble found. Despite the success of his model and his prediction of Hubble's observations, Friedmann's work remained largely unknown in the West until similar models were discovered in 1935 by the American physicist Howard Robertson and the British mathematician Arthur Walker, in response to Hubble's discovery of the uniform expansion of the universe. Although Friedmann found only one, there are in fact three different kinds of models that obey Friedmann's two fundamental assumptions. In the first kind (which Friedmann found) the universe is expanding sufficiently slowly that the gravitational attraction between the different galaxies causes the expansion to slow down and eventually to stop. The galaxies then start to move toward each other and the universe contracts. Fig. 3.2 shows how the distance between two neighboring galaxies changes as time increases. It starts at zero, increases to a maximum, and then decreases to zero again. In the second kind of solution, the universe is expanding so rapidly that the gravitational attraction can never stop it, though it does slow it down a bit. Fig. 3.3 shows the separation between neighboring galaxies in this model. It starts at zero and eventually the galaxies are moving apart at a steady speed. Finally, there is a third kind of solution, in which the universe is expanding only just fast enough to avoid recollapse. In this case the separation, shown in Fig. 3.4, also starts at zero and increases forever. However, the speed at which the galaxies are moving apart gets smaller and smaller, although it never quite reaches zero. A remarkable feature of the first kind of Friedmann model is that in it the universe is not infinite in space, but neither does space have any boundary. Gravity is so strong that space is bent round onto itself, making it rather like the surface of the earth. If one keeps traveling in a certain direction on the surface of the earth, one never comes up against an impassable barrier or falls over the edge, but eventually comes back to where one started. In the first Friedmann model, space is just like this, but with three dimensions instead of two for the earth's surface. The fourth dimension, time, is also finite in extent, but it is like a line with two ends or boundaries, a beginning and an end. We shall see later that when one combines general relativity with the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, it is possible for both space and time to be finite without any edges or boundaries. The idea that one could go right round the universe and end up where one started makes good science fiction, but it doesn't have much practical significance, because it can be shown that the universe would recollapse to zero size before one could get round. You would need to travel faster than light in order to end up where you started before the universe came to an end – and that is not allowed! In the first kind of Friedmann model, which expands and recollapses, space is bent in on itself, like the surface of the earth. It is therefore finite in extent. In the second kind of model, which expands forever, space is bent the other way, like the surface of a saddle. So in this case space is infinite. Finally, in the third kind of Friedmann model, with just the critical rate of expansion, space is flat (and therefore is also infinite). But which Friedmann model describes our universe? Will the universe eventually stop expanding and start contracting, or will it expand forever? To answer this question we need to know the present rate of expansion of the universe and its present average density. If the density is less than a certain critical value, determined by the rate of expansion, the gravitational attraction will be too weak to halt the expansion. If the density is greater than the critical value, gravity will stop the expansion at some time in the future and cause the universe to recollapse. We can determine the present rate of expansion by measuring the velocities at which other galaxies are moving away from us, using the Doppler effect. This can be done very accurately. However, the distances to the galaxies are not very well known because we can only measure them indirectly. So all we know is that the universe is expanding by between 5 percent and 10 percent every thousand million years. However, our uncertainty about the present average density of the universe is even greater. If we add up the masses of all the stars that we can see in our galaxy and other galaxies, the total is less than one hundredth of the amount required to halt the expansion of the universe, even for the lowest estimate of the rate of expansion. Our galaxy and other galaxies, however, must contain a large amount of 'dark matter' that we cannot see directly, but which we know must be there because of the influence of its gravitational attraction on the orbits of stars in the galaxies. Moreover, most galaxies are found in clusters, and we can similarly infer the presence of yet more dark matter in between the galaxies in these clusters by its effect on the motion of the galaxies. When we add up all this dark matter, we still get only about one tenth of the amount required to halt the expansion. However, we cannot exclude the possibility that there might be some other form of matter, distributed almost uniformly throughout the universe, that we have not yet detected and that might still raise the average density of the universe up to the critical value needed to halt the expansion. The present evidence therefore suggests that the universe will probably expand forever, but all we can really be sure of is that even if the universe is going to recollapse, it won't do so for at least another ten thousand million years, since it has already been expanding for at least that long. This should not unduly worry us: by that time, unless we have colonized beyond the Solar System, mankind will long since have died out, extinguished along with our sun! All of the Friedmann solutions have the feature that at some time in the past (between ten and twenty thousand million years ago) the distance between neighboring galaxies must have been zero. At that time, which we call the big bang, the density of the universe and the curvature of space-time would have been infinite. Because mathematics cannot really handle infinite numbers, this means that the general theory of relativity (on which Friedmann's solutions are based) predicts that there is a point in the universe where the theory itself breaks down. Such a point is an example of what mathematicians call a singularity. In fact, all our theories of science are formulated on the assumption that space-time is smooth and nearly flat, so they break down at the big bang singularity, where the curvature of space-time is infinite. This means that even if there were events before the big bang, one could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because predictability would break down at the big bang. Correspondingly, if, as is the case, we know only what has happened since the big bang, we could not determine what happened beforehand. As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences, so they should not form part of a scientific model of the universe. We should therefore cut them out of the model and say that time had a beginning at the big bang. Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible.) There were therefore a number of attempts to avoid the conclusion that there had been a big bang. The proposal that gained widest support was called the steady state theory. It was suggested in 1948 by two refugees from Nazi-occupied Austria, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, together with a Briton, Fred Hoyle, who had worked with them on the development of radar during the war. The idea was that as the galaxies moved away from each other, new galaxies were continually forming in the gaps in between, from new matter that was being continually created. The universe would therefore look roughly the same at all times as well as at all points of space. The steady state theory required a modification of general relativity to allow for the continual creation of matter, but the rate that was involved was so low (about one particle per cubic kilometer per year) that it was not in conflict with experiment. The theory was a good scientific theory, in the sense described earlier: it was simple and it made definite predictions that could be tested by observation. One of these predictions was that the number of galaxies or similar objects in any given volume of space should be the same wherever and whenever we look in the universe. In the late 1950s and early 1960s a survey of sources of radio waves from outer space was carried out at Cambridge by a group of astronomers led by Martin Ryle (who had also worked with Bondi, Gold, and Hoyle on radar during the war). The Cambridge group showed that most of these radio sources must lie outside our galaxy (indeed many of them could be identified with other galaxies) and also that there were many more weak sources than strong ones. They interpreted the weak sources as being the more distant ones, and the stronger ones as being nearer. Then there appeared to be less common sources per unit volume of space for the nearby sources than for the distant ones. This could mean that we are at the center of a great region in the universe in which the sources are fewer than elsewhere. Alternatively, it could mean that the sources were more numerous in the past, at the time that the radio waves left on their journey to us, than they are now. Either explanation contradicted the predictions of the steady state theory. Moreover, the discovery of the microwave radiation by Penzias and Wilson in 1965 also indicated that the universe must have been much denser in the past. The steady state theory therefore had to be abandoned. Another attempt to avoid the conclusion that there must have been a big bang, and therefore a beginning of time, was made by two Russian scientists, Evgenii Lifshitz and Isaac Khalatnikov, in 1963. They suggested that the big bang might be a peculiarity of Friedmann's models alone, which after all were only approximations to the real universe. Perhaps, of all the models that were roughly like the real universe, only Friedmann's would contain a big bang singularity. In Friedmann's models, the galaxies are all moving directly away from each other – so it is not surprising that at some time in the past they were all at the same place. In the real universe, however, the galaxies are not just moving directly away from each other – they also have small sideways velocities. So in reality they need never have been all at exactly the same place, only very close together. Perhaps then the current expanding universe resulted not from a big bang singularity, but from an earlier contracting phase; as the universe had collapsed the particles in it might not have all collided, but had flown past and then away from each other, producing the present expansion of the universe. How then could we tell whether the real universe should have started out with a big bang? What Lifshitz and Khalatnikov did was to study models of the universe that were roughly like Friedmann's models but took account of the irregularities and random velocities of galaxies in the real universe. They showed that such models could start with a big bang, even though the galaxies were no longer always moving directly away from each other, but they claimed that this was still only possible in certain exceptional models in which the galaxies were all moving in just the right way. They argued that since there seemed to be infinitely more Friedmann-like models without a big bang singularity than there were with one, we should conclude that there had not in reality been a big bang. They later realized, however, that there was a much more general class of Friedmann-like models that did have singularities, and in which the galaxies did not have to be moving any special way. They therefore withdrew their claim in 1970. The work of Lifshitz and Khalatnikov was valuable because it showed that the universe could have had a singularity, a big bang, if the general theory of relativity was correct. However, it did not resolve the crucial question: Does general relativity predict that our universe should have had a big bang, a beginning of time? The answer to this came out of a completely different approach introduced by a British mathematician and physicist, Roger Penrose, in 1965. Using the way light cones behave in general relativity, together with the fact that gravity is always attractive, he showed that a star collapsing under its own gravity is trapped in a region whose surface eventually shrinks to zero size. And, since the surface of the region shrinks to zero, so too must its volume. All the matter in the star will be compressed into a region of zero volume, so the density of matter and the curvature of space-time become infinite. In other words, one has a singularity contained within a region of space-time known as a black hole. At first sight, Penrose's result applied only to stars; it didn't have anything to say about the question of whether the entire universe had a big bang singularity in its past. However, at the time that Penrose produced his theorem, I was a research student desperately looking for a problem with which to complete my PhD thesis. Two years before, I had been diagnosed as suffering from ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, or motor neurone disease, and given to understand that I had only one or two more years to live. In these circumstances there had not seemed much point in working on my PhD – I did not expect to survive that long. Yet two years had gone by and I was not that much worse. In fact, things were going rather well for me and I had gotten engaged to a very nice girl, Jane Wilde. But in order to get married, I needed a job, and in order to get a job, I needed a PhD. In 1965 I read about Penrose's theorem that any body undergoing gravitational collapse must eventually form a singularity. I soon realized that if one reversed the direction of time in Penrose's theorem, so that the collapse became an expansion, the conditions of his theorem would still hold, provided the universe were roughly like a Friedmann model on large scales at the present time. Penrose's theorem had shown that any collapsing star must end in a singularity; the time-reversed argument showed that any Friedmann-like expanding universe must have begun with a singularity. For technical reasons, Penrose's theorem required that the universe be infinite in space. So I could in fact use it to prove that there should be a singularity only if the universe was expanding fast enough to avoid collapsing again (since only those Friedmann models were infinite in space). During the next few years I developed new mathematical techniques to remove this and other technical conditions from the theorems that proved that singularities must occur. The final result was a joint paper by Penrose and myself in 1970, which at last proved that there must have been a big bang singularity provided only that general relativity is correct and the universe contains as much matter as we observe. There was a lot of opposition to our work, partly from the Russians because of their Marxist belief in scientific determinism, and partly from people who felt that the whole idea of singularities was repugnant and spoiled the beauty of Einstein's theory. However, one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem. So in the end our work became generally accepted and nowadays nearly everyone assumes that the universe started with a big bang singularity. It is perhaps ironic that, having changed my mind, I am now trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe – as we shall see later, it can disappear once quantum effects are taken into account. We have seen in this chapter how, in less than half a century, man's view of the universe, formed over millennia, has been transformed. Hubble's discovery that the universe was expanding, and the realization of the insignificance of our own planet in the vastness of the universe, were just the starting point. As experimental and theoretical evidence mounted, it became more and more clear that the universe must have had a beginning in time, until in 1970 this was finally proved by Penrose and myself, on the basis of Einstein's general theory of relativity. That proof showed that general relativity is only an incomplete theory: it cannot tell us how the universe started off, because it predicts that all physical theories, including itself, break down at the beginning of the universe. However, general relativity claims to be only a partial theory, so what the singularity theorems really show is that there must have been a time in the very early universe when the universe was so small that one could no longer ignore the small-scale effects of the other great partial theory of the twentieth century, quantum mechanics. At the start of the 1970s, then, we were forced to turn our search for an understanding of the universe from our theory of the extraordinarily vast to our theory of the extraordinarily tiny. That theory, quantum mechanics, will be described next, before we turn to the efforts to combine the two partial theories into a single quantum theory of gravity.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE	The success of scientific theories, particularly Newton's theory of gravity, led the French scientist the Marquis de Laplace at the beginning of the nineteenth century to argue that the universe was completely deterministic. Laplace suggested that there should be a set of scientific laws that would allow us to predict everything that would happen in the universe, if only we knew the complete state of the universe at one time. For example, if we knew the positions and speeds of the sun and the planets at one time, then we could use Newton's laws to calculate the state of the Solar System at any other time. Determinism seems fairly obvious in this case, but Laplace went further to assume that there were similar laws governing everything else, including human behavior. The doctrine of scientific determinism was strongly resisted by many people, who felt that it infringed God's freedom to intervene in the world, but it remained the standard assumption of science until the early years of this century. One of the first indications that this belief would have to be abandoned came when calculations by the British scientists Lord Rayleigh and Sir James Jeans suggested that a hot object, or body, such as a star, must radiate energy at an infinite rate. According to the laws we believed at the time, a hot body ought to give off electromagnetic waves (such as radio waves, visible light, or X rays) equally at all frequencies. For example, a hot body should radiate the same amount of energy in waves with frequencies between one and two million million waves a second as in waves with frequencies between two and three million million waves a second. Now since the number of waves a second is unlimited, this would mean that the total energy radiated would be infinite. In order to avoid this obviously ridiculous result, the German scientist Max Planck suggested in 1900 that light, X rays, and other waves could not be emitted at an arbitrary rate, but only in certain packets that he called quanta. Moreover, each quantum had a certain amount of energy that was greater the higher the frequency of the waves, so at a high enough frequency the emission of a single quantum would require more energy than was available. Thus the radiation at high frequencies would be reduced, and so the rate at which the body lost energy would be finite. The quantum hypothesis explained the observed rate of emission of radiation from hot bodies very well, but its implications for determinism were not realized until 1926, when another German scientist, Werner Heisenberg, formulated his famous uncertainty principle. In order to predict the future position and velocity of a particle, one has to be able to measure its present position and velocity accurately. The obvious way to do this is to shine light on the particle. Some of the waves of light will be scattered by the particle and this will indicate its position. However, one will not be able to determine the position of the particle more accurately than the distance between the wave crests of light, so one needs to use light of a short wavelength in order to measure the position of the particle precisely. Now, by Planck's quantum hypothesis, one cannot use an arbitrarily small amount of light; one has to use at least one quantum. This quantum will disturb the particle and change its velocity in a way that cannot be predicted. Moreover, the more accurately one measures the position, the shorter the wavelength of the light that one needs and hence the higher the energy of a single quantum. So the velocity of the particle will be disturbed by a larger amount. In other words, the more accurately you try to measure the position of the particle, the less accurately you can measure its speed, and vice versa. Heisenberg showed that the uncertainty in the position of the particle times the uncertainty in its velocity times the mass of the particle can never be smaller than a certain quantity, which is known as Planck's constant. Moreover, this limit does not depend on the way in which one tries to measure the position or velocity of the particle, or on the type of particle: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world. The uncertainty principle had profound implications for the way in which we view the world. Even after more than fifty years they have not been fully appreciated by many philosophers, and are still the subject of much controversy. The uncertainty principle signaled an end to Laplace's dream of a theory of science, a model of the universe that would be completely deterministic: one certainly cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely! We could still imagine that there is a set of laws that determines events completely for some supernatural being, who could observe the present state of the universe without disturbing it. However, such models of the universe are not of much interest to us ordinary mortals. It seems better to employ the principle of economy known as Occam's razor and cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed. This approach led Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Paul Dirac in the 1920s to reformulate mechanics into a new theory called quantum mechanics, based on the uncertainty principle. In this theory particles no longer had separate, well-defined positions and velocities that could not be observed. Instead, they had a quantum state, which was a combination of position and velocity. In general, quantum mechanics does not predict a single definite result for an observation. Instead, it predicts a number of different possible outcomes and tells us how likely each of these is. That is to say, if one made the same measurement on a large number of similar systems, each of which started off in the same way, one would find that the result of the measurement would be A in a certain number of cases, B in a different number, and so on. One could predict the approximate number of times that the result would be A or B, but one could not predict the specific result of an individual measurement. Quantum mechanics therefore introduces an unavoidable element of unpredictability or randomness into science. Einstein objected to this very strongly, despite the important role he had played in the development of these ideas. Einstein was awarded the Nobel prize for his contribution to quantum theory. Nevertheless, Einstein never accepted that the universe was governed by chance; his feelings were summed up in his famous statement, 'God does not play dice.' Most other scientists, however, were willing to accept quantum mechanics because it agreed perfectly with experiment. Indeed, it has been an outstandingly successful theory and underlies nearly all of modern science and technology. It governs the behavior of transistors and integrated circuits, which are the essential components of electronic devices such as televisions and computers, and is also the basis of modern chemistry and biology. The only areas of physical science into which quantum mechanics has not yet been properly incorporated are gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe. Although light is made up of waves, Planck's quantum hypothesis tells us that in some ways it behaves as if it were composed of particles: it can be emitted or absorbed only in packets, or quanta. Equally, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle implies that particles behave in some respects like waves: they do not have a definite position but are 'smeared out' with a certain probability distribution. The theory of quantum mechanics is based on an entirely new type of mathematics that no longer describes the real world in terms of particles and waves; it is only the observations of the world that may be described in those terms. There is thus a duality between waves and particles in quantum mechanics: for some purposes it is helpful to think of particles as waves and for other purposes it is better to think of waves as particles. An important consequence of this is that one can observe what is called interference between two sets of waves or particles. That is to say, the crests of one set of waves may coincide with the troughs of the other set. The two sets of waves then cancel each other out rather than adding up to a stronger wave as one might expect (Fig. 4.1). A familiar example of interference in the case of light is the colors that are often seen in soap bubbles. These are caused by reflection of light from the two sides of the thin film of water forming the bubble. White light consists of light waves of all different wavelengths, or colors. For certain wavelengths the crests of the waves reflected from one side of the soap film coincide with the troughs reflected from the other side. The colors corresponding to these wavelengths are absent from the reflected light, which therefore appears to be colored. Interference can also occur for particles, because of the duality introduced by quantum mechanics. A famous example is the so-called two-slit experiment (Fig. 4.2). Consider a partition with two narrow parallel slits in it. On one side of the partition one places a source of light of a particular color (that is, of a particular wavelength). Most of the light will hit the partition, but a small amount will go through the slits. Now suppose one places a screen on the far side of the partition from the light. Any point on the screen will receive waves from the two slits. However, in general, the distance the light has to travel from the source to the screen via the two slits will be different. This will mean that the waves from the slits will not be in phase with each other when they arrive at the screen: in some places the waves will cancel each other out, and in others they will reinforce each other. The result is a characteristic pattern of light and dark fringes. The remarkable thing is that one gets exactly the same kind of fringes if one replaces the source of light by a source of particles such as electrons with a definite speed (this means that the corresponding waves have a definite length). It seems the more peculiar because if one only has one slit, one does not get any fringes, just a uniform distribution of electrons across the screen. One might therefore think that opening another slit would just increase the number of electrons hitting each point of the screen, but, because of interference, it actually decreases it in some places. If electrons are sent through the slits one at a time, one would expect each to pass through one slit or the other, and so behave just as if the slit it passed through were the only one there – giving a uniform distribution on the screen. In reality, however, even when the electrons are sent one at a time, the fringes still appear. Each electron, therefore, must be passing through both slits at the same time! The phenomenon of interference between particles has been crucial to our understanding of the structure of atoms, the basic units of chemistry and biology and the building blocks out of which we, and everything around us, are made. At the beginning of this century it was thought that atoms were rather like the planets orbiting the sun, with electrons (particles of negative electricity) orbiting around a central nucleus, which carried positive electricity. The attraction between the positive and negative electricity was supposed to keep the electrons in their orbits in the same way that the gravitational attraction between the sun and the planets keeps the planets in their orbits. The trouble with this was that the laws of mechanics and electricity, before quantum mechanics, predicted that the electrons would lose energy and so spiral inward until they collided with the nucleus. This would mean that the atom, and indeed all matter, should rapidly collapse to a state of very high density. A partial solution to this problem was found by the Danish scientist Niels Bohr in 1913. He suggested that maybe the electrons were not able to orbit at just any distance from the central nucleus but only at certain specified distances. If one also supposed that only one or two electrons could orbit at any one of these distances, this would solve the problem of the collapse of the atom, because the electrons could not spiral in any farther than to fill up the orbits with the least distances and energies. This model explained quite well the structure of the simplest atom, hydrogen, which has only one electron orbiting around the nucleus. But it was not clear how one ought to extend it to more complicated atoms. Moreover, the idea of a limited set of allowed orbits seemed very arbitrary. The new theory of quantum mechanics resolved this difficulty. It revealed that an electron orbiting around the nucleus could be thought of as a wave, with a wavelength that depended on its velocity. For certain orbits, the length of the orbit would correspond to a whole number (as opposed to a fractional number) of wavelengths of the electron. For these orbits the wave crest would be in the same position each time round, so the waves would add up: these orbits would correspond to Bohr's allowed orbits. However, for orbits whose lengths were not a whole number of wavelengths, each wave crest would eventually be canceled out by a trough as the electrons went round; these orbits would not be allowed. A nice way of visualizing the wave/particle duality is the so-called sum over histories introduced by the American scientist Richard Feynman. In this approach the particle is not supposed to have a single history or path in space-time, as it would in a classical, nonquantum theory. Instead it is supposed to go from A to B by every possible path. With each path there are associated a couple of numbers: one represents the size of a wave and the other represents the position in the cycle (i.e., whether it is at a crest or a trough). The probability of going from A to B is found by adding up the waves for all the paths. In general, if one compares a set of neighboring paths, the phases or positions in the cycle will differ greatly. This means that the waves associated with these paths will almost exactly cancel each other out. However, for some sets of neighboring paths the phase will not vary much between paths. The waves for these paths will not cancel out. Such paths correspond to Bohr's allowed orbits. With these ideas, in concrete mathematical form, it was relatively straightforward to calculate the allowed orbits in more complicated atoms and even in molecules, which are made up of a number of atoms held together by electrons in orbits that go round more than one nucleus. Since the structure of molecules and their reactions with each other underlie all of chemistry and biology, quantum mechanics allows us in principle to predict nearly everything we see around us, within the limits set by the uncertainty principle. (In practice, however, the calculations required for systems containing more than a few electrons are so complicated that we cannot do them.) Einstein's general theory of relativity seems to govern the large-scale structure of the universe. It is what is called a classical theory; that is, it does not take account of the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, as it should for consistency with other theories. The reason that this does not lead to any discrepancy with observation is that all the gravitational fields that we normally experience are very weak. However, the singularity theorems discussed earlier indicate that the gravitational field should get very strong in at least two situations, black holes and the big bang. In such strong fields the effects of quantum mechanics should be important. Thus, in a sense, classical general relativity, by predicting points of infinite density, predicts its own downfall, just as classical (that is, nonquantum) mechanics predicted its downfall by suggesting that atoms should collapse to infinite density. We do not yet have a complete consistent theory that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics, but we do know a number of the features it should have. The consequences that these would have for black holes and the big bang will be described in later chapters. For the moment, however, we shall turn to the recent attempts to bring together our understanding of the other forces of nature into a single, unified quantum theory.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND THE FORCES OF NATURE	Aristotle believed that all the matter in the universe was made up of four basic elements – earth, air, fire, and water. These elements were acted on by two forces: gravity, the tendency for earth and water to sink, and levity, the tendency for air and fire to rise. This division of the contents of the universe into matter and forces is still used today. Aristotle believed that matter was continuous, that is, one could divide a piece of matter into smaller and smaller bits without any limit: one never came up against a grain of matter that could not be divided further. A few Greeks, however, such as Democritus, held that matter was inherently grainy and that everything was made up of large numbers of various different kinds of atoms. (The word atom means 'indivisible' in Greek.) For centuries the argument continued without any real evidence on either side, but in 1803 the British chemist and physicist John Dalton pointed out that the fact that chemical compounds always combined in certain proportions could be explained by the grouping together of atoms to form units called molecules. However, the argument between the two schools of thought was not finally settled in favor of the atomists until the early years of this century. One of the important pieces of physical evidence was provided by Einstein. In a paper written in 1905, a few weeks before the famous paper on special relativity, Einstein pointed out that what was called Brownian motion – the irregular, random motion of small particles of dust suspended in a liquid – could be explained as the effect of atoms of the liquid colliding with the dust particles. By this time there were already suspicions that these atoms were not, after all, indivisible. Several years previously a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, J. J. Thomson, had demonstrated the existence of a particle of matter, called the electron, that had a mass less than one thousandth of that of the lightest atom. He used a set-up rather like a modern TV picture tube: a red-hot metal filament gave off the electrons, and because these have a negative electric charge, an electric field could be used to accelerate them toward a phosphor-coated screen. When they hit the screen, flashes of light were generated. Soon it was realized that these electrons must be coming from within the atoms themselves, and in 1911 the British physicist Ernest Rutherford finally showed that the atoms of matter do have internal structure: they are made up of an extremely tiny, positively charged nucleus, around which a number of electrons orbit. He deduced this by analyzing the way in which alpha-particles, which are positively charged particles given off by radioactive atoms, are deflected when they collide with atoms. At first it was thought that the nucleus of the atom was made up of electrons and different numbers of a positively charged particle called the proton, from the Greek word meaning 'first,' because it was believed to be the fundamental unit from which matter was made. However, in 1932 a colleague of Rutherford's at Cambridge, James Chadwick, discovered that the nucleus contained another particle, called the neutron, which had almost the same mass as a proton but no electrical charge. Chadwick received the Nobel prize for his discovery, and was elected Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (the college of which I am now a fellow). He later resigned as Master because of disagreements with the Fellows. There had been a bitter dispute in the college ever since a group of young Fellows returning after the war had voted many of the old Fellows out of the college offices they had held for a long time. This was before my time; I joined the college in 1965 at the tail end of the bitterness, when similar disagreements forced another Nobel-prize-winning Master, Sir Nevill Mott, to resign. Up to about thirty years ago, it was thought that protons and neutrons were 'elementary' particles, but experiments in which protons were collided with other protons or electrons at high speeds indicated that they were in fact made up of smaller particles. These particles were named quarks by the Cal Tech physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who won the Nobel prize in 1969 for his work on them. The origin of the name is an enigmatic quotation from James Joyce: 'Three quarks for Muster Mark!' The word quark is supposed to be pronounced like quart, but with a k at the end instead of a t, but is usually pronounced to rhyme with lark. There are a number of different varieties of quarks: there are six 'flavors,' which we call up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top. The first three flavors had been known since the 1960s but the charmed quark was discovered only in 1974, the bottom in 1977, and the top in 1995. Each flavor comes in three 'colors,' red, green, and blue. (It should be emphasized that these terms are just labels: quarks are much smaller than the wavelength of visible light and so do not have any color in the normal sense. It is just that modern physicists seem to have more imaginative ways of naming new particles and phenomena – they no longer restrict themselves to Greek!) A proton or neutron is made up of three quarks, one of each color. A proton contains two up quarks and one down quark; a neutron contains two down and one up. We can create particles made up of the other quarks (strange, charmed, bottom, and top), but these all have a much greater mass and decay very rapidly into protons and neutrons. We now know that neither the atoms nor the protons and neutrons within them are indivisible. So the question is: What are the truly elementary particles, the basic building blocks from which everything is made? Since the wavelength of light is much larger than the size of an atom, we cannot hope to 'look' at the parts of an atom in the ordinary way. We need to use something with a much smaller wavelength. As we saw in the last chapter, quantum mechanics tells us that all particles are in fact waves, and that the higher the energy of a particle, the smaller the wavelength of the corresponding wave. So the best answer we can give to our question depends on how high a particle energy we have at our disposal, because this determines on how small a length scale we can look. These particle energies are usually measured in units called electron volts. (In Thomson's experiments with electrons, we saw that he used an electric field to accelerate the electrons. The energy that an electron gains from an electric field of one volt is what is known as an electron volt.) In the nineteenth century, when the only particle energies that people knew how to use were the low energies of a few electron volts generated by chemical reactions such as burning, it was thought that atoms were the smallest unit. In Rutherford's experiment, the alpha-particles had energies of millions of electron volts. More recently, we have learned how to use electromagnetic fields to give particles energies of at first millions and then thousands of millions of electron volts. And so we know that particles that were thought to be 'elementary' thirty years ago are, in fact, made up of smaller particles. May these, as we go to still higher energies, in turn be found to be made from still smaller particles? This is certainly possible, but we do have some theoretical reasons for believing that we have, or are very near to, a knowledge of the ultimate building blocks of nature. Using the wave-particle duality discussed in the last chapter, everything in the universe, including light and gravity, can be described in terms of particles. These particles have a property called spin. One way of thinking of spin is to imagine the particles as little tops spinning about an axis. However, this can be misleading, because quantum mechanics tells us that the particles do not have any well-defined axis. What the spin of a particle really tells us is what the particle looks like from different directions. A particle of spin 0 is like a dot: it looks the same from every direction (Fig. 5.1-i). On the other hand, a particle of spin 1 is like an arrow: it looks different from different directions (Fig. 5.1-ii). Only if one turns it round a complete revolution (360 degrees) does the particle look the same. A particle of spin 2 is like a double-headed arrow (Fig. 5.1-iii): it looks the same if one turns it round half a revolution (180 degrees). Similarly, higher spin particles look the same if one turns them through smaller fractions of a complete revolution. All this seems fairly straightforward, but the remarkable fact is that there are particles that do not look the same if one turns them through just one revolution: you have to turn them through two complete revolutions! Such particles are said to have spin 1/2. All the known particles in the universe can be divided into two groups: particles of spin 1/2, which make up the matter in the universe, and particles of spin 0, 1, and 2, which, as we shall see, give rise to forces between the matter particles. The matter particles obey what is called Pauli's exclusion principle. This was discovered in 1925 by an Austrian physicist, Wolfgang Pauli – for which he received the Nobel prize in 1945. He was the archetypal theoretical physicist: it was said of him that even his presence in the same town would make experiments go wrong! Pauli's exclusion principle says that two similar particles cannot exist in the same state, that is, they cannot have both the same position and the same velocity, within the limits given by the uncertainty principle. The exclusion principle is crucial because it explains why matter particles do not collapse to a state of very high density under the influence of the forces produced by the particles of spin 0, 1, and 2: if the matter particles have very nearly the same positions, they must have different velocities, which means that they will not stay in the same position for long. If the world had been created without the exclusion principle, quarks would not form separate, well-defined protons and neutrons. Nor would these, together with electrons, form separate, well-defined atoms. They would all collapse to form a roughly uniform, dense 'soup.' A proper understanding of the electron and other spin-1/2 particles did not come until 1928, when a theory was proposed by Paul Dirac, who later was elected to the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge (the same professorship that Newton had once held and that I now hold). Dirac's theory was the first of its kind that was consistent with both quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity. It explained mathematically why the electron had spin 1/2, that is, why it didn't look the same if you turned it through only one complete revolution, but did if you turned it through two revolutions. It also predicted that the electron should have a partner: an antielectron, or positron. The discovery of the positron in 1932 confirmed Dirac's theory and led to his being awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1933. We now know that every particle has an antiparticle, with which it can annihilate. (In the case of the force-carrying particles, the antiparticles are the same as the particles themselves.) There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you meet your antiself, don't shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light. The question of why there seem to be so many more particles than antiparticles around us is extremely important, and I shall return to it later in the chapter. In quantum mechanics, the forces or interactions between matter particles are all supposed to be carried by particles of integer spin: 0, 1, or 2. What happens is that a matter particle, such as an electron or a quark, emits a force-carrying particle. The recoil from this emission changes the velocity of the matter particle. The force-carrying particle then collides with another matter particle and is absorbed. This collision changes the velocity of the second particle, just as if there had been a force between the two matter particles. It is an important property of the force-carrying particles that they do not obey the exclusion principle. This means that there is no limit to the number that can be exchanged, and so they can give rise to a strong force. However, if the force-carrying particles have a high mass, it will be difficult to produce and exchange them over a large distance. So the forces that they carry will have only a short range. On the other hand, if the force-carrying particles have no mass of their own, the forces will be long range. The force-carrying particles exchanged between matter particles are said to be virtual particles because, unlike 'real' particles, they cannot be directly detected by a particle detector. We know they exist, however, because they do have a measurable effect: they give rise to forces between matter particles. Particles of spin 0, 1, or 2 do also exist in some circumstances as real particles, when they can be directly detected. They then appear to us as what a classical physicist would call waves, such as waves of light or gravitational waves. They may sometimes be emitted when matter particles interact with each other by exchanging virtual force-carrying particles. (For example, the electric repulsive force between two electrons is due to the exchange of virtual photons, which can never be directly detected; but if one electron moves past another, real photons may be given off, which we detect as light waves.) Force-carrying particles can be grouped into four categories according to the strength of the force that they carry and the particles with which they interact. It should be emphasized that this division into four classes is man-made; it is convenient for the construction of partial theories, but it may not correspond to anything deeper. Ultimately, most physicists hope to find a unified theory that will explain all four forces as different aspects of a single force. Indeed, many would say this is the prime goal of physics today. Recently, successful attempts have been made to unify three of the four categories of force – and I shall describe these in this chapter. The question of the unification of the remaining category, gravity, we shall leave till later. The first category is the gravitational force. This force is universal, that is, every particle feels the force of gravity, according to its mass or energy. Gravity is the weakest of the four forces by a long way; it is so weak that we would not notice it at all were it not for two special properties that it has: it can act over large distances, and it is always attractive. This means that the very weak gravitational forces between the individual particles in two large bodies, such as the earth and the sun, can all add up to produce a significant force. The other three forces are either short range, or are sometimes attractive and sometimes repulsive, so they tend to cancel out. In the quantum mechanical way of looking at the gravitational field, the force between two matter particles is pictured as being carried by a particle of spin 2 called the graviton. This has no mass of its own, so the force that it carries is long range. The gravitational force between the sun and the earth is ascribed to the exchange of gravitons between the particles that make up these two bodies. Although the exchanged particles are virtual, they certainly do produce a measurable effect – they make the earth orbit the sun! Real gravitons make up what classical physicists would call gravitational waves, which are very weak – and so difficult to detect that they have not yet been observed. The next category is the electromagnetic force, which interacts with electrically charged particles like electrons and quarks, but not with uncharged particles such as gravitons. It is much stronger than the gravitational force: the electromagnetic force between two electrons is about a million million million million million million million (1 with forty-two zeros after it) times bigger than the gravitational force. However, there are two kinds of electric charge, positive and negative. The force between two positive charges is repulsive, as is the force between two negative charges, but the force is attractive between a positive and a negative charge. A large body, such as the earth or the sun, contains nearly equal numbers of positive and negative charges. Thus the attractive and repulsive forces between the individual particles nearly cancel each other out, and there is very little net electromagnetic force. However, on the small scales of atoms and molecules, electromagnetic forces dominate. The electromagnetic attraction between negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons in the nucleus causes the electrons to orbit the nucleus of the atom, just as gravitational attraction causes the earth to orbit the sun. The electromagnetic attraction is pictured as being caused by the exchange of large numbers of virtual massless particles of spin 1, called photons. Again, the photons that are exchanged are virtual particles. However, when an electron changes from one allowed orbit to another one nearer to the nucleus, energy is released and a real photon is emitted – which can be observed as visible light by the human eye, if it has the right wavelength, or by a photon detector such as photographic film. Equally, if a real photon collides with an atom, it may move an electron from an orbit nearer the nucleus to one farther away. This uses up the energy of the photon, so it is absorbed. The third category is called the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for radioactivity and which acts on all matter particles of spin 1/2, but not on particles of spin 0, 1, or 2, such as photons and gravitons. The weak nuclear force was not well understood until 1967, when Abdus Salam at Imperial College, London, and Steven Weinberg at Harvard both proposed theories that unified this interaction with the electromagnetic force, just as Maxwell had unified electricity and magnetism about a hundred years earlier. They suggested that in addition to the photon, there were three other spin-1 particles, known collectively as massive vector bosons, that carried the weak force. These were called W+ (pronounced W plus), W− (pronounced W minus), and Z° (pronounced Z naught), and each had a mass of around 100 GeV (GeV stands for gigaelectron-volt, or one thousand million electron volts). The Weinberg–Salam theory exhibits a property known as spontaneous symmetry breaking. This means that what appear to be a number of completely different particles at low energies are in fact found to be all the same type of particle, only in different states. At high energies all these particles behave similarly. The effect is rather like the behavior of a roulette ball on a roulette wheel. At high energies (when the wheel is spun quickly) the ball behaves in essentially only one way – it rolls round and round. But as the wheel slows, the energy of the ball decreases, and eventually the ball drops into one of the thirty-seven slots in the wheel. In other words, at low energies there are thirty-seven different states in which the ball can exist. If, for some reason, we could only observe the ball at low energies, we would then think that there were thirty-seven different types of ball! In the Weinberg–Salam theory, at energies much greater than 100 GeV, the three new particles and the photon would all behave in a similar manner. But at the lower particle energies that occur in most normal situations, this symmetry between the particles would be broken. W+, W− and Z° would acquire large masses, making the forces they carry have a very short range. At the time that Salam and Weinberg proposed their theory, few people believed them, and particle accelerators were not powerful enough to reach the energies of 100 GeV required to produce real W+, W−, or Z° particles. However, over the next ten years or so, the other predictions of the theory at lower energies agreed so well with experiment that, in 1979, Salam and Weinberg were awarded the Nobel prize for physics, together with Sheldon Glashow, also at Harvard, who had suggested similar unified theories of the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces. The Nobel committee was spared the embarrassment of having made a mistake by the discovery in 1983 at CERN (European Centre for Nuclear Research) of the three massive partners of the photon, with the correct predicted masses and other properties. Carlo Rubbia, who led the team of several hundred physicists that made the discovery, received the Nobel prize in 1984, along with Simon van der Meer, the CERN engineer who developed the antimatter storage system employed. (It is very difficult to make a mark in experimental physics these days unless you are already at the top!) The fourth category is the strong nuclear force, which holds the quarks together in the proton and neutron, and holds the protons and neutrons together in the nucleus of an atom. It is believed that this force is carried by another spin-1 particle, called the gluon, which interacts only with itself and with the quarks. The strong nuclear force has a curious property called confinement: it always binds particles together into combinations that have no color. One cannot have a single quark on its own because it would have a color (red, green, or blue). Instead, a red quark has to be joined to a green and a blue quark by a 'string' of gluons (red + green + blue = white). Such a triplet constitutes a proton or a neutron. Another possibility is a pair consisting of a quark and an antiquark (red + antired, or green + antigreen, or blue + antiblue = white). Such combinations make up the particles known as mesons, which are unstable because the quark and antiquark can annihilate each other, producing electrons and other particles. Similarly, confinement prevents one having a single gluon on its own, because gluons also have color. Instead, one has to have a collection of gluons whose colors add up to white. Such a collection forms an unstable particle called a glueball. The fact that confinement prevents one from observing an isolated quark or gluon might seem to make the whole notion of quarks and gluons as particles somewhat metaphysical. However, there is another property of the strong nuclear force, called asymptotic freedom, that makes the concept of quarks and gluons well-defined. At normal energies, the strong nuclear force is indeed strong, and it binds the quarks tightly together. However, experiments with large particle accelerators indicate that at high energies the strong force becomes much weaker, and the quarks and gluons behave almost like free particles. Fig. 5.2 shows a photograph of a collision between a high energy proton and antiproton. The success of the unification of the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces led to a number of attempts to combine these two forces with the strong nuclear force into what is called a grand unified theory (or GUT). This title is rather an exaggeration: the resultant theories are not all that grand, nor are they fully unified, as they do not include gravity. Nor are they really complete theories, because they contain a number of parameters whose values cannot be predicted from the theory but have to be chosen to fit in with experiment. Nevertheless, they may be a step toward a complete, fully unified theory. The basic idea of GUTs is as follows: as was mentioned above, the strong nuclear force gets weaker at high energies. On the other hand, the electromagnetic and weak forces, which are not asymptotically free, get stronger at high energies. At some very high energy, called the grand unification energy, these three forces would all have the same strength and so could just be different aspects of a single force. The GUTs also predict that at this energy the different spin-1/2 matter particles, like quarks and electrons, would also all be essentially the same, thus achieving another unification. The value of the grand unification energy is not very well known, but it would probably have to be at least a thousand million million GeV. The present generation of particle accelerators can collide particles at energies of about one hundred GeV, and machines are planned that would raise this to a few thousand GeV. But a machine that was powerful enough to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy would have to be as big as the Solar System – and would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate. Thus it is impossible to test grand unified theories directly in the laboratory. However, just as in the case of the electromagnetic and weak unified theory, there are low-energy consequences of the theory that can be tested. The most interesting of these is the prediction that protons, which make up much of the mass of ordinary matter, can spontaneously decay into lighter particles such as antielectrons. The reason this is possible is that at the grand unification energy there is no essential difference between a quark and an antielectron. The three quarks inside a proton normally do not have enough energy to change into antielectrons, but very occasionally one of them may acquire sufficient energy to make the transition because the uncertainty principle means that the energy of the quarks inside the proton cannot be fixed exactly. The proton would then decay. The probability of a quark gaining sufficient energy is so low that one is likely to have to wait at least a million million million million million years (1 followed by thirty zeros). This is much longer than the time since the big bang, which is a mere ten thousand million years or so (1 followed by ten zeros). Thus one might think that the possibility of spontaneous proton decay could not be tested experimentally. However, one can increase one's chances of detecting a decay by observing a large amount of matter containing a very large number of protons. (If, for example, one observed a number of protons equal to 1 followed by thirty-one zeros for a period of one year, one would expect, according to the simplest GUT, to observe more than one proton decay.) A number of such experiments have been carried out, but none have yielded definite evidence of proton or neutron decay. One experiment used eight thousand tons of water and was performed in the Morton Salt Mine in Ohio (to avoid other events taking place, caused by cosmic rays, that might be confused with proton decay). Since no spontaneous proton decay had been observed during the experiment, one can calculate that the probable life of the proton must be greater than ten million million million million million years (1 with thirty-one zeros). This is longer than the lifetime predicted by the simplest grand unified theory, but there are more elaborate theories in which the predicted lifetimes are longer. Still more sensitive experiments involving even larger quantities of matter will be needed to test them. Even though it is very difficult to observe spontaneous proton decay, it may be that our very existence is a consequence of the reverse process, the production of protons, or more simply, of quarks, from an initial situation in which there were no more quarks than antiquarks, which is the most natural way to imagine the universe starting out. Matter on the earth is made up mainly of protons and neutrons, which in turn are made up of quarks. There are no antiprotons or antineutrons, made up from antiquarks, except for a few that physicists produce in large particle accelerators. We have evidence from cosmic rays that the same is true for all the matter in our galaxy: there are no antiprotons or antineutrons apart from a small number that are produced as particle/antiparticle pairs in high-energy collisions. If there were large regions of antimatter in our galaxy, we would expect to observe large quantities of radiation from the borders between the regions of matter and antimatter, where many particles would be colliding with their antiparticles, annihilating each other and giving off high energy radiation. We have no direct evidence as to whether the matter in other galaxies is made up of protons and neutrons or antiprotons and antineutrons, but it must be one or the other: there cannot be a mixture in a single galaxy because in that case we would again observe a lot of radiation from annihilations. We therefore believe that all galaxies are composed of quarks rather than antiquarks; it seems implausible that some galaxies should be matter and some antimatter. Why should there be so many more quarks than antiquarks? Why are there not equal numbers of each? It is certainly fortunate for us that the numbers are unequal because, if they had been the same, nearly all the quarks and antiquarks would have annihilated each other in the early universe and left a universe filled with radiation but hardly any matter. There would then have been no galaxies, stars, or planets on which human life could have developed. Luckily, grand unified theories may provide an explanation of why the universe should now contain more quarks than antiquarks, even if it started out with equal numbers of each. As we have seen, GUTs allow quarks to change into antielectrons at high energy. They also allow the reverse processes, antiquarks turning into electrons, and electrons and antielectrons turning into antiquarks and quarks. There was a time in the very early universe when it was so hot that the particle energies would have been high enough for these transformations to take place. But why should that lead to more quarks than antiquarks? The reason is that the laws of physics are not quite the same for particles and antiparticles. Up to 1956 it was believed that the laws of physics obeyed each of three separate symmetries called C, P, and T. The symmetry C means that the laws are the same for particles and antiparticles. The symmetry P means that the laws are the same for any situation and its mirror image (the mirror image of a particle spinning in a right-handed direction is one spinning in a left-handed direction). The symmetry T means that if you reverse the direction of motion of all particles and antiparticles, the system should go back to what it was at earlier times; in other words, the laws are the same in the forward and backward directions of time. In 1956 two American physicists, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, suggested that the weak force does not in fact obey the symmetry P. In other words, the weak force would make the universe develop in a different way from the way in which the mirror image of the universe would develop. The same year, a colleague, Chien-Shiung Wu, proved their prediction correct. She did this by lining up the nuclei of radioactive atoms in a magnetic field, so that they were all spinning in the same direction, and showed that the electrons were given off more in one direction than another. The following year, Lee and Yang received the Nobel prize for their idea. It was also found that the weak force did not obey the symmetry C. That is, it would cause a universe composed of antiparticles to behave differently from our universe. Nevertheless, it seemed that the weak force did obey the combined symmetry CP. That is, the universe would develop in the same way as its mirror image if, in addition, every particle was swapped with its antiparticle! However, in 1964 two more Americans, J. W. Cronin and Val Fitch, discovered that even the CP symmetry was not obeyed in the decay of certain particles called K-mesons. Cronin and Fitch eventually received the Nobel prize for their work in 1980. (A lot of prizes have been awarded for showing that the universe is not as simple as we might have thought!) There is a mathematical theorem that says that any theory that obeys quantum mechanics and relativity must always obey the combined symmetry CPT. In other words, the universe would have to behave the same if one replaced particles by antiparticles, took the mirror image, and also reversed the direction of time. But Cronin and Fitch showed that if one replaces particles by antiparticles and takes the mirror image, but does not reverse the direction of time, then the universe does not behave the same. The laws of physics, therefore, must change if one reverses the direction of time – they do not obey the symmetry T. Certainly the early universe does not obey the symmetry T: as time runs forward the universe expands – if it ran backward, the universe would be contracting. And since there are forces that do not obey the symmetry T, it follows that as the universe expands, these forces could cause more antielectrons to turn into quarks than electrons into antiquarks. Then, as the universe expanded and cooled, the antiquarks would annihilate with the quarks, but since there would be more quarks than antiquarks, a small excess of quarks would remain. It is these that make up the matter we see today and out of which we ourselves are made. Thus our very existence could be regarded as a confirmation of grand unified theories, though a qualitative one only; the uncertainties are such that one cannot predict the numbers of quarks that will be left after the annihilation, or even whether it would be quarks or antiquarks that would remain. (Had it been an excess of antiquarks, however, we would simply have named antiquarks quarks, and quarks antiquarks.) Grand unified theories do not include the force of gravity. This does not matter too much, because gravity is such a weak force that its effects can usually be neglected when we are dealing with elementary particles or atoms. However, the fact that it is both long range and always attractive means that its effects all add up. So for a sufficiently large number of matter particles, gravitational forces can dominate over all other forces. This is why it is gravity that determines the evolution of the universe. Even for objects the size of stars, the attractive force of gravity can win over all the other forces and cause the star to collapse. My work in the 1970s focused on the black holes that can result from such stellar collapse and the intense gravitational fields around them. It was this that led to the first hints of how the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity might affect each other – a glimpse of the shape of a quantum theory of gravity yet to come.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	BLACK HOLES	The term black hole is of very recent origin. It was coined in 1969 by the American scientist John Wheeler as a graphic description of an idea that goes back at least two hundred years, to a time when there were two theories about light: one, which Newton favored, was that it was composed of particles; the other was that it was made of waves. We now know that really both theories are correct. By the wave/particle duality of quantum mechanics, light can be regarded as both a wave and a particle. Under the theory that light is made up of waves, it was not clear how it would respond to gravity. But if light is composed of particles, one might expect them to be affected by gravity in the same way that cannonballs, rockets, and planets are. At first people thought that particles of light traveled infinitely fast, so gravity would not have been able to slow them down, but the discovery by Roemer that light travels at a finite speed meant that gravity might have an important effect. On this assumption, a Cambridge don, John Michell, wrote a paper in 1783 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in which he pointed out that a star that was sufficiently massive and compact would have such a strong gravitational field that light could not escape: any light emitted from the surface of the star would be dragged back by the star's gravitational attraction before it could get very far. Michell suggested that there might be a large number of stars like this. Although we would not be able to see them because the light from them would not reach us, we would still feel their gravitational attraction. Such objects are what we now call black holes, because that is what they are: black voids in space. A similar suggestion was made a few years later by the French scientist the Marquis de Laplace, apparently independently of Michell. Interestingly enough, Laplace included it in only the first and second editions of his book The System of the World, and left it out of later editions; perhaps he decided that it was a crazy idea. (Also, the particle theory of light went out of favor during the nineteenth century; it seemed that everything could be explained by the wave theory, and according to the wave theory, it was not clear that light would be affected by gravity at all.) In fact, it is not really consistent to treat light like cannonballs in Newton's theory of gravity because the speed of light is fixed. (A cannonball fired upward from the earth will be slowed down by gravity and will eventually stop and fall back; a photon, however, must continue upward at a constant speed. How then can Newtonian gravity affect light?) A consistent theory of how gravity affects light did not come along until Einstein proposed general relativity in 1915. And even then it was a long time before the implications of the theory for massive stars were understood. To understand how a black hole might be formed, we first need an understanding of the life cycle of a star. A star is formed when a large amount of gas (mostly hydrogen) starts to collapse in on itself due to its gravitational attraction. As it contracts the atoms of the gas collide with each other more and more frequently and at greater and greater speeds – the gas heats up. Eventually, the gas will be so hot that when the hydrogen atoms collide they no longer bounce off each other, but instead coalesce to form helium. The heat released in this reaction, which is like a controlled hydrogen bomb explosion, is what makes the star shine. This additional heat also increases the pressure of the gas until it is sufficient to balance the gravitational attraction, and the gas stops contracting. It is a bit like a balloon – there is a balance between the pressure of the air inside, which is trying to make the balloon expand, and the tension in the rubber, which is trying to make the balloon smaller. Stars will remain stable like this for a long time, with heat from the nuclear reactions balancing the gravitational attraction. Eventually, however, the star will run out of its hydrogen and other nuclear fuels. Paradoxically, the more fuel a star starts off with, the sooner it runs out. This is because the more massive the star is, the hotter it needs to be to balance its gravitational attraction. And the hotter it is, the faster it will use up its fuel. Our sun has probably got enough fuel for another five thousand million years or so, but more massive stars can use up their fuel in as little as one hundred million years, much less than the age of the universe. When a star runs out of fuel, it starts to cool off and so to contract. What might happen to it then was first understood only at the end of the 1920s. In 1928 an Indian graduate student, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, set sail for England to study at Cambridge with the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, an expert on general relativity. (According to some accounts, a journalist told Eddington in the early 1920s that he had heard there were only three people in the world who understood general relativity. Eddington paused, then replied, 'I am trying to think who the third person is.') During his voyage from India, Chandrasekhar worked out how big a star could be and still support itself against its own gravity after it had used up all its fuel. The idea was this: when the star becomes small, the matter particles get very near each other, and so according to the Pauli exclusion principle, they must have very different velocities. This makes them move away from each other and so tends to make the star expand. A star can therefore maintain itself at a constant radius by a balance between the attraction of gravity and the repulsion that arises from the exclusion principle, just as earlier in its life gravity was balanced by the heat. Chandrasekhar realized, however, that there is a limit to the repulsion that the exclusion principle can provide. The theory of relativity limits the maximum difference in the velocities of the matter particles in the star to the speed of light. This means that when the star got sufficiently dense, the repulsion caused by the exclusion principle would be less than the attraction of gravity. Chandrasekhar calculated that a cold star of more than about one and a half times the mass of the sun would not be able to support itself against its own gravity. (This mass is now known as the Chandrasekhar limit.) A similar discovery was made about the same time by the Russian scientist Lev Davidovich Landau. This had serious implications for the ultimate fate of massive stars. If a star's mass is less than the Chandrasekhar limit, it can eventually stop contracting and settle down to a possible final state as a 'white dwarf' with a radius of a few thousand miles and a density of hundreds of tons per cubic inch. A white dwarf is supported by the exclusion principle repulsion between the electrons in its matter. We observe a large number of these white dwarf stars. One of the first to be discovered is a star that is orbiting around Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. Landau pointed out that there was another possible final state for a star, also with a limiting mass of about one or two times the mass of the sun but much smaller even than a white dwarf. These stars would be supported by the exclusion principle repulsion between neutrons and protons, rather than between electrons. They were therefore called neutron stars. They would have a radius of only ten miles or so and a density of hundreds of millions of tons per cubic inch. At the time they were first predicted, there was no way that neutron stars could be observed. They were not actually detected until much later. Stars with masses above the Chandrasekhar limit, on the other hand, have a big problem when they come to the end of their fuel. In some cases they may explode or manage to throw off enough matter to reduce their mass below the limit and so avoid catastrophic gravitational collapse, but it was difficult to believe that this always happened, no matter how big the star. How would it know that it had to lose weight? And even if every star managed to lose enough mass to avoid collapse, what would happen if you added more mass to a white dwarf or neutron star to take it over the limit? Would it collapse to infinite density? Eddington was shocked by that implication, and he refused to believe Chandrasekhar's result. Eddington thought it was simply not possible that a star could collapse to a point. This was the view of most scientists: Einstein himself wrote a paper in which he claimed that stars would not shrink to zero size. The hostility of other scientists, particularly Eddington, his former teacher and the leading authority on the structure of stars, persuaded Chandrasekhar to abandon this line of work and turn instead to other problems in astronomy, such as the motion of star clusters. However, when he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1983, it was, at least in part, for his early work on the limiting mass of cold stars. Chandrasekhar had shown that the exclusion principle could not halt the collapse of a star more massive than the Chandrasekhar limit, but the problem of understanding what would happen to such a star, according to general relativity, was first solved by a young American, Robert Oppenheimer, in 1939. His result, however, suggested that there would be no observational consequences that could be detected by the telescopes of the day. Then World War II intervened and Oppenheimer himself became closely involved in the atom bomb project. After the war the problem of gravitational collapse was largely forgotten as most scientists became caught up in what happens on the scale of the atom and its nucleus. In the 1960s, however, interest in the large-scale problems of astronomy and cosmology was revived by a great increase in the number and range of astronomical observations brought about by the application of modern technology. Oppenheimer's work was then rediscovered and extended by a number of people. The picture that we now have from Oppenheimer's work is as follows. The gravitational field of the star changes the paths of light rays in space-time from what they would have been had the star not been present. The light cones, which indicate the paths followed in space and time by flashes of light emitted from their tips, are bent slightly inward near the surface of the star. This can be seen in the bending of light from distant stars observed during an eclipse of the sun. As the star contracts, the gravitational field at its surface gets stronger and the light cones get bent inward more. This makes it more difficult for light from the star to escape, and the light appears dimmer and redder to an observer at a distance. Eventually, when the star has shrunk to a certain critical radius, the gravitational field at the surface becomes so strong that the light cones are bent inward so much that light can no longer escape (Fig. 6.1). According to the theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. Thus if light cannot escape, neither can anything else; everything is dragged back by the gravitational field. So one has a set of events, a region of space-time, from which it is not possible to escape to reach a distant observer. This region is what we now call a black hole. Its boundary is called the event horizon and it coincides with the paths of light rays that just fail to escape from the black hole. In order to understand what you would see if you were watching a star collapse to form a black hole, one has to remember that in the theory of relativity there is no absolute time. Each observer has his own measure of time. The time for someone on a star will be different from that for someone at a distance, because of the gravitational field of the star. Suppose an intrepid astronaut on the surface of the collapsing star, collapsing inward with it, sent a signal every second, according to his watch, to his spaceship orbiting about the star. At some time on his watch, say 11:00, the star would shrink below the critical radius at which the gravitational field becomes so strong nothing can escape, and his signals would no longer reach the spaceship. As 11:00 approached, his companions watching from the spaceship would find the intervals between successive signals from the astronaut getting longer and longer, but this effect would be very small before 10:59:59. They would have to wait only very slightly more than a second between the astronaut's 10:59:58 signal and the one that he sent when his watch read 10:59:59, but they would have to wait forever for the 11:00 signal. The light waves emitted from the surface of the star between 10:59:59 and 11:00, by the astronaut's watch, would be spread out over an infinite period of time, as seen from the spaceship. The time interval between the arrival of successive waves at the spaceship would get longer and longer, so the light from the star would appear redder and redder and fainter and fainter. Eventually, the star would be so dim that it could no longer be seen from the spaceship: all that would be left would be a black hole in space. The star would, however, continue to exert the same gravitational force on the spaceship, which would continue to orbit the black hole. This scenario is not entirely realistic, however, because of the following problem. Gravity gets weaker the farther you are from the star, so the gravitational force on our intrepid astronaut's feet would always be greater than the force on his head. This difference in the forces would stretch our astronaut out like spaghetti or tear him apart before the star had contracted to the critical radius at which the event horizon formed! However, we believe that there are much larger objects in the universe, like the central regions of galaxies, that can also undergo gravitational collapse to produce black holes; an astronaut on one of these would not be torn apart before the black hole formed. He would not, in fact, feel anything special as he reached the critical radius, and could pass the point of no return without noticing it. However, within just a few hours, as the region continued to collapse, the difference in the gravitational forces on his head and his feet would become so strong that again it would tear him apart. The work that Roger Penrose and I did between 1965 and 1970 showed that, according to general relativity, there must be a singularity of infinite density and space-time curvature within a black hole. This is rather like the big bang at the beginning of time, only it would be an end of time for the collapsing body and the astronaut. At this singularity the laws of science and our ability to predict the future would break down. However, any observer who remained outside the black hole would not be affected by this failure of predictability, because neither light nor any other signal could reach him from the singularity. This remarkable fact led Roger Penrose to propose the cosmic censorship hypothesis, which might be paraphrased as 'God abhors a naked singularity.' In other words, the singularities produced by gravitational collapse occur only in places, like black holes, where they are decently hidden from outside view by an event horizon. Strictly, this is what is known as the weak cosmic censorship hypothesis: it protects observers who remain outside the black hole from the consequences of the breakdown of predictability that occurs at the singularity, but it does nothing at all for the poor unfortunate astronaut who falls into the hole. There are some solutions of the equations of general relativity in which it is possible for our astronaut to see a naked singularity: he may be able to avoid hitting the singularity and instead fall through a 'wormhole' and come out in another region of the universe. This would offer great possibilities for travel in space and time, but unfortunately it seems that these solutions may all be highly unstable; the least disturbance, such as the presence of an astronaut, may change them so that the astronaut could not see the singularity until he hit it and his time came to an end. In other words, the singularity would always lie in his future and never in his past. The strong version of the cosmic censorship hypothesis states that in a realistic solution, the singularities would always lie either entirely in the future (like the singularities of gravitational collapse) or entirely in the past (like the big bang). I strongly believe in cosmic censorship so I bet Kip Thorne and John Preskill of Cal Tech that it would always hold. I lost the bet on a technicality because examples were produced of solutions with a singularity that was visible from a long way away. So I had to pay up, which according to the terms of the bet meant I had to clothe their nakedness. But I can claim a moral victory. The naked singularities were unstable: the least disturbance would cause them either to disappear or to be hidden behind an event horizon. So they would not occur in realistic situations. The event horizon, the boundary of the region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape, acts rather like a one-way membrane around the black hole: objects, such as unwary astronauts, can fall through the event horizon into the black hole, but nothing can ever get out of the black hole through the event horizon. (Remember that the event horizon is the path in space-time of light that is trying to escape from the black hole, and nothing can travel faster than light.) One could well say of the event horizon what the poet Dante said of the entrance to Hell: 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here.' Anything or anyone who falls through the event horizon will soon reach the region of infinite density and the end of time. General relativity predicts that heavy objects that are moving will cause the emission of gravitational waves, ripples in the curvature of space that travel at the speed of light. These are similar to light waves, which are ripples of the electromagnetic field, but they are much harder to detect. They can be observed by the very slight change in separation they produce between neighboring freely moving objects. A number of detectors are being built in the US, Europe, and Japan that will measure displacements of one part in a thousand million million million (1 with twenty-one zeros after it), or less than the nucleus of an atom over a distance of ten miles. Like light, gravitational waves carry energy away from the objects that emit them. One would therefore expect a system of massive objects to settle down eventually to a stationary state, because the energy in any movement would be carried away by the emission of gravitational waves. (It is rather like dropping a cork into water: at first it bobs up and down a great deal, but as the ripples carry away its energy, it eventually settles down to a stationary state.) For example, the movement of the earth in its orbit round the sun produces gravitational waves. The effect of the energy loss will be to change the orbit of the earth so that gradually it gets nearer and nearer to the sun, eventually collides with it, and settles down to a stationary state. The rate of energy loss in the case of the earth and the sun is very low – about enough to run a small electric heater. This means it will take about a thousand million million million million years for the earth to run into the sun, so there's no immediate cause for worry! The change in the orbit of the earth is too slow to be observed, but this same effect has been observed over the past few years occurring in the system called PSR 1913 + 16 (PSR stands for 'pulsar,' a special type of neutron star that emits regular pulses of radio waves). This system contains two neutron stars orbiting each other, and the energy they are losing by the emission of gravitational waves is causing them to spiral in toward each other. This confirmation of general relativity won J. H. Taylor and R. A. Hulse the Nobel prize in 1993. It will take about three hundred million years for them to collide. Just before they do, they will be orbiting so fast that they will emit enough gravitational waves for detectors like LIGO to pick up. During the gravitational collapse of a star to form a black hole, the movements would be much more rapid, so the rate at which energy is carried away would be much higher. It would therefore not be too long before it settled down to a stationary state. What would this final stage look like? One might suppose that it would depend on all the complex features of the star from which it had formed – not only its mass and rate of rotation, but also the different densities of various parts of the star, and the complicated movements of the gases within the star. And if black holes were as varied as the objects that collapsed to form them, it might be very difficult to make any predictions about black holes in general. In 1967, however, the study of black holes was revolutionized by Werner Israel, a Canadian scientist (who was born in Berlin, brought up in South Africa, and took his doctoral degree in Ireland). Israel showed that, according to general relativity, non-rotating black holes must be very simple; they were perfectly spherical, their size depended only on their mass, and any two such black holes with the same mass were identical. They could, in fact, be described by a particular solution of Einstein's equations that had been known since 1917, found by Karl Schwarzschild shortly after the discovery of general relativity. At first many people, including Israel himself, argued that since black holes had to be perfectly spherical, a black hole could only form from the collapse of a perfectly spherical object. Any real star – which would never be perfectly spherical – could therefore only collapse to form a naked singularity. There was, however, a different interpretation of Israel's result, which was advocated by Roger Penrose and John Wheeler in particular. They argued that the rapid movements involved in a star's collapse would mean that the gravitational waves it gave off would make it ever more spherical, and by the time it had settled down to a stationary state, it would be precisely spherical. According to this view, any non-rotating star, however complicated its shape and internal structure, would end up after gravitational collapse as a perfectly spherical black hole, whose size would depend only on its mass. Further calculations supported this view, and it soon came to be adopted generally. Israel's result dealt with the case of black holes formed from non-rotating bodies only. In 1963, Roy Kerr, a New Zealander, found a set of solutions of the equations of general relativity that described rotating black holes. These 'Kerr' black holes rotate at a constant rate, their size and shape depending only on their mass and rate of rotation. If the rotation is zero, the black hole is perfectly round and the solution is identical to the Schwarzschild solution. If the rotation is non-zero, the black hole bulges outward near its equator (just as the earth or the sun bulge due to their rotation), and the faster it rotates, the more it bulges. So, to extend Israel's result to include rotating bodies, it was conjectured that any rotating body that collapsed to form a black hole would eventually settle down to a stationary state described by the Kerr solution. In 1970 a colleague and fellow research student of mine at Cambridge, Brandon Carter, took the first step toward proving this conjecture. He showed that, provided a stationary rotating black hole had an axis of symmetry, like a spinning top, its size and shape would depend only on its mass and rate of rotation. Then, in 1971, I proved that any stationary rotating black hole would indeed have such an axis of symmetry. Finally, in 1973, David Robinson at Kings College, London, used Carter's and my results to show that the conjecture had been correct: such a black hole had indeed to be the Kerr solution. So after gravitational collapse a black hole must settle down into a state in which it could be rotating, but not pulsating. Moreover, its size and shape would depend only on its mass and rate of rotation, and not on the nature of the body that had collapsed to form it. This result became known by the maxim: 'A black hole has no hair.' The 'no hair' theorem is of great practical importance, because it so greatly restricts the possible types of black holes. One can therefore make detailed models of objects that might contain black holes and compare the predictions of the models with observations. It also means that a very large amount of information about the body that has collapsed must be lost when a black hole is formed, because afterward all we can possibly measure about the body is its mass and rate of rotation. The significance of this will be seen in the next chapter. Black holes are one of only a fairly small number of cases in the history of science in which a theory was developed in great detail as a mathematical model before there was any evidence from observations that it was correct. Indeed, this used to be the main argument of opponents of black holes: how could one believe in objects for which the only evidence was calculations based on the dubious theory of general relativity? In 1963, however, Maarten Schmidt, an astronomer at the Palomar Observatory in California, measured the red shift of a faint starlike object in the direction of the source of radio waves called 3C273 (that is, source number 273 in the third Cambridge catalogue of radio sources). He found it was too large to be caused by a gravitational field: if it had been a gravitational red shift, the object would have to be so massive and so near to us that it would disturb the orbits of planets in the Solar System. This suggested that the red shift was instead caused by the expansion of the universe, which, in turn, meant that the object was a very long distance away. And to be visible at such a great distance, the object must be very bright, must, in other words, be emitting a huge amount of energy. The only mechanism that people could think of that would produce such large quantities of energy seemed to be the gravitational collapse not just of a star but of a whole central region of a galaxy. A number of other similar 'quasistellar objects,' or quasars, have been discovered, all with large red shifts. But they are all too far away and therefore too difficult to observe to provide conclusive evidence of black holes. Further encouragement for the existence of black holes came in 1967 with the discovery by a research student at Cambridge, Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, of objects in the sky that were emitting regular pulses of radio waves. At first Bell and her supervisor, Antony Hewish, thought they might have made contact with an alien civilization in the galaxy! Indeed, at the seminar at which they announced their discovery, I remember that they called the first four sources to be found LGM 1–4, LGM standing for 'Little Green Men.' In the end, however, they and everyone else came to the less romantic conclusion that these objects, which were given the name pulsars, were in fact rotating neutron stars that were emitting pulses of radio waves because of a complicated interaction between their magnetic fields and surrounding matter. This was bad news for writers of space westerns, but very hopeful for the small number of us who believed in black holes at that time: it was the first positive evidence that neutron stars existed. A neutron star has a radius of about ten miles, only a few times the critical radius at which a star becomes a black hole. If a star could collapse to such a small size, it is not unreasonable to expect that other stars could collapse to even smaller size and become black holes. How could we hope to detect a black hole, as by its very definition it does not emit any light? It might seem a bit like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar. Fortunately, there is a way. As John Michell pointed out in his pioneering paper in 1783, a black hole still exerts a gravitational force on nearby objects. Astronomers have observed many systems in which two stars orbit around each other, attracted toward each other by gravity. They also observe systems in which there is only one visible star that is orbiting around some unseen companion. One cannot, of course, immediately conclude that the companion is a black hole: it might merely be a star that is too faint to be seen. However, some of these systems, like the one called Cygnus X-1 (Fig. 6.2), are also strong sources of X rays. The best explanation for this phenomenon is that matter has been blown off the surface of the visible star. As it falls toward the unseen companion, it develops a spiral motion (rather like water running out of a bath), and it gets very hot, emitting X rays (Fig. 6.3). For this mechanism to work, the unseen object has to be very small, like a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole. From the observed orbit of the visible star, one can determine the lowest possible mass of the unseen object. In the case of Cygnus X-1, this is about six times the mass of the sun, which, according to Chandrasekhar's result, is too great for the unseen object to be a white dwarf. It is also too large a mass to be a neutron star. It seems, therefore, that it must be a black hole. The brighter of the two stars near the center of the photograph is Cygnus X–1, which is thought to consist of a black hole and a normal star, orbiting around each other. There are other models to explain Cygnus X-1 that do not include a black hole, but they are all rather far-fetched. A black hole seems to be the only really natural explanation of the observations. Despite this, I had a bet with Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology that in fact Cygnus X-1 does not contain a black hole! This was a form of insurance policy for me. I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet, which would bring me four years of the magazine Private Eye. In fact, although the situation with Cygnus X-1 has not changed much since we made the bet in 1975, there is now so much other observational evidence in favor of black holes that I have conceded the bet. I paid the specified penalty, which was a one-year subscription to Penthouse, to the outrage of Kip's liberated wife. We also now have evidence for several other black holes in systems like Cygnus X-1 in our galaxy and in two neighboring galaxies called the Magellanic Clouds. The number of black holes, however, is almost certainly very much higher; in the long history of the universe, many stars must have burned all their nuclear fuel and have had to collapse. The number of black holes may well be greater even than the number of visible stars, which totals about a hundred thousand million in our galaxy alone. The extra gravitational attraction of such a large number of black holes could explain why our galaxy rotates at the rate it does: the mass of the visible stars is insufficient to account for this. We also have some evidence that there is a much larger black hole, with a mass of about a hundred thousand times that of the sun, at the center of our galaxy. Stars in the galaxy that come too near this black hole will be torn apart by the difference in the gravitational forces on their near and far sides. Their remains, and gas that is thrown off other stars, will fall toward the black hole. As in the case of Cygnus X-1, the gas will spiral inward and will heat up, though not as much as in that case. It will not get hot enough to emit X rays, but it could account for the very compact source of radio waves and infrared rays that is observed at the galactic center. It is thought that similar but even larger black holes, with masses of about a hundred million times the mass of the sun, occur at the centers of quasars. For example, observations with the Hubble telescope of the galaxy known as M87 reveal that it contains a disk of gas 130 light-years across rotating about a central object two thousand million times the mass of the Sun. This can only be a black hole. Matter falling into such a supermassive black hole would provide the only source of power great enough to explain the enormous amounts of energy that these objects are emitting. As the matter spirals into the black hole, it would make the black hole rotate in the same direction, causing it to develop a magnetic field rather like that of the earth. Very high energy particles would be generated near the black hole by the in-falling matter. The magnetic field would be so strong that it could focus these particles into jets ejected outward along the axis of rotation of the black hole, that is, in the directions of its north and south poles. Such jets are indeed observed in a number of galaxies and quasars. One can also consider the possibility that there might be black holes with masses much less than that of the sun. Such black holes could not be formed by gravitational collapse, because their masses are below the Chandrasekhar mass limit: stars of this low mass can support themselves against the force of gravity even when they have exhausted their nuclear fuel. Low-mass black holes could form only if matter was compressed to enormous densities by very large external pressures. Such conditions could occur in a very big hydrogen bomb: the physicist John Wheeler once calculated that if one took all the heavy water in all the oceans of the world, one could build a hydrogen bomb that would compress matter at the center so much that a black hole would be created. (Of course, there would be no one left to observe it!) A more practical possibility is that such low-mass black holes might have been formed in the high temperatures and pressures of the very early universe. Black holes would have been formed only if the early universe had not been perfectly smooth and uniform, because only a small region that was denser than average could be compressed in this way to form a black hole. But we know that there must have been some irregularities, because otherwise the matter in the universe would still be perfectly uniformly distributed at the present epoch, instead of being clumped together in stars and galaxies. Whether the irregularities required to account for stars and galaxies would have led to the formation of a significant number of 'primordial' black holes clearly depends on the details of the conditions in the early universe. So if we could determine how many primordial black holes there are now, we would learn a lot about the very early stages of the universe. Primordial black holes with masses more than a thousand million tons (the mass of a large mountain) could be detected only by their gravitational influence on other, visible matter or on the expansion of the universe. However, as we shall learn in the next chapter, black holes are not really black after all: they glow like a hot body, and the smaller they are, the more they glow. So, paradoxically, smaller black holes might actually turn out to be easier to detect than large ones!
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	BLACK HOLES AIN'T SO BLACK	Before 1970, my research on General Relativity had concentrated mainly on the question of whether or not there had been a big bang singularity. However, one evening in November that year, shortly after the birth of my daughter, Lucy, I started to think about black holes as I was getting into bed. My disability makes this rather a slow process, so I had plenty of time. At that date there was no precise definition of which points in space-time lay inside a black hole and which lay outside. I had already discussed with Roger Penrose the idea of defining a black hole as the set of events from which it was not possible to escape to a large distance, which is now the generally accepted definition. It means that the boundary of the black hole, the event horizon, is formed by the light rays that just fail to escape from the black hole, hovering forever just on the edge (Fig. 7.1). It is a bit like running away from the police and just managing to keep one step ahead but not being able to get clear away! Suddenly I realized that the paths of these light rays could never approach one another. If they did, they must eventually run into one another. It would be like meeting someone else running away from the police in the opposite direction – you would both be caught! (Or, in this case, fall into a black hole.) But if these light rays were swallowed up by the black hole, then they could not have been on the boundary of the black hole. So the paths of light rays in the event horizon had always to be moving parallel to, or away from, each other. Another way of seeing this is that the event horizon, the boundary of the black hole, is like the edge of a shadow – the shadow of impending doom. If you look at the shadow cast by a source at a great distance, such as the sun, you will see that the rays of light in the edge are not approaching each other. If the rays of light that form the event horizon, the boundary of the black hole, can never approach each other, the area of the event horizon might stay the same or increase with time but it could never decrease because that would mean that at least some of the rays of light in the boundary would have to be approaching each other. In fact, the area would increase whenever matter or radiation fell into the black hole (Fig. 7.2). Or if two black holes collided and merged together to form a single black hole, the area of the event horizon of the final black hole would be greater than or equal to the sum of the areas of the event horizons of the original black holes (Fig. 7.3). This nondecreasing property of the event horizon's area placed an important restriction on the possible behavior of black holes. I was so excited with my discovery that I did not get much sleep that night. The next day I rang up Roger Penrose. He agreed with me. I think, in fact, that he had been aware of this property of the area. However, he had been using a slightly different definition of a black hole. He had not realized that the boundaries of the black hole according to the two definitions would be the same, and hence so would their areas, provided the black hole had settled down to a state in which it was not changing with time. The nondecreasing behavior of a black hole's area was very reminiscent of the behavior of a physical quantity called entropy, which measures the degree of disorder of a system. It is a matter of common experience that disorder will tend to increase if things are left to themselves. (One has only to stop making repairs around the house to see that!) One can create order out of disorder (for example, one can paint the house), but that requires expenditure of effort or energy and so decreases the amount of ordered energy available. A precise statement of this idea is known as the second law of thermodynamics. It states that the entropy of an isolated system always increases, and that when two systems are joined together, the entropy of the combined system is greater than the sum of the entropies of the individual systems. For example, consider a system of gas molecules in a box. The molecules can be thought of as little billiard balls continually colliding with each other and bouncing off the walls of the box. The higher the temperature of the gas, the faster the molecules move, and so the more frequently and harder they collide with the walls of the box and the greater the outward pressure they exert on the walls. Suppose that initially the molecules are all confined to the left-hand side of the box by a partition. If the partition is then removed, the molecules will tend to spread out and occupy both halves of the box. At some later time they could, by chance, all be in the right half or back in the left half, but it is overwhelmingly more probable that there will be roughly equal numbers in the two halves. Such a state is less ordered, or more disordered, than the original state in which all the molecules were in one half. One therefore says that the entropy of the gas has gone up. Similarly, suppose one starts with two boxes, one containing oxygen molecules and the other containing nitrogen molecules. If one joins the boxes together and removes the intervening wall, the oxygen and the nitrogen molecules will start to mix. At a later time the most probable state would be a fairly uniform mixture of oxygen and nitrogen molecules throughout the two boxes. This state would be less ordered, and hence have more entropy, than the initial state of two separate boxes. The second law of thermodynamics has a rather different status than that of other laws of science, such as Newton's law of gravity, for example, because it does not hold always, just in the vast majority of cases. The probability of all the gas molecules in our first box being found in one half of the box at a later time is many millions of millions to one, but it can happen. However, if one has a black hole around, there seems to be a rather easier way of violating the second law: just throw some matter with a lot of entropy, such as a box of gas, down the black hole. The total entropy of matter outside the black hole would go down. One could, of course, still say that the total entropy, including the entropy inside the black hole, has not gone down – but since there is no way to look inside the black hole, we cannot see how much entropy the matter inside it has. It would be nice, then, if there was some feature of the black hole by which observers outside the black hole could tell its entropy, and which would increase whenever matter carrying entropy fell into the black hole. Following the discovery, described above, that the area of the event horizon increased whenever matter fell into a black hole, a research student at Princeton named Jacob Bekenstein suggested that the area of the event horizon was a measure of the entropy of the black hole. As matter carrying entropy fell into a black hole, the area of its event horizon would go up, so that the sum of the entropy of matter outside black holes and the area of the horizons would never go down. This suggestion seemed to prevent the second law of thermodynamics from being violated in most situations. However, there was one fatal flaw. If a black hole has entropy, then it ought also to have a temperature. But a body with a particular temperature must emit radiation at a certain rate. It is a matter of common experience that if one heats up a poker in a fire it glows red hot and emits radiation, but bodies at lower temperatures emit radiation too; one just does not normally notice it because the amount is fairly small. This radiation is required in order to prevent violation of the second law. So black holes ought to emit radiation. But by their very definition, black holes are objects that are not supposed to emit anything. It therefore seemed that the area of the event horizon of a black hole could not be regarded as its entropy. In 1972 I wrote a paper with Brandon Carter and an American colleague, Jim Bardeen, in which we pointed out that although there were many similarities between entropy and the area of the event horizon, there was this apparently fatal difficulty. I must admit that in writing this paper I was motivated partly by irritation with Bekenstein, who, I felt, had misused my discovery of the increase of the area of the event horizon. However, it turned out in the end that he was basically correct, though in a manner he had certainly not expected. In September 1973, while I was visiting Moscow, I discussed black holes with two leading Soviet experts, Yakov Zeldovich and Alexander Starobinsky. They convinced me that, according to the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle, rotating black holes should create and emit particles. I believed their arguments on physical grounds, but I did not like the mathematical way in which they calculated the emission. I therefore set about devising a better mathematical treatment, which I described at an informal seminar in Oxford at the end of November 1973. At that time I had not done the calculations to find out how much would actually be emitted. I was expecting to discover just the radiation that Zeldovich and Starobinsky had predicted from rotating black holes. However, when I did the calculation, I found, to my surprise and annoyance, that even nonrotating black holes should apparently create and emit particles at a steady rate. At first I thought that this emission indicated that one of the approximations I had used was not valid. I was afraid that if Bekenstein found out about it, he would use it as a further argument to support his ideas about the entropy of black holes, which I still did not like. However, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that the approximations really ought to hold. But what finally convinced me that the emission was real was that the spectrum of the emitted particles was exactly that which would be emitted by a hot body, and that the black hole was emitting particles at exactly the correct rate to prevent violations of the second law. Since then the calculations have been repeated in a number of different forms by other people. They all confirm that a black hole ought to emit particles and radiation as if it were a hot body with a temperature that depends only on the black hole's mass: the higher the mass, the lower the temperature. How is it possible that a black hole appears to emit particles when we know that nothing can escape from within its event horizon? The answer, quantum theory tells us, is that the particles do not come from within the black hole, but from the 'empty' space just outside the black hole's event horizon! We can understand this in the following way: what we think of as 'empty' space cannot be completely empty because that would mean that all the fields, such as the gravitational and electromagnetic fields, would have to be exactly zero. However, the value of a field and its rate of change with time are like the position and velocity of a particle: the uncertainty principle implies that the more accurately one knows one of these quantities, the less accurately one can know the other. So in empty space the field cannot be fixed at exactly zero, because then it would have both a precise value (zero) and a precise rate of change (also zero). There must be a certain minimum amount of uncertainty, or quantum fluctuations, in the value of the field. One can think of these fluctuations as pairs of particles of light or gravity that appear together at some time, move apart, and then come together again and annihilate each other. These particles are virtual particles like the particles that carry the gravitational force of the sun: unlike real particles, they cannot be observed directly with a particle detector. However, their indirect effects, such as small changes in the energy of electron orbits in atoms, can be measured and agree with the theoretical predictions to a remarkable degree of accuracy. The uncertainty principle also predicts that there will be similar virtual pairs of matter particles, such as electrons or quarks. In this case, however, one member of the pair will be a particle and the other an antiparticle (the antiparticles of light and gravity are the same as the particles). Because energy cannot be created out of nothing, one of the partners in a particle/antiparticle pair will have positive energy, and the other partner negative energy. The one with negative energy is condemned to be a short-lived virtual particle because real particles always have positive energy in normal situations. It must therefore seek out its partner and annihilate with it. However, a real particle close to a massive body has less energy than if it were far away, because it would take energy to lift it far away against the gravitational attraction of the body. Normally, the energy of the particle is still positive, but the gravitational field inside a black hole is so strong that even a real particle can have negative energy there. It is therefore possible, if a black hole is present, for the virtual particle with negative energy to fall into the black hole and become a real particle or antiparticle. In this case it no longer has to annihilate with its partner. Its forsaken partner may fall into the black hole as well. Or, having positive energy, it might also escape from the vicinity of the black hole as a real particle or antiparticle (Fig. 7.4). To an observer at a distance, it will appear to have been emitted from the black hole. The smaller the black hole, the shorter the distance the particle with negative energy will have to go before it becomes a real particle, and thus the greater the rate of emission, and the apparent temperature, of the black hole. The positive energy of the outgoing radiation would be balanced by a flow of negative energy particles into the black hole. By Einstein's equation E = mc2 (where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light), energy is proportional to mass. A flow of negative energy into the black hole therefore reduces its mass. As the black hole loses mass, the area of its event horizon gets smaller, but this decrease in the entropy of the black hole is more than compensated for by the entropy of the emitted radiation, so the second law is never violated. Moreover, the lower the mass of the black hole, the higher its temperature. So as the black hole loses mass, its temperature and rate of emission increase, so it loses mass more quickly. What happens when the mass of the black hole eventually becomes extremely small is not quite clear, but the most reasonable guess is that it would disappear completely in a tremendous final burst of emission, equivalent to the explosion of millions of H-bombs. A black hole with a mass a few times that of the sun would have a temperature of only one ten millionth of a degree above absolute zero. This is much less than the temperature of the microwave radiation that fills the universe (about 2.7° above absolute zero), so such black holes would emit even less than they absorb. If the universe is destined to go on expanding forever, the temperature of the microwave radiation will eventually decrease to less than that of such a black hole, which will then begin to lose mass. But, even then, its temperature would be so low that it would take about a million million million million million million million million million million million years (1 with sixty-six zeros after it) to evaporate completely. This is much longer than the age of the universe, which is only about ten or twenty thousand million years (1 or 2 with ten zeros after it). On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, there might be primordial black holes with a very much smaller mass that were made by the collapse of irregularities in the very early stages of the universe. Such black holes would have a much higher temperature and would be emitting radiation at a much greater rate. A primordial black hole with an initial mass of a thousand million tons would have a lifetime roughly equal to the age of the universe. Primordial black holes with initial masses less than this figure would already have completely evaporated, but those with slightly greater masses would still be emitting radiation in the form of X rays and gamma rays. These X rays and gamma rays are like waves of light, but with a much shorter wavelength. Such holes hardly deserve the epithet black: they really are white hot and are emitting energy at a rate of about ten thousand megawatts. One such black hole could run ten large power stations, if only we could harness its power. This would be rather difficult, however: the black hole would have the mass of a mountain compressed into less than a million millionth of an inch, the size of the nucleus of an atom! If you had one of these black holes on the surface of the earth, there would be no way to stop it from falling through the floor to the center of the earth. It would oscillate through the earth and back, until eventually it settled down at the center. So the only place to put such a black hole, in which one might use the energy that it emitted, would be in orbit around the earth – and the only way that one could get it to orbit the earth would be to attract it there by towing a large mass in front of it, rather like a carrot in front of a donkey. This does not sound like a very practical proposition, at least not in the immediate future. But even if we cannot harness the emission from these primordial black holes, what are our chances of observing them? We could look for the gamma rays that the primordial black holes emit during most of their lifetime. Although the radiation from most would be very weak because they are far away, the total from all of them might be detectable. We do observe such a background of gamma rays: Fig. 7.5 shows how the observed intensity differs at different frequencies (the number of waves per second). However, this background could have been, and probably was, generated by processes other than primordial black holes. The dotted line in Fig. 7.5 shows how the intensity should vary with frequency for gamma rays given off by primordial black holes, if there were on average 300 per cubic light-year. One can therefore say that the observations of the gamma ray background do not provide any positive evidence for primordial black holes, but they do tell us that on average there cannot be more than 300 in every cubic light-year in the universe. This limit means that primordial black holes could make up at most one millionth of the matter in the universe. With primordial black holes being so scarce, it might seem unlikely that there would be one near enough for us to observe as an individual source of gamma rays. But since gravity would draw primordial black holes toward any matter, they should be much more common in and around galaxies. So although the gamma ray background tells us that there can be no more than 300 primordial black holes per cubic light-year on average, it tells us nothing about how common they might be in our own galaxy. If they were, say, a million times more common than this, then the nearest black hole to us would probably be at a distance of about a thousand million kilometers, or about as far away as Pluto, the farthest known planet. At this distance it would still be very difficult to detect the steady emission of a black hole, even if it was ten thousand megawatts. In order to observe a primordial black hole one would have to detect several gamma ray quanta coming from the same direction within a reasonable space of time, such as a week. Otherwise, they might simply be part of the background. But Planck's quantum principle tells us that each gamma ray quantum has a very high energy, because gamma rays have a very high frequency, so it would not take many quanta to radiate even ten thousand megawatts. And to observe these few coming from the distance of Pluto would require a larger gamma ray detector than any that have been constructed so far. Moreover, the detector would have to be in space, because gamma rays cannot penetrate the atmosphere. Of course, if a black hole as close as Pluto were to reach the end of its life and blow up it would be easy to detect the final burst of emission. But if the black hole has been emitting for the last ten or twenty thousand million years, the chance of it reaching the end of its life within the next few years, rather than several million years in the past or future, is really rather small! So in order to have a reasonable chance of seeing an explosion before your research grant ran out, you would have to find a way to detect any explosions within a distance of about one light-year. In fact bursts of gamma rays from space have been detected by satellites originally constructed to look for violations of the Test Ban Treaty. These seem to occur about sixteen times a month and to be roughly uniformly distributed in direction across the sky. This indicates that they come from outside the Solar System since otherwise we would expect them to be concentrated toward the plane of the orbits of the planets. The uniform distribution also indicates that the sources are either fairly near to us in our galaxy or right outside it at cosmological distances because otherwise, again, they would be concentrated toward the plane of the galaxy. In the latter case, the energy required to account for the bursts would be far too high to have been produced by tiny black holes, but if the sources were close in galactic terms, it might be possible that they were exploding black holes. I would very much like this to be the case but I have to recognize that there are other possible explanations for the gamma ray bursts, such as colliding neutron stars. New observations in the next few years, particularly by gravitational wave detectors like LIGO, should enable us to discover the origin of the gamma ray bursts. Even if the search for primordial black holes proves negative, as it seems it may, it will still give us important information about the very early stages of the universe. If the early universe had been chaotic or irregular, or if the pressure of matter had been low, one would have expected it to produce many more primordial black holes than the limit already set by our observations of the gamma ray background. Only if the early universe was very smooth and uniform, with a high pressure, can one explain the absence of observable numbers of primordial black holes. The idea of radiation from black holes was the first example of a prediction that depended in an essential way on both the great theories of this century, general relativity and quantum mechanics. It aroused a lot of opposition initially because it upset the existing viewpoint: 'How can a black hole emit anything?' When I first announced the results of my calculations at a conference at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, I was greeted with general incredulity. At the end of my talk the chairman of the session, John G. Taylor from Kings College, London, claimed it was all nonsense. He even wrote a paper to that effect. However, in the end most people, including John Taylor, have come to the conclusion that black holes must radiate like hot bodies if our other ideas about general relativity and quantum mechanics are correct. Thus, even though we have not yet managed to find a primordial black hole, there is fairly general agreement that if we did, it would have to be emitting a lot of gamma rays and X rays. The existence of radiation from black holes seems to imply that gravitational collapse is not as final and irreversible as we once thought. If an astronaut falls into a black hole, its mass will increase, but eventually the energy equivalent of that extra mass will be returned to the universe in the form of radiation. Thus, in a sense, the astronaut will be 'recycled.' It would be a poor sort of immortality, however, because any personal concept of time for the astronaut would almost certainly come to an end as he was torn apart inside the black hole! Even the types of particles that were eventually emitted by the black hole would in general be different from those that made up the astronaut: the only feature of the astronaut that would survive would be his mass or energy. The approximations I used to derive the emission from black holes should work well when the black hole has a mass greater than a fraction of a gram. However, they will break down at the end of the black hole's life when its mass gets very small. The most likely outcome seems to be that the black hole will just disappear, at least from our region of the universe, taking with it the astronaut and any singularity there might be inside it, if indeed there is one. This was the first indication that quantum mechanics might remove the singularities that were predicted by general relativity. However, the methods that I and other people were using in 1974 were not able to answer questions such as whether singularities would occur in quantum gravity. From 1975 onward I therefore started to develop a more powerful approach to quantum gravity based on Richard Feynman's idea of a sum over histories. The answers that this approach suggests for the origin and fate of the universe and its contents, such as astronauts, will be described in the next two chapters. We shall see that although the uncertainty principle places limitations on the accuracy of all our predictions, it may at the same time remove the fundamental unpredictability that occurs at a space-time singularity.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	THE ORIGIN AND FATE OF THE UNIVERSE	Einstein's general theory of relativity, on its own, predicted that space-time began at the big bang singularity and would come to an end either at the big crunch singularity (if the whole universe recollapsed), or at a singularity inside a black hole (if a local region, such as a star, were to collapse). Any matter that fell into the hole would be destroyed at the singularity, and only the gravitational effect of its mass would continue to be felt outside. On the other hand, when quantum effects were taken into account, it seemed that the mass or energy of the matter would eventually be returned to the rest of the universe, and that the black hole, along with any singularity inside it, would evaporate away and finally disappear. Could quantum mechanics have an equally dramatic effect on the big bang and big crunch singularities? What really happens during the very early or late stages of the universe, when gravitational fields are so strong that quantum effects cannot be ignored? Does the universe in fact have a beginning or an end? And if so, what are they like? Throughout the 1970s I had been mainly studying black holes, but in 1981 my interest in questions about the origin and fate of the universe was reawakened when I attended a conference on cosmology organized by the Jesuits in the Vatican. The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went round the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to invite a number of experts to advise it on cosmology. At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the Pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference – the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death! In order to explain the ideas that I and other people have had about how quantum mechanics may affect the origin and fate of the universe, it is necessary first to understand the generally accepted history of the universe, according to what is known as the 'hot big bang model.' This assumes that the universe is described by a Friedmann model, right back to the big bang. In such models one finds that as the universe expands, any matter or radiation in it gets cooler. (When the universe doubles in size, its temperature falls by half. Since temperature is simply a measure of the average energy – or speed – of the particles, this cooling of the universe would have a major effect on the matter in it. At very high temperatures, particles would be moving around so fast that they could escape any attraction toward each other due to nuclear or electromagnetic forces, but as they cooled off one would expect particles that attract each other to start to clump together. Moreover, even the types of particles that exist in the universe would depend on the temperature. At high enough temperatures, particles have so much energy that whenever they collide many different particle/antiparticle pairs would be produced – and although some of these particles would annihilate on hitting antiparticles, they would be produced more rapidly than they could annihilate. At lower temperatures, however, when colliding particles have less energy, particle/antiparticle pairs would be produced less quickly – and annihilation would become faster than production. At the big bang itself the universe is thought to have had zero size, and so to have been infinitely hot. But as the universe expanded, the temperature of the radiation decreased. One second after the big bang, it would have fallen to about ten thousand million degrees. This is about a thousand times the temperature at the center of the sun, but temperatures as high as this are reached in H-bomb explosions. At this time the universe would have contained mostly photons, electrons, and neutrinos (extremely light particles that are affected only by the weak force and gravity) and their antiparticles, together with some protons and neutrons. As the universe continued to expand and the temperature to drop, the rate at which electron/antielectron pairs were being produced in collisions would have fallen below the rate at which they were being destroyed by annihilation. So most of the electrons and antielectrons would have annihilated with each other to produce more photons, leaving only a few electrons over. The neutrinos and antineutrinos, however, would not have annihilated with each other, because these particles interact with themselves and with other particles only very weakly. So they should still be around today. If we could observe them, it would provide a good test of this picture of a very hot early stage of the universe. Unfortunately, their energies nowadays would be too low for us to observe them directly. However, if neutrinos are not massless, but have a small mass of their own, as suggested by some recent experiments, we might be able to detect them indirectly: they could be a form of 'dark matter,' like that mentioned earlier, with sufficient gravitational attraction to stop the expansion of the universe and cause it to collapse again. About one hundred seconds after the big bang, the temperature would have fallen to one thousand million degrees, the temperature inside the hottest stars. At this temperature protons and neutrons would no longer have sufficient energy to escape the attraction of the strong nuclear force, and would have started to combine together to produce the nuclei of atoms of deuterium (heavy hydrogen), which contain one proton and one neutron. The deuterium nuclei would then have combined with more protons and neutrons to make helium nuclei, which contain two protons and two neutrons, and also small amounts of a couple of heavier elements, lithium and beryllium. One can calculate that in the hot big bang model about a quarter of the protons and neutrons would have been converted into helium nuclei, along with a small amount of heavy hydrogen and other elements. The remaining neutrons would have decayed into protons, which are the nuclei of ordinary hydrogen atoms. This picture of a hot early stage of the universe was first put forward by the scientist George Gamow in a famous paper written in 1948 with a student of his, Ralph Alpher. Gamow had quite a sense of humor – he persuaded the nuclear scientist Hans Bethe to add his name to the paper to make the list of authors 'Alpher, Bethe, Gamow,' like the first three letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha, beta, gamma: particularly appropriate for a paper on the beginning of the universe! In this paper they made the remarkable prediction that radiation (in the form of photons) from the very hot early stages of the universe should still be around today, but with its temperature reduced to only a few degrees above absolute zero (-273°C). It was this radiation that Penzias and Wilson found in 1965. At the time that Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow wrote their paper, not much was known about the nuclear reactions of protons and neutrons. Predictions made for the proportions of various elements in the early universe were therefore rather inaccurate, but these calculations have been repeated in the light of better knowledge and now agree very well with what we observe. It is, moreover, very difficult to explain in any other way why there should be so much helium in the universe. We are therefore fairly confident that we have the right picture, at least back to about one second after the big bang. Within only a few hours of the big bang, the production of helium and other elements would have stopped. And after that, for the next million years or so, the universe would have just continued expanding, without anything much happening. Eventually, once the temperature had dropped to a few thousand degrees, and electrons and nuclei no longer had enough energy to overcome the electromagnetic attraction between them, they would have started combining to form atoms. The universe as a whole would have continued expanding and cooling, but in regions that were slightly denser than average, the expansion would have been slowed down by the extra gravitational attraction. This would eventually stop expansion in some regions and cause them to start to recollapse. As they were collapsing, the gravitational pull of matter outside these regions might start them rotating slightly. As the collapsing region got smaller, it would spin faster – just as skaters spinning on ice spin faster as they draw in their arms. Eventually, when the region got small enough, it would be spinning fast enough to balance the attraction of gravity, and in this way disklike rotating galaxies were born. Other regions, which did not happen to pick up a rotation, would become oval-shaped objects called elliptical galaxies. In these, the region would stop collapsing because individual parts of the galaxy would be orbiting stably round its center, but the galaxy would have no overall rotation. As time went on, the hydrogen and helium gas in the galaxies would break up into smaller clouds that would collapse under their own gravity. As these contracted, and the atoms within them collided with one another, the temperature of the gas would increase, until eventually it became hot enough to start nuclear fusion reactions. These would convert the hydrogen into more helium, and the heat given off would raise the pressure, and so stop the clouds from contracting any further. They would remain stable in this state for a long time as stars like our sun, burning hydrogen into helium and radiating the resulting energy as heat and light. More massive stars would need to be hotter to balance their stronger gravitational attraction, making the nuclear fusion reactions proceed so much more rapidly that they would use up their hydrogen in as little as a hundred million years. They would then contract slightly, and as they heated up further, would start to convert helium into heavier elements like carbon or oxygen. This, however, would not release much more energy, so a crisis would occur, as was described in the chapter on black holes. What happens next is not completely clear, but it seems likely that the central regions of the star would collapse to a very dense state, such as a neutron star or black hole. The outer regions of the star may sometimes get blown off in a tremendous explosion called a supernova, which would outshine all the other stars in its galaxy. Some of the heavier elements produced near the end of the star's life would be flung back into the gas in the galaxy, and would provide some of the raw material for the next generation of stars. Our own sun contains about 2 percent of these heavier elements because it is a second-or third-generation star, formed some five thousand million years ago out of a cloud of rotating gas containing the debris of earlier supernovas. Most of the gas in that cloud went to form the sun or got blown away, but a small amount of the heavier elements collected together to form the bodies that now orbit the sun as planets like the earth. The earth was initially very hot and without an atmosphere. In the course of time it cooled and acquired an atmosphere from the emission of gases from the rocks. This early atmosphere was not one in which we could have survived. It contained no oxygen, but a lot of other gases that are poisonous to us, such as hydrogen sulfide (the gas that gives rotten eggs their smell). There are, however, other primitive forms of life that can flourish under such conditions. It is thought that they developed in the oceans, possibly as a result of chance combinations of atoms into large structures, called macromolecules, which were capable of assembling other atoms in the ocean into similar structures. They would thus have reproduced themselves and multiplied. In some cases there would be errors in the reproduction. Mostly these errors would have been such that the new macromolecule could not reproduce itself and eventually would have been destroyed. However, a few of the errors would have produced new macromolecules that were even better at reproducing themselves. They would have therefore had an advantage and would have tended to replace the original macromolecules. In this way a process of evolution was started that led to the development of more and more complicated, self-reproducing organisms. The first primitive forms of life consumed various materials, including hydrogen sulfide, and released oxygen. This gradually changed the atmosphere to the composition that it has today, and allowed the development of higher forms of life such as fish, reptiles, mammals, and ultimately the human race. This picture of a universe that started off very hot and cooled as it expanded is in agreement with all the observational evidence that we have today. Nevertheless, it leaves a number of important questions unanswered: (1) Why was the early universe so hot? (2) Why is the universe so uniform on a large scale? Why does it look the same at all points of space and in all directions? In particular, why is the temperature of the microwave background radiation so nearly the same when we look in different directions? It is a bit like asking a number of students an exam question. If they all give exactly the same answer, you can be pretty sure they have communicated with each other. Yet, in the model described above, there would not have been time since the big bang for light to get from one distant region to another, even though the regions were close together in the early universe. According to the theory of relativity, if light cannot get from one region to another, no other information can. So there would be no way in which different regions in the early universe could have come to have the same temperature as each other, unless for some unexplained reason they happened to start out with the same temperature. (3) Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse from those that go on expanding forever, that even now, ten thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical rate? If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size. (4) Despite the fact that the universe is so uniform and homogeneous on a large scale, it contains local irregularities, such as stars and galaxies. These are thought to have developed from small differences in the density of the early universe from one region to another. What was the origin of these density fluctuations? The general theory of relativity, on its own, cannot explain these features or answer these questions because of its prediction that the universe started off with infinite density at the big bang singularity. At the singularity, general relativity and all other physical laws would break down: one couldn't predict what would come out of the singularity. As explained before, this means that one might as well cut the big bang, and any events before it, out of the theory, because they can have no effect on what we observe. Space-time would have a boundary – a beginning at the big bang. Science seems to have uncovered a set of laws that, within the limits set by the uncertainty principle, tell us how the universe will develop with time, if we know its state at any one time. These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it. But how did he choose the initial state or configuration of the universe? What were the 'boundary conditions' at the beginning of time? One possible answer is to say that God chose the initial configuration of the universe for reasons that we cannot hope to understand. This would certainly have been within the power of an omnipotent being, but if he had started it off in such an incomprehensible way, why did he choose to let it evolve according to laws that we could understand? The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired. It would be only natural to suppose that this order should apply not only to the laws, but also to the conditions at the boundary of space-time that specify the initial state of the universe. There may be a large number of models of the universe with different initial conditions that all obey the laws. There ought to be some principle that picks out one initial state, and hence one model, to represent our universe. One such possibility is what are called chaotic boundary conditions. These implicitly assume either that the universe is spatially infinite or that there are infinitely many universes. Under chaotic boundary conditions, the probability of finding any particular region of space in any given configuration just after the big bang is the same, in some sense, as the probability of finding it in any other configuration: the initial state of the universe is chosen purely randomly. This would mean that the early universe would have probably been very chaotic and irregular because there are many more chaotic and disordered configurations for the universe than there are smooth and ordered ones. (If each configuration is equally probable, it is likely that the universe started out in a chaotic and disordered state, simply because there are so many more of them.) It is difficult to see how such chaotic initial conditions could have given rise to a universe that is so smooth and regular on a large scale as ours is today. One would also have expected the density fluctuations in such a model to have led to the formation of many more primordial black holes than the upper limit that has been set by observations of the gamma ray background. If the universe is indeed spatially infinite, or if there are infinitely many universes, there would probably be some large regions somewhere that started out in a smooth and uniform manner. It is a bit like the well-known horde of monkeys hammering away on typewriters – most of what they write will be garbage, but very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare's sonnets. Similarly, in the case of the universe, could it be that we are living in a region that just happens by chance to be smooth and uniform? At first sight this might seem very improbable, because such smooth regions would be heavily outnumbered by chaotic and irregular regions. However, suppose that only in the smooth regions were galaxies and stars formed and were conditions right for the development of complicated self-replicating organisms like ourselves who were capable of asking the question: why is the universe so smooth? This is an example of the application of what is known as the anthropic principle, which can be paraphrased as, 'We see the universe the way it is because we exist.' There are two versions of the anthropic principle, the weak and the strong. The weak anthropic principle states that in a universe that is large or infinite in space and/or time, the conditions necessary for the development of intelligent life will be met only in certain regions that are limited in space and time. The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty. One example of the use of the weak anthropic principle is to 'explain' why the big bang occurred about ten thousand million years ago – it takes about that long for intelligent beings to evolve. As explained above, an early generation of stars first had to form. These stars converted some of the original hydrogen and helium into elements like carbon and oxygen, out of which we are made. The stars then exploded as supernovas, and their debris went to form other stars and planets, among them those of our Solar System, which is about five thousand million years old. The first one or two thousand million years of the earth's existence were too hot for the development of anything complicated. The remaining three thousand million years or so have been taken up by the slow process of biological evolution, which has led from the simplest organisms to beings who are capable of measuring time back to the big bang. Few people would quarrel with the validity or utility of the weak anthropic principle. Some, however, go much further and propose a strong version of the principle. According to this theory, there are either many different universes or many different regions of a single universe, each with its own initial configuration and, perhaps, with its own set of laws of science. In most of these universes the conditions would not be right for the development of complicated organisms; only in the few universes that are like ours would intelligent beings develop and ask the question, 'Why is the universe the way we see it?' The answer is then simple: if it had been different, we would not be here! The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. We cannot, at the moment at least, predict the values of these numbers from theory – we have to find them by observation. It may be that one day we shall discover a complete unified theory that predicts them all, but it is also possible that some or all of them vary from universe to universe or within a single universe. The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. For example, if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different, stars either would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium, or else they would not have exploded. Of course, there might be other forms of intelligent life, not dreamed of even by writers of science fiction, that did not require the light of a star like the sun or the heavier chemical elements that are made in stars and are flung back into space when the stars explode. Nevertheless, it seems clear that there are relatively few ranges of values for the numbers that would allow the development of any form of intelligent life. Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty. One can take this either as evidence of a divine purpose in Creation and the choice of the laws of science or as support for the strong anthropic principle. There are a number of objections that one can raise to the strong anthropic principle as an explanation of the observed state of the universe. First, in what sense can all these different universes be said to exist? If they are really separate from each other, what happens in another universe can have no observable consequences in our own universe. We should therefore use the principle of economy and cut them out of the theory. If, on the other hand, they are just different regions of a single universe, the laws of science would have to be the same in each region, because otherwise one could not move continuously from one region to another. In this case the only difference between the regions would be their initial configurations and so the strong anthropic principle would reduce to the weak one. A second objection to the strong anthropic principle is that it runs against the tide of the whole history of science. We have developed from the geocentric cosmologies of Ptolemy and his forebears, through the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo, to the modern picture in which the earth is a medium-sized planet orbiting around an average star in the outer suburbs of an ordinary spiral galaxy, which is itself only one of about a million million galaxies in the observable universe. Yet the strong anthropic principle would claim that this whole vast construction exists simply for our sake. This is very hard to believe. Our Solar System is certainly a prerequisite for our existence, and one might extend this to the whole of our galaxy to allow for an earlier generation of stars that created the heavier elements. But there does not seem to be any need for all those other galaxies, nor for the universe to be so uniform and similar in every direction on the large scale. One would feel happier about the anthropic principle, at least in its weak version, if one could show that quite a number of different initial configurations for the universe would have evolved to produce a universe like the one we observe. If this is the case, a universe that developed from some sort of random initial conditions should contain a number of regions that are smooth and uniform and are suitable for the evolution of intelligent life. On the other hand, if the initial state of the universe had to be chosen extremely carefully to lead to something like what we see around us, the universe would be unlikely to contain any region in which life would appear. In the hot big bang model described above, there was not enough time in the early universe for heat to have flowed from one region to another. This means that the initial state of the universe would have had to have exactly the same temperature everywhere in order to account for the fact that the microwave background has the same temperature in every direction we look. The initial rate of expansion also would have had to be chosen very precisely for the rate of expansion still to be so close to the critical rate needed to avoid recollapse. This means that the initial state of the universe must have been very carefully chosen indeed if the hot big bang model was correct right back to the beginning of time. It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us. In an attempt to find a model of the universe in which many different initial configurations could have evolved to something like the present universe, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alan Guth, suggested that the early universe might have gone through a period of very rapid expansion. This expansion is said to be 'inflationary,' meaning that the universe at one time expanded at an increasing rate rather than the decreasing rate that it does today. According to Guth, the radius of the universe increased by a million million million million million (1 with thirty zeros after it) times in only a tiny fraction of a second. Guth suggested that the universe started out from the big bang in a very hot, but rather chaotic, state. These high temperatures would have meant that the particles in the universe would be moving very fast and would have high energies. As we discussed earlier, one would expect that at such high temperatures the strong and weak nuclear forces and the electromagnetic force would all be unified into a single force. As the universe expanded, it would cool, and particle energies would go down. Eventually there would be what is called a phase transition and the symmetry between the forces would be broken: the strong force would become different from the weak and electromagnetic forces. One common example of a phase transition is the freezing of water when you cool it down. Liquid water is symmetrical, the same at every point and in every direction. However, when ice crystals form, they will have definite positions and will be lined up in some direction. This breaks water's symmetry. In the case of water, if one is careful, one can 'supercool' it: that is, one can reduce the temperature below the freezing point (0°C) without ice forming. Guth suggested that the universe might behave in a similar way: the temperature might drop below the critical value without the symmetry between the forces being broken. If this happened, the universe would be in an unstable state, with more energy than if the symmetry had been broken. This special extra energy can be shown to have an antigravitational effect: it would have acted just like the cosmological constant that Einstein introduced into general relativity when he was trying to construct a static model of the universe. Since the universe would already be expanding just as in the hot big bang model, the repulsive effect of this cosmological constant would therefore have made the universe expand at an ever-increasing rate. Even in regions where there were more matter particles than average, the gravitational attraction of the matter would have been outweighed by the repulsion of the effective cosmological constant. Thus these regions would also expand in an accelerating inflationary manner. As they expanded and the matter particles got farther apart, one would be left with an expanding universe that contained hardly any particles and was still in the supercooled state. Any irregularities in the universe would simply have been smoothed out by the expansion, as the wrinkles in a balloon are smoothed away when you blow it up. Thus the present smooth and uniform state of the universe could have evolved from many different non-uniform initial states. In such a universe, in which the expansion was accelerated by a cosmological constant rather than slowed down by the gravitational attraction of matter, there would be enough time for light to travel from one region to another in the early universe. This could provide a solution to the problem, raised earlier, of why different regions in the early universe have the same properties. Moreover, the rate of expansion of the universe would automatically become very close to the critical rate determined by the energy density of the universe. This could then explain why the rate of expansion is still so close to the critical rate, without having to assume that the initial rate of expansion of the universe was very carefully chosen. The idea of inflation could also explain why there is so much matter in the universe. There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty zeros after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe. Where did they all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle pairs. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero. Now twice zero is also zero. Thus the universe can double the amount of positive matter energy and also double the negative gravitational energy without violation of the conservation of energy. This does not happen in the normal expansion of the universe in which the matter energy density goes down as the universe gets bigger. It does happen, however, in the inflationary expansion because the energy density of the supercooled state remains constant while the universe expands: when the universe doubles in size, the positive matter energy and the negative gravitational energy both double, so the total energy remains zero. During the inflationary phase, the universe increases its size by a very large amount. Thus the total amount of energy available to make particles becomes very large. As Guth has remarked, 'It is said that there's no such thing as a free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch.' The universe is not expanding in an inflationary way today. Thus there has to be some mechanism that would eliminate the very large effective cosmological constant and so change the rate of expansion from an accelerated one to one that is slowed down by gravity, as we have today. In the inflationary expansion one might expect that eventually the symmetry between the forces would be broken, just as supercooled water always freezes in the end. The extra energy of the unbroken symmetry state would then be released and would reheat the universe to a temperature just below the critical temperature for symmetry between the forces. The universe would then go on to expand and cool just like the hot big bang model, but there would now be an explanation of why the universe was expanding at exactly the critical rate and why different regions had the same temperature. In Guth's original proposal the phase transition was supposed to occur suddenly, rather like the appearance of ice crystals in very cold water. The idea was that 'bubbles' of the new phase of broken symmetry would have formed in the old phase, like bubbles of steam surrounded by boiling water. The bubbles were supposed to expand and meet up with each other until the whole universe was in the new phase. The trouble was, as I and several other people pointed out, that the universe was expanding so fast that even if the bubbles grew at the speed of light, they would be moving away from each other and so could not join up. The universe would be left in a very non-uniform state, with some regions still having symmetry between the different forces. Such a model of the universe would not correspond to what we see. In October 1981, I went to Moscow for a conference on quantum gravity. After the conference I gave a seminar on the inflationary model and its problems at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute. Before this, I had got someone else to give my lectures for me, because most people could not understand my voice. But there was not time to prepare this seminar, so I gave it myself, with one of my graduate students repeating my words. It worked well, and gave me much more contact with my audience. In the audience was a young Russian, Andrei Linde, from the Lebedev Institute in Moscow. He said that the difficulty with the bubbles not joining up could be avoided if the bubbles were so big that our region of the universe is all contained inside a single bubble. In order for this to work, the change from symmetry to broken symmetry must have taken place very slowly inside the bubble, but this is quite possible according to grand unified theories. Linde's idea of a slow breaking of symmetry was very good, but I later realized that his bubbles would have to have been bigger than the size of the universe at the time! I showed that instead the symmetry would have broken everywhere at the same time, rather than just inside bubbles. This would lead to a uniform universe, as we observe. I was very excited by this idea and discussed it with one of my students, Ian Moss. As a friend of Linde's, I was rather embarrassed, however, when I was later sent his paper by a scientific journal and asked whether it was suitable for publication. I replied that there was this flaw about the bubbles being bigger than the universe, but that the basic idea of a slow breaking of symmetry was very good. I recommended that the paper be published as it was because it would take Linde several months to correct it, since anything he sent to the West would have to be passed by Soviet censorship, which was neither very skilful nor very quick with scientific papers. Instead, I wrote a short paper with Ian Moss in the same journal in which we pointed out this problem with the bubble and showed how it could be resolved. The day after I got back from Moscow I set out for Philadelphia, where I was due to receive a medal from the Franklin Institute. My secretary, Judy Fella, had used her not inconsiderable charm to persuade British Airways to give herself and me free seats on a Concorde as a publicity venture. However, I was held up on my way to the airport by heavy rain and I missed the plane. Nevertheless, I got to Philadelphia in the end and received my medal. I was then asked to give a seminar on the inflationary universe at Drexel University in Philadelphia. I gave the same seminar about the problems of the inflationary universe, just as in Moscow. A very similar idea to Linde's was put forth independently a few months later by Paul Steinhardt and Andreas Albrecht of the University of Pennsylvania. They are now given joint credit with Linde for what is called 'the new inflationary model,' based on the idea of a slow breaking of symmetry. (The old inflationary model was Guth's original suggestion of fast symmetry breaking with the formation of bubbles.) The new inflationary model was a good attempt to explain why the universe is the way it is. However, I and several other people showed that, at least in its original form, it predicted much greater variations in the temperature of the microwave background radiation than are observed. Later work has also cast doubt on whether there could be a phase transition in the very early universe of the kind required. In my personal opinion, the new inflationary model is now dead as a scientific theory, although a lot of people do not seem to have heard of its demise and are still writing papers as if it were viable. A better model, called the chaotic inflationary model, was put forward by Linde in 1983. In this there is no phase transition or supercooling. Instead, there is a spin 0 field, which, because of quantum fluctuations, would have large values in some regions of the early universe. The energy of the field in those regions would behave like a cosmological constant. It would have a repulsive gravitational effect, and thus make those regions expand in an inflationary manner. As they expanded, the energy of the field in them would slowly decrease until the inflationary expansion changed to an expansion like that in the hot big bang model. One of these regions would become what we now see as the observable universe. This model has all the advantages of the earlier inflationary models, but it does not depend on a dubious phase transition, and it can moreover give a reasonable size for the fluctuations in the temperature of the microwave background that agrees with observation. This work on inflationary models showed that the present state of the universe could have arisen from quite a large number of different initial configurations. This is important, because it shows that the initial state of the part of the universe that we inhabit did not have to be chosen with great care. So we may, if we wish, use the weak anthropic principle to explain why the universe looks the way it does now. It cannot be the case, however, that every initial configuration would have led to a universe like the one we observe. One can show this by considering a very different state for the universe at the present time, say, a very lumpy and irregular one. One could use the laws of science to evolve the universe back in time to determine its configuration at earlier times. According to the singularity theorems of classical general relativity, there would still have been a big bang singularity. If you evolve such a universe forward in time according to the laws of science, you will end up with the lumpy and irregular state you started with. Thus there must have been initial configurations that would not have given rise to a universe like the one we see today. So even the inflationary model does not tell us why the initial configuration was not such as to produce something very different from what we observe. Must we turn to the anthropic principle for an explanation? Was it all just a lucky chance? That would seem a counsel of despair, a negation of all our hopes of understanding the underlying order of the universe. In order to predict how the universe should have started off, one needs laws that hold at the beginning of time. If the classical theory of general relativity was correct, the singularity theorems that Roger Penrose and I proved show that the beginning of time would have been a point of infinite density and infinite curvature of space-time. All the known laws of science would break down at such a point. One might suppose that there were new laws that held at singularities, but it would be very difficult even to formulate such laws at such badly behaved points, and we would have no guide from observations as to what those laws might be. However, what the singularity theorems really indicate is that the gravitational field becomes so strong that quantum gravitational effects become important: classical theory is no longer a good description of the universe. So one has to use a quantum theory of gravity to discuss the very early stages of the universe. As we shall see, it is possible in the quantum theory for the ordinary laws of science to hold everywhere, including at the beginning of time: it is not necessary to postulate new laws for singularities, because there need not be any singularities in the quantum theory. We don't yet have a complete and consistent theory that combines quantum mechanics and gravity. However, we are fairly certain of some features that such a unified theory should have. One is that it should incorporate Feynman's proposal to formulate quantum theory in terms of a sum over histories. In this approach, a particle does not have just a single history, as it would in a classical theory. Instead, it is supposed to follow every possible path in space-time, and with each of these histories there are associated a couple of numbers, one representing the size of a wave and the other representing its position in the cycle (its phase). The probability that the particle, say, passes through some particular point is found by adding up the waves associated with every possible history that passes through that point. When one actually tries to perform these sums, however, one runs into severe technical problems. The only way around these is the following peculiar prescription: one must add up the waves for particle histories that are not in the 'real' time that you and I experience but take place in what is called imaginary time. Imaginary time may sound like science fiction but it is in fact a well-defined mathematical concept. If we take any ordinary (or 'real') number and multiply it by itself, the result is a positive number. (For example, 2 times 2 is 4, but so is -2 times -2.) There are, however, special numbers (called imaginary numbers) that give negative numbers when multiplied by themselves. (The one called i, when multiplied by itself, gives -1, 2i multiplied by itself gives -4, and so on.) One can picture real and imaginary numbers in the following way. The real numbers can be represented by a line going from left to right, with zero in the middle, negative numbers like -1, -2, etc. on the left, and positive numbers, 1, 2, etc. on the right. Then imaginary numbers are represented by a line going up and down the page, with i, 2i, etc. above the middle, and -i, -2i, etc. below. Thus imaginary numbers are in a sense numbers at right angles to ordinary real numbers. To avoid the technical difficulties with Feynman's sum over histories, one must use imaginary time. That is to say, for the purposes of the calculation one must measure time using imaginary numbers, rather than real ones. This has an interesting effect on space-time: the distinction between time and space disappears completely. A space-time in which events have imaginary values of the time coordinate is said to be Euclidean, after the ancient Greek Euclid, who founded the study of the geometry of two-dimensional surfaces. What we now call Euclidean space-time is very similar except that it has four dimensions instead of two. In Euclidean space-time there is no difference between the time direction and directions in space. On the other hand, in real space-time, in which events are labeled by ordinary, real values of the time coordinate, it is easy to tell the difference – the time direction at all points lies within the light cone, and space directions lie outside. In any case, as far as everyday quantum mechanics is concerned, we may regard our use of imaginary time and Euclidean space-time as merely a mathematical device (or trick) to calculate answers about real space-time. A second feature that we believe must be part of any ultimate theory is Einstein's idea that the gravitational field is represented by curved space-time: particles try to follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, but because space-time is not flat their paths appear to be bent, as if by a gravitational field. When we apply Feynman's sum over histories to Einstein's view of gravity, the analogue of the history of a particle is now a complete curved space-time that represents the history of the whole universe. To avoid the technical difficulties in actually performing the sum over histories, these curved space-times must be taken to be Euclidean. That is, time is imaginary and is indistinguishable from directions in space. To calculate the probability of finding a real space-time with some certain property, such as looking the same at every point and in every direction, one adds up the waves associated with all the histories that have that property. In the classical theory of general relativity, there are many different possible curved space-times, each corresponding to a different initial state of the universe. If we knew the initial state of our universe, we would know its entire history. Similarly, in the quantum theory of gravity, there are many different possible quantum states for the universe. Again, if we knew how the Euclidean curved space-times in the sum over histories behaved at early times, we would know the quantum state of the universe. In the classical theory of gravity, which is based on real space-time, there are only two possible ways the universe can behave: either it has existed for an infinite time, or else it had a beginning at a singularity at some finite time in the past. In the quantum theory of gravity, on the other hand, a third possibility arises. Because one is using Euclidean space-times, in which the time direction is on the same footing as directions in space, it is possible for space-time to be finite in extent and yet to have no singularities that formed a boundary or edge. Space-time would be like the surface of the earth, only with two more dimensions. The surface of the earth is finite in extent but it doesn't have a boundary or edge: if you sail off into the sunset, you don't fall off the edge or run into a singularity. (I know, because I have been round the world!) If Euclidean space-time stretches back to infinite imaginary time, or else starts at a singularity in imaginary time, we have the same problem as in the classical theory of specifying the initial state of the universe: God may know how the universe began, but we cannot give any particular reason for thinking it began one way rather than another. On the other hand, the quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down, and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: 'The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.' The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE. It was at the conference in the Vatican mentioned earlier that I first put forward the suggestion that maybe time and space together formed a surface that was finite in size but did not have any boundary or edge. My paper was rather mathematical, however, so its implications for the role of God in the creation of the universe were not generally recognized at the time (just as well for me). At the time of the Vatican conference, I did not know how to use the 'no boundary' idea to make predictions about the universe. However I spent the following summer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There a friend and colleague of mine, Jim Hartle, worked out with me what conditions the universe must satisfy if space-time had no boundary. When I returned to Cambridge, I continued this work with two of my research students, Julian Luttrel and Jonathan Halliwell. I'd like to emphasize that this idea that time and space should be finite 'without boundary' is just a proposal: it cannot be deduced from some other principle. Like any other scientific theory, it may initially be put forward for aesthetic or metaphysical reasons, but the real test is whether it makes predictions that agree with observation. This, however, is difficult to determine in the case of quantum gravity, for two reasons. First, as will be explained in chapter 11, we are not yet sure exactly which theory successfully combines general relativity and quantum mechanics, though we know quite a lot about the form such a theory must have. Second, any model that described the whole universe in detail would be much too complicated mathematically for us to be able to calculate exact predictions. One therefore has to make simplifying assumptions and approximations – and even then, the problem of extracting predictions remains a formidable one. Each history in the sum over histories will describe not only the space-time but everything in it as well, including any complicated organisms like human beings who can observe the history of the universe. This may provide another justification for the anthropic principle, for if all the histories are possible, then so long as we exist in one of the histories, we may use the anthropic principle to explain why the universe is found to be the way it is. Exactly what meaning can be attached to the other histories, in which we do not exist, is not clear. This view of a quantum theory of gravity would be much more satisfactory, however, if one could show that, using the sum over histories, our universe is not just one of the possible histories but one of the most probable ones. To do this, we must perform the sum over histories for all possible Euclidean space-times that have no boundary. Under the 'no boundary' proposal one learns that the chance of the universe being found to be following most of the possible histories is negligible, but there is a particular family of histories that are much more probable than the others. These histories may be pictured as being like the surface of the earth, with the distance from the North Pole representing imaginary time and the size of a circle of constant distance from the North Pole representing the spatial size of the universe. The universe starts at the North Pole as a single point. As one moves south, the circles of latitude at constant distance from the North Pole get bigger, corresponding to the universe expanding with imaginary time (Fig. 8.1). The universe would reach a maximum size at the equator and would contract with increasing imaginary time to a single point at the South Pole. Even though the universe would have zero size at the North and South Poles, these points would not be singularities, any more than the North and South Poles on the earth are singular. The laws of science will hold at them, just as they do at the North and South Poles on the earth. The history of the universe in real time, however, would look very different. At about ten or twenty thousand million years ago, it would have a minimum size, which was equal to the maximum radius of the history in imaginary time. At later real times, the universe would expand like the chaotic inflationary model proposed by Linde (but one would not now have to assume that the universe was created somehow in the right sort of state). The universe would expand to a very large size and eventually it would collapse again into what looks like a singularity in real time. Thus, in a sense, we are still all doomed, even if we keep away from black holes. Only if we could picture the universe in terms of imaginary time would there be no singularities. If the universe really is in such a quantum state, there would be no singularities in the history of the universe in imaginary time. It might seem therefore that my more recent work had completely undone the results of my earlier work on singularities. But, as indicated above, the real importance of the singularity theorems was that they showed that the gravitational field must become so strong that quantum gravitational effects could not be ignored. This in turn led to the idea that the universe could be finite in imaginary time but without boundaries or singularities. When one goes back to the real time in which we live, however, there will still appear to be singularities. The poor astronaut who falls into a black hole will still come to a sticky end; only if he lived in imaginary time would he encounter no singularities. This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like. But according to the approach I described earlier, a scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations: it exists only in our minds. So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, 'real' or 'imaginary' time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description. One can also use the sum over histories, along with the no boundary proposal, to find which properties of the universe are likely to occur together. For example, one can calculate the probability that the universe is expanding at nearly the same rate in all different directions at a time when the density of the universe has its present value. In the simplified models that have been examined so far, this probability turns out to be high; that is, the proposed no boundary condition leads to the prediction that it is extremely probable that the present rate of expansion of the universe is almost the same in each direction. This is consistent with the observations of the microwave background radiation, which show that it has almost exactly the same intensity in any direction. If the universe were expanding faster in some directions than in others, the intensity of the radiation in those directions would be reduced by an additional red shift. Further predictions of the no boundary condition are currently being worked out. A particularly interesting problem is the size of the small departures from uniform density in the early universe that caused the formation first of the galaxies, then of stars, and finally of us. The uncertainty principle implies that the early universe cannot have been completely uniform because there must have been some uncertainties or fluctuations in the positions and velocities of the particles. Using the no boundary condition, we find that the universe must in fact have started off with just the minimum possible non-uniformity allowed by the uncertainty principle. The universe would have then undergone a period of rapid expansion, as in the inflationary models. During this period, the initial non-uniformities would have been amplified until they were big enough to explain the origin of the structures we observe around us. In 1992 the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE) first detected very slight variations in the intensity of the microwave background with direction. The way these non-uniformities depend on direction seems to agree with the predictions of the inflationary model and the no boundary proposal. Thus the no boundary proposal is a good scientific theory in the sense of Karl Popper: it could have been falsified by observations but instead its predictions have been confirmed. In an expanding universe in which the density of matter varied slightly from place to place, gravity would have caused the denser regions to slow down their expansion and start contracting. This would lead to the formation of galaxies, stars, and eventually even insignificant creatures like ourselves. Thus all the complicated structures that we see in the universe might be explained by the no boundary condition for the universe together with the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started – it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start if off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	THE ARROW OF TIME	In previous chapters we have seen how our views of the nature of time have changed over the years. Up to the beginning of this century people believed in an absolute time. That is, each event could be labeled by a number called 'time' in a unique way, and all good clocks would agree on the time interval between two events. However, the discovery that the speed of light appeared the same to every observer, no matter how he was moving, led to the theory of relativity – and in that one had to abandon the idea that there was a unique absolute time. Instead, each observer would have his own measure of time as recorded by a clock that he carried: clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree. Thus time became a more personal concept, relative to the observer who measured it. When one tried to unify gravity with quantum mechanics, one had to introduce the idea of 'imaginary' time. Imaginary time is indistinguishable from directions in space. If one can go north, one can turn around and head south; equally, if one can go forward in imaginary time, one ought to be able to turn round and go backward. This means that there can be no important difference between the forward and backward directions of imaginary time. On the other hand, when one looks at 'real' time, there's a very big difference between the forward and backward directions, as we all know. Where does this difference between the past and the future come from? Why do we remember the past but not the future? The laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the future. More precisely, as explained earlier, the laws of science are unchanged under the combination of operations (or symmetries) known as C, P, and T. (C means changing particles for antiparticles. P means taking the mirror image, so left and right are interchanged. And T means reversing the direction of motion of all particles: in effect, running the motion backward.) The laws of science that govern the behavior of matter under all normal situations are unchanged under the combination of the two operations C and P on their own. In other words, life would be just the same for the inhabitants of another planet who were both mirror images of us and who were made of antimatter, rather than matter. If the laws of science are unchanged by the combination of operations C and P, and also by the combination C, P, and T, they must also be unchanged under the operation T alone. Yet there is a big difference between the forward and backward directions of real time in ordinary life. Imagine a cup of water falling off a table and breaking into pieces on the floor. If you take a film of this, you can easily tell whether it is being run forward or backward. If you run it backward you will see the pieces suddenly gather themselves together off the floor and jump back to form a whole cup on the table. You can tell that the film is being run backward because this kind of behavior is never observed in ordinary life. If it were, crockery manufacturers would go out of business. The explanation that is usually given as to why we don't see broken cups gathering themselves together off the floor and jumping back onto the table is that it is forbidden by the second law of thermodynamics. This says that in any closed system disorder, or entropy, always increases with time. In other words, it is a form of Murphy's law: things always tend to go wrong! An intact cup on the table is a state of high order, but a broken cup on the floor is a disordered state. One can go readily from the cup on the table in the past to the broken cup on the floor in the future, but not the other way round. The increase of disorder or entropy with time is one example of what is called an arrow of time, something that distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time. There are at least three different arrows of time. First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time, the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases. Then, there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future. Finally, there is the cosmological arrow of time. This is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting. In this chapter I shall argue that the no boundary condition for the universe, together with the weak anthropic principle, can explain why all three arrows point in the same direction – and moreover, why a well-defined arrow of time should exist at all. I shall argue that the psychological arrow is determined by the thermodynamic arrow, and that these two arrows necessarily always point in the same direction. If one assumes the no boundary condition for the universe, we shall see that there must be well-defined thermodynamic and cosmological arrows of time, but they will not point in the same direction for the whole history of the universe. However, I shall argue that it is only when they do point in the same direction that conditions are suitable for the development of intelligent beings who can ask the question: why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands? I shall discuss first the thermodynamic arrow of time. The second law of thermodynamics results from the fact that there are always many more disordered states than there are ordered ones. For example, consider the pieces of a jigsaw in a box. There is one, and only one, arrangement in which the pieces make a complete picture. On the other hand, there are a very large number of arrangements in which the pieces are disordered and don't make a picture. Suppose a system starts out in one of the small number of ordered states. As time goes by, the system will evolve according to the laws of science and its state will change. At a later time, it is more probable that the system will be in a disordered state than in an ordered one because there are more disordered states. Thus disorder will tend to increase with time if the system obeys an initial condition of high order. Suppose the pieces of the jigsaw start off in a box in the ordered arrangement in which they form a picture. If you shake the box, the pieces will take up another arrangement. This will probably be a disordered arrangement in which the pieces don't form a proper picture, simply because there are so many more disordered arrangements. Some groups of pieces may still form parts of the picture, but the more you shake the box, the more likely it is that these groups will get broken up and the pieces will be in a completely jumbled state in which they don't form any sort of picture. So the disorder of the pieces will probably increase with time if the pieces obey the initial condition that they start off in a condition of high order. Suppose, however, that God decided that the universe should finish up in a state of high order but that it didn't matter what state it started in. At early times the universe would probably be in a disordered state. This would mean that disorder would decrease with time. You would see broken cups gathering themselves together and jumping back onto the table. However, any human beings who were observing the cups would be living in a universe in which disorder decreased with time. I shall argue that such beings would have a psychological arrow of time that was backward. That is, they would remember events in the future, and not remember events in their past. When the cup was broken, they would remember it being on the table, but when it was on the table, they would not remember it being on the floor. It is rather difficult to talk about human memory because we don't know how the brain works in detail. We do, however, know all about how computer memories work. I shall therefore discuss the psychological arrow of time for computers. I think it is reasonable to assume that the arrow for computers is the same as that for humans. If it were not, one could make a killing on the stock exchange by having a computer that would remember tomorrow's prices! A computer memory is basically a device containing elements that can exist in either of two states. A simple example is an abacus. In its simplest form, this consists of a number of wires; on each wire there are a number of beads which can be put in one of two positions. Before an item is recorded in a computer's memory, the memory is in a disordered state, with equal probabilities for the two possible states. (The abacus beads are scattered randomly on the wires of the abacus.) After the memory interacts with the system to be remembered, it will definitely be in one state or the other, according to the state of the system. (Each abacus bead will be at either the left or the right of the abacus wire.) So the memory has passed from a disordered state to an ordered one. However, in order to make sure that the memory is in the right state, it is necessary to use a certain amount of energy (to move the bead or to power the computer, for example). This energy is dissipated as heat, and increases the amount of disorder in the universe. One can show that this increase in disorder is always greater than the increase in the order of the memory itself. Thus the heat expelled by the computer's cooling fan means that when a computer records an item in memory, the total amount of disorder in the universe still goes up. The direction of time in which a computer remembers the past is the same as that in which disorder increases. Our subjective sense of the direction of time, the psychological arrow of time, is therefore determined within our brain by the thermodynamic arrow of time. Just like a computer, we must remember things in the order in which entropy increases. This makes the second law of thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. You can't have a safer bet than that! But why should the thermodynamic arrow of time exist at all? Or, in other words, why should the universe be in a state of high order at one end of time, the end that we call the past? Why is it not in a state of complete disorder at all times? After all, this might seem more probable. And why is the direction of time in which disorder increases the same as that in which the universe expands? In the classical theory of general relativity one cannot predict how the universe would have begun because all the known laws of science would have broken down at the big bang singularity. The universe could have started out in a very smooth and ordered state. This would have led to well-defined thermodynamic and cosmological arrows of time, as we observe. But it could equally well have started out in a very lumpy and disordered state. In that case, the universe would already be in a state of complete disorder, so disorder could not increase with time. It would either stay constant, in which case there would be no well-defined thermodynamic arrow of time, or it would decrease, in which case the thermodynamic arrow of time would point in the opposite direction to the cosmological arrow. Neither of these possibilities agrees with what we observe. However, as we have seen, classical general relativity predicts its own downfall. When the curvature of space-time becomes large, quantum gravitational effects will become important and the classical theory will cease to be a good description of the universe. One has to use a quantum theory of gravity to understand how the universe began. In a quantum theory of gravity, as we saw in the last chapter, in order to specify the state of the universe one would still have to say how the possible histories of the universe would behave at the boundary of space-time in the past. One could avoid this difficulty of having to describe what we do not and cannot know only if the histories satisfy the no boundary condition: they are finite in extent but have no boundaries, edges, or singularities. In that case, the beginning of time would be a regular, smooth point of space-time and the universe would have begun its expansion in a very smooth and ordered state. It could not have been completely uniform, because that would violate the uncertainty principle of quantum theory. There had to be small fluctuations in the density and velocities of particles. The no boundary condition, however, implied that these fluctuations were as small as they could be, consistent with the uncertainty principle. The universe would have started off with a period of exponential or 'inflationary' expansion in which it would have increased its size by a very large factor. During this expansion, the density fluctuations would have remained small at first, but later would have started to grow. Regions in which the density was slightly higher than average would have had their expansion slowed down by the gravitational attraction of the extra mass. Eventually, such regions would stop expanding and collapse to form galaxies, stars, and beings like us. The universe would have started in a smooth and ordered state, and would become lumpy and disordered as time went on. This would explain the existence of the thermodynamic arrow of time. But what would happen if and when the universe stopped expanding and began to contract? Would the thermodynamic arrow reverse and disorder begin to decrease with time? This would lead to all sorts of science-fiction-like possibilities for people who survived from the expanding to the contracting phase. Would they see broken cups gathering themselves together off the floor and jumping back onto the table? Would they be able to remember tomorrow's prices and make a fortune on the stock market? It might seem a bit academic to worry about what will happen when the universe collapses again, as it will not start to contract for at least another ten thousand million years. But there is a quicker way to find out what will happen: jump into a black hole. The collapse of a star to form a black hole is rather like the later stages of the collapse of the whole universe. So if disorder were to decrease in the contracting phase of the universe, one might also expect it to decrease inside a black hole. So perhaps an astronaut who fell into a black hole would be able to make money at roulette by remembering where the ball went before he placed his bet. (Unfortunately, however, he would not have long to play before he was turned to spaghetti. Nor would he be able to let us know about the reversal of the thermodynamic arrow, or even bank his winnings, because he would be trapped behind the event horizon of the black hole.) At first, I believed that disorder would decrease when the universe recollapsed. This was because I thought that the universe had to return to a smooth and ordered state when it became small again. This would mean that the contracting phase would be like the time reverse of the expanding phase. People in the contracting phase would live their lives backward: they would die before they were born and get younger as the universe contracted. This idea is attractive because it would mean a nice symmetry between the expanding and contracting phases. However, one cannot adopt it on its own, independent of other ideas about the universe. The question is: is it implied by the no boundary condition, or is it inconsistent with that condition? As I said, I thought at first that the no boundary condition did indeed imply that disorder would decrease in the contracting phase. I was misled partly by the analogy with the surface of the earth. If one took the beginning of the universe to correspond to the North Pole, then the end of the universe should be similar to the beginning, just as the South Pole is similar to the North. However, the North and South Poles correspond to the beginning and end of the universe in imaginary time. The beginning and end in real time can be very different from each other. I was also misled by work I had done on a simple model of the universe in which the collapsing phase looked like the time reverse of the expanding phase. However, a colleague of mine, Don Page, of Penn State University, pointed out that the no boundary condition did not require the contracting phase necessarily to be the time reverse of the expanding phase. Further, one of my students, Raymond Laflamme, found that in a slightly more complicated model, the collapse of the universe was very different from the expansion. I realized that I had made a mistake: the no boundary condition implied that disorder would in fact continue to increase during the contraction. The thermodynamic and psychological arrows of time would not reverse when the universe begins to recontract or inside black holes. What should you do when you find you have made a mistake like that? Some people never admit that they are wrong and continue to find new, and often mutually inconsistent, arguments to support their case – as Eddington did in opposing black hole theory. Others claim to have never really supported the incorrect view in the first place or, if they did, it was only to show that it was inconsistent. It seems to me much better and less confusing if you admit in print that you were wrong. A good example of this was Einstein, who called the cosmological constant, which he introduced when he was trying to make a static model of the universe, the biggest mistake of his life. To return to the arrow of time, there remains the question: why do we observe that the thermodynamic and cosmological arrows point in the same direction? Or in other words, why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands? If one believes that the universe will expand and then contract again, as the no boundary proposal seems to imply, this becomes a question of why we should be in the expanding phase rather than the contracting phase. One can answer this on the basis of the weak anthropic principle. Conditions in the contracting phase would not be suitable for the existence of intelligent beings who could ask the question: why is disorder increasing in the same direction of time as that in which the universe is expanding? The inflation in the early stages of the universe, which the no boundary proposal predicts, means that the universe must be expanding at very close to the critical rate at which it would just avoid recollapse, and so will not recollapse for a very long time. By then all the stars will have burned out and the protons and neutrons in them will probably have decayed into light particles and radiation. The universe would be in a state of almost complete disorder. There would be no strong thermodynamic arrow of time. Disorder couldn't increase much because the universe would be in a state of almost complete disorder already. However, a strong thermodynamic arrow is necessary for intelligent life to operate. In order to survive, human beings have to consume food, which is an ordered form of energy, and convert it into heat, which is a disordered form of energy. Thus intelligent life could not exist in the contracting phase of the universe. This is the explanation of why we observe that the thermodynamic and cosmological arrows of time point in the same direction. It is not that the expansion of the universe causes disorder to increase. Rather, it is that the no boundary condition causes disorder to increase and the conditions to be suitable for intelligent life only in the expanding phase. To summarize, the laws of science do not distinguish between the forward and backward directions of time. However, there are at least three arrows of time that do distinguish the past from the future. They are the thermodynamic arrow, the direction of time in which disorder increases; the psychological arrow, the direction of time in which we remember the past and not the future; and the cosmological arrow, the direction of time in which the universe expands rather than contracts. I have shown that the psychological arrow is essentially the same as the thermodynamic arrow, so that the two would always point in the same direction. The no boundary proposal for the universe predicts the existence of a well-defined thermodynamic arrow of time because the universe must start off in a smooth and ordered state. And the reason we observe this thermodynamic arrow to agree with the cosmological arrow is that intelligent beings can exist only in the expanding phase. The contracting phase will be unsuitable because it has no strong thermodynamic arrow of time. The progress of the human race in understanding the universe has established a small corner of order in an increasingly disordered universe. If you remember every word in this book, your memory will have recorded about two million pieces of information: the order in your brain will have increased by about two million units. However, while you have been reading the book, you will have converted at least a thousand calories of ordered energy, in the form of food, into disordered energy, in the form of heat that you lose to the air around you by convection and sweat. This will increase the disorder of the universe by about twenty million million million million units – or about ten million million million times the increase in order in your brain – and that's if you remember everything in this book. In the next chapter but one I will try to increase the order in our neck of the woods a little further by explaining how people are trying to fit together the partial theories I have described to form a complete unified theory that would cover everything in the universe.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	WORMHOLES AND TIME TRAVEL	The last chapter discussed why we see time go Forward: why disorder increases and why we remember the past but not the future. Time was treated as if it were a straight railway line on which one could only go one way or the other. But what if the railway line had loops and branches so that a train could keep going forward but come back to a station it had already passed? In other words, might it be possible for someone to travel into the future or the past? H. G. Wells in The Time Machine explored these possibilities, as have countless other writers of science fiction. Yet many of the ideas of science fiction, like submarines and travel to the moon, have become matters of science fact. So what are the prospects for time travel? The first indication that the laws of physics might really allow people to travel in time came in 1949 when Kurt Gödel discovered a new space-time allowed by general relativity. Gödel was a mathematician who was famous for proving that it is impossible to prove all true statements, even if you limit yourself to trying to prove all the true statements in a subject as apparently cut and dried as arithmetic. Like the uncertainty principle, Gödel's incompleteness theorem may be a fundamental limitation on our ability to understand and predict the universe, but so far at least it hasn't seemed to be an obstacle in our search for a complete unified theory. Gödel got to know about general relativity when he and Einstein spent their later years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA. His space-time had the curious property that the whole universe was rotating. One might ask: 'Rotating with respect to what?' The answer is that distant matter would be rotating with respect to directions that little tops or gyroscopes point in. This had the side effect that it would be possible for someone to go off in a rocket ship and return to earth before he set out. This property really upset Einstein, who had thought that general relativity wouldn't allow time travel. However, given Einstein's record of ill-founded opposition to gravitational collapse and the uncertainty principle, maybe this was an encouraging sign. The solution Gödel found doesn't correspond to the universe we live in because we can show that the universe is not rotating. It also had a nonzero value of the cosmological constant that Einstein introduced when he thought the universe was unchanging. After Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe, there was no need for a cosmological constant and it is now generally believed to be zero. However, other more reasonable space-times that are allowed by general relativity and which permit travel into the past have since been found. One is in the interior of a rotating black hole. Another is a space-time that contains two cosmic strings moving past each other at high speed. As their name suggests, cosmic strings are objects that are like string in that they have length but a tiny cross section. Actually, they are more like rubber bands because they are under enormous tension, something like a million million million million tons. A cosmic string attached to the earth could accelerate it from 0 to 60 mph in 1/30th of a second. Cosmic strings may sound like pure science fiction but there are reasons to believe they could have formed in the early universe as a result of symmetry-breaking of the kind discussed earlier. Because they would be under enormous tension and could start in any configuration, they might accelerate to very high speeds when they straighten out. The Gödel solution and the cosmic string space-time start out so distorted that travel into the past was always possible. God might have created such a warped universe but we have no reason to believe he did. Observations of the microwave background and of the abundances of the light elements indicate that the early universe did not have the kind of curvature required to allow time travel. The same conclusion follows on theoretical grounds if the no boundary proposal is correct. So the question is: if the universe starts out without the kind of curvature required for time travel, can we subsequently warp local regions of space-time sufficiently to allow it? A closely related problem that is also of concern to writers of science fiction is rapid interstellar or intergalactic travel. According to relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. If we therefore sent a spaceship to our nearest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri, which is about four light-years away, it would take at least eight years before we could expect the travelers to return and tell us what they had found. If the expedition were to the center of our galaxy, it would be at least a hundred thousand years before it came back. The theory of relativity does allow one consolation. This is the so-called twins paradox mentioned earlier. Because there is no unique standard of time, but rather observers each have their own time as measured by clocks that they carry with them, it is possible for the journey to seem to be much shorter for the space travelers than for those who remain on earth. But there would not be much joy in returning from a space voyage a few years older to find that everyone you had left behind was dead and gone thousands of years ago. So in order to have any human interest in their stories, science fiction writers had to suppose that we would one day discover how to travel faster than light. What most of these authors don't seem to have realized is that if you can travel faster than light, the theory of relativity implies you can also travel back in time, as the following limerick says: There was a young lady of Wight Who travelled much faster than light. She departed one day, In a relative way, And arrived on the previous night. The point is that the theory of relativity says that there is no unique measure of time that all observers will agree on. Rather, each observer has his or her own measure of time. If it is possible for a rocket traveling below the speed of light to get from event A (say, the final of the 100-meter race of the Olympic Games in 2012) to event B (say, the opening of 100,004th meeting of the Congress of Alpha Centauri), then all observers will agree that event A happened before event B according to their times. Suppose, however, that the spaceship would have to travel faster than light to carry the news of the race to the Congress. Then observers moving at different speeds can disagree about whether event A occurred before B or vice versa. According to the time of an observer who is at rest with respect to the earth, it may be that the Congress opened after the race. Thus this observer would think that a spaceship could get from A to B in time if only it could ignore the speed-of-light speed limit. However, to an observer at Alpha Centauri moving away from the earth at nearly the speed of light, it would appear that event B, the opening of the Congress, would occur before event A, the 100-meter race. The theory of relativity says that the laws of physics appear the same to observers moving at different speeds. This has been well tested by experiment and is likely to remain a feature even if we find a more advanced theory to replace relativity. Thus the moving observer would say that if faster-than-light travel is possible, it should be possible to get from event B, the opening of the Congress, to event A, the 100-meter race. If one went slightly faster, one could even get back before the race and place a bet on it in the sure knowledge that one would win. There is a problem with breaking the speed-of-light barrier. The theory of relativity says that the rocket power needed to accelerate a spaceship gets greater and greater the nearer it gets to the speed of light. We have experimental evidence for this, not with spaceships but with elementary particles in particle accelerators like those at Fermilab or CERN. We can accelerate particles to 99.99 percent of the speed of light, but however much power we feed in, we can't get them beyond the speed-of-light-barrier. Similarly with spaceships: no matter how much rocket power they have, they can't accelerate beyond the speed of light. That might seem to rule out both rapid space travel and travel back in time. However, there is a possible way out. It might be that one could warp space-time so that there was a shortcut between A and B. One way of doing this would be to create a wormhole between A and B. As its name suggests, a wormhole is a thin tube of space-time which can connect two nearly flat regions far apart. There need be no relation between the distance through the wormhole and the separation of its ends in the nearly flat background. Thus one could imagine that one could create or find a wormhole that would lead from the vicinity of the solar system to Alpha Centauri. The distance through the wormhole might be only a few million miles even though earth and Alpha Centauri are twenty million million miles apart in ordinary space. This would allow news of the 100-meter race to reach the opening of the Congress. But then an observer moving toward the earth should also be able to find another wormhole that would enable him to get from the opening of the Congress on Alpha Centauri back to earth before the start of the race. So wormholes, like any other possible form of travel faster than light, would allow one to travel into the past. The idea of wormholes between different regions of space-time was not an invention of science fiction writers but came from a very respectable source. In 1935, Einstein and Nathan Rosen wrote a paper in which they showed that general relativity allowed what they called 'bridges,' but which are now known as wormholes. The Einstein-Rosen bridges didn't last long enough for a spaceship to get through: the ship would run into a singularity as the wormhole pinched off. However, it has been suggested that it might be possible for an advanced civilization to keep a wormhole open. To do this, or to warp space-time in any other way so as to permit time travel, one can show that one needs a region of space-time with negative curvature, like the surface of a saddle. Ordinary matter, which has a positive energy density, gives space-time a positive curvature, like the surface of a sphere. So what one needs, in order to warp space-time in a way that will allow travel into the past, is matter with negative energy density. Energy is a bit like money: if you have a positive balance, you can distribute it in various ways, but according to the classical laws that were believed at the beginning of the century, you weren't allowed to be overdrawn. So these classical laws would have ruled out any possibility of time travel. However, as has been described in earlier chapters, the classical laws were superseded by quantum laws based on the uncertainty principle. The quantum laws are more liberal and allow you to be overdrawn on one or two accounts provided the total balance is positive. In other words, quantum theory allows the energy density to be negative in some places, provided that this is made up for by positive energy densities in other places, so that the total energy remains positive. An example of how quantum theory can allow negative energy densities is provided by what is called the Casimir effect. Even what we think of as 'empty' space is filled with pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles that appear together, move apart, and come back together and annihilate each other. Now, suppose one has two parallel metal plates a short distance apart. The plates will act like mirrors for the virtual photons or particles of light. In fact they will form a cavity between them, a bit like an organ pipe that will resonate only at certain notes. This means that virtual photons can occur in the space between the plates only if their wavelengths (the distance between the crest of one wave and the next) fit a whole number of times into the gap between the plates. If the width of a cavity is a whole number of wavelengths plus a fraction of a wavelength, then after some reflections backward and forward between the plates, the crests of one wave will coincide with the troughs of another and the waves will cancel out. Because the virtual photons between the plates can have only the resonant wavelengths, there will be slightly fewer of them than in the region outside the plates where virtual photons can have any wavelength. Thus there will be slightly fewer virtual photons hitting the inside surfaces of the plates than the outside surfaces. One would therefore expect a force on the plates, pushing them toward each other. This force has actually been detected and has the predicted value. Thus we have experimental evidence that virtual particles exist and have real effects. The fact that there are fewer virtual photons between the plates means that their energy density will be less than elsewhere. But the total energy density in 'empty' space far away from the plates must be zero, because otherwise the energy density would warp the space and it would not be almost flat. So, if the energy density between the plates is less than the energy density far away, it must be negative. We thus have experimental evidence both that space-time can be warped (from the bending of light during eclipses) and that it can be curved in the way necessary to allow time travel (from the Casimir effect). One might hope therefore that as we advance in science and technology, we would eventually manage to build a time machine. But if so, why hasn't anyone come back from the future and told us how to do it? There might be good reasons why it would be unwise to give us the secret of time travel at our present primitive state of development, but unless human nature changes radically, it is difficult to believe that some visitor from the future wouldn't spill the beans. Of course, some people would claim that sightings of UFOs are evidence that we are being visited either by aliens or by people from the future. (If the aliens were to get here in reasonable time, they would need faster-than-light travel, so the two possibilities may be equivalent.) However, I think that any visit by aliens or people from the future would be much more obvious and, probably, much more unpleasant. If they are going to reveal themselves at all, why do so only to those who are not regarded as reliable witnesses? If they are trying to warn us of some great danger, they are not being very effective. A possible way to explain the absence of visitors from the future would be to say that the past is fixed because we have observed it and seen that it does not have the kind of warping needed to allow travel back from the future. On the other hand, the future is unknown and open, so it might well have the curvature required. This would mean that any time travel would be confined to the future. There would be no chance of Captain Kirk and the Starship Enterprise turning up at the present time. This might explain why we have not yet been overrun by tourists from the future, but it would not avoid the problems that would arise if one were able to go back and change history. Suppose, for example, you went back and killed your great great grandfather while he was still a child. There are many versions of this paradox but they are essentially equivalent: one would get contradictions if one were free to change the past. There seem to be two possible resolutions to the paradoxes posed by time travel. One I shall call the consistent histories approach. It says that even if space-time is warped so that it would be possible to travel into the past, what happens in space-time must be a consistent solution of the laws of physics. According to this viewpoint, you could not go back in time unless history showed that you had already arrived in the past and, while there, had not killed your great great grandfather or committed any other acts that would conflict with your current situation in the present. Moreover, when you did go back, you wouldn't be able to change recorded history. That means you wouldn't have free will to do what you wanted. Of course, one could say that free will is an illusion anyway. If there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can't predict what they will do. However, if the human then goes off in a rocket ship and comes back before he or she set off, we will be able to predict what he or she will do because it will be part of recorded history. Thus, in that situation, the time traveler would have no free will. The other possible way to resolve the paradoxes of time travel might be called the alternative histories hypothesis. The idea here is that when time travelers go back to the past, they enter alternative histories which differ from recorded history. Thus they can act freely, without the constraint of consistency with their previous history. Steven Spielberg had fun with this notion in the Back to the Future films: Marty McFly was able to go back and change his parent's courtship to a more satisfactory history. The alternative histories hypothesis sounds rather like Richard Feynman's way of expressing quantum theory as a sum over histories, which was described in Chapters 4 and 8. This said that the universe didn't just have a single history: rather it had every possible history, each with its own probability. However, there seems to be an important difference between Feynman's proposal and alternative histories. In Feynman's sum, each history comprises a complete space-time and everything in it. The space-time may be so warped that it is possible to travel in a rocket into the past. But the rocket would remain in the same space-time and therefore the same history, which would have to be consistent. Thus Feynman's sum over histories proposal seems to support the consistent histories hypothesis rather than the alternative histories. The Feynman sum over histories does allow travel into the past on a microscopic scale. We saw that the laws of science are unchanged by combinations of the operations C, P, and T. This means that an antiparticle spinning in the anticlockwise direction and moving from A to B can also be viewed as an ordinary particle spinning clockwise and moving backward in time from B to A. Similarly, an ordinary particle moving forward in time is equivalent to an antiparticle moving backward in time. As has been discussed earlier, 'empty' space is filled with pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles that appear together, move apart, and then come back together and annihilate each other. So, one can regard the pair of particles as a single particle moving on a closed loop in space-time. When the pair is moving forward in time (from the event at which it appears to that at which it annihilates), it is called a particle. But when the particle is traveling back in time (from the event at which the pair annihilates to that at which it appears), it is said to be an antiparticle traveling forward in time. The explanation of how black holes can emit particles and radiation was that one member of a virtual particle/antiparticle pair (say, the antiparticle) might fall into the black hole, leaving the other member without a partner with which to annihilate. The forsaken particle might fall into the hole as well, but it might also escape from the vicinity of the black hole. If so, to an observer at a distance it would appear to be a particle emitted by the black hole. One can, however, have a different but equivalent intuitive picture of the mechanism for emission from black holes. One can regard the member of the virtual pair that fell into the black hole (say, the antiparticle) as a particle traveling backward in time out of the hole. When it gets to the point at which the virtual particle/antiparticle pair appeared together, it is scattered by the gravitational field into a particle traveling forward in time and escaping from the black hole. If, instead, it were the particle member of the virtual pair that fell into the hole, one could regard it as an antiparticle traveling back in time and coming out of the black hole. Thus the radiation by black holes shows that quantum theory allows travel back in time on a microscopic scale and that such time travel can produce observable effects. One can therefore ask: does quantum theory allow time travel on a macroscopic scale, which people could use? At first sight, it seems it should. The Feynman sum over histories proposal is supposed to be over all histories. Thus it should include histories in which space-time is so warped that it is possible to travel into the past. Why then aren't we in trouble with history? Suppose, for example, someone had gone back and given the Nazis the secret of the atom bomb? One would avoid these problems if what I call the chronology protection conjecture holds. This says that the laws of physics conspire to prevent macroscopic bodies from carrying information into the past. Like the cosmic censorship conjecture, it has not been proved but there are reasons to believe it is true. The reason to believe that chronology protection operates is that when space-time is warped enough to make travel into the past possible, virtual particles moving on closed loops in space-time can become real particles traveling forward in time at or below the speed of light. As these particles can go round the loop any number of times, they pass each point on their route many times. Thus their energy is counted over and over again and the energy density will become very large. This could give space-time a positive curvature which would not allow travel into the past. It is not yet clear whether these particles would cause positive or negative curvature or whether the curvature produced by some kinds of virtual particles might cancel that produced by other kinds. Thus the possibility of time travel remains open. But I'm not going to bet on it. My opponent might have the unfair advantage of knowing the future.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	THE UNIFICATION OF PHYSICS	As was explained in the first chapter, it would be very difficult to construct a complete unified theory of everything in the universe all at one go. So instead we have made progress by finding partial theories that describe a limited range of happenings and by neglecting other effects or approximating them by certain numbers. (Chemistry, for example, allows us to calculate the interactions of atoms, without knowing the internal structure of an atom's nucleus.) Ultimately, however, one would hope to find a complete, consistent, unified theory that would include all these partial theories as approximations, and that did not need to be adjusted to fit the facts by picking the values of certain arbitrary numbers in the theory. The quest for such a theory is known as 'the unification of physics.' Einstein spent most of his later years unsuccessfully searching for a unified theory, but the time was not ripe: there were partial theories for gravity and the electromagnetic force, but very little was known about the nuclear forces. Moreover, Einstein refused to believe in the reality of quantum mechanics, despite the important role he had played in its development. Yet it seems that the uncertainty principle is a fundamental feature of the universe we live in. A successful unified theory must, therefore, necessarily incorporate this principle. As I shall describe, the prospects for finding such a theory seem to be much better now because we know so much more about the universe. But we must beware of overconfidence – we have had false dawns before! At the beginning of this century, for example, it was thought that everything could be explained in terms of the properties of continuous matter, such as elasticity and heat conduction. The discovery of atomic structure and the uncertainty principle put an emphatic end to that. Then again, in 1928, physicist and Nobel prize winner Max Born told a group of visitors to Göttingen University, 'Physics, as we know it, will be over in six months.' His confidence was based on the recent discovery by Dirac of the equation that governed the electron. It was thought that a similar equation would govern the proton, which was the only other particle known at the time, and that would be the end of theoretical physics. However, the discovery of the neutron and of nuclear forces knocked that one on the head too. Having said this, I still believe there are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature. In previous chapters I have described general relativity, the partial theory of gravity, and the partial theories that govern the weak, the strong, and the electromagnetic forces. The last three may be combined in so-called grand unified theories, or GUTs, which are not very satisfactory because they do not include gravity and because they contain a number of quantities, like the relative masses of different particles, that cannot be predicted from the theory but have to be chosen to fit observations. The main difficulty in finding a theory that unifies gravity with the other forces is that general relativity is a 'classical' theory; that is, it does not incorporate the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. On the other hand, the other partial theories depend on quantum mechanics in an essential way. A necessary first step, therefore, is to combine general relativity with the uncertainty principle. As we have seen, this can produce some remarkable consequences, such as black holes not being black, and the universe not having any singularities but being completely self-contained and without a boundary. The trouble is, as explained earlier, that the uncertainty principle means that even 'empty' space is filled with pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles. These pairs would have an infinite amount of energy and, therefore, by Einstein's famous equation E = mc2, they would have an infinite amount of mass. Their gravitational attraction would thus curve up the universe to infinitely small size. Rather similar, seemingly absurd infinities occur in the other partial theories, but in all these cases the infinities can be canceled out by a process called renormalization. This involves canceling the infinities by introducing other infinities. Although this technique is rather dubious mathematically, it does seem to work in practice, and has been used with these theories to make predictions that agree with observations to an extraordinary degree of accuracy. Renormalization, however, does have a serious drawback from the point of view of trying to find a complete theory, because it means that the actual values of the masses and the strengths of the forces cannot be predicted from the theory, but have to be chosen to fit the observations. In attempting to incorporate the uncertainty principle into general relativity, one has only two quantities that can be adjusted: the strength of gravity and the value of the cosmological constant. But adjusting these is not sufficient to remove all the infinities. One therefore has a theory that seems to predict that certain quantities, such as the curvature of space-time, are really infinite, yet these quantities can be observed and measured to be perfectly finite! This problem in combining general relativity and the uncertainty principle had been suspected for some time, but was finally confirmed by detailed calculations in 1972. Four years later, a possible solution, called 'supergravity,' was suggested. The idea was to combine the spin-2 particle called the graviton, which carries the gravitational force, with certain other particles of spin 3/2, 1, 1/2, and 0. In a sense, all these particles could then be regarded as different aspects of the same 'super-particle,' thus unifying the matter particles with spin 1/2 and 3/2 with the force-carrying particles of spin 0, 1, and 2. The virtual particle/antiparticle pairs of spin 1/2 and 3/2 would have negative energy, and so would tend to cancel out the positive energy of the spin 2, 1, and 0 virtual pairs. This would cause many of the possible infinities to cancel out, but it was suspected that some infinities might still remain. However, the calculations required to find out whether or not there were any infinities left uncanceled were so long and difficult that no one was prepared to undertake them. Even with a computer it was reckoned it would take at least four years, and the chances were very high that one would make at least one mistake, probably more. So one would know one had the right answer only if someone else repeated the calculation and got the same answer, and that did not seem very likely! Despite these problems, and the fact that the particles in the supergravity theories did not seem to match the observed particles, most scientists believed that supergravity was probably the right answer to the problem of the unification of physics. It seemed the best way of unifying gravity with the other forces. However, in 1984 there was a remarkable change of opinion in favor of what are called string theories. In these theories the basic objects are not particles, which occupy a single point of space, but things that have a length but no other dimension, like an infinitely thin piece of string. These strings may have ends (the so-called open strings) or they may be joined up with themselves in closed loops (closed strings) (Fig. 11.1 and Fig. 11.2). A particle occupies one point of space at each instant of time. Thus its history can be represented by a line in space-time (the 'world-line'). A string, on the other hand, occupies a line in space at each moment of time. So its history in space-time is a two-dimensional surface called the world-sheet. (Any point on such a world-sheet can be described by two numbers, one specifying the time and the other the position of the point on the string.) The world-sheet of an open string is a strip: its edges represent the paths through space-time of the ends of the string (Fig. 11.1). The world-sheet of a closed string is a cylinder or tube (Fig. 11.2): a slice through the tube is a circle, which represents the position of the string at one particular time. Two pieces of string can join together to form a single string; in the case of open strings they simply join at the ends (Fig. 11.3), while in the case of closed strings it is like the two legs joining on a pair of trousers (Fig. 11.4). Similarly, a single piece of string can divide into two strings. In string theories, what were previously thought of as particles are now pictured as waves traveling down the string, like waves on a vibrating kite string. The emission or absorption of one particle by another corresponds to the dividing or joining together of strings. For example, the gravitational force of the sun on the earth was pictured in particle theories as being caused by the emission of a graviton by a particle in the sun and its absorption by a particle in the earth (Fig. 11.5). In string theory, this process corresponds to an H-shaped tube or pipe (Fig. 11.6) (string theory is rather like plumbing, in a way). The two vertical sides of the H correspond to the particles in the sun and the earth and the horizontal crossbar corresponds to the graviton that travels between them. String theory has a curious history. It was originally invented in the late 1960s in an attempt to find a theory to describe the strong force. The idea was that particles like the proton and the neutron could be regarded as waves on a string. The strong forces between the particles would correspond to pieces of string that went between other bits of string, as in a spider's web. For this theory to give the observed value of the strong force between particles, the strings had to be like rubber bands with a pull of about ten tons. In 1974 Joël Scherk from Paris and John Schwarz from the California Institute of Technology published a paper in which they showed that string theory could describe the gravitational force, but only if the tension in the string were very much higher, about a thousand million million million million million million tons (1 with thirty-nine zeros after it). The predictions of the string theory would be just the same as those of general relativity on normal length scales, but they would differ at very small distances, less than a thousand million million million million millionth of a centimeter (a centimeter divided by 1 with thirty-three zeros after it). Their work did not receive much attention, however, because at just about that time most people abandoned the original string theory of the strong force in favor of the theory based on quarks and gluons, which seemed to fit much better with observations. Scherk died in tragic circumstances (he suffered from diabetes and went into a coma when no one was around to give him an injection of insulin). So Schwarz was left alone as almost the only supporter of string theory, but now with the much higher proposed value of the string tension. In 1984 interest in strings suddenly revived, apparently for two reasons. One was that people were not really making much progress toward showing that supergravity was finite or that it could explain the kinds of particles that we observe. The other was the publication of a paper by John Schwarz and Mike Green of Queen Mary College, London, that showed that string theory might be able to explain the existence of particles that have a built-in left-handedness, like some of the particles that we observe. Whatever the reasons, a large number of people soon began to work on string theory and a new version was developed, the so-called heterotic string, which seemed as if it might be able to explain the types of particles that we observe. String theories also lead to infinities, but it is thought they will all cancel out in versions like the heterotic string (though this is not yet known for certain). String theories, however, have a bigger problem: they seem to be consistent only if space-time has either ten or twenty-six dimensions, instead of the usual four! Of course, extra space-time dimensions are a commonplace of science fiction, indeed, they provide an ideal way of overcoming the normal restriction of general relativity that one cannot travel faster than light or back in time. The idea is to take a shortcut through the extra dimensions. One can picture this in the following way. Imagine that the space we live in has only two dimensions and is curved like the surface of an anchor ring or torus (Fig. 11.7). If you were on one side of the inside edge of the ring and you wanted to get to a point on the other side, you would have to go round the inner edge of the ring. However, if you were able to travel in the third dimension, you could cut straight across. Why don't we notice all these extra dimensions, if they are really there? Why do we see only three space dimensions and one time dimension? The suggestion is that the other dimensions are curved up into a space of very small size, something like a million million million million millionth of an inch. This is so small that we just don't notice it: we see only one time dimension and three space dimensions, in which space-time is fairly flat. It is like the surface of a straw. If you look at it closely, you see it is two-dimensional (the position of a point on the straw is described by two numbers, the length along the straw and the distance round the circular direction). But if you look at it from a distance, you don't see the thickness of the straw and it looks one-dimensional (the position of a point is specified only by the length along the straw). So it is with space-time: on a very small scale it is ten-dimensional and highly curved, but on bigger scales you don't see the curvature or the extra dimensions. If this picture is correct, it spells bad news for would-be space travelers: the extra dimensions would be far too small to allow a spaceship through. However, it raises another major problem. Why should some, but not all, of the dimensions be curled up into a small ball? Presumably, in the very early universe all the dimensions would have been very curved. Why did one time dimension and three space dimensions flatten out, while the other dimensions remain tightly curled up? One possible answer is the anthropic principle. Two space dimensions do not seem to be enough to allow for the development of complicated beings like us. For example, two-dimensional animals living on a one-dimensional earth would have to climb over each other in order to get past each other. If a two-dimensional creature ate something it could not digest completely, it would have to bring up the remains the same way it swallowed them, because if there were a passage right through its body, it would divide the creature into two separate halves: our two-dimensional being would fall apart (Fig. 11.8). Similarly, it is difficult to see how there could be any circulation of the blood in a two-dimensional creature. There would also be problems with more than three space dimensions. The gravitational force between two bodies would decrease more rapidly with distance than it does in three dimensions. (In three dimensions, the gravitational force drops to 1/4 if one doubles the distance. In four dimensions it would drop to 1/8, in five dimensions to 1/16 and so on.) The significance of this is that the orbits of planets, like the earth, around the sun would be unstable: the least disturbance from a circular orbit (such as would be caused by the gravitational attraction of other planets) would result in the earth spiraling away from or into the sun. We would either freeze or be burned up. In fact, the same behavior of gravity with distance in more than three space dimensions means that the sun would not be able to exist in a stable state with pressure balancing gravity. It would either fall apart or it would collapse to form a black hole. In either case, it would not be of much use as a source of heat and light for life on earth. On a smaller scale, the electrical forces that cause the electrons to orbit round the nucleus in an atom would behave in the same way as gravitational forces. Thus the electrons would either escape from the atom altogether or would spiral into the nucleus. In either case, one could not have atoms as we know them. It seems clear then that life, at least as we know it, can exist only in regions of space-time in which one time dimension and three space dimensions are not curled up small. This would mean that one could appeal to the weak anthropic principle, provided one could show that string theory does at least allow there to be such regions of the universe – and it seems that indeed string theory does. There may well be other regions of the universe, or other universes (whatever that may mean), in which all the dimensions are curled up small or in which more than four dimensions are nearly flat, but there would be no intelligent beings in such regions to observe the different number of effective dimensions. Another problem is that there are at least four different string theories (open strings and three different closed string theories) and millions of ways in which the extra dimensions predicted by string theory could be curled up. Why should just one string theory and one kind of curling up be picked out? For a time there seemed no answer, and progress got bogged down. Then, from about 1994, people started discovering what are called dualities: different string theories and different ways of curling up the extra dimensions could lead to the same results in four dimensions. Moreover, as well as particles, which occupy a single point of space, and strings, which are lines, there were found to be other objects called p-branes, which occupied two-dimensional or higher-dimensional volumes in space. (A particle can be regarded as a 0-brane and a string as a 1-brane but there were also p-branes for p=2 to p=9.) What this seems to indicate is that there is a sort of democracy among supergravity, string, and p-brane theories: they seem to fit together but none can be said to be more fundamental than the others. They appear to be different approximations to some fundamental theory that are valid in different situations. People have searched for this underlying theory, but without any success so far. However, I believe there may not be any single formulation of the fundamental theory any more than, as Gödel showed, one could formulate arithmetic in terms of a single set of axioms. Instead it may be like maps – you can't use a single map to describe the surface of the earth or an anchor ring: you need at least two maps in the case of the earth and four for the anchor ring to cover every point. Each map is valid only in a limited region, but different maps will have a region of overlap. The collection of maps provides a complete description of the surface. Similarly, in physics it may be necessary to use different formulations in different situations, but two different formulations would agree in situations where they can both be applied. The whole collection of different formulations could be regarded as a complete unified theory, though one that could not be expressed in terms of a single set of postulates. But can there really be such a unified theory? Or are we perhaps just chasing a mirage? There seem to be three possibilities: 1) There really is a complete unified theory (or a collection of overlapping formulations), which we will someday discover if we are smart enough. 2) There is no ultimate theory of the universe, just an infinite sequence of theories that describe the universe more and more accurately. 3) There is no theory of the universe: events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent but occur in a random and arbitrary manner. Some would argue for the third possibility on the grounds that if there were a complete set of laws, that would infringe on God's freedom to change his mind and intervene in the world. It's a bit like the old paradox: can God make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it? But the idea that God might want to change his mind is an example of the fallacy, pointed out by St Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time: time is a property only of the universe that God created. Presumably, he knew what he intended when he set it up! With the advent of quantum mechanics, we have come to recognize that events cannot be predicted with complete accuracy but that there is always a degree of uncertainty. If one likes, one could ascribe this randomness to the intervention of God, but it would be a very strange kind of intervention: there is no evidence that it is directed toward any purpose. Indeed, if it were, it would by definition not be random. In modern times, we have effectively removed the third possibility above by redefining the goal of science: our aim is to formulate a set of laws that enables us to predict events only up to the limit set by the uncertainty principle. The second possibility, that there is an infinite sequence of more and more refined theories, is in agreement with all our experience so far. On many occasions we have increased the sensitivity of our measurements or made a new class of observations, only to discover new phenomena that were not predicted by the existing theory, and to account for these we have had to develop a more advanced theory. It would therefore not be very surprising if the present generation of grand unified theories was wrong in claiming that nothing essentially new will happen between the electroweak unification energy of about 100 GeV and the grand unification energy of about a thousand million million GeV. We might indeed expect to find several new layers of structure more basic than the quarks and electrons that we now regard as 'elementary' particles. However, it seems that gravity may provide a limit to this sequence of 'boxes within boxes.' If one had a particle with an energy above what is called the Planck energy, ten million million million GeV (1 followed by nineteen zeros), its mass would be so concentrated that it would cut itself off from the rest of the universe and form a little black hole. Thus it does seem that the sequence of more and more refined theories should have some limit as we go to higher and higher energies, so that there should be some ultimate theory of the universe. Of course, the Planck energy is a very long way from the energies of around a hundred GeV, which are the most that we can produce in the laboratory at the present time. We shall not bridge that gap with particle accelerators in the foreseeable future! The very early stages of the universe, however, are an arena where such energies must have occurred. I think that there is a good chance that the study of the early universe and the requirements of mathematical consistency will lead us to a complete unified theory within the lifetime of some of us who are around today, always presuming we don't blow ourselves up first. What would it mean if we actually did discover the ultimate theory of the universe? As was explained earlier, we could never be quite sure that we had indeed found the correct theory, since theories can't be proved. But if the theory was mathematically consistent and always gave predictions that agreed with observations, we could be reasonably confident that it was the right one. It would bring to an end a long and glorious chapter in the history of humanity's intellectual struggle to understand the universe. But it would also revolutionize the ordinary person's understanding of the laws that govern the universe. In Newton's time it was possible for an educated person to have a grasp of the whole of human knowledge, at least in outline. But since then, the pace of the development of science has made this impossible. Because theories are always being changed to account for new observations, they are never properly digested or simplified so that ordinary people can understand them. You have to be a specialist, and even then you can only hope to have a proper grasp of a small proportion of the scientific theories. Further, the rate of progress is so rapid that what one learns at school or university is always a bit out of date. Only a few people can keep up with the rapidly advancing frontier of knowledge, and they have to devote their whole time to it and specialize in a small area. The rest of the population has little idea of the advances that are being made or the excitement they are generating. Seventy years ago, if Eddington is to be believed, only two people understood the general theory of relativity. Nowadays tens of thousands of university graduates do, and many millions of people are at least familiar with the idea. If a complete unified theory was discovered, it would only be a matter of time before it was digested and simplified in the same way and taught in schools, at least in outline. We would then all be able to have some understanding of the laws that govern the universe and are responsible for our existence. Even if we do discover a complete unified theory, it would not mean that we would be able to predict events in general, for two reasons. The first is the limitation that the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics sets on our powers of prediction. There is nothing we can do to get around that. In practice, however, this first limitation is less restrictive than the second one. It arises from the fact that we could not solve the equations of the theory exactly, except in very simple situations. (We cannot even solve exactly for the motion of three bodies in Newton's theory of gravity, and the difficulty increases with the number of bodies and the complexity of the theory.) We already know the laws that govern the behavior of matter under all but the most extreme conditions. In particular, we know the basic laws that underlie all of chemistry and biology. Yet we have certainly not reduced these subjects to the status of solved problems: we have, as yet, had little success in predicting human behavior from mathematical equations! So even if we do find a complete set of basic laws, there will still be in the years ahead the intellectually challenging task of developing better approximation methods, so that we can make useful predictions of the probable outcomes in complicated and realistic situations. A complete, consistent, unified theory is only the first step: our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	CONCLUSION	We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: what is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is? To try to answer these questions we adopt some 'world picture.' Just as an infinite tower of tortoises supporting the flat earth is such a picture, so is the theory of superstrings. Both are theories of the universe, though the latter is much more mathematical and precise than the former. Both theories lack observational evidence: no one has ever seen a giant tortoise with the earth on its back, but then, no one has seen a superstring either. However, the tortoise theory fails to be a good scientific theory because it predicts that people should be able to fall off the edge of the world. This has not been found to agree with experience, unless that turns out to be the explanation for the people who are supposed to have disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle! The earliest theoretical attempts to describe and explain the universe involved the idea that events and natural phenomena were controlled by spirits with human emotions who acted in a very humanlike and unpredictable manner. These spirits inhabited natural objects, like rivers and mountains, including celestial bodies, like the sun and moon. They had to be placated and their favors sought in order to ensure the fertility of the soil and the rotation of the seasons. Gradually, however, it must have been noticed that there were certain regularities: the sun always rose in the east and set in the west, whether or not a sacrifice had been made to the sun god. Further, the sun, the moon, and the planets followed precise paths across the sky that could be predicted in advance with considerable accuracy. The sun and the moon might still be gods, but they were gods who obeyed strict laws, apparently without any exceptions, if one discounts stories like that of the sun stopping for Joshua. At first, these regularities and laws were obvious only in astronomy and a few other situations. However, as civilization developed, and particularly in the last 300 years, more and more regularities and laws were discovered. The success of these laws led Laplace at the beginning of the nineteenth century to postulate scientific determinism; that is, he suggested that there would be a set of laws that would determine the evolution of the universe precisely, given its configuration at one time. Laplace's determinism was incomplete in two ways. It did not say how the laws should be chosen and it did not specify the initial configuration of the universe. These were left to God. God would choose how the universe began and what laws it obeyed, but he would not intervene in the universe once it had started. In effect, God was confined to the areas that nineteenth-century science did not understand. We now know that Laplace's hopes of determinism cannot be realized, at least in the terms he had in mind. The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics implies that certain pairs of quantities, such as the position and velocity of a particle, cannot both be predicted with complete accuracy. Quantum mechanics deals with this situation via a class of quantum theories in which particles don't have well-defined positions and velocities but are represented by a wave. These quantum theories are deterministic in the sense that they give laws for the evolution of the wave with time. Thus if one knows the wave at one time, one can calculate it at any other time. The unpredictable, random element comes in only when we try to interpret the wave in terms of the positions and velocities of particles. But maybe that is our mistake: maybe there are no particle positions and velocities, but only waves. It is just that we try to fit the waves to our preconceived ideas of positions and velocities. The resulting mismatch is the cause of the apparent unpredictability. In effect, we have redefined the task of science to be the discovery of laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limits set by the uncertainty principle. The question remains, however: how or why were the laws and the initial state of the universe chosen? In this book I have given special prominence to the laws that govern gravity, because it is gravity that shapes the large-scale structure of the universe, even though it is the weakest of the four categories of forces. The laws of gravity were incompatible with the view held until quite recently that the universe is unchanging in time: the fact that gravity is always attractive implies that the universe must be either expanding or contracting. According to the general theory of relativity, there must have been a state of infinite density in the past, the big bang, which would have been an effective beginning of time. Similarly, if the whole universe recollapsed, there must be another state of infinite density in the future, the big crunch, which would be an end of time. Even if the whole universe did not recollapse, there would be singularities in any localized regions that collapsed to form black holes. These singularities would be an end of time for anyone who fell into the black hole. At the big bang and other singularities, all the laws would have broken down, so God would still have had complete freedom to choose what happened and how the universe began. When we combine quantum mechanics with general relativity, there seems to be a new possibility that did not arise before: that space and time together might form a finite, four-dimensional space without singularities or boundaries, like the surface of the earth but with more dimensions. It seems that this idea could explain many of the observed features of the universe, such as its large-scale uniformity and also the smaller-scale departures from homogeneity, like galaxies, stars, and even human beings. It could even account for the arrow of time that we observe. But if the universe is completely self-contained, with no singularities or boundaries, and completely described by a unified theory, that has profound implications for the role of God as Creator. Einstein once asked the question: 'How much choice did God have in constructing the universe?' If the no boundary proposal is correct, he had no freedom at all to choose initial conditions. He would, of course, still have had the freedom to choose the laws that the universe obeyed. This, however, may not really have been all that much of a choice; there may well be only one, or a small number, of complete unified theories, such as the heterotic string theory, that are self-consistent and allow the existence of structures as complicated as human beings who can investigate the laws of the universe and ask about the nature of God. Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him? Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, 'The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.' What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant! However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	ALBERT EINSTEIN	Einstein's connection with the politics of the nuclear bomb is well known: he signed the famous letter to President Franklin Roosevelt that persuaded the United States to take the idea seriously, and he engaged in postwar efforts to prevent nuclear war. But these were not just the isolated actions of a scientist dragged into the world of politics. Einstein's life was, in fact, to use his own words, 'divided between politics and equations.' Einstein's earliest political activity came during the First World War, when he was a professor in Berlin. Sickened by what he saw as the waste of human lives, he became involved in antiwar demonstrations. His advocacy of civil disobedience and public encouragement of people to refuse conscription did little to endear him to his colleagues. Then, following the war, he directed his efforts toward reconciliation and improving international relations. This, too, did not make him popular, and soon his politics were making it difficult for him to visit the United States, even to give lectures. Einstein's second great cause was Zionism. Although he was Jewish by descent, Einstein rejected the biblical idea of God. However, a growing awareness of anti-Semitism, both before and during the First World War, led him gradually to identify with the Jewish community, and later to become an outspoken supporter of Zionism. Once more unpopularity did not stop him from speaking his mind. His theories came under attack; an anti-Einstein organization was even set up. One man was convicted of inciting others to murder Einstein (and fined a mere six dollars). But Einstein was phlegmatic. When a book was published entitled 100 Authors Against Einstein, he retorted, 'If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!' In 1933, Hitler came to power. Einstein was in America, and declared he would not return to Germany. Then, while Nazi militia raided his house and confiscated his bank account, a Berlin newspaper displayed the headline 'Good News from Einstein – He's Not Coming Back.' In the face of the Nazi threat, Einstein renounced pacifism, and eventually, fearing that German scientists would build a nuclear bomb, proposed that the United States should develop its own. But even before the first atomic bomb had been detonated, he was publicly warning of the dangers of nuclear war and proposing international control of nuclear weaponry. Throughout his life, Einstein's efforts toward peace probably achieved little that would last – and certainly won him few friends. His vocal support of the Zionist cause, however, was duly recognized in 1952, when he was offered the presidency of Israel. He declined, saying he thought he was too naive in politics. But perhaps his real reason was different: to quote him again, 'Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.'
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	GALILEO GALILEI	Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science. His renowned conflict with the Catholic Church was central to his philosophy, for Galileo was one of the first to argue that man could hope to understand how the world works, and, moreover, that we could do this by observing the real world. Galileo had believed Copernican theory (that the planets orbited the sun) since early on, but it was only when he found the evidence needed to support the idea that he started to publicly support it. He wrote about Copernicus's theory in Italian (not the usual academic Latin), and soon his views became widely supported outside the universities. This annoyed the Aristotelian professors, who united against him, seeking to persuade the Catholic Church to ban Copernicanism. Galileo, worried by this, traveled to Rome to speak to the ecclesiastical authorities. He argued that the Bible was not intended to tell us anything about scientific theories, and that it was usual to assume that, where the Bible conflicted with common sense, it was being allegorical. But the Church was afraid of a scandal that might undermine its fight against Protestantism, and so took repressive measures. It declared Copernicanism 'false and erroneous' in 1616, and commanded Galileo never again to 'defend or hold' the doctrine. Galileo acquiesced. In 1623, a longtime friend of Galileo's became the Pope. Immediately Galileo tried to get the 1616 decree revoked. He failed, but he did manage to get permission to write a book discussing both Aristotelian and Copernican theories, on two conditions: he would not take sides and would come to the conclusion that man could in any case not determine how the world worked because God could bring about the same effects in ways unimagined by man, who could not place restrictions on God's omnipotence. The book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was completed and published in 1632, with the full backing of the censors – and was immediately greeted throughout Europe as a literary and philosophical masterpiece. Soon the Pope, realizing that people were seeing the book as a convincing argument in favor of Copernicanism, regretted having allowed its publication. The Pope argued that although the book had the official blessing of the censors, Galileo had nevertheless contravened the 1616 decree. He brought Galileo before the Inquisition, who sentenced him to house arrest for life and commanded him to publicly renounce Copernicanism. For a second time, Galileo acquiesced. Galileo remained a faithful Catholic, but his belief in the independence of science had not been crushed. Four years before his death in 1642, while he was still under house arrest, the manuscript of his second major book was smuggled to a publisher in Holland. It was this work, referred to as Two New Sciences, even more than his support for Copernicus, that was to be the genesis of modern physics.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	ISAAC NEWTON	Isaac Newton was not a pleasant man. His relations with other academics were notorious, with most of his later life spent embroiled in heated disputes. Following publication of Principia Mathematica – surely the most influential book ever written in physics – Newton had risen rapidly into public prominence. He was appointed president of the Royal Society and became the first scientist ever to be knighted. Newton soon clashed with the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, who had earlier provided Newton with much needed data for Principia, but was now withholding information that Newton wanted. Newton would not take no for an answer: he had himself appointed to the governing body of the Royal Observatory and then tried to force immediate publication of the data. Eventually he arranged for Flamsteed's work to be seized and prepared for publication by Flamsteed's mortal enemy, Edmond Halley. But Flamsteed took the case to court and, in the nick of time, won a court order preventing distribution of the stolen work. Newton was incensed and sought his revenge by systematically deleting all references to Flamsteed in later editions of Principia. A more serious dispute arose with the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. Both Leibniz and Newton had independently developed a branch of mathematics called calculus, which underlies most of modern physics. Although we now know that Newton discovered calculus years before Leibniz, he published his work much later. A major row ensued over who had been first, with scientists vigorously defending both contenders. It is remarkable, however, that most of the articles appearing in defense of Newton were originally written by his own hand – and only published in the name of friends! As the row grew, Leibniz made the mistake of appealing to the Royal Society to resolve the dispute. Newton, as president, appointed an 'impartial' committee to investigate, coincidentally consisting entirely of Newton's friends! But that was not all: Newton then wrote the committee's report himself and had the Royal Society publish it, officially accusing Leibniz of plagiarism. Still unsatisfied, he then wrote an anonymous review of the report in the Royal Society's own periodical. Following the death of Leibniz, Newton is reported to have declared that he had taken great satisfaction in 'breaking Leibniz's heart.' During the period of these two disputes, Newton had already left Cambridge and academe. He had been active in anti-Catholic politics at Cambridge, and later in Parliament, and was rewarded eventually with the lucrative post of Warden of the Royal Mint. Here he used his talents for deviousness and vitriol in a more socially acceptable way, successfully conducting a major campaign against counterfeiting, even sending several men to their death on the gallows.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	APPENDIX	Questions about our origins were once regarded as the territory of philosophers and theologians. But gradually the answers have been provided by science; speculations have been replaced by hard facts. Especially in the last two decades since the 1996 reissue of A Brief History of Time, we have made remarkable progress in understanding the genesis and evolution of the universe. Many of the ideas that I put forward as hypotheses have now been confirmed. And still other developments have been a complete surprise.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	Dark energy and the accelerating expansion of the universe	For example, in 1998, our picture of the universe's future was radically revised. Two competing teams using the Hubble Space Telescope independently reached the conclusion that the expansion of our universe is accelerating. The implications for the fate of space are immediate: the eventual re-collapse of the universe (Friedmann's big crunch, pp.50–2) no longer appears to be an option. Space, it seems, will expand for ever. Why should space expand at an accelerating rate? The cause has become known as 'dark energy'. But this is just a name; it doesn't tell us anything in itself. In fact Friedmann's original picture seemed compelling: either gravity is strong enough to pull everything back together, and the expansion decelerates over time; or it isn't strong enough, and the expansion coasts along unimpeded. Neither of those scenarios suggested anything about the expansion actually speeding up. Einstein's own work holds part of the answer. At one point, he tried modifying his theory of general relativity to make the universe eternal and unchanging – something he was convinced ought to be true – by introducing a so-called cosmological constant (p.47) into his equations. This constant plays the role of an 'antigravity' force built into the very fabric of spacetime. That was in 1917, long before the expansion of the universe was established. Later, Einstein retracted the idea once he realized that Friedmann's models neatly explained Edwin Hubble's observations (p.10). The retraction might have been premature. At present, it seems that the acceleration first spotted in 1998 can, in fact, be explained by Einstein's antigravitation. But that's not the end of it, because the underlying cosmological constant can be given any value, and therefore can push space apart at any rate. Simple estimates suggest that the acceleration should whip the universe apart long before galaxies can form. So why is the strength of antigravity just as it is? If the no boundary proposal (p.131) is correct, an infinity of universes exist in parallel. Each of these universes might well have a different strength for antigravity, especially if string theory is on the right track to a complete under - standing of physics. We would then naturally live in one of the universes with a comfortably small dark energy; the anthropic principle (p.140) reminds us that, if galaxies had never formed, we would not be here to discuss the matter.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	Microwave background radiation and the no boundary proposal	If the no boundary proposal might be central to understanding these developments, we should re-examine how it holds up in light of our rapidly improving observational handle on the early cosmos. In particular we can now understand the origins of structure in our universe using measurements of cosmic microwave background radiation (p.134). As the name suggests, this is made up of microwaves – as used by your microwave oven, only much less powerful. They would heat your pizza to only −270.4°C, which isn't much good for defrosting, let alone cooking. But these ultra-weak microwaves are spectacularly valuable, because there is only one reasonable explanation for their presence: they are radiation left over from an early time when the universe was very hot and dense. As the universe expanded, the radiation cooled until it is just the faint remnant we can detect today. The existence of the background radiation was established in 1965. Immediately upon its detection, it was seen as powerful direct evidence for predictions based on Einstein's general relativity. Part of my own PhD thesis work, finished just months before, had been to show that the early hot, dense phase was unavoidable in Einstein's picture. But the value of measuring the radiation has become greater still. At first the microwaves seemed to have an identical intensity in every direction. This led to ideas like inflation (p.144), which in its initial formulation was intended to explain how the early universe came to be so uniform. On closer inspection, it actually predicted there would be very slight variations from place to place. The deviations from uniformity come about through quantum mechanical uncertainty, which imposes a minimum level of fluctuations. As successive generations of space telescopes have measured the microwave background radiation with increasing precision – first COBE in 1992 (p.49), then WMAP in 2001, and most recently Planck in 2013 – this prediction has proved to be correct. There are indeed changes in the intensity of the radiation, at the level of about one part in 100,000. More significantly, we have now determined that the precise pattern of variations agrees with the specific predictions I and others made by combining inflation with the no boundary proposal. To describe the physical conditions at the big bang, the no boundary proposal combines Einstein's relativity with quantum theory. It says that when we go back towards the beginning of our universe space and time become fuzzy and 'cap off ', somewhat like the North Pole on the surface of the earth. Asking what came before the big bang is meaningless according to the no boundary proposal, because there is no notion of time available to refer to. It would be like asking what lies north of the North Pole. With my colleagues James Hartle (with whom I first put forward the no boundary proposal more than thirty years ago) and Thomas Hertog I have put all this to the test. We calculated what kind of universe would emerge from the big bang according to the no boundary proposal, and compared this prediction with our observations. This confirms that our universe should have come into existence with a burst of inflation. So the features now measured in the microwave background radiation appear to confirm inflation and the no boundary proposal. But there is one key prediction of the theory which has yet to be verified. According to inflation, a small part of the fluctuations in the microwave radiation can be traced to gravitational waves generated during the phase of rapid expansion. This primordial gravitational radiation is the analogue of the quantum radiation from black holes and can be regarded as coming from the event horizon of the early inflationary stages of the universe. Its detection would confirm that black holes emit quantum radiation, something almost impossible to confirm directly. I will say more about detection of gravitational waves below, but those generated in the early universe show up most clearly in the polarization of the radiation. We are only in the early stages of measuring this polarization, and there is real hope that it will provide firm and convincing evidence for our theory of the big bang. Even without a clear view of the polarization, the cosmic microwave background data are so good that we can now start to fill in some of the blanks. Inflation and the no boundary proposal leave a number of details unspecified: the precise energies involved, for example, and the link to the underlying particle physics. These details subtly change the expected patterns; by carefully studying what is seen, we are now beginning to understand physics near the grand unification energy. To put that in context, it is a million million times higher than can be probed by the very best experimental facility on earth, the Large Hadron Collider.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	Eternal inflation and the multiverse	The developments described above mean that in the last two decades, inflation has been transformed from speculation into a cornerstone of modern cosmology. But not everyone likes its conclusions, especially since we now believe inflation likely gives rise to a vast number of universes, known collectively as a multiverse. As I mentioned above, inflation predicts that the universe will be nearly, but not perfectly, uniform. The deviations from uniformity are imposed by quantum mechanics, and have now been precisely characterized from observations of the cosmic microwave background. The very same quantum mechanical effect can give rise to the multiverse. Inflation is driven by a strange type of energy that has antigravitational properties; on average, the amount of this energy decreases as inflation proceeds, until there is no longer enough and the accelerated expansion ends. But, in some regions of spacetime, quantum fluctuations temporarily reverse the overall trend. Such regions gain more energy and consequently inflate for longer. In 1986, the Russian–American physicist Andrei Linde calculated that, if inflation starts at a sufficiently high energy, there will always be some place where the fluctuations win: the energy remains high, and inflation continues eternally. But there will be other places where the fluctuations lose, and the expected trend of decreasing energy takes hold. Such patches become entire individual universes such as our own. If we could zoom out far enough, we would see countless other universes, separated by Linde's regions of the multiverse that are continuing to inflate. Eternal inflation and the no boundary proposal together predict that our universe is not unique. Instead, from the quantum fuzz at the big bang many different universes emerge, possibly with different local laws of physics and chemistry. We may not live in the most probable of all universes. Rather, we live in one where the conditions are favorable for complexity and the development of life. Even though we cannot go from one universe to another, the successful predictions of the theory for observations in our universe provide support for the world view predicted by the no boundary proposal. For a long time, many physicists brushed these arguments to one side. The idea of a multiverse makes some people queasy, and they would rather assume inflation to take place at a lower energy, so sidestepping Linde's argument. However, the latest observations from the Planck satellite make this escapology trick look increasingly implausible.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	Gravitational waves	Using polarization of the cosmic microwave background to show that gravitational waves were produced in the early universe, as mentioned earlier, would be one way to very directly confirm the high energies involved in inflation. I hope that we will not have to wait too long for this development; in the meantime, we have recently seen direct confirmation that gravitational waves (p.101) can be produced in the modern-day universe. Exactly a century after Einstein first predicted their existence, a worldwide consortium of scientists known as the LIGO collaboration announced in 2016 that gravitational waves had been detected for the first time. The first sixty years were the hardest. During this time there was confusion over the status of the waves: should they exist in practice or are they just a mathematical artefact, unconnected with reality? Even Einstein seemed uncertain, and came close to publishing an erroneous disproof of their physicality in the 1930s. But over time the physics community settled on the view that the waves should be real. One consequence was that energy would be very slowly lost from orbiting bodies. Until recently, such energy loss was our only evidence for the existence of the waves (p.102). This was very convincing, but still indirect. Actually measuring gravitational waves as they pass through the earth is far more technologically challenging, which is why it took until 2016. But the decades of technological development have proved worthwhile, because we now have a completely new way to study the universe. Even the first events that LIGO detected – waves resulting from the collision and merging of two black holes – allowed us to confirm our understanding of a process that no traditional telescope has ever been, or will ever be, able to probe. For me, it was really exciting to see observations of colliding black holes. LIGO will observe many such events in the near future. These observations will, I believe, confirm a prediction I made in 1970 – that the surface area of the final black hole was greater than the sum of the initial holes' areas. This 'area theorem', which led to my slightly later realization that black holes will gradually lose their mass over time, was secure on mathematical grounds. But one can never be too sure of an idea until it is tested against nature. There is a bright future for LIGO and other gravitational wave observatories. We can expect to build up a large catalogue of detections, providing detailed insight into the populations of black holes in our universe. That in turn will allow us to search for even slight deviations from predictions based on Einstein's theory. As we continue our search for a full quantum theory of gravity, this treasure trove of information about extreme regions of spacetime will be immensely valuable.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	The information paradox	One reason for my excitement over LIGO's gravitational wave detections is that the area theorem is directly linked to a major controversy surrounding black holes known as the information paradox. Information is a sacred thing in physics; if we are able to describe the entire state of the universe today with a certain amount of information (the positions and speeds of all the particles, for example), we expect to need the same amount of information to describe the entire state of the universe tomorrow. This assumption underlies our ability to make scientific predictions, and is quietly built into Newton's and Einstein's work; it's even part of quantum mechanics. One might therefore hope it will remain true when we formulate a final theory of quantum gravity. When a black hole is formed, information about individual objects that have fallen in (their shapes, sizes, and chemical compositions, for example) becomes obscured. The only information about what formed it, is its total mass, its spin and its possible electric charge. This is the so-called 'no-hair' theorem.This is not too much of a problem, since the objects can just be regarded as hidden away rather than entirely lost. But if, as I showed in a letter published in Nature in 1974, quantum mechanics allows black holes to lose their mass and disappear (p.119), there is a difficulty. After the black hole is gone, what has then happened to the information? When I wrote A Brief History of Time, I believed that the information concerning what had fallen into the black hole was truly lost, perhaps residing in a separate universe hived off from our own. In 1997 I even bet Caltech physics professor John Preskill an encyclopedia of his choice that I was right. It was only later, in 2004, that I realized I had been wrong, after considering what happens to black holes after an infinite amount of time has passed. The amount of information at the start and the end was the same! When I conceded, John asked for an encyclopedia of baseball which I duly gave him. (My attempt to persuade him that cricket is more interesting was unsuccessful.) My change of opinion started by considering one of the most remarkable discoveries to arise from string theory: there appears to be an exact correspondence between the behavior of gravity and an obscure branch of physics known as conformal field theory. The details of the link don't matter for our purposes. All one needs to know is that anything described by conformal field theory – now including black holes – demonstrably preserves information. Very recently, it was realized that the 'no-hair' theorem was formulated in a way that was too restrictive. There is also supertranslation and superrotation hair. It seems that the information about material that formed the black hole remains preserved on the horizon as supertranslation and superrotation hair. We do not yet know if this is enough information to save the principles of quantum mechanics. Neither do we yet know how the information might emerge from the black hole. Even harder questions can be asked then about the fundamental nature of the singularities of spacetime that general relativity predicts must exist inside black holes. Of course, this abstract argument doesn't tell us exactly how the lost information manages to leak back out of a black hole in practice. One must be clear that, when the information finally makes its way out of the black-hole-like region, it will emerge in a very hard-to-interpret format. It is like burning a book. Information is not technically lost, if one keeps the ashes and the smoke – which makes me think again about the baseball encyclopedia I gave John Preskill. I should perhaps have given him its burnt remains instead.
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking	[ "nonfiction" ]	[ "science", "physics", "astronomy" ]	Outlook	In the twenty years since the last revision of this book, progress in cosmology has been rapid. Some of the developments, such as the detection of gravitational waves and the steady improvement in our understanding of the early universe, were anticipated; others, like dark energy and the accelerating universe, less so. Perhaps the most striking trend is one that many find uncomfortable: the no boundary proposal and eternal inflation point increasingly strongly to the idea that our universe is just one of many. Copernicus first suggested in the sixteenth century that we are not placed at the center of even our own universe (p. 4); yet we are still struggling to accept just how vanishingly small a fragment of reality our familiar world represents. It may not be much longer before the evidence for a multiverse becomes overwhelming. Despite the vastness of the multiverse, there is a sense in which we remain significant: we can still be proud to be part of a species that is working all this out. With that in mind, the coming years should be just as exciting as the last twenty. ⁂ [ GLOSSARY ] Absolute zero: The lowest possible temperature, at which substances contain no heat energy. Acceleration: The rate at which the speed of an object is changing. Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to observe it. Antiparticle: Each type of matter particle has a corresponding antiparticle. When a particle collides with its antiparticle, they annihilate, leaving only energy. Atom: The basic unit of ordinary matter, made up of a tiny nucleus (consisting of protons and neutrons) surrounded by orbiting electrons. Big bang: The singularity at the beginning of the universe. Big crunch: The singularity at the end of the universe. Black hole: A region of space-time from which nothing, not even light, can escape, because gravity is so strong. Black hole area theorem: Ignoring the effects of quantum mechanics, the surface area of a black hole can only grow with time. Casimir effect: The attractive pressure between two flat, parallel metal plates placed very near to each other in a vacuum. The pressure is due to a reduction in the usual number of virtual particles in the space between the plates. Chandrasekhar limit: The maximum possible mass of a stable cold star, above which it must collapse into a black hole. Conservation of energy: The law of science that states that energy (or its equivalent in mass) can neither be created nor destroyed. Coordinates: Numbers that specify the position of a point in space and time. Cosmological constant: A mathematical device used by Einstein to give space-time an inbuilt tendency to expand. Cosmology: The study of the universe as a whole. Dark energy: An unknown form of energy which is accelerating the expansion of the universe and is believed to permeate all of space. Dark matter: Matter in galaxies, clusters, and possibly between clusters, that cannot be observed directly but can be detected by its gravitational effect. As much as 90 percent of the mass of the universe may be in the form of dark matter. Duality: A correspondence between apparently different theories that lead to the same physical results. Edwin Hubble: (1889–1953) American astronomer who played a pivotal role in establishing that distant galaxies recede from Earth, and therefore that space is expanding. Einstein-Rosen bridge: A thin tube of space-time linking two black holes. Also see Wormhole. Electric charge: A property of a particle by which it may repel (or attract) other particles that have a charge of similar (or opposite) sign. Electromagnetic force: The force that arises between particles with electric charge; the second strongest of the four fundamental forces. Electron: A particle with negative electric charge that orbits the nucleus of an atom. Electroweak unification energy: The energy (around 100 GeV) above which the distinction between the electromagnetic force and the weak force disappears. Elementary particle: A particle that, it is believed, cannot be subdivided. Eternal inflation: A possible variant of inflation in which much of space continues expanding rapidly while relatively small individual portions drop their expansion rate to become universes such as our own. If correct, this implies our entire cosmos is embedded within a much larger inflating multiverse. Event: A point in space-time, specified by its time and place. Event horizon: The boundary of a black hole. Exclusion principle: The idea that two identical spin-1/2 particles cannot have (within the limits set by the uncertainty principle) both the same position and the same velocity. Field: Something that exists throughout space and time, as opposed to a particle that exists at only one point at a time. Frequency: For a wave, the number of complete cycles per second. Friedmann models: Descriptions of the evolution and fate of the universe, based on Einstein's general relativity. For sufficiently high densities of matter, these models predict that the universe will eventually collapse in on itself in a 'big crunch'. Gamma rays: Electromagnetic rays of very short wavelength, produced in radioactive decay or by collisions of elementary particles. General relativity: Einstein's theory based on the idea that the laws of science should be the same for all observers, no matter how they are moving. It explains the force of gravity in terms of the curvature of a four-dimensional space-time. Geodesic: The shortest (or longest) path between two points. Grand unification energy: The energy above which, it is believed, the electromagnetic force, weak force, and strong force become indistinguishable from each other. Grand unified theory (GUT): A theory which unifies the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces. Gravitational waves: Ripples in the curvature of space, predicted in 1916 by Albert Einstein and first directly detected in 2016 by the LIGO consortium. Imaginary time: Time measured using imaginary numbers. Inflation: The theory that space expanded rapidly in the early universe, giving rise to an almost but not perfectly uniform universe today, in agreement with observations. Information paradox: The information content of objects falling into a black hole at first sight seems to be lost, but this contradicts the laws of quantum mechanics. It is now believed that the information is returned in an altered form in the Hawking radiation escaping the black hole. Large Hadron Collider: The world's largest and most powerful particle collider. Built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), it is situated deep in the earth near Geneva. Light cone: A surface in space-time that marks out the possible directions for light rays passing through a given event. Light-second (Light-year): the distance traveled by light in one second (year). Magnetic field: The field responsible for magnetic forces, now incorporated along with the electric field, into the electromagnetic field. Mass: The quantity of matter in a body; its inertia, or resistance to acceleration. Microwave background radiation: The radiation from the glowing of the hot early universe, now so greatly red-shifted that it appears not as light but as microwaves (radio waves with a wavelength of a few centimeters). See also COBE, see here. Naked singularity: A space-time singularity not surrounded by a black hole. Neutrino: An extremely light (possibly massless) particle that is affected only by the weak force and gravity. Neutron: An uncharged particle, very similar to the proton, which accounts for roughly half the particles in an atomic nucleus. Neutron star: A cold star, supported by the exclusion principle repulsion between neutrons. No boundary condition/proposal: The idea that the universe is finite but has no boundary (in imaginary time). Nuclear fusion: The process by which two nuclei collide and coalesce to form a single, heavier nucleus. Nucleus: The central part of an atom, consisting only of protons and neutrons, held together by the strong force. Particle accelerator: A machine that, using electromagnets, can accelerate moving charged particles, giving them more energy. Phase: For a wave, the position in its cycle at a specified time: a measure of whether it is at a crest, a trough, or somewhere in between. Photon: A quantum of light. Planck satellite: Operated from 2009-2013 and named after the German physicist Max Planck, this produced our most precise all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background. Planck's quantum principle: The idea that light (or any other classical waves) can be emitted or absorbed only in discrete quanta, whose energy is proportional to their wavelength. Positron: The (positively charged) antiparticle of the electron. Primordial black hole: A black hole created in the very early universe. Proportional: 'X is proportional to Y' means that when Y is multiplied by any number, so is X. 'X is inversely proportional to Y' means that when Y is multiplied by any number, X is divided by that number. Proton: A positively charged particle, very similar to the neutron, that accounts for roughly half the particles in the nucleus of most atoms. Pulsar: A rotating neutron star that emits regular pulses of radio waves. Quantum: The indivisible unit in which waves may be emitted or absorbed. Quantum chromodynamics (QCD): The theory that describes the interactions of quarks and gluons. Quantum mechanics: The theory developed from Planck's quantum principle and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Quark: A (charged) elementary particle that feels the strong force. Protons and neutrons are each composed of three quarks. Radar: A system using pulsed radio waves to detect the position of objects by measuring the time it takes a single pulse to reach the object and be reflected back. Radioactivity: The spontaneous breakdown of one type of atomic nucleus into another. Red shift: The reddening of light from a star that is moving away from us, due to the Doppler effect. Singularity: A point in space-time at which the space-time curvature becomes infinite. Singularity theorem: A theorem that shows that a singularity must exist under certain circumstances – in particular, that the universe must have started with a singularity. Space-time: The four-dimensional space whose points are events. Spatial dimension: Any of the three dimensions that are spacelike – that is, any except the time dimension. Special relativity: Einstein's theory based on the idea that the laws of science should be the same for all observers, no matter how they are moving. Spectrum: The component frequencies that make up a wave. The visible part of the sun's spectrum can be seen in a rainbow. Spin: An internal property of elementary particles, related to, but not identical to, the everyday concept of spin. Stationary state: One that is not changing with time: a sphere spinning at a constant rate is stationary because it looks identical at any given instant. String theory: A theory of physics in which particles are described as waves on strings. Strings have length but no other dimension. Strong force: The strongest of the four fundamental forces, with the shortest range of all. It holds the quarks together within protons and neutrons, and holds the protons and neutrons together to form atoms. Uncertainty principle: The principle, formulated by Heisenberg, that one can never be exactly sure of both the position and the velocity of a particle; the more accurately one knows the one, the less accurately one can know the other. Virtual particle: In quantum mechanics, a particle that can never be directly detected, but whose existence does have measurable effects. Wave/particle duality: The concept in quantum mechanics that there is no distinction between waves and particles; particles may sometimes behave like waves, and waves like particles. Wavelength: For a wave, the distance between two adjacent troughs or two adjacent crests. Weak force: The second weakest of the four fundamental forces, with a very short range. It affects all matter particles, but not force-carrying particles. Weight: The force exerted on a body by a gravitational field. It is proportional to, but not the same as, its mass. White dwarf: A stable cold star, supported by the exclusion principle repulsion between electrons. Wormhole: A thin tube of space-time connecting distant regions of the universe. Wormholes might also link to parallel or baby universes and could provide the possibility of time travel.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 1	The devil's boots don't creak. —SCOTTISH PROVERB JULY 1831 DARTMOOR, ENGLAND The first time I laid eyes on Langstone Manor, I could not blame my husband for having stayed away for over fifteen years. I'm sure it didn't help that the weather was far from hospitable. Heavy gray clouds filled the sky, releasing sheets of rain that obscured the horizon, all but concealing my view of the infamous moors rising to the east. But even on a bright, sunlit day, I struggled to imagine the house being more inviting. In truth, it appeared downright foreboding, even without the painful memories that plagued Gage. Memories I could see weighing on him now. They were written in the tautness of his brow and the deep pools of his eyes as he stared up at the stone manor through our hired carriage's window. Sebastian Gage had conducted dozens of precarious inquiries, had faced down Turkish warriors in the Greek War of Independence, and had most recently been winged by a bullet fired by a temperamental Irish housemaid during our last inquiry only a week before, but this place somehow still troubled him. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, if I were about to enter my first husband, Sir Anthony Darby's, London town house—that place of so many unhappy remembrances—I wouldn't have been so sanguine. It's never easy to confront the demons of our past. But to see my normally unflappable husband so apprehensive unsettled me. I reached out to touch Gage's hand where it gripped his leg, hoping to offer him a bit of reassurance. I wanted to do more than that, but with our maid and valet seated across from us, that would have been highly inappropriate. As loyal and trustworthy as Bree and Anderley might be, and privy to more intimacies than most, having assisted us with numerous murderous inquiries, there were still some things that should remain private between husband and wife. Gage turned his hand over to squeeze my fingers and offered me a fleeting smile before turning back to the view outside his window. I followed suit, curious about this place where he had spent so much of his childhood. He'd told me little about his time here with his mother while his father had been away at sea, fighting Napoleon and manning the blockade. However, what he had revealed had spoken volumes, and I'd been able to infer even more than he probably realized from the things he hadn't said. Whatever else he felt about this place, it was clear he'd not been happy. I stared upward at the manor's edifice of coarse stone and tall mullioned windows, their glass dark and oily in the gloom. Two symmetrical wings projected from the main block, their exteriors echoing that of the one before us, but for the long narrow windows which I suspected had once been arrow slits, now fitted with glass. The roof was covered in small slate shingles only a shade lighter than the clouds. The tall chimneys and sprocket eaves with their gabled ends added angles and dimension to the bland façade, but they failed to lighten the overall melancholy feel of the setting in any way. The manor didn't look much different than I anticipated the granite-shattered outcroppings of the tors would look. I wondered if that had been the builder's intention. If so, he'd succeeded, but at what cost? As beautiful as the landscape of Dartmoor was purported to be, it was also treacherous, and this home had taken on many of the same characteristics. The garden which had sprung up in the courtyard before the manor also did nothing to help matters. Hedged in by an imposing metal gate and stone walls, thick beds of green plants and a few straggling pale flowers had taken root at the edges of the gravel lane. Trees ringed the edge of the property, their twisted trunks seeming to sprout from the very walls themselves as if they would not be denied access, or allowed to escape. The garden was clearly well kept, its verges rigidly maintained, but some more colorful flowers and a bit of judicious pruning would have done much to lighten the space. But perhaps those plants did not grow in this climate and the dense foliage refused to be stunted. "Do you think they realize we've arrived?" I asked, beginning to question whether we should send Anderley to knock on the door. In the failing light, it was impossible to see much of anything beneath the pale stone archway through which I presumed one accessed the main door, but a footman hurried forth from its recess, allaying my uncertainty. However, any question as to whether our arrival had been anticipated was swiftly answered by the widening of the young man's eyes as he scrutinized our trunks strapped to the roof of the carriage. "Good evening, sir," he murmured upon opening the chaise's door. "Were you expected?" Gage's mouth tightened in what looked like annoyance, but that I knew to be an emotion far more complicated. "Yes," he announced before stepping down into the loose gravel without offering the servant any further explanation. Taking the umbrella from the startled footman's hand, he reached back to assist me. I wrapped my shawl tighter around me against the wind, and opened my mouth to remind him it wasn't the servant's fault he'd been caught unprepared. But one look at Gage's face made me fall silent. He already knew this, and his tight-lipped displeasure was not directed at the footman, but at his grandfather, the Viscount Tavistock. Regardless of our delayed arrival, the viscount should have made his staff aware of the prospect of our coming. After all, he'd been the one to write to Gage, begging him to visit—a move which Gage assured me was entirely out of character for the proud, taciturn man. His urgent missive had originally been sent to London and had to be forwarded on to us in Ireland, where we had just wrapped up our latest murderous inquiry, causing a delay of more than a week. In our rush to reach Langstone Manor, we'd not paused to send a message ahead of us to confirm our plans, knowing it wouldn't have arrived much before we would. Given that postponement, it was possible that the matter for which we'd been summoned had already been resolved. Or perhaps Lord Tavistock had simply given up on us. Whatever the reason, the household was not prepared for our visit. Gage hurried us forward, pausing once we'd stepped through the arch into the covered porch, where he turned to address the footman who trailed behind us. "The coachman has driven us all the way from Plymouth, and I've promised him lodging for the night for himself and his horses. Please see to it, as well as our servants and luggage." The flustered expression on the footman's face would have been comical had I not also felt some empathy for him. He was young and inexperienced, and so could not be blamed for his failure to recognize Gage after his long absence, or perhaps for even being cognizant of his existence. The footman glanced back and forth between us and the carriage, uncertain whether he should insist he announce us or do as Gage had instructed. Fortunately, an older man came to his rescue. "Timothy, do as he asks," said a slight man standing in the shadows next to the door before shifting his gaze to meet my husband's. "I'll show Mr. Gage inside." It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim light underneath the porch, but Gage already recognized the speaker. "Hammett, I'm surprised to see you're still with us." I stiffened, surprised by the rudeness of my husband's comment, but the other man didn't seem the least insulted if the grin that cracked his thin mouth was any indication. "Aye. Yer cousins haven't rent me from this mortal coil yet. Nor your grandfather neither." A flicker of a smile crossed Gage's face. The elderly man, who I now recognized must be the butler, ushered us out of the damp into a small vestibule. He tilted his head to inspect Gage and then me, dislodging the few stray gray hairs still clinging to the top of his head. "This'll be yer bride, then?" Though he was merely a servant, I felt I had been assessed and judged, and apparently found acceptable, for his creaky voice warmed. "Welcome to Langstone Manor." "Thank you," I replied. Then his eyes narrowed on Gage. "You've been gone a long while." Gage was not fazed nor chagrined by the old retainer's censure. "If I wasn't already conscious of that, the sight of your wrinkled face would certainly remind me. But what are you still doing here? I thought you would have retired to one of the estate's cottages or shuffled off to the seaside long ago." "And leave his lordship to fend off these leeches alone?" His scraggly brow lowered. "Not that it'll matter much longer." The remainder of Gage's levity fled at this comment. "How is he?" "You'll see for yerselves," Hammett replied gruffly, turning at the sound of footsteps. I followed his gaze toward the gleaming wooden staircase on the opposite side of the long stone entry hall, where a tall woman dressed in a midnight blue gown had paused a few feet from the base of the steps. I could not immediately discern who she was in relation to Gage, but it was evident from the manner in which his eyes hardened and his nostrils flared that she was not someone he was fond of. And the feeling was mutual. I was accustomed to everyone liking my husband. Those who weren't already won over by his good looks were quickly persuaded by his charm and easy nature. Even his father, who was derisive and sometimes unforgivably hard on him, still cared for him in his own contrary way. However, this woman took few pains to conceal the loathing shimmering in her eyes. Where this naked animosity came from, I didn't know, but it took me aback. Maintaining a façade of polite composure, Gage stepped forward to greet her, but halted when a dark-haired man came bustling into the hall through a doorway on the left. "Mother, did you know a carriage has arrived? Do you think it could be . . ." His words faltered as he followed her gaze toward where we stood. His eyes widened. Given my reputation, it was not the most awkward welcome I'd ever received, but considering the fact that I suspected these people were related to Gage in some way, it was certainly the most disconcerting. Indignation began to build inside me, not on my behalf, but on Gage's. I was used to people thinking the worst of me. The scandal over my involvement with the work of my first husband, the great anatomist Sir Anthony Darby—specifically my sketching his dissections for an anatomical textbook he was writing—had blackened my name and made me a figure of fear and revulsion in many circles. Few cared to note that my participation had been forced, or that in spite of it, my drawings had been beautiful and flawless. For them it was proof enough of my unnaturalness that as a gentlewoman I had not only survived such a gruesome ordeal, but also gone on to use that reluctantly accrued knowledge to help solve murders and other crimes. Gage, on the other hand, was a different story. As a gentleman inquiry agent of some renown, he did not suffer the same slights to his character. In fact, the work he undertook as a diversion—for he had no need to earn his living—only enhanced his reputation. Combined with the fact that he was perhaps the most charismatic and attractive young gentleman in all of England, he was practically guaranteed an eager invitation from every hostess in the country. I had feared that our marriage would harm his standing, but thus far our unlikely match had only raised his prominence to almost mythical proportions. But apparently this partiality did not extend to his late mother's family. Watching the trio eye one another, their expressions ranging from wariness to outright enmity, I now better understood my husband's initial reluctance to come here. Even though it had been quickly overridden, by his own inclination and my admittedly uninformed opinion, it said a great deal about his relationship with the maternal relatives he'd spent much of his childhood with that he wouldn't immediately wish to come to their aid. The dark-haired man was the first to speak. He took a few hesitant steps toward us before resuming a more assured stride. "Gage, is that you?" His mouth curled into an uncertain grin. "By Jove, it is!" He reached out to shake his hand. "Dashed it's been a long time." "It's good to see you, Rory," Gage replied. Much of the hostility he'd directed at the woman had faded from his eyes as he greeted the other man, but there was still a guardedness to his demeanor. "And this must be your wife," Rory guessed. "Grandfather told us you'd wed." His expression couldn't help but hold rabid interest, though he did at least try, rather unsuccessfully, to mask it. "Yes." Gage gazed down at me with a glint of protective pride. "Kiera, allow me to introduce my cousin, the Honorable Roland Trevelyan." I offered him my hand, which he clasped respectfully. "I'm pleased to meet you, Mr. Trevelyan." "Likewise, Mrs. Gage." His pale blue eyes, just a few shades darker than Gage's wintry hue—obviously a Trevelyan trait—softened with regard. "Is this your first time visiting the West Country?" "Yes," I replied. "Before today, I'm afraid I'd never set foot on English soil farther west than Oxford." I paused to consider. "Unless you count Cumberland. I suppose that's farther west than Oxfordshire." Rory's expression turned self-deprecating. "I wouldn't know. I'm afraid I never was very good at geography." His eyes flicked to Gage. "Got my knuckles rapped more than a few times for not being able to point out Devonshire on the map." I smiled at his attempt at levity even as his jest failed to amuse the others. Though I didn't yet know what his relationship with Gage had been like in the past, I couldn't help warming to the man before me. There was something about his lack of pretension and his almost bumbling charm that made him quite agreeable. He wasn't as handsome or alluring as Gage, but in this instance I think such slick assurance would have worked against him, making me question his sincerity. The click of footsteps crossing the granite floor recalled us to the presence of the other woman in the room, who had observed her son's greetings with cool detachment. Rory glanced over his shoulder. "Mother, come meet Mrs. Gage." Though past fifty, she was still a remarkably beautiful woman with dark hair sparsely streaked with gray, smooth skin, and flashing dark eyes. I could see now that the lovely gown I'd viewed from a distance was also terribly stylish, and undoubtedly purchased from a London shop. Combined with her rigid posture, elegant coiffure, and what I suspected were artfully applied cosmetics, I began to feel rather unkempt and dowdy in my striped carriage dress of straw, rose, and pale blue. Little as I cared for fashion, I felt grateful my more sophisticated sister had insisted on helping me choose the new gowns for my trousseau before I wed Gage three months prior. Otherwise, I had no doubt the woman before me would have judged me even more harshly than I could see she'd already done. She lifted her chin to stare down her nose at me as her eyes gleamed with cold calculation. "But it isn't Mrs. Gage, is it? Properly you should be addressed as Lady Darby, should you not?" It was questioned with quiet civility, but I knew better. So did Gage, though he didn't even flinch as she skillfully slid the dagger of her insult into his side. She was not the first person to point out this ridiculous bit of etiquette to us. Because my first husband had been a baronet, a higher rank than Gage as a mere mister, by courtesy—though not by right—I was allowed to keep Sir Anthony Darby's name and rank. To address me as Mrs. Gage would be considered a snub by many in society, but I was more than eager to shed my first husband's name, regardless of the correct forms of address. And so I told her. "Actually, I prefer to take my new husband's name." I favored Gage with a loving smile lest she think he had been the one to insist upon this request. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rory's grin broaden. "I see," the woman replied stonily, though it didn't slip my notice she hadn't actually agreed to my appeal. "Good evening, Aunt Vanessa," Gage proclaimed, the sharp glint returning to his eyes. Her perfectly arched eyebrows lifted. "Sebastian." I didn't like the grating manner in which she pronounced his name, absurdly adding an extra syllable, which she accented. I was quite certain she was doing it that way on purpose. "Kiera, allow me to present my aunt, the Dowager Baroness Langstone." So she was not a blood relation, but Gage's uncle's widow, and his late mother's sister-in-law. "Not that I'm not happy to see you," she said to Gage after nodding to me, her inflection stating that's exactly what she meant, "but what are you doing here?" I looked up at Gage, wondering how he would take the news that his grandfather had evidently not shared his plans with the other members of the family, but he did not seem surprised. That in and of itself said a great deal. "Grandfather sent for me," he explained, giving us both the satisfaction of startling Lady Langstone. "We're here to find Alfred."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 2	Gage's aunt and cousin blinked at us in astonishment. "Or barring that, at least uncover what has happened to him," Gage added. When still neither of them replied, he scowled. "Unless he's no longer missing?" Rory was the first to react, his demeanor brightening. "Capital! We could use the help, if you ask me. He's been gone over ten days now, and while at first I thought my brother was simply off on some lark, he's begun to worry me." "Grandfather said he walked out onto the moors one day and disappeared?" He nodded. "No one's seen hide nor hair of him since." His mouth twisted. "At least, no one who'll admit it." "Why would they keep something like that to themselves?" I asked, not understanding what he meant. But before he could answer, Lady Langstone recovered herself. "Then I suppose you'll wish to stay here?" It seemed an odd response to such a revelation, particularly given the fact that Gage had traveled all this way to help locate her missing son. But perhaps that's exactly why she couldn't address it. Perhaps her hatred was such that she couldn't contemplate the fact that Gage was here to lend his assistance, so she turned to safer topics. "The emerald chamber, I think," she murmured, frowning at the tapestry hanging on the wall. "No need to go to the trouble. We'll be more than comfortable staying in Windy Cross Cottage," Gage interjected. Rory darted an uncertain glance at his mother as she lifted her gaze to meet Gage's. His brow furrowed upon seeing their reaction. "Are there other tenants?" Lady Langstone turned her head, studying him with one eye as she drew out her words slowly. "No, but the viscount had the cottage demolished." None of what had come before had seemed to disturb Gage, but at this pronouncement he winced. "Demolished! When?" She glanced at her son, as if giving the matter some thought. "Oh, a dozen years ago or so. Not long after your dear mother was laid to rest." She didn't smile, but nonetheless I could tell how much satisfaction she had derived from relaying this bit of news to him. Why it seemed to affect Gage so profoundly, I didn't know, but I would have liked nothing more than to douse the twinkle in his aunt's eyes. "Then I suppose the emerald chamber will be satisfactory," Gage replied, not bothering to hide his displeasure any longer. The dowager baroness nodded assent and turned to the butler, who I'd almost forgotten still hovered in the shadows behind us. "Hammett, please see to it." "Aye, my lady," he replied as he stepped forward. "Just as soon as I've shown them up to his lordship. Told me to bring them straight up just as soon as they arrived, he did." Based on the defiant curl in Hammett's lip, I suspected this statement wasn't strictly true, but whatever his reasons for circumventing Lady Langstone, I wasn't about to argue with him. I was anxious to meet Gage's grandfather and to hear his own thoughts on his missing heir and what exactly he believed we could do about it. But I did find it interesting that Gage wasn't the only one who appeared to be none too fond of the dowager baroness. Hammett did not wait for her ladyship's agreement, but led us past her up the elegantly carved staircase and through the corridors to the master bedchamber. As bleak as the exterior and entry hall had been, I still held hope that the remainder of the interior would be more welcoming. After all, my brother-in-law, the Earl of Cromarty's, castle in the western Highlands appeared somewhat cold and austere from the outside, despite its lovely setting. The soaring hall was festooned with the weaponry of his ancestors—hardly an encouraging first sight for a weary traveler. But once you passed deeper into the castle's recesses or stepped into the sweeping rooms, you felt the heart and life of the family living there, the echoes of the centuries of clan members who'd resided within its sheltering walls. Not so at Langstone Manor. Though the floors were carpeted in plush rugs and the walls hung with paintings and tapestries—some of which I would have liked to pause and examine—there was no light or warmth, quite literally. A chill seemed to have permanently invaded the corridors despite it being the height of summer, and the few windows there were contained such dusky glass that they did little to peel back the shadows. The air was close and thick with must even though the adornments were spotlessly dusted. As simple as the configuration of the manor appeared from the outside, the inside proved to be nothing of the sort. Apparently there had been numerous modifications and additions made to the house over the years, though for some reason these alterations hadn't included many more windows than the original structure boasted. Whether the people residing here had simply wished to lessen their window tax or they'd been determined to hide something within, I didn't know, but either way the result was a dark labyrinth of corridors and staircases. I shivered, pressing closer to Gage's side, wondering at his relatives, and ancestors, that they'd been so content to live in such environs. The lavish possessions adorning the space had been placed there in an attempt to alleviate the somber atmosphere, but wouldn't their money have been better spent on widening the windows or reglazing those that already existed? My thoughts turned to Gage's mother. Had she been eager to escape? Was that one of the reasons she'd been so susceptible to Gage's father's charms? Though I'd never been on the receiving end of his allures, Gage's father was supposed to be an even more legendary charmer than his son. As such, there had never been any doubt why she'd fallen for his golden good looks. But I'd wondered at her eagerness to marry someone below her social standing, a man who at the time had been a lowly mister with no hope of ever gaining a title, a man whom her family had threatened to disown her over. Ultimately they hadn't, though her father had made certain to tie up much of the money she would inherit so that in the event of her untimely death it would go to her children and not her husband, but that had not meant they'd ever been accepting of her choice, merely tolerant. And in the end, her escape had been short-lived. Because of her illness, she'd returned here to live with her son while her husband was away at sea. I glanced up at Gage, curious whether he was also thinking of his mother. It was impossible to tell whether his furrowed brow was evidence of reminiscences of the past or anticipation of the interview with his grandfather to come. Hammett's shambling gait finally drew to a stop before a heavy wooden door. He looked back at Gage almost in reproof before lifting his hand to knock. I didn't understand what had been communicated between the two men, but from the manner in which his jaw clenched, it was apparent that Gage had. From within, we heard the sound of coughing, and then a rough voice called out for us to enter. "Master Gage has arrived, m'lord, and his wife," Hammett announced as he opened the door, and then stepped back to allow us through. I'm not sure exactly what I'd expected to find, but it was not the wizened old man leaning back against a mound of pillows in a massive four-poster bed. Gage had described his grandfather as a proud man, a man to whom rules and propriety were very important. So for him to greet us in such a manner meant one thing. He was incapable of receiving us any other way. I flicked a glance up at Gage's stiff features, knowing he must be concerned by the discovery that his grandfather was quite ill. The old man had made no mention of his health in his letter. But then, a man like him wouldn't. Gage guided me a few steps closer, affording me a better view of the man who'd quite possibly had more influence on my husband's upbringing than his own father. It was difficult to know how much of his appearance had been ravaged by illness and how much was part of his normal aspect. Whatever the case, in marked contrast to his renownedly beautiful daughter and handsome grandson, I doubted the viscount had ever been classified as appealing in all his life. In truth, Gage looked nothing like him. The only feature he might have inherited from his grandfather was his height, though Lord Tavistock's stature was taken quite to the extreme. Even reclining in bed, he was close to six and a half feet tall, and whipcord lean. It was good to see that despite his sickness, his will remained intact. He glared across the room at us with sharp silver eyes, the crystalline color made all the more arresting by being paired with the silver hair slicked back from his forehead. His rather prominent brow ridge and long, thin nose put me in mind of nothing so much as a greyhound or a whippet. And when he spoke, biting off his words in a hoarse growl, it did nothing to dispel the notion. "Well, you took your time in coming, now, didn't you?" With all of the tension radiating from Gage, I'd expected him to scowl or snap back, but instead the old man's surliness seemed to relieve Gage. A fond smile even curled the corners of his lips. "Good evening to you as well, Grandfather." "Yes, yes," the old man replied impatiently. "What took you so long?" Gage pressed a hand to my back to move us toward the side of the bed, refusing to be hurried. "Considering the fact that we've come all the way from Ireland, and that Father had to forward your message on to me, I would argue we made admirable haste." I didn't miss the way his grandfather's mouth tightened at the mention of Lord Gage. "Suspect your father took his time about sending it." His eyes flicked over me before narrowing on Gage in consideration. "Ireland, hmm?" Then he shook his head as if changing his mind. "I don't want to know. But now that you're here, perhaps someone can make heads or tails of this business." Gage's eyebrows arched. "Maybe. But first I'm going to present my wife." The viscount's gaze bored into mine as my husband performed the introductions. I suspected he was trying to intimidate me, but any effect his frosty glower might have had was rather diminished by the fact that he was also trying to stave off a coughing fit. I wasn't sure what, if anything, he thought of me, but I couldn't help but smile at the crotchety picture he seemed determined to make. "It's a pleasure to meet you," I murmured, offering him my hand. It appeared for a moment the viscount might snub me. Then he slowly lifted his hand to clasp mine, allowing me to feel how his tissue-thin skin stretched over his bones even through my gloves. "Now that that's done, you can leave us," he declared with finality as he turned back to his grandson. "We have family matters to discuss." This was a response I was accustomed to. Most people believed a gentlewoman had no place in a delicate inquiry, be it murder or something more benign. Even with my scandalous reputation, they often balked at my involvement, and I'd expected Lord Tavistock to be no different. As such, since it was his family, I was prepared to follow Gage's lead, but I'd not expected such an impassioned response. "Yes, and she is family now." He wrapped an arm around my waist, anchoring me to his side. "She also happens to be a skilled investigator in her own right. If you wish to find out what happened to Alfred as quickly as possible, it would behoove you to enlist her help as well." My cheeks warmed upon hearing his praise, and I straightened my spine farther, hoping to help prove his point. His grandfather's eyes flashed with irritation. "I'll tell her everything you say anyway," he pointed out. "Allowing her to stay simply saves us time." The viscount's mouth remained clamped in a thin line for several moments longer, but upon seeing that his grandson was not about to relent, he grumbled his concession. "Like I told you in my letter, your cousin Alfred is missing. He walked out of the back garden gate onto the moors eleven days ago and vanished." "And no one saw which direction he was headed?" Gage glanced distractedly behind him, before crossing the room to move two ladder-back chairs positioned against the wall closer to the bed. "No. At least, none who'll admit it." Whether his words were an unconscious echo of his grandson Rory's or not, I found it interesting that they both suspected someone of withholding information. I wondered if they were referring to the same person. "And I suppose you've already searched the moors and the surrounding villages and countryside?" Gage asked. The wooden chairs creaked as we settled into them, a fitting accompaniment to the wind and rain buffeting the windowpanes. I reached up to remove my straw crape bonnet and then tugged my fingers from my traveling gloves, a move I regretted, for my hands cramped with cold. A blazing fire crackled in the hearth on the opposite wall, but its heat did not reach far into the room. As sumptuous as the furnishings and fabrics were, they could not patch the drafty windows or shrink the size of the chamber. Nor could the scents of bay rum and lavender fully mask the sour stench of illness. "Of course," Lord Tavistock said. "There was no trace of him." "That or it hasn't been found yet," Gage replied gravely. His grandfather nodded, his silver eyes darkened by some troubling thought. I glanced between the men, trying to understand what they knew that I didn't. Noticing my confusion, Gage attempted to explain. "Much of Dartmoor is extremely isolated. It's all too easy to become lost and disoriented. Especially if the weather shifts, which it is notorious for doing. It can be bright and sunny one instant, and then suddenly the sky clouds over and pours rain or snow, or a fog rolls in so thick you can't see your hands in front of your face. There are more tales than one can count about people becoming lost out on the moors and never being seen again." He glanced at his grandfather. "And anyone who lives near the moor can name at least half a dozen people they've personally known who've suffered a similar fate. Though most of the time it's discovered later that they stumbled into a bog or froze to death." My eyes widened. "So is that what you suspect happened?" I asked, not wishing such a fate on anyone. Though I was curious how we were supposed to be able to help if that was the case. Surely the neighboring farmers and miners who worked on or near Dartmoor would be of much greater assistance than Gage or I ever could. Gage studied his grandfather, who sat frowning down at the deep green blanket draped across his lap. "Did the weather shift that day?" "No, but you know as well as I do that the weather on the high moors can change even when it doesn't here," he replied, still never lifting his gaze. "But that's not what you think happened?" Gage guessed, seeing the same obstinate light in his eyes that I did. He lifted his liver-spotted hand to smother a cough, before retorting, "Did they tell you their balderdash theories?" He nodded toward the door. "That it's all a bit of japery. That Alfred has taken himself off on some exploit and not seen fit to inform us." I shared a look with Gage, finding it interesting that, on the contrary, Rory had seemed to refute just such a possibility. Had he changed his mind? "Has Alfred gone away without telling anyone before?" Gage asked. "Not for more than a day or two," the viscount argued. "So it wouldn't be entirely out of character?" His grandfather scowled. "For a day or two," he reiterated sharply. "And one of his ne'er-do-well friends always knew where he could be found." Gage's lip curled into a sneer. "I see he hasn't changed, then." At first the viscount looked as if he wanted to argue, but then realized he couldn't. "No." Gage looked away. "Well, if he's still anything like he was at school, I wouldn't be surprised to hear some wronged husband or father shot him and sunk his body in a bog." "He is engaged to be married," his grandfather countered between rasping coughs, as if this made a difference. "Or, at least, nearly so." "I'll be sure to offer her my condolences." Before receiving his grandfather's letter, Gage had spoken of his cousin only in passing, and after he'd relayed only the bare essentials because I'd pestered him for them. All I knew about Alfred was that he was two years older and, as his grandfather's heir, claimed Lord Langstone as his courtesy title. Gage's silence on the matter had seemed indicative of his concern, but now that assumption proved wrong. For it was becoming apparent that, whatever else was true about Alfred, Gage felt a great deal of animosity toward him. Animosity that did not surprise his grandfather, who merely frowned at this last comment. "He will settle down after he marries. Most men do. Besides, Lady Juliana will be a viscountess, and a rather wealthy and influential one at that. That should be compensation enough for any trifling indiscretions." Spoken like a lord who had no concept what it was like to be a lady who has given all her power, all her wealth, all her independence to a man who doesn't deserve it. It was Gage's turn to glower. "The Duke of Bedford's daughter?" "Yes. It's a fitting match." "It's a disastrous match! Lady Juliana is much too soft-spoken and gentle for the likes of Alfred. He'll run roughshod over her." The viscount's voice grew more strident even as he struggled to get his words out. "She'll be deferential. As a wife should be." "That's not how I remember Grandmother. Or my own mother, for that matter." The viscount thumped his fist against the counterpane with more force than his cough-choked voice could manage. "Do not speak of your grandmother that way." "And my mother?" Gage countered, almost rising from his seat. "But we already know she wasn't deferential enough or I wouldn't be here." "Gentlemen," I interrupted before either of them could say something they would regret. "Please. This argument about Lady Juliana is of no consequence if we cannot find Lord Langstone." I glanced between the two men, who continued to bristle at one another. I waited for the viscount to catch his breath, concerned by the rattle in his chest. He sank deeper into the pillows propped behind him, tiring from exertion. Nonetheless, we couldn't leave our conversation as it was. I urged Gage to pour him a glass of water from the ewer on the nightstand. "Now, Lord Tavistock, you seem to be certain that your heir is not absent of his own will. And you don't believe he was a victim of the natural hazards of the moor. So what do you think happened to him?" The viscount accepted the glass from Gage's hand and gingerly sipped from it. I frowned. As strong as the bark of his cough had been, I'd expected him to gulp down the water. But the pain that crossed his features every time he swallowed told me this ailment was far more serious, affecting his tonsils and throat. If he had this much trouble ingesting water, how much food was he able to eat? He met my gaze over the rim of his glass, and something in my features must have communicated what I'd deduced. Gage was forever teasing me that I was terrible at hiding my thoughts, and though I'd improved over the past months during our inquiries, I'd not taken care to guard my impressions from his grandfather. In the future, I decided it would be best if I did, for he scowled at me in annoyance. Breathing more heavily than before, he sank back into his pillows, passing Gage the glass, of which he'd only drunk a quarter of the contents. The skin across Gage's face stretched taut, having likely been reminded of his mother's own battle with a similar illness. He'd once described to me her racking coughs, and his fear when she'd struggled to catch her breath. "Why are Gage and I here?" I murmured, rephrasing my query in more succinct terms. He continued to frown, clamping his mouth shut as if refusing to speak. He almost seemed angry that I'd asked him such a thing, that I was making him put it into words. In truth, I already knew the answer. I had known it from the moment Gage had read his letter and explained how little communication he'd had with his grandfather in the past fifteen years. The last time my husband had set foot in Langstone Manor, he'd been here to bury his mother in the family plot at the churchyard nearby. Something had happened then. Something worse than the circumstances surrounding his mother's death and the subsequent discovery that she'd been murdered. Something he'd yet to tell me, yet to explain. Until I better understood, I wasn't about to spare Lord Tavistock's sensibilities by saying the words he didn't wish to utter. But Gage was not of the same mind. "You think he's met with foul play," he surmised sharply, perhaps impatient for this interview to be over. The viscount's features seemed to sink in on themselves, becoming even gaunter. "That is my worry." "So the angry husband or father of a woman Alfred has trifled with isn't outside the realm of possibility?" Gage charged. His grandfather's mouth pursed, but he stopped trying to deny it. "Why do you suspect Lord Langstone has met with violence?" I persisted. "Do you have any proof?" "Why do you think I asked you here?" he remarked stiffly. I glanced at Gage, whose mouth was twisted in frustration. However, there was something in his eyes, something in the way he scoured his grandfather's features that made me think he wasn't completely attending to the conversation. "Yes, but you must realize we need a reason to trust your assertion," I explained, feeling like I was addressing one of my nieces or nephews, not an octogenarian. "How else are we to know where to begin?" "I know that boy. He's my heir. I would know if he's in trouble, and I tell you, he is." He raised his eyebrows imperiously in challenge. I nodded, stifling a sigh. I wasn't one to doubt the power of intuition. It had aided me more times than I could count. But surely Lord Tavistock understood we needed more information to go on than that. I began to gather my things to rise, thinking perhaps it was time to bring this interview to an end. His lordship was fatigued. Just in the past quarter of an hour the hollows around his eyes had deepened. But then he surprised me. "Sebastian is right," he murmured, frowning at his legs. "Alfred has always had a . . . thirst for drink and women. If he'd taken the carriage or his horse into the village or off to a friend's home and been gone for a night, maybe two, I would not be surprised. But eleven days?" He shook his head. "No. And certainly not walking on foot." I sat back, pondering what he'd just told us. "Why don't you think he met with an accident—" "Because he knew those moors! Knew them like his own face." "Yes, but Grandfather, men who've known Dartmoor far better than we ever could have still met their deaths out there," Gage contended. "Do you think I don't know that?" he snapped. "I tell you, your cousin didn't fall into a bog or any such a thing. At least, not of his own folly." "But if he were drunk—" "He wasn't! Not when he left here." But I could tell he wasn't so sure of that, and Gage's skepticism was patently clear. Whatever the real reason for Lord Tavistock's certainty, it was apparent we were not going to coax it from him this evening. Not when he began coughing again, nearly doubling over from the effort. Gage stood up, alarm tightening his features as he tried to assist his grandfather. Once he'd helped the old man rest back against his pillows, the viscount shooed him away. He shut his eyes as his chest rapidly rose and fell. I pressed a reassuring hand to my husband's arm. "Should we call for someone?" I asked his grandfather. "No." I wanted to press, but it would do no good. He was not at death's door, but if this illness persisted, at his age, it could not be far off.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 3	I was not surprised to find Hammett waiting for us in the corridor. Gage closed the door softly behind us so as not to wake his grandfather, who seemed to have already fallen into a shallow slumber, before turning to address the servant. "Be honest with me. How ill is he?" "The doctor says he'll be lucky if he sees the harvest. But you know yer grandfather. Stubborn as stone. Never was one to let another have his way. Though, I'm not sure, but I suspect the Lord's will is stronger than his." "What is he suffering from?" I asked curiously. "Bronchial ailments are usually a winter complaint." The butler shrugged. "I couldn't tell ye, m'lady. But whatever 'tis, it's plagued him since before the spring thaw. 'Twas not but a tiny cough then." His eyes fastened on the door as if to see past it. "Not so tiny anymore." Gage frowned. "Why didn't anyone write me sooner?" Hammett looked up at him, a tight line of censure running between his brows. "Didn't know ye cared to be told." He turned away, striding down the corridor. "I'll show ye to yer rooms." Though to most my husband's face would appear a mask of indifference, I could see the pain radiating across his features. I reached out to link my arm through his, lending him what comfort he would take as we followed Hammett down the hall. The chambers we'd been assigned seemed to be at the opposite end of the house from his lordship's. Whether this had been intentional on Lady Langstone's part, I didn't know, but I couldn't fault our accommodations. As was customary for most married couples among the aristocracy, we were given two adjoining bedchambers, and like the viscount's, they were both spacious and drafty. However, the furnishings and fabrics were shiny, plush, and crisp. Gage's aunt might not have been the most pleasant person, but she certainly knew how to run a household. Because of its positioning at the corner of the manor, my chamber also boasted two large windows, affording the room more light than I'd yet to see elsewhere. I was standing next to one of these windows, trying to see past the rain-splattered panes to the mist-shrouded moors beyond, when Gage entered through the connecting door. His eyes scoured the room before lifting to meet mine. "I see your luggage hasn't arrived either." I glanced toward the dainty dressing table fashioned of cherrywood where Bree would have customarily already laid out my brush and comb, as well as other grooming items. Crossing to the wardrobe, I opened the doors graced with the carved image of a rowan tree to find the space inside empty. "You're right. Could your aunt have changed her mind about which bedchambers we were to be assigned?" For there was no doubt after seeing the emerald green silk wallpaper adorning the walls that this was the emerald chamber of which she'd spoken. "It's doubtful," he replied, nodding to the fire crackling in my hearth. Not even the most frivolous of noblemen wasted money on lighting fires in unused guest chambers. He reached out to pull the cord that would summon a servant from belowstairs. "I take it Anderley wasn't waiting in your chamber." He shook his head, sinking down into the ivory cushions of the rosewood fainting couch positioned near the hearth. I moved across the Aubusson rug to join him, a thought having occurred to me. "You don't think this is Anderley's way of expressing his displeasure at being here, do you?" I'd only recently learned that Gage's valet had an impish and somewhat childish inclination to play small pranks when he was irritated or determined to have his way. Or, in the case of my missing gray serge painting dress, when his aesthetic sensibilities had been offended. "No. Anderley is undeniably underhanded at times, but his actions are always considered and far more subtle. Causing our luggage to go missing now would serve no purpose other than to aggravate us. We've already arrived. There's no turning back." He draped his arm around my shoulders and sighed. "Undoubtedly the servants were misinformed." "Well, if our trunks don't arrive soon, I suppose we'll have to dine in our traveling clothes, and your aunt will simply have to screw up her nose and accept it." Gage ran his fingers absently through the loose hairs that had fallen from their pins to tickle the back of my neck. "Yes. Aunt Vanessa is rather haughty." Trying to ignore the way my skin tingled at his touch, I peered up at him through my lashes, cautiously broaching a subject that had puzzled me. "I couldn't help but notice there was no love lost between the two of you." His face creased into a humorless smile. "Yes, well, now you can understand why I've avoided her and my cousins' presence whenever possible when they're in London. She never did approve of my playing with her sons, let alone sharing their tutor." "Because of your father?" He nodded. "I didn't mind so much for my sake, but she treated my mother like she was a pariah unworthy to dine at the same table with her." His eyes narrowed. "Which was ridiculous. Regardless of who she'd married, Mother was still a viscount's daughter. But Aunt Vanessa could never let her forget how far she'd sunk to wed a mere Royal Navy captain." "And your grandfather allowed her to treat his daughter that way?" I asked, aghast. "Oh, she behaved icily correct whenever he was present, though I always felt he must have known about it. It wasn't so terrible when my uncle was alive. He made her keep a civil tongue in her head. But after he passed . . ." He shook his head. "She was as mean as a viper." I pressed a hand to his chest, wishing I could heal the hurt his aunt had so callously caused. "I'm sorry." He shrugged as if it didn't matter, but I could tell it did. How much more so had it troubled him as a young boy? "It must infuriate her to know that my father now holds a title. All those years of slighting us and now the cause of her condescension ranks alongside her, and has the ear of the king." "Yes, I imagine that must eat at her. Especially now that she will never be the viscountess. Does she act as your grandfather's hostess, then? Is that why she still lives here instead of London or the dower house?" I paused to consider. "Is there a dower house?" "Yes. We passed it along the lane, though you could not see much of it beyond the hedgerows." Gage rested his ankle over his other knee, leaning deeper back into the cushions. "She does act as hostess in what little entertaining my grandfather does. But I'm certain she stays here more to keep an eye on her sons' interests than anything." It was my turn to frown. "What do you mean? Alfred is your father's rightful heir. Your grandfather can hardly disown him." "Yes, but not all of his property is entailed. A significant portion of Grandfather's wealth derives from the stakes in the tin and silver mines he owns. He's free to bequeath those to anyone he pleases." I arched my eyebrows. "Including you." The corners of his lips curled into a cynical smile. "Yes." "No wonder she wasn't happy to see you. She's obviously worried your grandfather sent for you for other reasons than locating Alfred. Though, I can't understand why she would be more concerned with whatever you might or might not inherit than the fact that her son has disappeared." I tapped my fingers against the cushions beneath me. "Unless she has no reason to worry about where he is." "I had precisely the same notion, my perceptive wife. If Alfred got himself into some sort of trouble, his mother might have convinced him it was best to lay low for a time and let the matter blow over rather than risk Grandfather's wrath." "What sort of trouble?" His mouth twisted. "The usual. Gambling. Fisticuffs. Damaged property. A maid or respectable female he's seduced and gotten in the family way." I blinked. "Your cousin is capable of all those things?" "Oh, yes. He's a recurring offender." He sighed, sinking his head back against the couch. "And if it proves to be true my dear aunt is hiding him, then by now she's realized she made a grave miscalculation. I can't imagine she ever anticipated Grandfather would summon me here to find him." I studied the intricate medallion surrounding the chandelier hanging from the ceiling, considering everything he'd told me. "Do you think your grandfather suspects?" I glanced to the side to see Gage blinking open bleary eyes to gaze up at me. I smiled in apology for disturbing him. If he felt anything like I did, I imagine he'd been seconds from falling asleep. It seemed we'd been moving nonstop for over a fortnight, bouncing from one inquiry to another, racing from the Lake District of Cumberland to Ireland and now on to Dartmoor. Setting off for Ireland from our honeymoon had only made the journeys and investigations that followed all the more jarring. That day alone, we'd docked in Plymouth just before midday and promptly climbed into a hired chaise to travel on to Dartmoor with the rainy weather at our heels. When it caught up with us outside of Tavistock, the gateway to the moors, I'd suggested we find a room in one of the town's inns for the night and venture on to Langstone Manor in the morning, but Gage had insisted we press on. I hadn't argued, though fatigue dragged at my bones. But now that I'd met this loving family of his, I began to question his haste, for I could think of nothing we could do to locate his cousin on a night like this. Morning would have been soon enough to begin our search. If, in fact, there was even a search to be conducted. "Do I think he suspects Aunt Vanessa knows where Alfred is?" Gage asked as if to refocus his own drifting thoughts as much as to clarify. "Yes. Do you think that's why your grandfather had trouble answering our questions? Is he calling their bluff, so to speak?" Gage's brow furrowed in consideration, and then he shook his head. "No. I don't think my grandfather would have caused such a fuss, dragging us all the way from Ireland, if that's all this is." "Yes, but he didn't know we were in Ireland," I pointed out. "He sent his letter to London, expecting you to be there, or somewhere thereabouts." I bit my lip, debating whether to mention the other inkling that had occurred to me. Gage lifted his head, sensing I was withholding something. "What? What else are you deliberating over in that astounding little brain of yours?" I hesitated a moment longer, uncertain he would wish to hear it. "Has it occurred to you that your grandfather might have been grateful for the ruse such a feigned disappearance afforded him?" I proposed gently. "You said yourself he's very proud. And now he's ill and probably knows he's not much longer for this earth. It's been fifteen years since he's even set eyes on you. Maybe he wanted to see you again, but he was afraid that if he wrote and asked you to come for his sake, well, that you might refuse." Gage's pale blue eyes fastened on the embroidered ivory bed skirt, as if trying to imagine such a scenario and finding it bewildering. Just the fact that he was so staggered by such a suggestion made my heart ache for him. Despite the difficulties our hasty voyage had caused us, part of me wished it was true. That his grandfather truly had been desperate enough to lie to bring us here, if only to make Gage feel as if he was wanted by at least one person in his family. I watched as he struggled to form a response. But before he could reply, a peremptory rap on the door preceded Bree's entrance. My maid bustled inside carrying my valise, followed by a footman hefting my trunk over his shoulder. "My apologies, m'lady," Bree proclaimed breathlessly, before directing the pale-headed footman. "Over there." She resumed eye contact with me and then darted a suspicious glare over her shoulder. "Somebody told the lads to deliver yer trunks to the attics instead o' bringin' 'em to the rooms." "Thank you, Bree. We were beginning to wonder." Regretfully abandoning the comfort of the couch and Gage's solid presence at my side, I forced myself to rise to my feet as the footman turned to leave, averting his eyes. "I'm sure it was all an honest mistake." A bizarre one, but an honest one nonetheless. Bree harrumphed as the footman passed her, plainly not agreeing with me. "I trust Anderley has also located Mr. Gage's trunk and is awaiting him next door?" "Aye, m'lady." I nodded at Gage, who was trying rather unsuccessfully to hide a grin at Bree's ruffled outrage as he departed through the connecting door. She plopped my valise on the pristine ivory counterpane beside my discarded gloves and bonnet, and opened it to begin pulling out the items I would require. "Something simple this evening, I think," I told her, beginning to unfasten my own pelisse. "The Prussian blue gown with gold trim?" she suggested promptly, as if she'd already been considering the matter. "It almost matches yer eyes." "Yes, that should do." I was slightly taken aback by her harried movements and sharp responses. This wasn't the first time we'd found ourselves in a strained situation among unfamiliar society and staff, and Bree usually responded with unruffled amusement at the foibles of others. So seeing her in such an agitated state was somewhat of a novelty, and spoke volumes as to the conditions belowstairs. I watched as she crossed back and forth between the bed and the dressing table, laying out my possessions with her usual precision, all the while wearing a scowl that made her eyes flash with fire. "That bad?" I murmured when she swiveled to approach my trunk of clothes. She paused to glance up at me, and seeing the sympathetic smile curling my lips, exhaled shakily. "My apologies, m'lady." She shook her head. "This bungle wi' the trunks just has me flustered." "Are you sure that's all?" I asked as I settled onto the padded bench before the dressing table, not bothering to hide my skepticism. When she didn't respond, and merely continued to rifle through the contents of the trunk, I decided she might need a little encouraging. "How is the staff? Do you think this . . ." I searched for a diplomatic word ". . . confusion with the trunks is uncommon?" She scoffed, rising to her feet and allowing the skirts of my gown to unfold. Her eyes scoured the delicate fabric. "Bree," I said, waiting for her to look up at me. "Truly, I would like to know. The state of this household might give me and Mr. Gage some helpful indications as to what is really going on." A self-deprecating smile quirked the corners of her lips. "You know me, m'lady. I'll no' spare my opinions." She lifted the wrinkled gown. "But if I'm to have ye respectably dressed in time for dinner, I'll need to press this immediately." I shrugged. "I don't mind the wrinkles. Lady Langstone will simply have to suffer the sight of them. It's not our fault the viscount's staff lost our luggage." Bree's face tightened, and I remembered then that I wasn't the only one who would be judged lacking if I turned up in the dining room with my appearance being anything but impeccable despite the day's difficulties. "I see." I tilted my head. "It seems the servants take after their mistress." Bree didn't respond, but it was obvious I'd guessed right. I nodded to the gown. "Go on, then." I swiveled to stare into the mirror, pushing a hand through my tangled deep chestnut brown tresses. "And send a maid up with some water so I can bathe away this dust." Draping the gown over her arm, she moved toward the door, but before she could open it, someone rapped softly. I watched in the mirror as Bree opened it to let in a young, mousy-haired maid. The girl bobbed an awkward curtsy, sloshing the water in the ewer she carried. I should have known my ever-efficient lady's maid had already requested bathing water. The maid's eyes dipped to the gown Bree carried as she set the ewer beside the washbasin. "Mr. Anderley told me her ladyship would be needin' a gown pressed. And that I'm to 'take extra care not to damage it.'" The way she spoke Gage's valet's name and quoted him so precisely made it clear she was already smitten. Bree and I were accustomed to this reaction to the tall, dark, and handsome servant. The black eye he currently sported, courtesy of a scuffle during our last inquiry, only made him look roguish and all the more attractive to the female staff. I could see Bree suppressing a roll of her eyes as she passed the dress over. "Please, see that you don't." There was no need for further warning. Not when Anderley's approbation was at stake. The girl bobbed another curtsy and then exited the room carrying the gown before her like it was the Crown Jewels. I waited until the door shut before speaking. "Now, out with it," I ordered Bree, lifting the ewer to pour the warm water into the bowl. "Gossip at will." She didn't need to be told twice. "They're no' but a lot o' puffed-up Sassenachs. Said they couldna understand what I was sayin', even though I ken they could. And then tried to blame the missin' trunks on me." Though it was true Bree had an accent, it was not nearly as thick as many Scots', and perfectly intelligible even to someone who had not spent a great deal of time in Scotland. She had originally been employed in my father's and subsequently my brother's households at my childhood home in the Borders region of England and Scotland. The staff there was a mixture of both nationalities, and almost indistinguishable from each other. Anyone from that area recognized the Borders were almost a country unto themselves, identifying less with the people in London or Edinburgh and more with their neighbors, whichever side of the arbitrary boundary they happened to fall on. Given that fact, it was no wonder Bree found the viscount's staff's condescension infuriating. But I was afraid she was going to find this to be quite typical of English servants, who at times could be even more pretentious than their aristocratic employers. I hoped she would be able to make the adjustment. I'd already lost one maid who could not handle the challenges and rigors of being parted from her family and her Highland home. "Did Anderley defend you?" I asked, blotting my face with a towel. I had long been curious how my and Gage's personal servants behaved with one another outside of our presence. They seemed to fare well enough with each other, though I wouldn't have called them friends. She bent over the trunk again, extracting the rest of my dresses and stomping across the room to lay them across the bed in a pile until they could be properly hung. "He's no more impressed by the lot o' 'em than I am. Though bein' an Englishman, he can comport himself wi' that icy disdain o' his and no one says a thing edgewise." I grimaced in commiseration. Some things were no different belowstairs than above. I was sorry to hear they were being so condescending not only for her sake, but for that of the investigation. "Are they all so patronizing?" "No, no' all." Having located my slippers and undergarments for the evening, she moved behind me and took over the task of unbuttoning my traveling gown. Her nimble fingers moved quickly down my spine. "Mainly the upper servants. The lowers maids and footmen wouldna dare do more than titter." She sighed. "And I suspect some o' 'em are even sympathetic." I glanced over my shoulder. "What of Mr. Hammett?" Having witnessed the surly banter he'd traded with Gage, which masked a long-held fondness, I had a difficult time imagining him harassing my maid. "The butler? Nay, he's a correct one, like our Jeffers. Wasna puttin' up wi' the others' nonsense once he found oot aboot the trunks. You'd still be waitin' for 'em if it wasna for him." Bree whisked my dress over my head and draped it over the fainting couch before beginning on the fastenings of my corset. I waited until I could see her face in the mirror before continuing. "Well, I need you to cozen those who'll speak to you and find out what you can about the family, particularly the missing grandson, Alfred, and his mother, the Dowager Lady Langstone. Enlist Anderley to help you, if Gage isn't doing so already." Bree's eyes flicked up to meet mine, sharp with intellect. "You suspect her o' bein' involved?" "Possibly," I admitted. "Her reaction to our arrival and to her son having gone missing was peculiar to say the least. Definitely not what I would have expected, given the circumstances." Bree nodded. "Consider it done." I pivoted as she pulled my arms from the garment, looking at her directly. "Given her employer's haughtiness, I suspect her ladyship's maid is one of your worst offenders. But if there's any way you can convince her to trust you, that might prove beneficial." Bree's face screwed up in confirmation, and then smoothed into a taut smile. "Well, they do say those who are prickliest have often had the most thorns stuck in 'em." A twinkle lit her brown eyes. "I 'spose I'll just have to employ some o' that charm my Irish gran taught me." Relieved to see some of her good humor had returned, I tugged at an errant curl resting along my neck. "Now, what do you propose we do with this mess?" Bree studied my head and shook her own resignedly. "Oh, m'lady, how you manage to muddle yer hair so I'll never ken."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 4	Despite our best efforts, Gage and I still descended the stairs a quarter of an hour later than the designated hour we'd been given for dinner. I thought our haste had been admirable, but Lady Langstone seemed to be of a different opinion, even though it was her staff's fault our trunks had been taken to the attics. "How good of you to finally join us," she drawled, her eyes sharp with derision. Lifting her chin, she turned with a swirl of maroon silk and led us from the hall down a corridor to the left. That she'd been lying in wait for us at the base of the stairs instead of the drawing room said much about her impatience. "I can't promise anything will be warm at this point." I arched my eyebrows, hoping none of the servants had heard her make such an assertion. A well-run household knew how to keep its dishes warm and when to time their final preparation. The incident with the trunks aside, I had seen no indication that the staff wasn't anything but exemplary. Given the fact that Hammett, as butler, would be presiding over the dinner service, I had no doubt everything would run smoothly. This held true to my expectations when we settled into our chairs before a gleaming table service, and bowls of lightly steaming creamy white chicken soup were set before us. The light from the chandelier overhead glistened off the silverware and reflected in the mirror over the fireplace and off the ornate gold frames of the paintings adorning the walls. However, contrary to being pleased, Lady Langstone seemed only more irritated by this sign of the staff's efficiency. I found it baffling that she would rather be proven right in her vindictiveness than be presented as a good hostess. After all, an efficient household was as much a credit to her as to the staff. I did my best to ignore her sour expression, turning to address Rory, our only other dinner companion. "So Gage tells me he was schooled with you and your brother." I cast a mischievous smile at my husband. "Tell me, what was he like as a boy?" I urged, as curious to know the answer as I was to see how Rory would respond. "Well, in the classroom he was quite studious and earnest." He flashed his cousin a grin. "To tell the truth, he was always more clever than my brother or me." "Only because he had to be, dear," Lady Langstone interjected between spoonfuls of soup. Rory's cadence faltered hearing this casually delivered insult, but otherwise he ignored it. "And I suppose he was just as resolute outside of it. Always doggedly determined to be the best at everything." He gave a bark of sudden laughter. "Alfred used to say..." But he broke off upon seeing Gage's face, which had turned stony. A slight flush crested Rory's cheeks and his brow furrowed as he seemed to reconsider his words. "He used to say, well . . ." He cleared his throat. "It doesn't really matter what Alfred said. Never did like to come in second, and the way he'd snarl at you made you wish you'd let him win. It ruined the fun more often than not." His eyes dipped to his bowl, seeing something the rest of us couldn't, so he missed the black look his mother cast his way, perhaps for being disloyal to his brother. I glanced at Gage, wondering what he thought of his cousin's admission and found that the forbidding expression had faded from his eyes to be replaced with quiet consideration. "I seem to remember you boys fighting a great deal," Lady Langstone said as her soup was whisked away and replaced by filleted sole simmered in butter and lemon juice. Though she spoke as if she cared very little about the matter, her lips pursed. Gage and Rory exchanged a look rife with unspoken things. Things neither of them seemed eager to reminisce over. "I suspect most boys do," Rory remarked before taking a long drink of his wine. "Too true," I said, hoping to relieve some of the tension. "My brother and cousins were constantly pounding each other for some perceived slight one moment and then happily engaged in some bit of sport the next. Our nanny always said that so long as they didn't actually maim each other, it was best to let them have it out, and it would all be over quicker." I looked up to find my husband watching me with a small smile. I'd never been one to chatter, so I guessed my efforts to distract had been obvious. At least to him. Regrettably, the effort was all but wasted, for Lady Langstone seemed determined to pursue the topic and her grudge. "Well, for members of civilized families I suppose it's not cause for alarm," she sniffed. "But I'm afraid the matter is quite different when some of the parties involved have the blood of ruffians and smugglers running through their veins." It was evident she was talking about Gage, for his father's maternal relatives were rather notorious for their activities along the Cornish coast. This was also a point she'd evidently made numerous times before, for Gage stifled a sigh before rather aggressively attacking a bite of fish. His head lifted in surprise when Rory spoke up in his defense. "Well, I don't know about blood, other than the fact that we were all guilty of spilling a bit of it." He tipped his cup toward Gage. "But I'm certain you gave your mother much less grief than we gave ours." I imagined that was true. Gage had a fiercely protective streak. One I'd long suspected had developed from watching his mother's battle with illness while his father was so far away for much of the year. Now that I realized she'd also been contending with the slights of some of her own family, Gage's behavior made all the more sense. He would not have wanted her to suffer on account of his poor behavior, too. His aunt pushed away her plate with a small shove, as if she'd suddenly lost her appetite. "Except the incident with the Brays' ceremonial dagger." Her sharp gaze flicked to me and then to Gage, who returned it with a pointed glare of his own. I didn't know what she was referring to. My husband had never shared anything about a dagger with me, and I wasn't about to ask him to elaborate now. But the incident she had referred to clearly troubled Rory. He shifted anxiously as he observed their silent standoff, before signaling to the footman to refill his glass. Though I'd never been one to overindulge, I found myself following suit. I drained my first glass of wine and requested more. If I was to make it through this dinner with all its barbed commentary, I wasn't sure I wanted my wits completely intact. In any case, my head already ached. Whether it was because Bree had put a little too much force into braiding my hair into a coronet or a result of the long days of travel, it seemed unlikely that drink could make it worse. I pressed a hand to my temple and broached the subject that was most pressing to us all, and yet the one no one seemed to wish to address. In doing so, I knew I might be overstepping myself, for I'd planned to let Gage take the lead of this investigation, whatever form it took. But witnessing the antagonistic behavior of his aunt, I thought it might be better if I were the one to force the issue. "You must be beside yourself with worry, Lady Langstone." I arched my eyebrows, struggling to mask my sarcasm. "Concerned for your son's whereabouts and whether he's injured himself or fallen into trouble." Her posture turned rigid, her eyes bright like two pieces of hard jet, but she did not speak. "Lord Tavistock seems all but certain Alfred is not absent of his own volition. Not for so many days. But Rory, you indicated you assumed otherwise," I prompted. "Initially, yes." He frowned. "But now I'm less certain." "Why did you believe he was off on some lark?" I questioned, harking back to the comment he'd made in the entry hall after learning why Gage and I were here. "Because it's not uncommon for him to do so. For a day or two or three," he qualified, tapping his fingers against the base of his glass. His eyes narrowed in deliberation. "In London, he often disappears for a few days, returning home whenever he's had his fill of whatever vice he's been pursuing." His mother made a sound of protest, but he cut her off wearily. "There's no point in hiding it, Mother. I know you're as aware of the truth as I am. And it will come as no surprise to Gage." His eyes lifted to meet mine. "I suspect his wife wouldn't care for us to dance delicately around the situation either. She seems to be eminently logical and levelheaded." I nodded my thanks, grateful he hadn't touted the unsavory events in my past as evidence I was unlikely to be shocked by the fact that some gentlemen drank to excess, gambled, or visited the demimonde. What was there to be taken aback by about a man bedding someone other than his wife when I had seen the internal anatomy of a human being laid open on a table for me to sketch? "But this isn't London," I murmured, finishing his thought for him. "No, it isn't. And so there are fewer . . . opportunities for him to indulge himself. He might hie off to his chum Glanville's home at Kilworthy Park, or visit one of his other friends in the vicinity. Barring that, I know he's visited the local pubs a time or two, looking for willing company among the barmaids. But he's never away for more than a night or two at that." "Mr. Glanville called a few days ago," Lady Langstone chimed in to say. A frown still pleated her brow. "He's been very helpful with the search. He wanted us to know he'd spoken to all of their friends and no one has seen or heard from Alfred." Given her earlier behavior, I couldn't help but be skeptical of her willingness to supply such information. Was Mr. Glanville in collusion with her and she wished us to leave him alone? Or was she concerned with our discovering the full extent of Alfred's proclivities? Regardless, I felt a visit to Kilworthy Park was in order. One glance at Gage's curious expression told me he harbored a similar intention. "What of Plymouth?" he asked, spearing a parsnip. "Did Alfred ever venture there?" "I couldn't tell you." Rory's mouth twisted. "My brother wasn't exactly forthcoming about his pursuits. Glanville, or perhaps the coachman, would be able to tell you better than I can." I glanced at Lady Langstone, wondering how she would react to her son's suggestion that we question Alfred's friend, but she feigned absorption in her food. Gage's eyes strayed toward the heavy rose damask drapes that had been pulled across the windows, shielding our view of the darkness falling over the garden and the sharp pings of cold rain that continued to be flung by the wind against the glass. It was not a night to be out, especially on the exposed expanses of the high moors. "What do you think happened to him?" His gaze swiveled to spear first his aunt and then his cousin, giving them no quarter. "Where do you think Alfred is?" Lady Langstone paled and for the first time I could see that she was not as sangfroid about the matter as she appeared. I studied her, wondering if perhaps I had judged her a bit too harshly. After all, her son was missing, and if she wasn't somehow involved, she must be racked with worry indeed, no matter how she strove to hide it. However, she was not the first to speak. Instead, her younger son straightened in his chair, narrowing his eyes at the centerpiece of white roses. "It simply doesn't seem possible he fell into a bog or wandered out to a part of the moors we have yet to search." His gaze lifted to his mother before meeting Gage's. "But he was ill during the days before he disappeared. Not like Grandfather's ailment. Laid low by some stomach complaint worse than normal crapulence." He paused, his mouth pressing tight. "I wonder . . ." He hesitated, beginning again. "I worry he was not really well enough to be out of bed. What if he fell sicker or became delusional?" Lady Langstone's fingers tightened around the fork she grasped in her hand, turning her knuckles white. She didn't even seem conscious that she was doing so, until she caught me watching her. Then she inhaled, forcing her shoulders to relax, and carefully set her utensil aside, resting her hands in her lap before speaking. "It's possible. Though, I do not like to think that is what happened." Gage's manner softened in answer to her distress. "What do you hope happened?" She swallowed, her words emerging haltingly. "That he took himself off to Plymouth or a friend's home farther afield than Kilworthy Park and couldn't be bothered to inform any of us." "Without a horse or carriage?" "Yes, well, the walk to Peter Tavy or even Merrivale isn't so very far. And there are a number of smaller farms bordering the moor. Perhaps he borrowed a horse from one of them." None of us pointed out how improbable her suggestion was. In any case, I suspected she already knew. If Alfred had borrowed a horse, surely the farmer or hostler would have spoken up when they discovered the viscount was searching for his grandson. That is, if he'd borrowed one. From what I'd learned of Gage's cousin, he scarcely seemed the type to travel any distance on a borrowed nag when he could easily do so in greater comfort and style. Which led us back to one glaring point. If Alfred hadn't gone into hiding of his own volition—with or without his mother's help—then something unpleasant had probably befallen him. We finished our meal on that somber note and retired to our chambers. I was largely quiet as Bree helped me undress and ready myself for bed. My things had all been put away and the room tidied while I ate dinner. Knowing my maid must be as tired, if not more so, than I, I sent her off to find her own bed. My thoughts kept returning to the moors, to their silent but relentless presence beyond the garden wall. There was something preternatural about them, something ancient. I could not forget they were there. Their existence seemed to always be lurking somewhere in the background of my mind as a sort of hum of anticipation. I lifted aside the gold damask drapes to peer out into the rain-soaked darkness, knowing I would not be able to see anything, and yet not able to resist. Perhaps it was the very fact that I had not been able to truly glimpse them yet that made the moors seem so fascinating to me. The weather and then nightfall had maddeningly kept them cloaked. I only hoped tomorrow would be different, for my sake and for Alfred's. When my husband entered the room a few moments later through the connecting door, he found me still peering out at what little I could see of the manor's back terrace and gardens. I'd been expecting him, for we'd yet to spend a night apart in the three months of our marriage, despite it being unfashionable to share a bedchamber. Instead, Gage used his assigned room merely to dress with the assistance of his valet, affording me and Bree some privacy as she helped me with my ablutions. I hoped it would always be this way. I glanced up as the door clicked shut and allowed the heavy drapes to fall back into place. "Curious about the moors?" he guessed, knowing me all too well. He smiled tiredly, pausing at the foot of the bed. "I'm sorry our arrival couldn't have been under more auspicious circumstances." I knew he was speaking about more than the weather. I waved the matter aside. "You look as if you could fall asleep on your feet," I murmured, reaching up to caress his jaw. Tilting my head, I studied his pale blue eyes. "But your mind won't let you." His arms wrapped around my waist, pulling me against him. "Perceptive, as always." His grin turned humorless. "Though I suppose it doesn't require a great deal of acuity to deduce there is much weighing on my mind." I rested my head against his chest, pressing my hand to the warm skin over his heart revealed by the part in the collar of his burgundy silk dressing gown. "Do you wish to discuss it or will that only make it more difficult to sleep?" A long exhale shuddered through him as he rested his chin on my head. "Oh, that I could ignore it." I inhaled the spicy scent of his cologne and the natural musk of his skin, feeling my body soften further to mold against his as my blood thickened. "I could . . . attempt to distract you." I gazed up at him through my lashes, fighting the blush cresting my cheeks. Although I'd been a widow when he and I wed, relations between myself and Gage had been a complete revelation. And while I had grown bolder and more comfortable with the physical side of our marriage, I was still by far the shyer of the two of us, and the least likely to initiate intimacy. Though I was more than happy to partake. Gage's eyes darkened and his lips curled into a smile that could only be termed wolfish. "Could you?" he drawled, lowering his head to capture my lips. But before they could touch, he drew back, staring over my shoulder at something. I turned my head, trying to follow his gaze. "What is it?" A pleat formed between his eyes. "Just one moment." He crossed the room toward the corner where a tall bureau stood. Then he leaned down to press his shoulder against it, slowly sliding the heavy oak desk across the floor to the right. I stared at him in bafflement. "What are you doing?" He paused to catch his breath and then with a grunt continued his labor, sliding the piece of furniture over about two more feet. "There," he proclaimed, standing tall again as he rested his hands on his hips in satisfaction. "That should do it." "Do what?" He nodded at the bureau, or rather the wall behind where it now stood. "Block the entrance to one of the secret passages."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 5	"What?!" I gasped, striding across the room to stand next to him. Gage pointed toward the edge of the wood paneling that spanned the wall from floor to ceiling on either side of the fireplace. I hadn't noticed it earlier—then, of course, I hadn't been looking—but there was definitely a narrow groove running up the wall that was not evident on the other side. About a foot to the left hung a long woven tapestry of medieval knights and maidens, which I assumed was meant to mask any further evidence of the mechanism. "I apologize. I should have mentioned it sooner. In all honesty, it slipped my mind," he explained. "How many secret passages are there?" I asked, still somewhat shocked by such a discovery. "Three. Four if you count the priest's hole in the back parlor." He spoke so nonchalantly, as if all of this was common. I'd heard of castles and manor houses that boasted secret passages, but I'd yet to knowingly stay in one. And rather than intrigue me, it somehow made this foreboding, unwelcoming place seem all the more cold and heartless. To think someone could have snuck in and out of our chamber without our knowledge made me feel angry and violated. My spine stiffened, and I crossed my arms over my chest. "Do you think your aunt assigned us this chamber because of it?" "I can't help but think that was part of her consideration." He frowned in deliberation. "But surely she must have known I would be aware of them. My cousins are." I turned to scour the chamber for signs that anyone else had been in the room other than Bree, but I had no idea what to look for. Upon being shown into the chamber before dinner, I hadn't really given the space much consideration, having been distracted by other things. And if changes had been made even prior to that, we would never have known. "Perhaps she didn't realize you were aware of them, or she anticipated you'd forgotten." I scowled at the couch where earlier we'd reclined discussing matters. "Or she'd hoped you would trust them not to intrude." I turned back to the wall behind the bureau, searching it for any signs of holes or other crevices. Gage draped an arm around my shoulders as if sensing my unease. "The walls are too thick for them to eavesdrop," he assured me. "And the tapestry muffles what sound that does filter through." I glanced up at him, curious how he was so certain of such a thing, but seeing the tightening at the corner of his eyes, I decided not to ask. Instead, I leaned closer, absorbing his warmth. A draft coming from somewhere on this side of the chamber—the secret door?—had crept over my toes and up under my night rail. Feeling me shiver, my husband urged me up into the bed and under the thick covers. He leaned back against the pillows plumped in front of the headboard, and I rested my head on his shoulder. He'd not removed his dressing gown, so I knew he had something to say before we indulged in any sort of distraction. The clock ticked away on the mantel while he contemplated whatever it was he wished to discuss. My eyes began to droop—his heat and solid presence lulling me into slumber—when finally he spoke. "You can ask me." I blinked open my eyes to look up at him. He dropped his gaze from the point he had been staring at on the opposite wall. "You don't have to dance around asking the questions I can see forming in your eyes. I know I haven't proven to be the most forthcoming individual, especially about my past, and I can't promise I will always give you a straightforward answer, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try." He swallowed. "I . . . I want you to try. Otherwise, I'm not certain I will ever bring myself to speak of it." I sat taller to look at him, surprised by this change in him. Given the fact that I'd practically had to drag information out of him at knifepoint in the past, it was a welcome one. I well understood secrecy, for I had never been one to share a great deal of myself. I also had my fair share of skeletons I would rather remain in the closet. But Gage had transformed reticence into an art form. "How do you know the walls are too thick?" I asked softly, sensing something fragile behind his eyes. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed again. "Because my father met with Aunt Vanessa here." His revelation of the secret passage had been shock enough, but this pronouncement rendered me completely mute. Fortunately, he didn't seem to need further coaxing in order to continue. "I followed him here once, through the passage. My father had come home to us for one of his leaves, and he'd been acting strangely ever since his arrival. Mother hadn't seemed to notice, but then, she was particularly ill that spring." One side of his mouth curled upward in chagrin. "I'd been trying to avoid him whenever I could because he tended to try to pack in an entire six months' worth of paternal scolding and correction into his short visits." His eyes narrowed in remembrance. "But unlike other visits, evasion hadn't proved difficult or earned me extra reprimands." "Because he was slipping away as well," I surmised. He nodded. "I needed to know why. To understand what was more important than staying by my mother's side or even lecturing me." Though Gage strove to conceal it, I could hear the hurt, lonely boy he had once been struggling behind his words. These were events he had never come to terms with. Memories he had never fully confronted. And they affected his relationship with his father even to this day. It also further explained his abhorrence of his aunt. I reached down to touch his opposite hand where it rested in his lap, rubbing my thumb up and down over the back of it. "Were he and your aunt . . . were they . . .?" I broke off, not knowing how to finish the question. "No. Not that time, at least." He stared down at our hands. "I could hear their raised voices, but not what they were saying. And I had to dart into a cobwebbed alcove to avoid being seen by my father when he left through the passage." "So you didn't confront him about it?" I already knew the answer, but I asked anyway. "No. Not then. Not ever." His brow lowered into a fierce scowl. "I'm not sure I trust my father to give me an honest answer. If he even deigned to give me an answer at all." Having firsthand knowledge of Lord Gage's high-handed, disdainful demeanor, I suspected he was right. "Did your mother know?" "I don't know. I hope not." I studied the intricately embroidered pattern on the counterpane as Gage lifted his fingers to thread them through mine. "What of your aunt?" I voiced in hesitation. He lifted his eyes to meet my gaze. "Have you ever asked her?" He arched a single eyebrow. "Asked her what? If my father proved unfaithful to my mother, the woman who degraded herself by marrying him?" "That's no worse than your aunt degrading herself by becoming his lover after she mercilessly mocked and derided your mother for years." I paused. "But I see your point. If whatever happened between them wasn't an affaire de coeur, then by questioning her about it, you've all but admitted your father is the knave she's accused him of being." Having labeled the relationship what it could have been, another thought occurred to me. "Is it distasteful to sleep here? Would you rather we slept in the bed in your chamber?" "My room is even colder than this one because the fireplace is not drawing correctly." He tightened the arm draped around me from behind, snuggling me closer to his side. "No. I shall be fine. Particularly with you here to help banish unpleasant imaginings." I smiled coyly. "I'm so pleased I can be useful." He reached up to coil a loose tendril of hair brushing my cheek around his finger. "You are ever so much more than useful," he murmured with a roguish twinkle in his eye. But then his expression turned more serious. "I'm glad you're here with me, Kiera. This would have been much more difficult on my own." He gazed up at the bed hangings above us. "I'm not sure I would have even had the nerve to come." I lifted a hand to his chin, forcing him to look at me. "Well, I am. Having seen you with your grandfather, there's no doubt in my mind that you would have accepted his summons, no matter how much you dreaded it." They must have been the words he'd needed to hear, for his brow smoothed and his shoulders relaxed. Until that moment, I hadn't realized the prospect that he might have ignored his grandfather's letter had been bothering him. Evidently the discovery that the viscount was ill had rattled him more than he wished to admit. He turned his body to press more fully against me and lowered his mouth to my neck. "Now, weren't you saying something about distracting me?" I sighed and set about being as diverting as possible. Though, to be honest, I wasn't sure whether I was the diversion or the diverted. Either way, I had no complaint.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 6	Despite the long journey and our tiring nocturnal efforts, I woke early the next morning. The pale light of dawn had just begun to filter through the curtains, casting a shadowy glow over the room almost like the gloaming in the Highlands. It was that hour when the light seemed almost tangible, a hazy wash of color over the darkness. I lay in bed staring up at the bed curtains, which we had never closed, still trying to shake off the bonds of slumber. However, far from relaxed, I felt unsettled. I didn't have to struggle to recall why. It was because of the dream I'd had sometime during the night. The vision of someone standing at the foot of the bed. They hadn't moved or spoken, merely hovered over us while we slept before vanishing into the gloom. It didn't take much insight to guess where this worrying apparition had originated. I turned my head to look at the wall where the bureau Gage had moved still blocked the entrance to the secret passage. I breathed a little deeper at the evidence that the heavy piece of furniture had not been disturbed, but a shiver still worked through my frame at the memory of that figure watching us while we were unaware. Another shiver ran through me and I realized it wasn't entirely my distressing nightmare that caused me to tremble. The room was also bitter cold. The fire in the grate had long since died, and no servant had yet entered to coax it back to life. Then a gust of air brushed over my skin, rustling the bed curtains and the drapes over one of the windows. I stiffened, shaking with renewed force from both the chill and the realization that a window was open. A window that had been shut the night before. I burrowed deeper under the covers, pressing close to my husband's side. "Gage," I whispered. He hummed sleepily and lifted his hand to cup my hip to pull me back against him, mistaking my intent. "Gage!" The second time the frantic tone of my voice must have penetrated through the fog of sleep, for he lifted his head off the pillow and cracked open one eye to look at me. "The window is open," I hissed. He glanced in the direction I indicated with my nodding head, clearly not understanding why this alarmed me. Just as he opened his mouth to question me, I saw comprehension dawn. His eyes widened and he pushed upright, allowing the covers to slide off his bare shoulders down to his waist. He turned to look at the bureau and the secret entrance as I had before tentatively rising from the bed. Snatching up his dressing gown, he covered himself and cinched the belt at the waist before he approached the window. He cursed, lifting his foot as he stepped into a puddle of undoubtedly frigid water. The drapes fluttered inward and he grasped them, yanking them aside. As suspected, the casement window stood open to the chill air, both panes having swung outward, though one gaped wider than the other. Clutching the covers up over my chest, I sat up to watch as he leaned forward to peer out. I found it odd that the casements swung outward when normally they swung inward, but it was not the first time I'd encountered such an anomaly. In any case, they should have made it harder for an intruder to enter, but someone had opened those windows, and it hadn't been me or Gage. My heart kicked in my chest at the prospect that my dream had been real. That someone had stood over us in our sleep. Gage lifted his head and then looked left and right along the side of the house, before grasping both casements to swing them shut. But prior to latching them, he paused to examine both frames. He lifted his finger to fiddle with something, then closed the windows and locked them tightly. "What did you discover?" I asked. He crossed to the other window to check its lock, all but ignoring my query. "Gage?" When he was satisfied, he hurried back to the bed and under the warm covers. I squeaked as his cold feet and hands brushed against me. "Well?" I prodded impatiently. "I should have checked the locks last night," he replied with a frown. "You can be sure I'll do so from now on." "Yes, but what did you find outside the window?" His gaze met mine, debating how much to reveal. I arched an eyebrow in scolding, letting him know he'd best not attempt to fob me off. He grinned sheepishly. "The light was not strong enough to tell for sure, but there appeared to be footsteps in the mud below the window." I stiffened. "But how did they climb up? And how did they open the casements?" "As for the climbing, I'm not certain. There's nothing attached to the outside of the building to assist them. Possibly a rope secured to the roof." He sighed and raked a hand back through his golden locks, sending them into even more disarray. "As for opening the windows, it appears they used an old rope trick. There's a hook attached to the outside of the frame. One that shouldn't be there. They must have tied a quick-release knot like the type used to secure a horse's reins. Looped it around the hook and left both ends dangling. Then after they pulled the window open, all they had to do was tug the other end to release the rope." "Removing any proof of how they did it. But who would do such a thing? Surely such an effort would require premeditation?" "Yes. The rope must have already been secured to the hook before we retired." I clutched the covers tighter to my chest. Had they tried entering our chamber through the secret passage but found it blocked? Had they suspected Gage would do so and the rope was merely a backup plan? "I don't understand. Why would they go to such lengths to enter our chamber in the middle of the night? What was the purpose?" Gage lifted one arm, placing his hand behind his head as he reclined back. He seemed far less concerned about the matter than I believed he should be. "I don't know why. There's certainly nothing remarkable to be found unless they wished to steal your jewels." He narrowed his eyes at the window. "I'm not even sure someone did enter." "What do you mean?" "I find it hard to believe we wouldn't have heard them clambering in through the window with naught but the aid of a rope. There is water on the floor, but the drapes are merely damp, so I suspect they waited until after the storm had passed to open the casements. Even so, I still think we would have woken if someone had attempted to enter our chamber through the window. But perhaps that wasn't the point." I bit my lip, apprehending what he meant. If their only goal had been to unnerve us, then they'd succeeded, at least for my part. But, of course, I hadn't told my husband about my vision in the middle of the night. Perhaps if he was aware I'd either dreamt of or woken up to find someone hovering over us, he wouldn't be so blasé about the matter. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him when a faint knock on the door presaged the entrance of the young maid who had ironed my gown the night before. She blushed at the sight of us together in my bed looking back at her. "I . . . I'm to tend the fires," she stammered, lifting her bucket of implements. I nodded and sank back under the covers next to my husband and closed my eyes. Saying anything to her would only embarrass her further. So we lay quietly listening to the soft scrape and shush of her efforts as she rebuilt the fire in the hearth. Under normal circumstances, we would have still been asleep and never even marked her presence. I would have liked to fall back asleep, but my mind was too alert. And so, it seemed, was Gage's, for the moment the maid slipped out the door, he threw the covers off him. "I need to speak to Rory." "Why?" I watched as he rolled out of bed to approach the crackling fire. "Because I've just remembered that Alfred used that very method to climb into our tutor's chamber and leave insects and other nasty surprises for him." This pronouncement made me sit up, pulling my knees to my chest. I gingerly lifted the covers to search underneath. "You think your missing cousin climbed into our window?" I asked, not having considered the possibility that Alfred might have been our nighttime visitor. He lifted his eyebrows significantly. "That or someone wants us to think it was him." I looked underneath his pillows and then mine. "Who else knew about his trick? I assume his brother must have been aware." "Oh, yes. As well as several members of the staff. Though, truth be told, it's hardly a secret maneuver. Kiera?" I glanced up to find him watching me with a gently reproving smile. "I hardly think he climbed up here to put a snake in our bed." I lowered the blanket I'd been searching beneath. "Yes, of course." But just in case, I decided it would be best if I rose for the day as well. Contemplating the matter, I donned my own sapphire dressing gown and crossed the room to perch on the edge of one of the rosewood armchairs with needlepoint upholstery positioned before the hearth. "It's doubtful that whoever wished to disturb us came from elsewhere. The stormy weather alone would have discouraged anyone from being out and about." "And no one outside of Langstone Manor even knows we're here." "So they must be from the manor." I frowned. "We've speculated your aunt might be helping your cousin to hide. Do you think she could have gotten a message to him?" Gage stared into the fire, his brow furrowed in consideration. "Not unless he's very close by. Perhaps even somewhere on the manor grounds." "Are there places he could hide for such a length of time and not be discovered?" "I can think of a few. Although such a feat would require the assistance of at least one of the servants. I can't imagine my aunt fetching and carrying food and other unmentionables, even for her own son." "If Alfred is hiding nearby, do you think Rory knows? Do you think he suspects? After all, your grandfather isn't in any shape to search the grounds, so Rory would be the only one he truly needed to avoid." "And Hammett," he replied, sinking into the other chair. "I have a difficult time imagining my grandfather's majordomo being duped in such a manner. I suspect he's already searched the manor and its grounds. Extensively." A smile crept over my lips. "He doesn't trust Alfred?" Gage snorted. "Not unless his opinion has drastically changed in the last fifteen years." His mouth tightened as if he'd just realized it very well could have. Fifteen years was a long time. "But as far as whether Rory would help to shield him, I'm not certain. Though I think it's evident neither he nor my aunt are sharing all they know." "You sensed that as well, hmm?" "I would have to be the most obtuse person in all of England not to." I tilted my head, ever curious about his family. "Tell me about Rory. He seems fairly kind and amiable." "He does, doesn't he?" His brow was puzzled. "I take it that wasn't always the case?" "He was never as malicious as Alfred." One corner of his lip curled derisively. "Though, that's not saying much." He exhaled. "No, I suppose looking back, Rory doubtless followed his older brother's lead so that he wouldn't turn on him. After all, if Alfred was focused on me, then he couldn't tease his slower, smaller brother. But either time or Alfred's absence seems to have given Rory courage and perspective." "He did seem to feel genuine remorse for whatever memories he'd dredged up during dinner yesterday evening," I offered. Gage nodded distractedly. "But based on everything I'm hearing, I don't think I like Alfred much." I scowled. "He sounds like an utter blackguard. One I'd like to give a piece of my mind as well as a sound thrashing." Some of the warmth and light that had faded from my husband's eyes returned at this pronouncement, and I was happy to see it, even if it was somewhat at my expense. "I would like to see that." I lifted my chin. "I bet you would." He reached for my hand across the distance between our chairs and I gave it to him. The frisson of attraction and reassurance I always felt at his touch raced along my skin. "Then let's hope you have the chance." He squeezed my fingers before releasing them as he stood. "For now, I have a letter to write to a contact in Plymouth. I would like to know whether Alfred has recently made an appearance in that fair city." His countenance darkened again. "I suppose I should also write my father and ask him to make some discreet inquiries about my cousin there." "Do you honestly think he traveled all the way to London without leaving word of his intentions, without taking his valet or his possessions?" "No. But it's worth verifying." His eyes shone with vindictive delight. "Besides, all it costs me is a few moments to pen a letter. I won't be the one searching the city on what is almost certainly a wild-goose chase." I couldn't help but laugh. After everything we'd gone through during our last inquiry—an investigation we'd undertaken at Lord Gage's behest—it seemed only fair we should return the favor in some small measure. "After that I believe we should have a chat with Hammett and Rory." He whirled toward the door connecting his assigned bedchamber with mine, speaking over his shoulder. "And then, dear wife, I think it's time you caught your first glimpse of the moors."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 7	"You're welcome to search yourselves," Hammett said when we tracked him down in the butler's pantry a short time later. "But I assure ye, I combed the house and grounds myself soon as the Dowager Langstone sounded the alarm." "It was Lady Langstone who first suggested Alfred was missing and might be in distress?" Gage asked, sharing a look with me. He nodded, continuing to polish a piece of silverware. "Said he was 'sposed to join her for tea, and when he didn't appear, she discovered he hadn't been seen for two days. Not since one o' the gardeners spied him walkin' out on the moor." "Did the gardener see which direction he was headed?" "Couldn't tell. Not for sure. But he supposed he might be walkin' up toward White Tor." Gage leaned casually against the door frame, crossing one ankle over the other. Contrary to his indifferent appearance, I knew this meant he was ruminating over some idea. "Did Alfred often go for walks on the moor?" This question made Hammett slow his ministrations, his brow furrowing. "Not as a rule, no. But recently I'd heard tell o' him going for a stroll a time or two. More often he'd take his horse." "Do you know the reason for this change in his behavior?" He shook his head, seeming puzzled. "Truth to tell, I hadn't even contemplated it before now. Wouldn't think twice about hearing the viscount, or you, or even Master Roland amblin' o'er the moors. But Lord Langstone? He wasn't one for constitutionals or quiet reflection. And what else could he be doin' out on those moors?" That was a leading question if ever I'd heard one. What had Alfred been doing on his treks over the moor? And did it have anything to do with his disappearance? Gage glanced back into the dining room as if to be certain we were still alone. "How were relations between the viscount and Alfred?" Hammett peered at Gage over a pair of spectacles perched on his nose. "You know how they always were. Never saw eye to eye." He turned back to examine the utensil in his hand, then set it aside and reached for another. "Well, not much changes in this old manor." "Had there been any particularly nasty arguments in the weeks before Alfred disappeared? Any more altercations than usual?" "Not that I'm aware of. Why?" He spared him another glance. "You'll not be thinkin' your grandfather has anything to do with this, now will ye?" "No," my husband replied distractedly. "I'm just trying to understand what my cousin's state of mind was before he disappeared." "A dangerous thing, to be sure." The majordomo looked up at me and winked. It was such an unexpected bit of levity from the crusty old man, and so swiftly done before he turned back to his task, that I questioned whether it had actually happened. Gage straightened from his slouch. "Thank you, Hammett. Do you know where we might find my cousin Rory?" He bobbed his head to the left. "Master Roland is usually in the viscount's study at this time o' the morning. A scapegrace your cousin Langstone might be, but at least that one understands someone 'll have to be capable of taking o'er the reins o' the viscount's estates," he added with approval. "I expect he hopes his brother 'll keep him and their mother about if he proves himself to be useful." An unwelcome thought occurred to me as Gage took my arm and led me out of the dining room and down a corridor to the right. I was glad he knew where he was going, for I was certain I would have become lost. Even in the light of a new day, the halls and chambers were dark and shadowy, requiring the glow of sconces and lamps to peel back the gloom. "Gage," I began cautiously. "Hmmm?" I hesitated, hearing the preoccupation in his voice. "Who inherits the viscountcy after Alfred if he dies?" I already knew the answer, but it somehow seemed gentler to lead Gage into it. It turned out I had no need for delicacy, for the look in his eyes when they met mine told me he'd already harbored a similar notion. "I'm sure you already know that until Alfred marries and conceives a son, it falls to his younger brother. So unless Alfred has a secret wife stashed in a cottage somewhere, Rory would become my grandfather's heir." "Then I suppose you've considered—" "That Rory is behind Alfred's disappearance?" he finished for me in a tense voice. "Yes. Though I don't like to think it." Sensing his turmoil, I tried to lessen the pain such speculation caused by asking after the rest of his family. "How many children did your grandfather have? Do you have any other cousins?" "Only three who survived infancy—my mother; her brother, Alfred and Rory's father; and my aunt, Matilda. Aunt Matilda and her husband and two children—Edmund and Hester—have always split their time between London and a cottage a short distance from here. Though, Hester has since wed and lives with her husband and children, of course." "And Edmund? Is he married?" "Not the last I knew." His voice was taciturn. There was no loving inflection when reflecting on his relatives, only a reserved recitation of facts, and that saddened me. I'd always known I was fortunate in my family. In my parents, my brother and sister, and even my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I recalled all of them with mostly love and affection. Long ago, I'd realized that Gage had not been so lucky, but I hadn't recognized how intolerably so. Except for his mother, whom he still adored fifteen years after her death, I couldn't name a single member of his family he held in esteem. Even his father, Lord Gage, was a thorn in his side. And a thorn in mine, if the truth be told. After watching them together, I believed there was some fondness between Gage and his grandfather, though if pressed I suspected they would demur. "Then I would hazard a guess that they would be at their cottage nearby," I said. Given the fact that most of the nobility and gentry preferred to escape the heat and stench of London during summer, it wasn't a detail that was difficult to construe. "Likely," he replied. And yet they weren't here assisting with the efforts to locate their lost relative. None of Gage's family had even mentioned them, nor did my husband seem eager to visit them. I didn't know how to view this level of disinterest. It seemed a bit heartless to me, but then my numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins would have been swarming all over the hills had I gone missing. They would have descended on the location like vengeful angels, teasing and annoying each other and stepping on each other's toes, but also nurturing, defending, and bolstering those who needed it. As if sensing some of my confusion, my husband squeezed my arm where it linked with his. "I do usually see Aunt Matilda and her children in London several times a year. By no means do we avoid each other. At least, not like Aunt Vanessa and Alfred when they come to town." I was bursting with more questions about his family, but I didn't want to press too hard too quickly and risk him falling stubbornly silent as he had so often done in the past, regardless of his assurances that he wouldn't. But before I could tactfully voice another query, we found ourselves outside the study. He gave a peremptory knock and pushed the ajar door further open. Rory looked up at us over a document clasped in his hands and grinned. "Good morning. I hope you both slept well." He sat back in the chair he occupied behind the sturdy oak desk positioned before a small stone hearth. The surface overflowed with papers, all arranged and organized into stacks. "Good morning," Gage replied, his eyes flitting over the paperwork. "Hammett suggested we would find you here. That you've been helping Grandfather with the estate management." Rory dropped his gaze to the paper still clutched in his hand before setting it aside. "Yes, well, we caught him trying to descend the stairs when we all know he's in no condition to exert himself in such a manner. I volunteered to handle all the trivial matters and bring those papers that required his attention to him. At least until he's well enough to venture forth again." Someone had to do it. The words weren't spoken, but they gleamed in his eyes, hanging in the air between us nonetheless. Gage was not so willing to ignore them. "Shouldn't Alfred be doing this?" It wasn't voiced as an accusation, but more of a concerned query. "Probably," Rory admitted with a sigh. He turned to look out the window, narrowing his eyes. "But you know Alfred. He never was one to interrupt his fun." They shared a look of silent apprehension, undoubtedly wondering what was going to happen when Alfred inherited the title. Rory pushed up from his chair with determined cheer. "But I'm certain you're not here to discuss the flooding in the south pasture or the masonry crumbling over the fireplace in the billiard room. Did you wish me to show you where Alfred was last seen?" I was surprised when Gage did not reply. He appeared to be distracted by something on the wall opposite the window, and it took me a moment to realize why. There were three portraits spanning the length of the wall, but it was toward the one of the woman on the left that Gage took several steps. It was his mother. I'd never seen an image of Emma Trevelyan Gage, yet I felt certain the blond beauty smiling mischievously down at us from the wall was she. There were the pale winter blue eyes and the softly tousled curls my husband had inherited. But if I had held any doubts, the longing and tenderness that flashed in his eyes would have confirmed it. An answering twinge pricked in my chest, a yearning for my own mother who had passed when I was only eight years old. I supposed no matter how old you were, or how long ago your mother had passed, you never stopped wanting her. The portrait had been completed by a painter of some skill, though his brushwork was unfamiliar to me. However, I would have chosen a different color palette to capture her complexion. One more similar to the woman rendered at a slightly older age in the portrait hanging next to her. I quickly deduced this one was a wedding portrait of her mother—Gage's grandmother. She also boasted the same blue eyes, but a pointier chin and a more somber demeanor. On her other side hung a young man who could only be her son—Rory's father and Gage's uncle. His looks were a match to the current viscount, though softened in some way, either by nature or by the artist's fancy. I supposed the man could be a depiction of Lord Tavistock as his younger self, but given the fact this portrait was hanging beside the other two deceased members of his immediate family, I decided it must be his son. "When did Grandfather have her portrait moved here?" Gage asked quietly. Rory moved forward to stand beside us. "I don't recall exactly. It's hung there for years now." He turned to study his cousin's profile. "I keep forgetting you haven't been here in fifteen years." Gage lowered his gaze to meet his, but Rory had already looked away, staring up at the portrait again. "Have you visited St. Peter's Churchyard yet?" Had I not been watching him so closely, I'm not sure I would have seen the swift tightening of my husband's jaw and brow. "No," he murmured, seeming to gather himself before turning to his cousin once again. "Did you say you can show us where Alfred was last seen?" If Rory considered this abrupt change of topic odd, he didn't indicate so by word or expression, but merely gestured toward the door. "Let me just change my shoes." His eyes dipped to my dainty slippers. "And you might wish to as well."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 8	A quarter of an hour later, appropriately shod and attired for the rough, boggy ground of the moors, we stepped out onto the back terrace. The garden at the rear of the manor was not any more impressive than that at the front, and largely echoed its presentation. Neat and tidy, constrained by the walls, and for the most part colorless, except for a profusion of purple flowering butterfly bushes near the west corner. Though now that I could see a glimpse of what was beyond the stone boundaries, I better understood why more time had not been spent cultivating a more pleasing aspect. For what could compete with the view that unfolded once one followed the path through the faded wooden gate and out onto the commons? Heather-covered moorland stretched toward the cloud-speckled cerulean blue horizon, rolling and rising, unbroken by anything but a small brook that trickled northward. I could see now that Langstone Manor sat on a sort of peninsula of pastures and straggling forest that pushed out into the high moors, so that the house was nearly surrounded by heath. From this vantage, I could see no fewer than four of the tors Dartmoor was so well-known for towering in the distance. These hills topped by their craggy granite outcroppings, each one uniquely shaped, their faces etched and weathered by time, silently stood watch over the bleak landscape surrounding them. I nearly gasped at the windswept scenery laid before me. There was such a stark beauty to it, a sort of wild desolation, that I felt my breath catch. In many ways it reminded me of the Scottish Highlands, and yet it had a mysterious quality all its own. This was a land that was still untamed and unpredictable when so many stretches of Britain were not, and in that knowledge lay the treachery of its splendor. "Yes, it does rather have that effect on one, doesn't it?" Gage murmured, standing close beside me. I tore my gaze away from the moors to look up at him. The gleam in his eyes was almost as poignant as when he'd been staring up at his mother's portrait. Until that moment, I hadn't known what this place meant to him. He never spoke of it, and I hadn't dared to raise its specter. Not until we received that letter from his grandfather. And even then, when I questioned him, trying to learn about the childhood home we were racing hundreds of miles to reach, not once had he made me suspect he felt anything but aversion for this place. To discover now that had all been an illusion left me reeling. This place obviously stirred something inside him—something warm and lasting—and yet he had not shared it with me. How much more of my husband did I not fathom? How much more did he keep hidden deep within him, somewhere I could not see to reach? He blinked against the sudden glint of the sun breaking through the clouds and turned to meet my gaze. Something of my thoughts must have shown on my face, for his expression grew shuttered. I could almost physically feel the door he had opened between us last night being shut, not with a bang, but with a gentle nudge. "That's the direction the gardener said he assumed Alfred was headed." Rory pointed to the north, over the warbling brook toward a squat tor in the distance. "He'd crossed the beck and might have been peeling off toward the Langstone." A frown formed between Gage's eyes as he planted his hands on his hips to survey the landscape. "Was he certain the man was Alfred?" It was some distance to the brook. Far enough that you would not be able to see a person's face clearly, though you could observe their clothing and mannerisms. "I suspect so, as Alfred had passed him striding through the garden." Rory glanced back toward the manor through the weather-beaten boards. "The gardener found a piece of paper on the ground and supposed he might have dropped it. That's why he stepped through the gate to call after him. But Alfred either didn't hear him or didn't wish to be delayed, for he never turned back." "A paper?" "Yes. Torn from one of the Plymouth newspapers. I've no idea why." "Did the gardener keep it?" he asked. Rory's head reared back slightly. "I'm not sure. I hadn't considered it. You'll have to ask him." Gage nodded, taking several strides in the direction Alfred had gone. "Let's follow in his footsteps, shall we? I need to become reacquainted with the lay of the land, so to speak." The narrow path was scarcely more than a track worn down amid the vegetation. It was plainly little used, and as such, rough going. Rocks and pebbles littered the ground between the tufts of gorse and heather in some places, while in others the plants hid boggy depths which grasped at our boots, trying to steal them from our feet. As we approached the brook, my husband turned back to warn me. "Be careful here, Kiera. There are loose quarrying stones from an old tin workings flung about." I followed his advice, shadowing his footsteps as best as I could. We forged the brook with the aid of a few strategically placed stepping-stones, and turned our steps northwest, trailing another branch of the same brook. The land there became easier to traverse, gentler on the soles of my feet, though muddier. I was glad I'd chosen to wear my short reddish fawn redingote and matching walking dress, for the hem was certain to be crusted with dirt and grass by the time we returned to the manor. If only women could respectably wear pantaloons and riding boots. Though I was sure Gage had selected the color on purpose, his walnut brown breeches still appeared neat and tidy despite the muck splattering his tall boots. "I know this might sound odd," Gage said, falling into step beside his cousin. "But since you've been handling Grandfather's paperwork, have you noticed anything alarming? Anything that would explain Alfred's disappearance? A large bill or an angry letter..." Rory shook his head. "I apprehend what you're suggesting, but the answer is no. I'm afraid not." He tilted his head in thought. "Unless Hammett circumvented me and delivered it straight to Grandfather." "Has he done so before?" "Once or twice." His voice turned wry. "I suppose when it's something sensitive he doesn't believe I should see." He turned to look at Gage. "I know he delivered a letter from your father. I saw it on Grandfather's nightstand." I could hear the frown in my husband's voice. "When was this?" "About a week ago." And yet the viscount had not mentioned it. But Gage plainly didn't want that to be evident to his cousin, for he nodded. "Ah, yes. What of a will?" he added, switching topics. "I assume he has one. Is it stored in his study or in the possession of his solicitor?" Rory's mouth twitched. "What do you think?" "With the solicitor." Gage grinned. "He always was precise." "And well aware of my mother's machinations." Gage glanced at him in surprise. Rory arched his eyebrows. "Don't pretend you're not aware that my mother is constantly scheming to see that Alfred and I inherit all of Grandfather's property. She's done so all our lives." "I'm just surprised to hear you admit it." "Yes, well, I no longer have any illusions about my mother. Or my brother, for that matter." He sighed heavily. "They are who they are." His eyes flicked to me and then to Gage. "Just as I have no illusions that I must be a suspect in Alfred's disappearance." "Why do you say that?" Gage replied, his tone neither confirming nor denying it. "Because if something should happen to Alfred, I'll become Grandfather's heir." Gage studied his cousin's features, seeming to try to see into his head. I decided that while his cousin was being so straightforward, we might as well ask the question we were all thinking. "Do you have anything to do with Alfred's disappearance?" My husband scowled at me. But Rory only smiled. "No, Mrs. Gage, I don't." Perhaps it was the fact that he'd listened to my request that he should use my new married name and not my courtesy title that influenced my perception and not genuine intuition, but I felt almost certain he was being honest. Gage must have agreed, for he ventured to ask another question. One that was perhaps more fraught. "Would it surprise you to learn that your brother wasn't in distress? That he might have decided to go into hiding of his own volition." He paused. "And that your mother might have helped him." Rory didn't even blink before answering. "That wouldn't surprise me in the least."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 9	I'm not sure who was more shocked by his blunt answer—myself or Gage. Regardless, we both stumbled to a stop. "Do you think that's what happened?" Gage pressed, finding his words first. "Do you think your mother was either persuaded to help Alfred or pushed him to hide herself because some . . . situation arose where she deemed it necessary?" "I trust you mean because he's done something that would have infuriated Grandfather, not that he's killed a man or some such thing?" Rory remarked. "Yes." He shook his head in bafflement. "I don't know. I doubt they would have qualms about doing just such a thing. But Alfred hasn't angered Grandfather. At least, no more than usual. There's been no reports of misdeeds or irate visitors." He glanced between us. "If he's done something for which he needs to hide, I'm not aware of it." Gage began slowly pacing forward again, considering his cousin's words. "Perhaps he doesn't know about it yet," I suggested, falling in step beside Rory. "It's possible," Rory admitted, though his eyes remained trained on Gage's perplexed profile. "Does this mean you don't think Alfred is really missing?" "We don't know what to think," he replied honestly. "We're merely attempting to explore every possibility, and everything I know of Alfred tells me he's capable of such a ruse." Rory nodded. "And someone utilized the same rope-and-knot trick on our bedchamber window that Alfred used to terrorize our tutors." And possibly stood over us, watching while we slept. Though I hadn't yet mentioned that to Gage, for surely it must have been naught but an eerie dream. Rory's eyebrows shot skyward. "You think it was my brother?" "Maybe," Gage replied, watching him as closely as I was. "Or someone else familiar with it." It was Rory's turn to stumble to a stop as he realized what Gage was implying. "Me?" He gave a harsh bark of laughter. "Why on earth would I do that?" "I don't know." Rory frowned at the tightness in Gage's voice. "I did no such thing. I have no reason to." His brow furrowed angrily. "Unless you think me a thief." Why this statement caused Gage to recoil as if he'd been punched in the stomach, I didn't know, but an entire conversation passed between the two men without either of them saying a word. "No," Gage finally answered aloud, turning away. "But I had to ask." There was a new stiltedness in their demeanors as we pressed onward uphill across the moor. The ground here was spongy with peat, and I was beginning to make out the shapes of large rocks nestled among it on the ridge before us. Several sheep from a larger herd milled about the stones, grazing on the tall grasses. Though I was curious about whatever secret lay behind their silent altercation, I was not sorry for the hush that fell so I could reflect on my surroundings. I was a portrait artist, so landscapes had never been my specialty, but I could well see that Dartmoor was rich fodder for painters of that type. Especially on a day like today when the heath was speckled with vibrant colors—pink heather, yellow gorse, and the amber-tipped grass waving in the wind—and the canvas of the sky was dotted with puffy clouds for contrast. The sun shone bright, almost making me wish I'd left off my cloak, but the clear, cool air brushing my cheeks made me glad for it. Just being there among it all, my artist's muse awakened and stretched. My mood lifted with each step I took deeper into the expanse of the moor and away from that oppressive house. Unfortunately, Gage did not seem to share my contentment. "To be honest, I was surprised to hear that Alfred was even staying here at Langstone Manor." His voice was subtly laced with challenge. "I presumed he'd still be in London, pursuing all the pleasures it has to offer, and steering clear of Grandfather's watchful eye." I was relieved when Rory didn't take up the gauntlet Gage's barbed comment had thrown down, but instead answered with something close to weariness. "Yes, well, I suspect he's only here for the summer." "He doesn't usually leave town like the rest of society," Gage replied more tamely. His cousin kicked at the grass before his feet. "I also think it has something to do with the fact that he'd heard you would be returning to London, with your fascinating new bride in tow." He flicked a glance at me. "He never could stand to be outshone. And you seem to do it at every turn." Gage didn't attempt to respond to this, and I wasn't sure if it was because he agreed or he was stunned by Rory's answer. Perhaps a little of both. We'd been prepared for the interest our marriage would draw among London society. After all, Gage was the handsome and charming golden boy while I was a scandalous outcast. Our union had caused no small amount of shocked and perplexed speculation. We'd been subjected to a degree of unwanted attention and conjecture in Edinburgh during the three months of our engagement and marriage when we'd lived there, but we'd known it was but a taste of what was to come in London. I was not looking forward to such scrutiny. As we drew closer, I could see that the rocks before us were large indeed. And what seemed to be a random pattern began to take on a definite shape. These had quite obviously been moved here. The first stone we encountered also happened to be the biggest. The menhir would have stood about nine feet tall had it not fallen out of its socket into the soft peat. It was the end point of what appeared to be a row of smaller stones. A short distance away, the other large stones—most of which had also fallen—formed a stone circle, a rather forlorn formation among the vast emptiness of the moor. Gage paused next to the menhir, propping one foot on it. "This is the Langstone." Removing his hat, he let the wind riffle through his hair and narrowed his eyes against the sun to survey the rest of the site. "Hence the name of the manor." His arm swept from left to right. "And this area is called Langstone Moor. It stretches up toward Cocks Hill and over to the River Walkham and the bogs and marshes of Greena Ball. A bit to the southeast you can see the granite outcroppings of Great Mis Tor." His arm continued its arc, gesturing to the landscape south of the manor. "That hill further in the distance is Roos Tor." His hand moved past the manor to point toward a mound a quarter of a mile or so to the west. "And then, of course, this is White Tor." To the north and east, I could see a few farms and pastures, but from northwest around to the south stretched only the expanse of the bleak moor and its enigmatic tors. "What lies beyond?" I asked, wondering what existed past my line of sight. "A few miles to the south, there are a few towns and settlements. Princetown and its infamous prison are about five miles away as the crow flies. But that way . . ." He gestured toward the brow of Cocks Hill. "You could walk for days without encountering another soul. And if you became lost . . ." There was no need for him to finish that statement. Despite the warm sun beating down on my back, I shivered at the thought. I now better understood what Gage and his grandfather had meant when they said that men had become disoriented and vanished, never to be seen again. Even in sunny weather, I could imagine the difficulty. But if rain, or snow, or fog hampered your visibility, it would be impossible to know where you were or in what direction you were headed. Rory's mind seemed to have followed the same track, for his voice when he spoke was somber. "If, for whatever reason, Alfred set off in that direction, I'm not sure we'll ever find him." We all fell silent, I supposed contemplating the sobering and terrifying possibility. Then Gage inhaled and straightened. "Well, first we need to figure out just where he was going. Just because the gardener saw him headed in this direction doesn't mean he didn't change course or double back." He turned to his cousin. "What was Alfred doing before he set off on his walk? Who was he with?" Rory's gaze had strayed to the southwest in the direction of Great Mis Tor, and his thoughts seemed to have followed, for it took him a moment to respond. "Oh, um, I don't know. I remember passing him in the hall on my way to review some correspondence with Grandfather a short time before he must have set out. I asked if he was feeling better, but he didn't reply, just continued walking. He seemed . . . distracted." "Had he spoken with Grandfather?" He shook his head. "Not for several days, if I recall correctly. Not since his stomach complaint had begun." "And how did he seem after that interview?" "Well, he left the manor, and took his horse and rode off hell-bent for somewhere, if that's any indication. But that wasn't uncommon." So there could have been an altercation of some kind, one that perhaps Rory wasn't privy to. But if that was the case, if that was the catalyst, then why hadn't Alfred disappeared that night? Had he needed to make arrangements? Had his stomach ailment prevented him from following through? Or had something unexpected truly befallen him, and all of this speculation was for naught? I glanced at Gage, curious how he wanted to proceed. "Before we do anything further, I want to climb White Tor and get a better view of the land surrounding the manor. I suspect you'll appreciate it, too, Kiera." I eagerly agreed and we set off toward the west. But before we'd even taken a dozen steps, there was a loud snap and I stumbled, almost tumbling into the peat. Gage's arm shot out to clasp my elbow, keeping me upright. "Are you well?" he asked, his voice tight with concern. "Yes," I replied uncertainly as I recovered myself. "I . . . I think it was my boot." We bent to examine my right foot and found the lace had broken. Too neatly, to my mind. "I don't think it can be fixed," Gage said, examining the cord. He began to pull at the longer lower part of the lace. "But I think I can tie this part around your ankle to keep the boot on your foot. It won't be the most comfortable fastening, but it should allow you to walk back to the manor rather than be carried." I sighed. "Do it." I could sense Gage's frustration as he wound the cord twice around my ankle and knotted it with a hard tug. "How is that?" he asked, rising to his feet again. I tested my foot, moving forward gingerly. The boot slipped as I walked, the leather gaping, but there was nothing else to be done. I dropped my skirts back into place. "It will have to do." My husband moved to my side to take my arm. "Then I suppose White Tor will have to wait..." Pressing a hand to his bicep, I cut him off. "There's no reason you and Rory shouldn't continue. I can see the manor from here. I can make my way back alone." Gage's expression brightened in eagerness, but still he hesitated, out of concern for me. "Are you certain?" "Yes," I assured him, and then set off by myself before he could argue. "Now go on." "We won't be long," he called after me. I waved my hand in acknowledgment and continued my shuffling steps back toward Langstone Manor. I could already feel my spirits, which had been lifted by the walk on the moor and the sunshine, lower again. It was partly disappointment at my not being able to climb the tor, and partly the dread of returning to that dreary house. Irritation also pricked me, for I had a dawning suspicion that someone at the manor was determined to cause us difficulties and discomfort. First the trunks, then the open window, and now my bootlace. I supposed the trunks and bootlace could simply be coincidences, but combined with the window, I had a difficult time believing that. Bree was nothing if not careful and efficient. She would have known I intended to use my walking boots while I was here, and she would have inspected them as she polished them this morning. In any case, I had seen the crisply severed edges of the lace. Only one strand of the cord seemed at all stretched. It had not frayed over time, but appeared to have all but snapped in one fell swoop. Such things did not happen. Not often, anyway. By the time I reached the manor and found my way through the labyrinth of corridors to my bedchamber, I was in something of a rage. So rather than ring for Bree, I marched into Gage's connecting chamber and tugged the bellpull there. It was only a matter of minutes before Anderley answered the summons. "Back so soon, sir. I thought you'd be . . ." The valet's voice trailed away in surprise at the sight of me glaring at him instead of his employer. "Mr. Anderley, I want you to tell me the truth this instant. Are you up to no good?" I didn't care what Gage's assurances were; I wanted to hear straight from his valet's mouth that he wasn't playing pranks again. Gage might trust him with his life, and likely for good reason. After all, I'd witnessed their cool coordination when a situation grew serious or potentially dangerous. But that didn't mean I believed Anderley always behaved with our best interests in mind. "I . . . I don't know what you mean, my lady." He seemed genuinely confused; however, I also knew him to be quite a good actor when the situation called for it. "Are you playing pranks because you're unhappy to be here?" His eyes widened. "No, my lady. Of course not." "There's no 'of course' about it." His mouth opened and then closed, and then he voiced a question of his own. "Are you talking about the trunks?" "As well as our window being opened during the middle of the night. And now my bootlace snapping." I gestured down to my foot hidden beneath my skirts. "I've had nothing to do with any of that," he replied adamantly. "Mr. Gage mentioned the window, but he alleged his cousin might be responsible." He tilted his head. "I take it he's not." I narrowed my eyes, scrutinizing his expression, trying to tell whether he was being truthful. "He says not, and I'm fairly certain he's being honest." Anderley nodded, gazing back at me uncertainly. He didn't rush to add further assurances, which swayed me. In my experience, liars often provided too many details. I crossed my arms over my chest. "Well, given your past actions, you can't blame me for suspecting you." His shoulders lowered a fraction, sensing my mistrust was waning. "I suppose it serves me right. Miss McEvoy warned me this would happen one day if I did not stop my mischief." His nose scrunched up as if he didn't like admitting Bree had been correct. I lowered my arms, crossing toward the escritoire where Gage's traveling desk still sat open from when he'd penned his letters this morning. "Yes, well, perhaps it was precipitous of me to assume there's one person behind all of these things," I admitted, wondering if I had been somewhat rash now that my temper had cooled. "Maybe the misplaced trunks and my bootlace snapping were both accidents." I frowned, still unhappy with that explanation. "But there's something decidedly odd about it all." "Yes, well, maybe not so odd." Suspicion gleamed in the valet's dark eyes. "You know something." He didn't reply, but I could tell I was right. "You believe you know who is behind all this." When he still didn't answer, I arched a single eyebrow, letting him know I was not going to be fobbed off. He was well aware I was no ordinary society wife, and that my and Gage's marriage was not of the traditional sort. His scowl darkened. "Lord Langstone's valet, a rather repugnant toad named Cooper." "You sound as if you are acquainted." He gave a single sharp nod. "We've been forced to endure each other's company more than we'd like. Though, truth be told, once is one time too many." "From what I've learned of his employer, I can only imagine, but what in particular makes Mr. Cooper so objectionable?" "He can't abide the fact that Mr. Gage is considered more attractive and fashionable than his employer, that Mr. Gage's attendance is courted above Lord Langstone among members of society in London." His lips creased into a humorous smile. "Perhaps you don't realize, but a good valet prides himself on his employer's appearance and presentation. If he is not turned out to perfection, then it's a reflection on us. And while we have no control over our employer's charm, or wit, or ability to act like a gentleman, we still take credit for it nonetheless." I was not familiar with all the particulars of the life of a valet, but having already realized that my appearance was either a credit or discredit to my maid's abilities, none of this came as a surprise. If Mr. Cooper was intent on comparing his abilities to others, it must have been doubly insulting that Gage's company should be preferred over his employer's, given the fact that Lord Langstone was higher in rank and would presumably inherit a greater fortune. "And this is why you think he's determined to make our stay uncomfortable?" "What other means does he have to retaliate?" As a valet, not many. The idea that Alfred's valet might be responsible for all of this both relieved and aggravated me. In one sense, I was reassured to hear all of it might only be the work of an aggrieved servant. But that same suggestion also made me angry and affronted that he would carry out such petty actions. It also raised some interesting questions. "Do you think Mr. Cooper knows anything about his employer's disappearance?" I asked, curious to hear his opinion. I'd presumed since Alfred had left his clothing and his valet behind that he was not involved, but perhaps I'd been too hasty. Anderley clasped his hands behind his back. "My impression is that he does not, simply because Cooper has never been any good at hiding his thoughts. He seems far too frustrated and out of humor to be parcel to any scheme. I would have expected him to be more twitchy." He cleared his throat, rocking back on his heels. "But just to be sure, I've asked Miss McEvoy to do what she can to convince him to share what he knows with her. I would attempt the matter myself, only I'm certain Cooper would rather don a sackcloth than confide in me." My lips quirked at the notion. "As for the damage to your bootlaces, I'll help Miss McEvoy keep a closer eye on your garments, as I've been doing with Mr. Gage's. I didn't think Cooper would sink so low as to tamper with a lady's attire, otherwise I would have said something before." "Thank you," I replied and then hesitated, another thought having occurred to me. In truth, I'd been lucky my bootlace had snapped where it did. Had I been further out on the moor or descending a staircase, the situation might not have turned out so well. Such a realization made me uneasy, especially when coupled with my troubling dream and the open window. "You don't think he's . . . capable of violence, do you?" I asked as casually as possible. I appreciated the way Anderley paused to consider my question. "Not directly. He might slash the dresses in your wardrobe, but he would never have the stomach to assault another person." I nodded, wishing I felt more comforted by his answer. Anderley seemed to sense this, for he offered me a reassuring smile. "Allow me to handle him, my lady." His eyes hardened. "And if it turns out he's not the one causing trouble, I'll find that culprit, too."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 10	As expected, Bree was indignant when she saw the damage to my boot. Though she didn't need to tell me, for I already knew, she swore up and down she'd inspected my boots that very morning and there had been nothing wrong with them. In fact, I suspected she was even angrier about the incident than I had been. I assured her I didn't blame her, but her face was still red with outrage when she stomped out to see to the stains at the bottom of my walking dress. I located my sketchbook and settled onto the fainting couch with my stocking feet tucked up beneath my cornflower blue gown. Despite Anderley's assurances that he would get to the bottom of all this nonsense, I couldn't help feeling a bit out of sorts. Which I supposed was the culprit's exact intention. Part of me questioned whether I was making connections and assigning culpability where there were none. But another part of me—the part that perked up when I sensed something was not as it seemed—told me I was right to be suspicious. And I'd learned long ago not to ignore my intuition, or the consequences could be dire. In any case, sketching always seemed to settle me when I was tired or strained. Unlike painting, which absorbed all of my attention and made me nearly oblivious to the world around me, sketching merely distracted me from the present while still allowing my brain to percolate on what it wished in the background. I paused with my charcoal poised over the paper, intending to draw the moor, but then I realized a drawing in black and white could never do it justice. A proper rendering of the moor would require paint and a large canvas. And while I would have dearly loved to unpack my supplies and escape into my art, I hadn't the time for such a luxury. Not to mention the fact that Gage needed me here with him, not disappearing into my head. So instead I set about capturing the likenesses of the people who populated Langstone Manor, hoping maybe something my artist's eye had noted might shed light on the investigation. I began with Lord Tavistock, before moving on to Lady Langstone and Rory. Then, almost without realizing it, I began to draw Emma Trevelyan Gage. My sketch was hazy at best, having only the portrait in Tavistock's study to model it off of, but it seemed somewhat fitting, seeing as my understanding of Gage's mother was also hazy. I couldn't help but be drawn to the puzzle of who Emma had really been. After all, she had arguably been the single most important person in Gage's life, and yet, I knew so little about her. I knew she'd defied her family to marry the man she loved, even though he was beneath her in rank. I knew she'd brought her son back here to live rather than remain in Plymouth alone, presumably because of the illness that plagued her for most of Gage's life. I knew she'd been murdered by her maid, Annie—poisoned to keep her ill and in need of Annie's care, until one day the poison became too much for her body. But that was all. Gage shared his memories of her so rarely. He seemed to keep them locked away inside him, somewhere I couldn't reach. After meeting several members of the Trevelyan family, I could better understand his intense loyalty to her, but I didn't really have any better sense of who she was than I had before. Who was this woman who had chosen to return to a place she must have been desperate to escape rather than tough it out in Plymouth? Had she been so ill she feared for her safety? Had she believed raising her son at Langstone would provide him with better opportunities, that it would prepare him for a future beyond what Gage's father had at that time been able to provide? If so, I couldn't fault her logic. After all, had Gage not shared his cousins' tutors, had his grandfather not insisted he attend Cambridge, he would not be the man he was today. It was difficult to imagine Gage without his veneer of gentlemanly polish. Even without the benefit of the education Lord Tavistock had been able to supply, I had no doubt Gage would have acquired knowledge somehow. He was far too intelligent not to. And his mother would have instructed him in at least the basics of correct behavior. But he would not have been the smoothly refined, elegantly charming man he was today, nor the darling of society. He would have been like his father, feigning an ease with the world he lived in, but knowing he was never truly of it. I frowned down at the woman I'd sketched. And that was part of the trouble, wasn't it. Perhaps Emma hadn't known she and her son would face such harassment and belittling when they arrived at Langstone, but once she discovered the treatment Gage faced, had she questioned her decision? Had she wondered if this was the best place for him? Why had she stayed? Upon his return, Gage found me reclined on the fainting couch still grappling with these conundrums. I blinked up at him, wondering how long he'd been standing over my shoulder without my realizing it. I opened my mouth to speak, but then noted the somewhat haggard look in his eyes. Glancing down at the sketch of his mother his gaze was riveted on, I apprehended why. "I'm sorry," I murmured, closing my sketchbook. My cheeks flushed with guilt, feeling somehow I had trod where I shouldn't. "Perhaps I shouldn't have . . ." I fumbled for the right words, not wishing to upset him more. But before I could find them, he gently rested a hand on my shoulder. "No. It just . . . caught me off guard, that's all. I don't mind if you sketch my mother. Though that portrait artist painted her nose wrong. It was more like my grandfather's, but not quite so long." I set my sketchbook aside and rose to my feet. Smelling the scent of Gage's cologne and the starch applied to his cravats, I noted that he'd already changed into fresh clothes. His hair was also slightly damp, curling about his forehead and the base of his neck. Pressing a hand to the navy superfine fabric of his coat, I leaned up to press a kiss to his lips. I sensed this was not the time to ask him about his mother, about their past. The look in his eyes had been too raw. So I returned to more pressing matters. "Discover anything else of interest?" He shook his head. "Not particularly. Everything seemed just as I remembered it." I waited to see if he would mention anything about Anderley or the bootlace, but his mind seemed consumed by other things. In any case, I had not expected his valet to tattle about our conversation. That would be up to me whether I chose to do so. Anderley might have his faults, but he had never tried to interfere between me and Gage. At least, not since his employer's interest in me had become fixed. "I'm going to have a word with Grandfather," Gage said, his thoughts still distracted. "Would you like to accompany me?" "Of course." Hammett had explained earlier that one of the best times to visit the viscount was after his midmorning nap. By that point the congestion from overnight would have had time to clear and the morning dose of medicine to take effect. Combined with the extra rest and the sun shining through what windows there were, it usually rendered him in the best mood. Regrettably, today that wisdom did not hold true. As we entered his chamber, he was barking at a servant I suspected was his valet, sending the man scampering from the room. His eyes lifted as he passed me by, seeming to communicate he wished us luck in dealing with his irascible employer. Lord Tavistock reclined back into his mound of pillows, smothering a cough. "Well," he rasped upon catching sight of us. "Have you found my grandson yet?" "I think you know the answer to that," Gage replied calmly as he approached the bed. "After all, we're investigators, not wonder-workers." He paused, studying his grandfather's gaunt face. "How are you?" "I'm old," he snapped, waving his grandson's concern aside. "Tell me what you've learned." But Gage wasn't willing to be ordered about. Instead, he took his time settling into his chair next to the bed. "When did you last speak with Alfred? How long before he disappeared?" The viscount's scowl deepened. "What concern is that of yours?" "It may have some bearing on the investigation." "How?" Gage didn't sigh aloud, but I could tell he was suppressing his exasperation. "Grandfather, you asked me here to find Alfred. If you wish me to do so, you need to trust my methods." His brow furrowed in annoyance. "And you cannot expect me to report on my progress twice a day." Lord Tavistock's face contorted as if he'd bitten into something rancid and he was about to spit it out. It was evident he wasn't accustomed to being defied, but given his circumstances he was in no position to make demands. He flicked a glance at me and then begrudgingly relented. "I spoke with him three days before he vanished. Among other things, we spoke about his neglect to take any interest in the estate. Which he promised to remedy." Gage was not willing to be diverted so easily. "What other things?" His grandfather's expression remained thunderous despite the cough that rattled up from his throat. "My health, the state of the roads, his engagement. I can't recall every last thing!" "Did you argue?" His silver eyes turned piercing. "You think he snuck away. That he chose to leave. But I told you I know that's not what happened. I know it." "Yes, but how do you know it?" Gage persisted. "Simple intuition could be telling you something is wrong, I'll grant. But I doubt it's being specific enough as to tell you that natural causes are not to blame." His grandfather turned away, his mouth clamped in a stubborn line. "Do you have any enemies we should know about? Did Alfred?" "No more than usual," he muttered. Gage's hands fisted in aggravation, and I sympathized. For a man who'd gone to such lengths to bring us here to find his heir, his grandfather was remarkably unforthcoming. Which only made me wonder if I had been correct in my initial suspicions. Did he already know where Alfred was and had used his grandson's hiding as an excuse to draw Gage here? If that was the case, if reconciliation was the goal, he wasn't doing a very good job of it. "You haven't received a ransom note, have you?" Gage asked. "Do you suspect he's been kidnapped?" The viscount turned back at this bit of guesswork. "No, I haven't. That would make this entire matter a bit easier, wouldn't it? At least knowing what happened to him." His voice tightened with strain at the end, and I wasn't certain his suppressing a cough was entirely to blame. He seemed genuinely troubled. However, Gage did not hear it as such. His eyes flashed in anger. "I heard you tore down Windy Cross Cottage." His grandfather stiffened. "It wasn't being used anymore. You made it clear you had no need of it." He shrugged in feigned indifference. "And after a time it simply became an eyesore." "Yes, it always was one, wasn't it?" Gage snarled before rising to his feet and striding from the room. I offered the viscount a tight smile of commiseration before following my husband. It was evident to me there was a world of suppressed emotion behind much of what Lord Tavistock had said. Emotion my husband could not sense while repressing his own hurt. But although I didn't know all the details that had led to Gage refusing to set foot here for fifteen years, I was strongly of the belief that the fault did not lie with my husband. As such, any further efforts toward reconciliation needed to begin with Lord Tavistock. After all, Gage had already set aside past hurts to come to his grandfather's aid. Whether the stubborn old viscount was capable of doing what needed to be done remained to be seen. But if we found Alfred before Lord Tavistock could put his pride aside long enough to make things right, I didn't think Gage would ever give him another chance. I frowned. I couldn't let that happen. Not when I sensed Gage needed this. If his grandfather didn't act soon, I might be forced to meddle.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 11	By the time I caught up with Gage, he'd already turned the corner toward the stairs that would lead him to the more public rooms of the house. I grabbed his arm before he reached them. "Sebastian, wait," I murmured, using his given name as I did when we were alone. I hoped it might gain his attention since his other name had not. He whirled about to face me, anger and resentment still flashing in his eyes. And beneath those were the ever-present pain and confusion I suspected he'd been carrying nearly all his life. I pressed a hand to his chest, wishing there was something I could do for him. Some way to ease all the old hurts that had resurfaced. For him, being here was like prodding an old wound, one that had never fully healed. "I suppose you think I'm being too hard on him," he snapped. I shook my head, answering calmly. "No. But . . ." I hesitated to say more. "I do think you need to be a bit more patient with him." "Patient?! Alfred has been missing for twelve days. How long does he want him to remain so?" I arched my eyebrows in gentle chastisement, for we both knew that was not what I was referring to. "He has things he wants to say to you. You just need to give him a little more time to get there. You said it yourself, he's stubborn and proud. It's not easy for him to admit weakness or failure." He exhaled heavily as if laboring under a great weight and turned to stare at the dull suit of armor situated in the corner where the corridor made an abrupt turn. "I suspect you're right. He just . . ." His hands fisted at his sides. "He makes me so furious." I grimaced in understanding. "If it's any consolation, I think you infuriate him as well." "Good," he retorted, but then as he considered what I'd said, he gave a low chuckle. "Oh, what a pair we make," he sighed. My smile turned more genuine. "Yes. The two of you together make lovely company." He chuckled deeper, pulling me into his side. Seeing his good humor restored, I ventured to ask the question that was nagging at me. "What is Windy Cross Cottage?" He glanced down at me. "It's been mentioned twice, and given your reaction just now it's obvious how much it means to you." His embrace slackened, but he didn't release me. "That's where my mother and I lived." "Not here at the manor?" His gaze hardened again. "We weren't fit to reside in the manor. They were determined to never let her forget what her choice in a husband meant." He shook his head when I would have offered him consolation. "But it turned out for the best anyway. Then my mother didn't have to contend with Aunt Vanessa's constant slights or hear my cousins mock me. All told, I was up at the manor, for my lessons and such, far more often than she was." I couldn't help but feel a stab of empathy for Emma Gage. How lonely that must have been. To have your husband far away at sea for nearly fifty weeks out of a year and then be separated from the rest of your family because they were ashamed of you. However, I also couldn't repress the irritation that had been simmering inside of me at the continued evidence of her failure to shield her son. From everything I'd heard thus far, he was the one who had protected her at every turn—keeping all the hurtful things inflicted on him to himself rather than upset her. They'd moved here when Gage was but three years old. What mother allows a child so young to carry such a burden? I knew she'd been ill off and on, but I had a difficult time believing she was not aware of what was happening. Yet another piece to the puzzle that was Emma Trevelyan Gage. I repressed a sigh. Perhaps I was being too hard on her. Perhaps my own dormant motherly instincts had been roused by my delayed courses a few weeks before and had made me too sensitive to the subject. Though I wasn't expecting now—at least, I didn't think so—it was only a matter of time before I was. In any case, there was no doubt Gage's mother had loved him. And I wasn't about to share my conflicting reflections about her with her son. Gage adored his mother, and if he wasn't resentful of her behavior, I wasn't going to make him so. The rest of his family had already proven to be less than loving. Giving him doubts about the one person who had truly loved him would be horribly cruel. If only the rest of his family, including his father, had loved him so well, there would have been no need for either of them to protect each other. Hearing the sound of someone stirring at the end of the corridor to our left, Gage tucked my arm through his and led me down the stairs. "So how do you propose we spend our afternoon?" I inquired, hoping to steer our conversation toward lighter topics, especially given the fact that we might encounter Lady Langstone or Rory at any moment. "I think a visit to Alfred's friend at Kilworthy Park is in order." Recalling his aunt's comments on Mr. Glanville at dinner the evening before, I had to agree. "I've already checked with Hammett and discovered it's only five miles distant. And in any case, I would welcome the chance to gather my thoughts." I nodded, hearing his unspoken feelings as loudly as if he'd voiced them, for they echoed my own. Apparently, I wasn't the only one feeling confined by the stone walls surrounding us. Any opportunity to step away for even a short time was a welcome one.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 12	Kilworthy Park sat nestled in a wooded valley to the west of Langstone Manor. The lands themselves would have been quite impressive if not for the obvious neglect. Gates hung off their hinges, a window in the gatehouse was shattered, and the lane was overgrown. Even the rambling Georgian monstrosity of a manor seemed to be falling apart—quite literally, if the pile of masonry near the base of the south tower was anything to judge by. Mr. Glanville was obviously in dun territory, and dangerously so if his house was crumbling around him. I didn't know what to anticipate from such a man, and told Gage so. He'd been quiet most of the trip, mulling over everything we'd learned. But as we rolled by the derelict gatehouse, he leaned forward to gaze out the window at the property. "Mr. Glanville is the very definition of a wastrel. I've had the dubious pleasure of his company on occasion, and while he's relatively unobjectionable, he's also perfectly useless. And content to be so." We heard the thwack of a branch hitting Tavistock's carriage and then a rather colorful curse from the coachman above. "What does he do with himself?" "Drink, gamble, and visit dubious establishments." Gage tilted his head toward me. "As I said, nothing useful. I think his only goal is to spend his father's money. Which he seems to be doing at remarkable speed," he added as we rounded the unkempt lane in front of the manor. "Who was his father?" "Sir Francis Glanville. He was knighted for some service to the Crown, served as a Member of Parliament, and was attributed as a highly successful investor in the East India Company, among other things. From what I recall, he actually disowned his son for his profligate ways, but then relented just before he died." I stared up at the gargoyles projecting from the roofline. "Perhaps he had no one else to leave the money to," I murmured softly, uncertain I would like to live in such a building even if it were in better repair. "Whatever the reason, I'm afraid that's not really our concern. However, the fact that this building has upwards of thirty or more rooms, any of which Alfred could be hiding in, is." We were shown into a massive drawing room with mismatched floor rugs and high ceilings smudged with soot. The fire in the hearth cast little heat, even when I was standing directly in front of it, and I wrapped my arms tighter about me, grateful I'd retained my sapphire blue redingote instead of passing it to the butler with my hat and gloves. Between the dented wood and saggy cushions on the furniture, and the fading wallpaper and chipped plaster along the fireplace, it was clear the interior of Kilworthy Park had fared no better than the exterior. The air smelled sour and not altogether pleasant, and I found myself eager to finish this errand and be gone. When Mr. Glanville charged into the room, I was more than grateful for the distraction from our surroundings. "Gage," he boomed, reaching for my husband's hand. "It's good to see you, old chum." Glanville was broad shouldered and tall, nearly as tall as my husband. But what must have been an impressive physique at one time had since softened with indulgence. Most of his clothes stretched taut over his frame, straining at the seams, save for his coat, which hung from his shoulders. It was evident that garment had once belonged to someone else—a man whose figure must have been massive in order for his coat to dwarf the man before me. I guessed Glanville was only about five years older than Gage and his cousins, but he looked much older. "And this must be your mysterious wife," he proclaimed, turning to me to bow in greeting. "Please, please, have a seat. What brings you to my neck of the woods?" he quipped, jauntily using the Americanism as we all settled into our chairs. "We're here about my cousin, Lord Langstone," Gage replied. This pronouncement sent all the humor fleeing from our host's face. "Yes, I'd forgotten you and Alfy were related," he muttered almost under his breath before raising his voice once again. "Well, whatever trouble he's gotten himself into, I'm afraid I've nothing to do with it. Not this time, anyway." For a moment, this vehement response made Gage fumble for his words. "What makes you think he's in trouble?" He sat forward, gesturing broadly. "Because the Dowager Lady Langstone came charging in here making all sorts of accusations. As if I had him locked up in my attics. And I'll tell you what I told her. I don't know where Langstone is. Haven't seen the fellow in over a month." He sank back with a sigh of exasperation. "If ye ask me, he probably hared off to London without telling her." Gage and I shared a look, wondering why his aunt had been so quick to imply that Glanville had come to her and not the other way around. Except that a lady racing off to confront one of her son's profligate friends was not exactly becoming behavior. "Could he be staying with one of his other friends in the area?" Gage asked, testing to see how much of what Lady Langstone had said was true and how much was fiction. "How should I know?" he snapped. Some of the irritation began to drain from his face as he glanced between us, clearly having realized something. "Wait. You're inquiry agents. So if you're here, then . . . Is Alfy actually missing?" "It appears so." Glanville scraped a hand through his thinning hair, making some of the strands stand on end. "Well, dash it all. I thought he was just dodging his mother." Gage leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. "Why would he need to do that?" "Because . . ." Our host paused, considering us before he continued. "Because she could be a right harpy when she had a mind to be. Always haranguing him for one thing or another." Considering who we were, I supposed he'd decided he didn't care what we reported back to Lady Langstone, or if his words got his friend into trouble. "Was there anything in particular she harangued him about more than anything else?" Gage asked, struggling to mask his disapproval at the man's rude comments. He might not like his aunt, but she was still a lady. "Marriage, for one. Wanted him to settle down. Put his neck in the parson's mousetrap." "I'm told he was about to become engaged." Glanville gave a bark of laughter. "To Lady Juliana? Not if he could help it." "What do you mean?" I asked in surprise. "They were pressuring him to marry her, but he was having none of it. Not that he objected to her, precisely. Or the dowry she would bring with her. But he wasn't interested in being leg shackled to anyone." Gage didn't appear to be shocked by this pronouncement. "Were they threatening to cut him off if he didn't comply?" "I don't know about that. But I doubt he would spread that about were it true." He winked at me where I perched in the most comfortable spot I could find on the far edge of one of the settees. "Doesn't exactly ingratiate yourself to the publicans or the ladies." Gage's brow furrowed in annoyance. "You said you hadn't seen him in over a month. Was that normal?" Glanville sat back, rubbing his jaw. "That's the thing. When he was down from London, I usually saw him a couple of times a week. Not that we kept a schedule or anything. But he would kick over the traces and come see me, or I'd find him acting corky at one of the local taverns and join in." "But not recently?" He shook his head. "And the last few times I did see him, he acted strangely. I would have said he was simply having a fit of the blue devils, but there seemed to be more to it than that." "You say he was in low spirits?" He grimaced. "Yes. Sort of. Maybe," he vacillated. "To tell you the truth, I don't really know what to call it. I only know he wasn't his usual self." "And what was usual?" I could hear the same frustration in Gage's voice that was growing in me. Though Glanville was sharing plenty of information with us, most of it was unspecific. This seemed to be his nature and not a deliberate attempt to stymie us, which only made his blather all the more irritating. Glanville's eyes flicked toward me. "You know. On the cut. Friendly with the muslin. Happy to stand huff." I nearly rolled my eyes at his ridiculous overuse of cant. Evidently, he assumed it was some sort of code I wouldn't be able to decipher. Gage's tone was droll when he responded in kind. "So because he wasn't jug bitten, and consequently unwilling to frank you and pay your way, that meant he was behaving oddly?" "Exactly," he exclaimed, missing Gage's use of sarcasm. He frowned. "The barmaids were always keen on Alfy. I couldn't understand why he was suddenly turning them away." "Maybe he was weary of it all." "Maybe," Glanville conceded, though his expression communicated he considered such a notion to be cracked. Gage opened his mouth to say more, but then closed it again as a young maid entered the room, stumbling under the weight of a tray. The dishes rattled as she set the salver down on the chipped surface of the table before her employer. Her relieved sigh was audible as she straightened and bobbed a quick curtsy before escaping the way she'd come. Glanville sat forward and reached for the decanter of amber liquid, pouring a liberal splash into his glass. "Help yourselves," he declared, pushing the tray across the table toward me. I might have been offended by his terrible manners if I hadn't already been anticipating them after listening to his absurd mode of speech. Had he been born to a lower class or even at the disadvantage of being an American, his behavior would not necessarily have incensed me. But I was quite certain Mr. Glanville had been raised properly, with every opportunity a gentleman is afforded. His uncouth comments and complete disregard of etiquette were nothing more than evidence of a rude, selfish man. As such, I didn't bother to hide my scowl. Not that it deterred him in the least. Gage accepted a glass of brandy as well, perhaps wishing for some fortification to help him through the rest of this conversation. For a moment, I considered pouring myself some of the libation, but then decided my disregarding the rules of decorum would only sanction Glanville's boorishness. However, after taking one sip of the weak, tepid tea, I wished I'd followed my first inclination. Rather than choke it down, I set it aside, not bothering to hide my distaste. This only made Glanville grin. "Now you know why I prefer the brandy." Before I could snap back a retort, Gage lowered his glass and redirected the interview to the reason for our visit. I bit my tongue, knowing the sooner we got the information we came for, the sooner we could leave. "In the past, had you and Langstone ever traveled to Plymouth?" We'd already spoken to Tavistock's coachman about this very topic, but I was curious how Glanville would answer. "Together? No. But I've seen him there, at the theater and the pubs along Union Street." Glanville gestured with his glass, sloshing the liquid inside. "Is that where you think he's gone?" "We're looking into it, but I have my doubts." Glanville nodded as if he agreed and drained his glass before reaching for the decanter to refill it. Gage studied him intently. "So you truly have no idea where Langstone is or what might have happened to him?" Lowering the glass bottle with a clatter, our host glanced up at him almost in surprise. "Haven't the foggiest." When Gage continued to scrutinize his demeanor, a glower creased his features. "Listen here, if you're trying to imply I'm hiding him here somewhere, in my attics or wherever, you're welcome to have a look. Search the entire house for all I care." He sat back, lifting his glass to take another swallow. "You won't be wasting my time." My husband glanced at me and I shook my head, having a difficult time believing Glanville would be a loyal enough friend to conceal the fact that Alfred was here, let alone allow him to stay under his roof for an extended amount of time in the first place. "What if you had to speculate?" Gage pressed. "Is there someplace he might have gone we haven't thought of?" Glanville shook his head, his mouth set mulishly. "How about enemies? Do you know of anyone who might wish him harm? A wronged lover or her male relatives? Another drinking companion? A . . . a tenant of Langstone?" Glanville's brow lifted. "This might be nothing, but has Lord Tavistock mentioned the Swing letters he received?" Gage stiffened. "Alfred told you Lord Tavistock received some Swing letters?" His voice was sharp with shock. Our host nodded. "We talked about it mostly in jest, for a handful of the landowners in the area got them, including me. Though I've no idea why. Couldn't afford one of those new threshing machines even if I wanted one." His lips curled, trying to make light of the matter even now, though it failed to amuse me or Gage. "Swing letters?" I asked, hoping one of the men would explain what they were talking about. "There's been widespread rioting among the agricultural workers in the south and east of England since last autumn," Gage turned to say. "Thus far it's only included the destruction of threshing machines and the burning of wheelhouses and hayricks—things of that nature. My father has been keeping me apprised of the situation in case it should escalate into anything more serious." Into something that should require his investigative skills. I could read between the lines. "Yes, but why? Don't the threshing machines make their jobs easier?" "For the laborers whose jobs the machines don't displace, yes. But farmers and landowners now require less men to bring in the harvest, and have lowered the wages of those whom they do still employ. The workers have been banding together, and in some cases sending these Swing letters to the farmers, magistrates, and others who they think are responsible for their problems. They threaten to take action if their demands aren't met." "Namely raising wages and getting rid of their threshing machines?" I asked. "Precisely." He glanced at Glanville, who had been listening quietly while nursing his latest glass of brandy. "Though I hadn't realized there was any rioting occurring so far west." "For those with land to be planted, there's been some unrest." He gestured with the hand holding his glass, splashing liquid onto the floor. "Not like we've heard of to the east. But some." "Has there been much destruction?" He shrugged. "A burning or two." I sat forward away from the cushions, wondering if the sour stench I smelled clinging to the settee was spilled liquor. "Is that the only action they threaten to take? Setting fire to the machines and such?" "From what I understand, the threats are quite vague." Gage's tone trailed away in bemusement as we watched Glanville try and fail to rise from his chair twice. When finally he gained his feet, he crossed to the writing desk positioned in front of one of the windows and rummaged around in the drawer. Having located what he was looking for, he grunted in satisfaction and returned to thrust something under Gage's nose. "Here." I leaned forward to see they were letters of some kind. Gage read the first one aloud. Sir, This is to acquaint you that if your threshing machines are not destroyed by you directly we shall commence our labors. Signed on behalf of the whole, Swing. His mouth twisted wryly. "Fairly straightforward." He passed me the first letter while he unfolded the second. Sir, Your name is down amongst the Black Hearts in the Black Book and this is to advise you and the like of you . .. He broke off, and I glanced up from my perusal of the first note. Clearing his throat, he started to read again. This is to advise you and the like of you to make your wills. His eyes flicked up toward me as he continued. Ye have been the Blackguard Enemies of the People on all occasions. Ye have not yet done as ye ought. Swing. "That sounds like they're threatening more than the destruction of property," I said. "I would say so." He spoke lightly as he passed the second letter to me, but I could see that his eyes were troubled. "And you said Alfred claimed the ones they received at Langstone Manor were similar?" he asked Glanville. "I assume so. We didn't discuss the specifics." Our host's words had begun to slur, and I realized it was time to bring our interview to a close. But first I had one more question. "Who is Swing?" "That would be Captain Swing, a sort of mythical mouthpiece for the rioters," Gage explained. "It refers to the swinging stick of the flail used in hand threshing." "So it's not a real person?" He grimaced. "No. And Father says all the letters he's seen have exhibited different handwriting, so there's no reason to think any one person has taken on that personification. The rioters seem to use it at will." Which meant tracking down the specific man who had sent these letters and the letters to Lord Tavistock would not be so simple. If, in fact, the same person had even sent them. "May we keep these?" Gage asked Glanville, who slouched lower in his chair. He waved them away. "Take 'em. Oh, and if ye do find Alfy . . ." He grinned as we rose to our feet. "Let him know he owes me fifty quid."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 13	"Well, that was an enlightening conversation," I remarked as we jolted down the uneven lane. "Which part? The part where we discovered Aunt Vanessa lied, or the part where we learned my grandfather is not sharing everything he knows?" I reached over to touch Gage's hand where it rested on his leg, drawing his gaze away from the window. I heard the frustration in his voice, felt it tightening his muscles. At the sight of my empathetic smile, he exhaled, sinking his head back against the squabs. "I'm not sure why I expected them to be forthcoming. People always have something to hide. Even family." He gave a dry chuckle, revising his statement. "Especially family." His eyes slid toward the view outside the window again. "I guess I hoped that given the stakes, they would be more forthright with us." His mouth screwed up in disgust. "Unlike my father." Lord Gage had much to answer for, particularly when it came to his deception and dishonesty during our last inquiry. But now was not the time to rehash that. There would be plenty of time during our journey on to London after this matter with Alfred was resolved. "I suppose I can understand why your aunt wasn't truthful with us," I said, beginning with the person whose lies Gage found easiest to stomach. "Given what I know about her, she would hardly want it known she lost her cool composure and rushed off to confront a known profligate in his own home. Somehow I suspect she would deny she ever screamed like a harpy." Gage's lips quirked, as if he might enjoy witnessing such a sight. "True. She rarely ever lost her temper that I can recall. The icy slices of her tongue were usually more than effective." I jostled into his shoulder as the carriage wheel thudded into a particularly nasty rut and then turned out of the drive onto the road. "I suppose this explains the odd manner in which she hastened to tell us Glanville had called on her without our even asking. She wanted to discourage us from visiting him because she didn't want us to know the truth." His leg bounced restlessly beneath our joined hands. "Given the fact that Aunt Vanessa rushed off to confront Glanville, and Hammett's assurance that he searched every part of the manor's property, I think we have to conclude that my aunt is not helping Alfred hide." He sounded less than pleased to concede such a thing. I supposed because it was the simplest solution. And one that would do his aunt and Alfred no credit. "I agree," I replied. "That doesn't mean Alfred isn't hiding somewhere, but I don't think Lady Langstone is involved if he is. I also think Glanville was being honest when he said he had no idea where his friend was. I don't think he would have bothered to fib for him if he had." Gage nodded. "He would've had to make some sort of effort to retrieve Alfred from the moors, and I can't see that happening. You'll recall, no one at any of the farms along the roads bordering that part of the moor reported anything suspicious. I have just as hard a time imagining none of them saw Glanville's carriage rumble by as I do believing one of those people would lie about loaning my cousin a horse, as Aunt Vanessa suggested." I released his hand and shifted in my seat so that I could see him better. "So if he's not with Glanville or being hidden by his mother, then where is he?" I nibbled my lip in deliberation. "Could he be with another friend?" Gage tapped his fingers against his leg. "I don't know. But . . . I think we have to consider the possibility that he actually met with some sort of harm." "Because of the Swing letters?" "Among other things." His expression grew grim. "The truth is, I find it increasingly difficult to believe Alfred would disappear on his own in such a manner, and for such a long time. Without his clothes, or his valet, or his horse. From what I know of my cousin, he would never have the patience to hide for so long. Not merely to avoid my grandfather's wrath." Even though the things he said about his cousin were less than complimentary, genuine apprehension crept into his voice. He might not like the man, but he plainly still cared about him. I rubbed a hand over his arm in comfort. "Maybe Alfred has changed?" "Maybe," he replied, though his tone of voice said that was doubtful. Having never met Alfred, I had to defer to Gage's knowledge of him. But I was also aware that sometimes those who were closest to us also held the greatest bias. "Glanville claimed Alfred started acting oddly a month before he disappeared. Drinking less, ignoring women, refusing to pay his friend's way, avoiding him. Do you think he might have begun to reconcile himself to an engagement with Lady Juliana?" Gage scoffed. "I think it more probable he was already suffering from a stomach complaint." I gazed at him in gentle chastisement. "You're not being very impartial." He scowled as if he wanted to argue that point, but then sighed. "You're right. I'm not." He raked a hand back through his golden hair, thinking over the matter. "It's possible. It's also possible Grandfather simply cut off his funds. Though, such a thing has never stopped Alfred from buying on credit in the past, and I can't imagine it would now either." "Has anyone spoken to Lady Juliana? Perhaps she knows something." "We can ask, but I doubt it." "Then perhaps we shall have to pay her a visit as well." He pressed a hand to the breast of his coat, underneath which he'd stowed the letters Glanville had given us in his inner pocket. "I would like to ask her father if he's received any of these Swing letters, either at Endsleigh House or any of his other properties." "Why do you think the viscount failed to mention them to us? If they're worded anything like Glanville's letters, wouldn't the sender have been an obvious suspect?" I tilted my head, mulling over the possibilities. "Could he have forgotten?" It was clear Gage didn't like the suggestion his grandfather might have forgotten such an important thing. "I don't know. Given his certainty that someone caused Alfred harm, I would have expected him to eagerly show us any such letters." His eyes narrowed as a thought occurred to him. "Unless he doesn't know about them." "Rory," I murmured, following his line of thinking. "He said he's been handling much of the estate business, as well as Grandfather's correspondence. At least, the missives Hammett doesn't confiscate first. And I doubt he would trouble himself over a few nondescript letters." "Perhaps Rory decided, given the viscount's health, it would be best not to trouble him over them." Gage tilted his head in acknowledgment. "It's probably what I would have done." I plucked at a piece of lint clinging to my cornflower blue skirt. "But . . . then why didn't he tell us about them?" "That's a very good question." He turned to look out the window into the slanting rays of the late afternoon sun. "One I think we should ask him."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 14	"To be honest, I hadn't connected them to Alfred's disappearance," Rory told us when we cornered him in the viscount's study a short time later. He must have been able to read the skepticism in both of our faces, for he hastened to explain. "They just seemed so . . . ridiculous. I set them aside and never gave them a second thought." "Did you read them?" Gage asked incredulously. His brow furrowed in mild affront. "Of course. But their grammar was so horrendous, and the threats . . . well, I thought them naught but toothless yammering." I arched my eyebrows at this excuse. So a man needed to use correct grammar in order for his threats to be taken seriously? Could Rory not hear how foolish he sounded? "Here." He bent over, rummaging in one of the lowest drawers in the desk. Finding what he was looking for, he thrust the folded papers toward Gage. "Read them yourself." I leaned closer to see over his shoulder, discovering two of the letters read almost exactly like the first one Glanville had shown us. The third grew harsher in tone, but unlike Glanville's second letter, it made no reference to causing bodily harm. It merely declared that the destruction of the threshing machines would be coming, as would a list of their further demands. Gage shuffled back through the pages. "These are all the letters you received?" "Yes. The last one arrived about three weeks ago. But no one has damaged any of the estate's property or made any further demands." Rory raised his hands in bewilderment. "Have you shown Grandfather any of these?" He shook his head. "I didn't think he needed to be bothered by them. You know how he is. They would only make him livid." The cousins shared a look of mutual understanding. "What of Alfred? I assume he was aware of them?" I asked. Glanville had said as much. "Yes, I showed him two of them," Rory replied. "He thought them a colossal joke." "Could he have decided to do something about them?" Rory's gaze was rife with scorn. "I suppose it's possible." I looked up at Gage. "Maybe he confronted someone over them and the matter turned ugly?" I shrugged, not really knowing if that was a likely scenario or not. "Perhaps someone from one of the farms bordering the moor to the north?" He narrowed his eyes on the tall stone hearth beyond Rory, considering the matter. "That would explain why he was seen walking in that direction. And why no one in that area has admitted to seeing him. If someone caused him bodily harm, or intended to cover for someone who had, they wouldn't speak up." He huffed an exasperated breath. "It's as good an explanation for his setting off across the moor as any I can think of." Had I not been looking at Rory, I might not have seen the loathing that flickered briefly over his face. His gaze lifted from where he stared down at the desk and caught me watching him. A beat passed before he spoke, and it was that tiny hesitation that made me wonder if what he told us next he'd intended to keep to himself. "As to that, I've been thinking. I believe I may have an alternative explanation." He tapped the edge of the desk. "I think he might have been paying a visit to Lorna Galloway. Her cottage doesn't lie directly on that path, but it's not a terribly roundabout way to go. Especially if the moor was swampy that day and he wanted to avoid some of the more spongy heath that lies to the east." "Who is Lorna Galloway?" Here he hesitated again, as if he wasn't certain how to describe her. "She's a local woman who lives out on the moor. A by-blow of Lord Sherracombe's. He set her mother and her up in a cottage along the River Walkham. A rather isolated place. People rarely venture out that far. The mother died several years ago, but her daughter still lives there." "Alone?" Gage asked in disapproval. Rory nodded. "I've heard Sherracombe has offered to find her a better situation, but she refuses to leave." I sympathized with this Miss Galloway. As the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, the term "better situation" was rather misleading. The best she could hope for was either a position as a teacher at a girls' boarding school or an arranged marriage to a man who was willing to overlook her low birth in favor of the connection to her father. At least by remaining out on the moor, she was somewhat the master of her own fate. The cottage might be owned by her father, but she was free to do as she pleased. Though her life could not be easy, and must be quite lonely at times. "I guess she prefers her solitude," Rory added with a shrug, dismissing her decision as something akin to a whim. "But why would Alfred visit her?" Gage tilted his head. "Unless you're implying she's taken after her mother." "Well, do you honestly expect any different? Living out there on her own, no husband, no guardian." The sins of the mother . .. It was generally expected that the child of a parent with loose morals must necessarily follow in their footsteps, but Rory's words left a bitter taste in my mouth nonetheless. In truth, his callous opinion made me worried for Miss Galloway. Whether she entertained men of her own accord or not, the fact that men assumed she would placed her in a dangerous position, particularly residing in such an isolated place. I only hoped her father had made it clear she was under his protection. That would at least give her some shelter from blackguards, even though their scruples would be held in check by their desire not to cross his lordship rather than qualms about overpowering a woman. Similar considerations flitted through my husband's mind, for his mouth pursed in distaste, and I loved him all the more for it. "I hope Alfred isn't . . . taking advantage of the situation," he remarked with disapproval. Rory huffed. "I should say it's much more likely the other way around." He leaned forward, giving Gage a significant look. "She's a genuine eye-biter, if ever I've met one." Gage scowled. "You don't mean..." "I do," he stated with conviction. When my husband's scowl only deepened, my curiosity rose. "What's an eye-biter?" I asked. "An eye-biter is . . ." Gage paused to consider his words, almost as if he didn't want to say them. "Well, she's a witch who enchants men with her eyes." The base of my spine tingled. "A witch?" He looked uncertainly at his cousin. "Yes." The use of that word always alarmed me, for I'd been tarred with the same brush by those who saw my enforced involvement with my late husband's anatomy work as proof that I was unnatural. They'd made up all sorts of appalling rumors to support this belief, even going so far as to accuse me of being a siren, a murderer, and a cannibal. So I was always wary when the term was bandied about without any further proof whatsoever of its veracity. That being said, I did have Scottish blood flowing through my veins. As such, I wasn't quick to dismiss the existence of superstitious things. After all, I'd encountered my fair share of strange phenomena I couldn't easily explain—second sight, ghostly apparitions, unsettling curses. However, the intensely logical side of myself found it difficult to wholeheartedly accept any of it as truth. There was always room for doubt. Gage, on the other hand, had rarely wavered in his belief that such occurrences had a rational explanation. Perhaps one we simply could not yet deduce or understand. Which was why I found it so intriguing that he didn't immediately contradict his cousin's assertion about Lorna Galloway. Though his reply was not without a hint of skepticism. "And you think she's . . . bewitched Alfred?" At this Rory seemed to soften his disdain, for he shrugged. "I know he's visited her several times in the past few months." He leaned forward in his chair. "And Mother claims he's been drinking some sort of tincture Miss Galloway gave him." "I assume you're suggesting this tincture is connected to his stomach complaint," I asked when Gage didn't speak up, but instead silently studied his cousin. "Can you tell me that's not suspicious?" Rory challenged. "I would say it's interesting, but until we know what was in that tincture and when exactly he started ingesting it, I wouldn't care to speculate." Rory's eyes hardened and I could tell he wanted to make an angry retort, but he merely jerked his head in confirmation. In truth, I did find the fact that Alfred was taking some sort of remedy from Lorna Galloway highly suggestive, but not necessarily for the reasons Rory did. Had Alfred sought out Miss Galloway specifically for the tonic, and if so, why? Had he been suffering from his stomach complaint much longer than we realized? Or was some sort of other illness plaguing him? "Did Alfred keep the tincture in his chamber?" Gage asked. Rory shrugged. "I assume." "Then we'll have to search his rooms for it. I suppose a visit to this Miss Galloway is also in order." He slid forward in his chair, preparing to rise. "After we speak with those in the village and surrounding farms about these Swing letters." A soft creak issued from the direction of the doorway, but when I glanced behind me, no one entered. I turned back around to find both men watching me. "I thought I heard something." "It's an old house," Rory replied, as if that were explanation enough. But he cleared his throat as Gage pushed to his feet. "You might want to speak to Grandfather before you go to the village." "To tell him about the Swing letters? I intend to." "Well, yes, and . . ." He grimaced. "I'll let him explain. Just . . . don't go anywhere without speaking to him first." Gage and I shared a look of mutual exasperation. What else had they been keeping from us?
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 15	"What do you mean most of the villagers don't know Alfred's missing?" Gage's voice snapped with restrained ferocity. A ferocity I couldn't blame him for. I also felt it itching along my skin. Lord Tavistock scowled up at his grandson from his bed. Even though the evening light filtering through the windows should have been kinder to his appearance, he looked worse than he had that morning. Dark circles ringed his eyes as he struggled to remain upright even with the support of his mound of pillows. But the stubborn man wouldn't recline further. He was determined to face us on as equal a footing as he could manage. "Discretion was called for." His throat rattled with congestion. "The situation is delicate. I couldn't have the Duke of Bedford finding out before I knew what had happened. Otherwise he might withdraw his permission for Alfred to court his daughter. And if the worst should come to pass, forbid Rory from paying court in the future. So I instructed the men to be circumspect in their search." "Yes, and I'm sure that approach yielded adequate results," Gage sneered, turning to pace up and down the length of the bed. "I'm sure their search was thorough. Probably saved us a lot of unnecessary trouble by not having every commoner from here to Yelverton knocking on the door to offer up one made-up story after another in exchange for a reward." Gage paused in his pacing and joined me to glare down at his grandfather in disapproving disbelief. Did he wish to find his grandson or not? Had one of my loved ones gone missing, I would have scoured the earth for them, left no stone unturned to find them, especially if their safety were in question. But Lord Tavistock continued to give conflicting information. One moment he was certain something bad had befallen Alfred—even going so far as to suggest it had been foul play—and the next he was telling us not to ask questions in the village. Not yet. If I was frustrated by his fickle, contradictory behavior, Gage must have been beyond exasperated. "Are you expecting him to just come strolling up the lane?" he demanded. "No! I expect you to find him." His grandfather stabbed a finger up at him. "Without a lot of fuss." He pressed a handkerchief to his mouth, trying to stifle the cough that rattled up from his chest. The hoarse sound of it alarmed me. When I flicked a glance at Gage standing next to him, his face seemed to close in on itself, wiping away all trace of emotion. "That's why you asked me here to investigate, isn't it?" he asked once his grandfather's coughing subsided. "Your chief concern was discretion. And by asking me, a family member, to handle the matter, you believed you would get it." He spoke with indifference, as if the truth didn't greatly concern him, but I could sense the roiling sentiments beneath the surface. I knew how much such a realization must cut him. His grandfather didn't know him as well as I did, so he could not know the pain he caused. Or perhaps he did and didn't care. Either way, his only response was a cold stare. To break the standoff, I stepped closer to the foot of the bed. "So I take it no one has spoken to Lady Juliana about the matter?" Lord Tavistock turned to me in annoyance. "No." I considered the viscount. His body appeared to be shriveling before our very eyes, sinking into the mattress. And yet his eyes gleamed like two silver daggers, resolved to exert his will, whatever the cost. "Would Lady Juliana know anything about all of this?" After everything we'd learned, I found it difficult to believe Alfred had shared more than pleasantries with her. "How should I know that?" Lord Tavistock replied defensively, perhaps unwittingly providing an answer to my question. "Somehow I don't think Alfred was as keen to marry Lady Juliana as you've led us to believe." He lifted his chin, attempting to stare down his nose at me. "The boy will do as he's told." Gage's mouth quirked derisively, telling me that was doubtful. "Is that what you and Alfred argued over? Was he refusing to marry the Duke of Bedford's daughter?" His fists clenched where they rested over the counterpane as he bit out his next words. "He had some misguided notions I had to correct him over." Then suddenly the tension in his body released and his face paled as he sank deeper into the pillows. "I don't wish to talk about this anymore." He closed his eyes. "It has no bearing on the matter at hand anyway." He blinked open his eyes to look at Gage for a brief second before shutting them again. "Just find Alfred." I wasn't so certain his impending engagement to Lady Juliana was unrelated to what had happened to Alfred, and I could tell Lord Tavistock wasn't either, but it was pointless to pursue the matter now. Not when he could barely open his eyes. Our conversation had fatigued his already exhausted body. He needed to rest. Gage followed me from the room, but when I would have turned left to return to our chambers, he grabbed hold of my hand and pulled me to the right instead. "Where are we going?" I gasped as we hurried around several corners. "To search Alfred's room." "Are we racing someone?" He slowed his steps. "My apologies." His voice was stilted with residual anger. Seeing his grandfather in such a weakened state palpably upset him, but it was easier to be irate. Less complicated. "I'm as eager as you are to find out if any of the tincture Rory mentioned is in Alfred's chamber, but shouldn't we be dressing for dinner?" "I can't stomach the idea of eating dinner with Aunt Vanessa and Rory just now. We'll have trays sent up. Do you mind?" he asked almost as an afterthought. "Of course not." As if dining alone with my husband was any hardship. After all of our travel and this day's rushing about, I would have quite happily secluded myself in my chamber with naught but Gage for company for an entire week. But given our current investigation, I would take what I could get. In truth, much of the urgency of our quest had drained from the situation. Alfred had already been missing for nearly a fortnight, so any trail he had left behind had already grown cold. Combined with the fact that his family, many of the key players in this melodrama, were being less than forthcoming about all they knew, it was impossible not to notice that our inquiry was hopelessly stagnant. One night away from our hosts could not harm our progress any more than their deception was already doing. We veered down a corridor heavily cloaked in shadows and stumbled to a stop. Even the sconces in this part of the manor were not lit. Gage backed up a step. "Stay here." Retracing our path, he picked up two candlesticks sitting on one of the tables. Then he reached up to light their wicks from the flickering flame of the last wall sconce left burning. Returning to me, he passed me one of the candles and took my hand to guide me down the passage. The air here seemed cooler than in the other part of the manor. Perhaps because it felt uninhabited, almost forgotten. And yet Alfred's bedchamber was here. Unless Gage was wrong. Maybe his cousin had switched rooms in the years since Gage last visited. I opened my mouth to question him when something fluttered in the corner of my eye. Something pale and gossamer. My heart climbed into my throat and my steps faltered. "What is it?" Gage asked as I forced myself to look behind me. There was nothing there. "What?" he reiterated. "Nothing. I . . . I just thought I saw something, but I . . . must have imagined it," I replied haltingly. But even as I spoke the words I felt a chill across the back of my neck. It trailed downward, as if someone had stroked a finger along my spine. "It's probably just the ghosts." "Ghosts," I squeaked. "Be calm," he chided gently, pulling me forward. "I was joking." I swallowed. "Oh." We halted before a door and he frowned. "My cousins used to try to tell me the manor was haunted. They swore a gray lady and a man named Stephen roamed the corridors. Stephen? Really?" he scoffed. "You'd think they could have been more subtle." Given the fact that Gage's father's name was Stephen, and since he had been away at war fighting on a Royal Navy vessel so they never knew from one day to the next where he was, I thought it particularly cruel. "They claimed it was your father?" "They never went so far as to do that. But they implied it." His brow furrowed. "Though Rory told me once he supposed it was actually the spirit of the Stephen who has a grave marker at a crossroads on the moor near White Tor." Before I could ask why that Stephen was buried there, Gage pushed open the door to the bedchamber. The scents of sweat, cologne, and traces of smoke wafted toward us, confirming that this room was indeed still inhabited. But one step deeper into the chamber also told us that in Alfred's absence it had not gone undisturbed. In the gloom, I might have mistaken the mess for simple untidiness, except that it seemed apparent someone had been searching for something, and recently. Drawers hung open, their contents rifled. The doors of the wardrobe gaped, the clothes hanging inside having received similar treatment. No self-respecting valet would have left his employer's garments in such disarray, and from what Anderley had told me, I gleaned that Alfred's valet was even more fastidious than most. I turned to ask what Gage made of the matter, and was surprised to see that he'd expected this. His eyes registered no shock, only weary acceptance. "How did you know we would find Alfred's room like this?" He leaned down to pick up a book that had fallen to the floor. "Because I fear our presence has set something in motion rather than bringing it to an end." "What do you mean?" He shook his head resignedly. "I'm not sure how to explain it, except . . ." His gaze lifted to meet mine. "No one was looking very hard for Alfred before our arrival. Not even Grandfather. Not truly." "And yet he urgently sent for you," I murmured, trying to follow his line of thought. "Yes, he sent for me, and then proceeded to hamper our search with half-truths and omissions. He told us he's concerned Alfred may have met with foul play, but he doesn't want us to ask too many questions. It doesn't add up." I hesitated to ask the question that needed to be asked, knowing it would cause pain, but it had to be addressed. "Do you think your grandfather's illness might have . . . compromised his faculties in some way?" He set the book carefully on the nightstand and lit another candle as he considered my query. "I don't know," he reluctantly admitted. "It's possible. He certainly wouldn't want to admit it if that were true." His jaw hardened. "On the other hand, he seems perfectly capable of refuting or dodging only the questions he doesn't wish to answer." "True," I murmured, crossing to the dressing table, where a few bottles were arranged on a silver tray. Either the person who had been here before us had taken greater care not to disturb their placement, or whatever they'd been looking for would not be found in liquid form. I glanced cursorily through the labels, finding nothing out of the ordinary—cologne, pomade, ointment. Gage opened and closed drawers behind me while I sifted through the contents of the dressing table, finding nothing of interest. Leaving my candle on the table, I moved on to the wardrobe and flicked through the array of clothing, checking the pockets of the coats. I was about halfway through my search when I paused to wonder if there was any way to tell whether there were garments missing. Alfred's valet would know. But would he tell us? "I assume this is the tincture Rory mentioned," Gage said. I joined him on the opposite side of the bed, taking the bottle he cradled from his hands. It was nearly empty and filled with a muddy brown liquid. I tilted it closer to the light of his candle, trying to analyze its contents. "There's also this." His hand reached into the top drawer of the second nightstand and extracted a bundle of plants, roots and all, tied together with a white string. Now wilted and withered, some of the once-green stems sported tiny flowers while others supported a bristling seed head. "What is it?" "Herb bennet. It grows in the hedgerows all throughout Dartmoor." He brushed his finger over one of the dead heads. "And these little burs stick to everything. Including little boys' clothes." I smiled at the image of a young Gage traipsing home covered in burs, but my amusement quickly fled. "Why did Alfred have some of it tucked inside his bedside drawer?" "That I don't know." Scrutinizing the dried stalks, I wondered if there was a book on plant and herb lore in Langstone's library. He replaced the sad bouquet in the drawer while I retained hold of the bottle. "What did you think of what Rory said about Lorna?" I asked as he sat on the edge of the bed to open the lower drawer. He paused for a second before reaching in to sort through the jumbled contents. "I assume you mean that bit about her being a witch." He lifted out a sheet of foolscap and then tossed it back in after a brief glance. "Well, there are many definitions of a witch—a wisewoman; a healer, or hedge witch, as the locals would say." I crossed my arms over my chest. "You know very well which definition your cousin was implying." He sighed and glanced up at me, closing the drawer. "I do. And you know me well enough to know I think it's a lot of nonsense. I'm not sure why Rory is spouting such claptrap. I would have thought him more sensible than that." He raked a hand through his hair as he stood. "Whatever the case, if Miss Galloway gave Alfred this tincture, then she's a hedge witch. And Rory plainly mistrusts her." "I agree. Which makes me wonder why he didn't mention her or her tincture sooner. And why didn't your aunt?" Setting the bottle next to my candle, I resumed my search of the shadowy confines of the wardrobe while Gage moved on to the escritoire. "As I said, half-truths and omissions," he groused. "Ones that seem pointless." He shuffled through the papers and detritus littering the top of the desk, not bothering to take care with their contents. When the rustling stopped, I looked over to see him holding what appeared to be a newspaper. "Have you found something?" When he didn't respond, I moved closer to see what had captured his interest. It was an edition of Woolmer's Exeter and Plymouth Gazette dated July second. He flipped the newspaper over to what should have been the front page, running his thumb down the torn left edge. "I suspect this is where that article Alfred dropped came from," he said. I had to agree. "Have you spoken to the gardener about it?" "No, but I'll ask Hammett to arrange an interview tomorrow morning." He folded what remained of the newspaper and tucked it under his arm. His eyes strayed toward the nightstand. "Then, if the fine weather holds, I think it would be best to pay Miss Galloway a visit." He frowned. "I suppose we'll have to ask Rory to show us the way." I only hoped he was better at hiding his disdain for her than I presumed or Miss Galloway must certainly be aware of it. If that awareness tainted her perception of us, then any of our attempts to gain information from her might prove futile. I'd been on the receiving end of such contempt many times, and it always made me less than willing to cooperate. "Do you think he's the person who searched this room?" "Perhaps. If so, it's hard to know what exactly he was looking for. After all, we found the tincture and this newspaper." He scowled at something in the shadows near the hearth. Picking up his candle, he crossed the room and knelt next to the corner of the rug. Rather than lying flat, it had rolled up under itself, as if something had caught on it. Or someone had lifted it and not replaced it correctly. "Hold this." He passed me the candle and paper and pulled the corner of the rug back to see beneath it. At first nothing seemed amiss. Nothing was stashed beneath the rug, and the smooth wooden floorboards appeared straight and even. But when Gage stepped forward, there was an audible creak. He stomped his foot, locating the exact board that was making the sound, and then knelt to pry at the cracks. I leaned closer, holding the light up for him to see. Once Gage found the right grip, the board easily lifted away from the floor to reveal a cavity beneath. He reached for the candle and shone the light down into the hole, finding it empty of all but dirt and dust. Even so, for good measure, he cautiously prodded the opening for anything that might have been left behind. "Well, it appears whoever searched this room before us found what they were looking for," he declared, sitting back on his legs. He sighed in exasperation. "And I haven't the foggiest idea what it was." He dropped the board back into place with a thud and then rose to roll the rug back over it. "If not Rory, who do you think it could be?" I asked. "Lady Langstone? Alfred's valet, Cooper?" He shook his head, staring at the rug. "I don't know. But it's clearly something they didn't want someone else to find. Whether that means it has something to do with Alfred's disappearance, I don't know. Not yet." I knew that tone of voice and that set of his jaw. Stubborn resolve practically exuded from his pores. "But we're going to find Alfred by whatever means necessary. Even if my grandfather doesn't approve." His expression turned troubled. "Whether I like him or not, as his cousin, I owe Alfred that much." I didn't contradict him, though my opinion was precisely the opposite. He didn't owe his blackguard cousin anything. Not after the way Alfred had treated him. But because Gage was a good man, an honorable one, I understood why he needed to try. "You think something bad has befallen him, don't you?" I murmured, able to read between the lines. "You're worried he's been injured . . . or worse." I reached for his hand, taking it between my own. He spoke quietly. "It seems more likely now than it did before." He swallowed. "And dead or alive, he deserves to be found." He didn't mention anything about bringing him justice, but if the worst should have happened, if Alfred had met with violence, that desire would swiftly follow.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 16	Cresting a windswept rise, we pulled our horses to a stop to gaze out over the landscape. From our vantage at Langstone Manor, and even walking northwest toward the Langstone, I'd not realized how varied the terrain was. Instead of one gradual, continuous rise, the moor undulated in dips and waves, sinking into valleys carved by the rivers and streams that flowed through it before climbing again. Below us the River Walkham ambled its way gently southward. But across its banks soared Great Mis Tor, its craggy slopes speckled with rocks and its summit topped by impressive towering stacks of granite. A smoky haze had settled over the moor overnight, one that the brighter rays of the sun hadn't yet burned its way through. But in spite of the mist, the air boasted a crisp, clear quality I'd experienced few other places. One that had a sharp, almost acrid undertone, and made the mouth pucker, but not unpleasantly. Turning my eyes to the south, I glimpsed the stony peaks of Roos Tor and Great Staple Tor. Behind us to the east lay the manor and the village of Peter Tavy beyond. To the north stretched the desolation of Langstone Moor, its gorse and heather broken only by the occasional stone, and what appeared to be the remains of an old settlement. I should have been overawed by the site—and I was—but I also felt uneasy, skittish. I'd dreamt again of a man watching us while we slept—a shadow looming over the end of our bed. But when I woke, there was no one there. Although, unlike the night before, the window had not been open. I wasn't sure what to make of it. Was it a dream, an image conjured by my imagination? Perhaps influenced by our inquiry and the secrets that seemed to hide around every corner of Langstone Manor. Or was someone haunting us, entering our chamber by another means? Gage had blocked the entrance to the secret passage, but what if there was another? Or what if the intruder had simply entered through one of our bedchamber doors? If so, how was it possible that I was awake enough to be conscious of his presence and yet unable to rouse myself to confront him? I repressed a shiver at the disturbing prospect. Sensing my apprehension, my horse danced to the side and tossed her head. I took a firmer grip on her reins and my tumbling nerves, and brought her back around while I forced calm, steady breaths through my lungs. Gage cast me a curious glance, and I offered him as reassuring a smile as I could muster. In any case, it must be obvious to him that something was amiss. He knew well my skill with horses, and if a spirited gelding was unable to throw me, then I was certainly capable of handling this docile mare. Rory, however, was not familiar enough with my proficiencies to know better, and I'd done nothing to dispel that notion as he and Gage discussed horseflesh during our ride. "What's gotten into you, Eyebright?" Rory chided, reaching over to grip her bridle. The pretty bay mare whickered in protest and then sank her head in shame. I felt guilty for letting her take the blame, but it was better that I not explain my anxieties to Rory. Now that the horse was settled, he gave me a gentle smile and lifted his hand to point to a spot across the river. "That's Lorna Galloway's cottage." Nestled among the bell heather and bilberry on the lower slopes of Great Mis Tor, not far from where the river curved to the east, perched a small stone cottage. Cottage being a somewhat ubiquitous term, ironically encompassing everything from humble one-room dwellings to lavish country residences boasting upward of twenty rooms. I hadn't known precisely what to expect. But this home definitely fell closer to the modest end of the category. I found it difficult to picture Lord Sherracombe riding his horse all the way out here to visit his mistress. I wasn't sure if such an arrangement spoke more to his character or his mistress's. Whatever the case, I hoped she'd loved the moor, just as I hoped her daughter did, because they certainly lived in the depths of it. I couldn't help being curious about this woman who'd been raised in such relative isolation, with naught but her mother and occasionally her father for company. Dartmoor was hauntingly lovely, but also wild and unforgiving. Such an environment must have imprinted on her soul somehow. Perhaps that was why Rory was so certain she was a witch. I nudged my horse forward, trailing Rory down the hill toward the river. Our steeds carefully picked their way through the rocks along the banks of the river upstream until Rory found a place for us to cross. Along this upper valley, the river was by no means wide, but it was riddled with slick rocks. One wrong step by man or beast could result in broken limbs or a deadly head injury. "There's a stone slab bridge further upstream." Rory nodded toward the north. "But it's too narrow for the horses." But not too narrow for Alfred to have used. It further explained why Rory had suggested he might have headed northeast away from the manor and then across to the east before turning south. Rory guided us to a spot where the river was shallow enough I could see the pebbled bottom. Thirty feet or so further up the stream, the water cascaded musically over a stretch riddled with rocks, slowing the flow of water. This ended in what amounted to a crisp little pool where small trout darted to and fro. The location of Miss Galloway's cottage had been chosen with care. The cascade would provide clean drinking water, and the pool offered an abundance of fish. Once across, we followed a narrow trail along the river's edge, which utilized a natural indentation in the rising slope of Great Mis Tor so the climb was not so steep. The path then leveled off and led away to the north and the stone cabin. Glancing about me, I couldn't see another habitation or living soul, merely rocks, heath, and sky. If one climbed to the top of the tor, I imagined you could see for miles around on a clear day. But at this lower point you might have believed yourself the only person in the world. It was beautiful, and its solitude called to my artistic nature, making me want to hole myself up here in this desolate spot and paint until I was too exhausted to stand. And then wake up and paint some more. I'd rarely had time to indulge myself in such a manner in months. I could already feel my fingertips tingling with the desire to grip my specially weighted brushes. The idea of living such an isolated existence also chilled me. Not so long ago, I'd considered just such a life. Worn down and disillusioned by all that had befallen me after the scandal over my involvement in my late husband's anatomy work, I'd thought to seclude myself in a cottage much like this. My sister and brother would have both been happy for me to continue shuffling between their households, but I'd begun to feel the weight of being such a burden to them. Withdrawal had seemed like it might be a better option. Had Gage not suddenly entered my world and made me long for more, convincing me to risk my life and my heart even after all I'd been through, I might very well have ended up just like Miss Galloway. Except I wouldn't have been completely alone. I knew my family. They might have let me live in my little cottage, but they would never have stayed away. I would have had frequent visitors. But according to Rory, Miss Galloway had no one but an absent father. "Miss Galloway lives here all alone?" I asked Rory again, feeling a sort of trepidation at the prospect of seeing the other side to the coin I'd flipped. Rory glanced over his shoulder, allowing me and Gage to ride our horses up alongside his before he answered. "Yes. Gossip in the village says she let the charwoman go who used to come out to her cottage to cook and clean several times a week. The same woman whom Sherracombe had hired to do so for her mother since he moved her out here." His voice was tight with a disapproval I didn't understand, for this action had no bearing on him. Unless he alleged the charwoman's dismissal was to keep her from prying into Miss Galloway's witchy activities. As we drew closer to the stone cottage, I could see that it was indeed small, likely boasting only two or three rooms. A curtain in one of the windows twitched, and a few moments later a young woman emerged onto the small stone porch extending from the house in the direction of the river. She moved toward the corner closest to us, crossing her arms over her chest as she watched us approach. Her stance didn't appear the least inviting. Neither did her face as we drew near enough to see it, though it was lovely. Large, heavily lashed eyes narrowed at us, and her pale pink lips puckered in antipathy. I could hardly blame her, especially when I glanced at Rory and saw the thinly veiled contempt gleaming in his eyes. Had I been able to reach him and also do so subtly, I would have elbowed him in the ribs. Rory might distrust her, but thus far she'd done nothing to earn our disdain. We were the ones trespassing on her favor, so to speak. Unless the sight of her unbound hair was what had so riled him. Her long blond locks fell past her waist, tied back from her face with a ribbon like a young girl might have worn. As a rule, women did not wear their hair down among polite society, but then again, she probably hadn't been expecting company. However, the rest of her appearance was faultless, even somewhat modest, given her high-necked, lace-trimmed rose-patterned dress and kid boots. In any case, Gage seemed unruffled by her appearance, giving her one of his most charming smiles. "Pardon us for the intrusion," he demurred, breaking the rules of protocol to speak to her before his cousin could properly introduce us, undoubtedly out of fear of what rude remark Rory might open with. "We don't wish to impose upon your time." He nodded to Rory. "But my cousin said you might be able to help us." "How is that?" she retorted, not softening in the least under Gage's attention. Ignoring the hostility in her gaze, he dismounted so that he could speak with her at her level. Or a little below her level, as the height of the porch put her above anyone standing below. "I'm Sebastian Gage, and this is my wife." She flicked a glance at me as I also dismounted, quickly dismissing me. "We're looking for my cousin, Lord Langstone. His grandfather is concerned because he's been missing for nearly a fortnight. The last anyone saw of him, he walked out onto the moor and never returned." Miss Galloway tilted her head. "And what is that to me?" It was spoken as almost a challenge. She must have known what people presumed about her. She would have to be soft in the head not to. But it was obvious she resented those assumptions. "We thought you might have seen something." Gage hesitated. "Are you acquainted with Lord Langstone?" Miss Galloway arched a single eyebrow, clearly aware we knew the answer to this question. I almost smiled at her refusal to be taken in by Gage's charm and careful handling. "I'm sure Mr. Trevelyan has already informed you of that fact." She shot Rory a venomous look where he still remained on horseback. "Is he here?" Rory replied bluntly. I could see that Miss Galloway wanted to deliver him a scathing set down, but she settled for a sharp-worded "No" instead. Rory narrowed his eyes in suspicion. "When was the last time you saw him?" Gage interjected before Rory could speak again. "Could he have passed this way?" She exhaled in frustration. "I already told the men who were out searching for Lord Langstone during the days immediately after he apparently went missing that I'd not seen him in over a week. I'm sorry he's missing, but I can't help you." She spread her hands. "I don't know where he is." "Did he ever say that he planned to go away, or mention any friends he intended to see?" She shook her head, her patience growing thin. "Was he acting strangely in any way that last time you saw him?" Gage hastened to ask before she cut him off. This question made her brow furrow, though I couldn't be sure why. Truth be told, I was having difficulty interpreting her mannerisms. She was guarded and irritated by our presence, but had she also adopted her angry, rigid behavior to mask the fact she was lying? Before she could form a reply, Rory spoke again, making me wish we'd left him behind and found our way here on our own. "Why did you dismiss old Mrs. Dunning?" I assumed he meant the charwoman he'd mentioned earlier. A matter which, as far as I could tell, had no bearing on Alfred's disappearance. Any softening that Gage had painstakingly achieved with Miss Galloway was lost as her spine stiffened. "I don't believe that's any of your business." "What are you doing in that cottage that you didn't want her to see?" She gave a mocking laugh. "What do you think I'm doing? Brining cats? Filleting fenny snake?" she quipped, borrowing from Shakespeare's Macbeth. "Poisoning entrails?" But this last taunt struck too close to Rory's suspicions, and he pounced on it like a cat with a string. "Are you making poisons? Is that why you sent Mrs. Dunning away?" Miss Galloway scowled. "Why should I pay someone else to do something I can do for myself?" "If Lord Sherracombe is willing to compensate her, why would you want to do the work yourself?" Rory sneered. I could sense the frustration simmering within her that she would never be able to make such a man understand, so I quietly answered for her. "Because life is fickle." She lowered her gaze to meet mine for the first time since we'd been introduced. "Because Lord Sherracombe might not have the decency or the foresight to leave her anything in his will, and his heir might not wish to continue to support her." Something flickered behind her eyes, a sort of understanding, as she recognized I was far more familiar with her situation than she would have ever guessed. When Sir Anthony had died, he'd left me little more than a pittance. The rest had gone to his cousin—a man who had never liked me, and absolutely despised me after learning of my part in Sir Anthony's work. Had my sister and her husband not welcomed me into their home, I would have had nowhere to go, and barely enough money to live respectably, albeit humbly for a handful of years. After that my only choice would have been to remarry or find some form of employment in the few positions open to impecunious gentlewomen. That is, if I could convince a man or an employer to overlook my lack of fortune and scandalous past. I shuddered to think what would have become of me if not for my family. Men like Rory and even Gage had never had to worry about such eventualities. Even as a second son, Rory could rely on Lord Tavistock to bequeath him a significant enough portion that he would never need worry about survival. His brother might eject him from Langstone Manor when he inherited, but he would have enough funds to live elsewhere without difficulty. Just as Gage had known since a young age that he would always inherit the portion Lord Tavistock bestowed on him as the future child of his mother in Emma and Lord Gage's wedding contract. This had enabled Gage to live his life without being under his father's thumb, and had made our marriage possible. Otherwise, I was certain Lord Gage would have cut him off without a farthing for daring to defy him and wed me. As such, even though Miss Galloway's life had been very different from my own, I still felt an affinity for her. Her intelligence and spunk only made me predisposed to like her more, as well as her refusal to cow to either Rory's badgering or Gage's charm. Such delight in her actions was counter to our aims, but I enjoyed it all the same. Miss Galloway's green eyes gleamed at me, as if she recognized the pleasure I was taking in her defiance. "I comprehend your predicament, Miss Galloway," Gage replied politely. "But it really is most urgent that we find Lord Langstone. Is there truly no assistance you can give us?" "I suggest you search her cottage," Rory declared. "I wouldn't be surprised to find she's hiding him. That or you'll find evidence of his belongings. Perhaps when her poison didn't work on him she killed him by a more direct method." Miss Galloway's glower returned, though this time it was also tinged with a perplexity I shared. Why was Rory so antagonistic? His remarks went above and beyond mere condescension. And why was he suddenly so certain she had played some part in Alfred's disappearance? The location of her cottage, isolated out here among the moors, was convenient to the last place Alfred was seen, but one could hardly cast blame based on the placement of a person's dwelling. "You are not entering my cottage," Miss Galloway retorted to Rory and then nodded at Gage. "And neither is he." Her eyes then fell to me. "But I'll allow Lady Darby to search if she wishes." So she was aware of who I was. Gage had introduced me as his wife. He'd made no mention of the title from my first husband I retained out of courtesy. Who had told her about me? Alfred? The villagers? I stepped forward, willing to put our curiosity to rest, and hopeful she would more readily answer our questions without Rory glaring sullenly down at her from the horse he'd never dismounted. But Gage reached out a hand to halt me. I looked up into his pale blue eyes, able to read his concern. Though he had the courtesy not to say the words aloud, I knew he was asking me whether following Miss Galloway inside was a wise thing to do. I arched my eyebrows, uncertain what exactly he assumed would befall me inside. Did he think Miss Galloway would attack me? Or was he more worried about her casting a spell? "I'll be fine," I assured him in a low voice. Miss Galloway stood by her door, ushering me inside. Although I didn't share Gage's trepidation, I still paused ever so slightly at the threshold. Yes, I felt a kinship with this woman, but I didn't truly know her. What if I was wrong to believe she didn't wish me ill? After all, I'd been fooled in the past. I met her gaze, and the steady, watchful regard she returned helped me take the final step inside. If she were intent on harming me, wouldn't she have given me a reassuring smile in order to coax me into her domain? Even so, my heart kicked in my chest as she slammed the door shut behind us.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 17	After all of Rory's allusions to witches, I'm not sure what I had expected to find, but it wasn't the cozy room into which she ushered me. The cottage was indeed tiny, but every space had been used with such clever economy that it didn't feel confining. The front half of the main room was set up as a kitchen, including a table and benches, a cupboard, and an iron rack from which pots hung. Various herbs hung from another part of the ceiling, being dried before they were stored in the jars that lined several shelves below them. A large stone hearth dominated the center of the room, dividing the kitchen from a small sitting area with two well-worn chairs. Thick woolen blankets draped over the backs of each, while a round table set between them boasted a stack of five or six books. Below it rested a basket of mending on a threadbare but well-cared-for rug covering the slate floor. My eyes were first drawn to the chairs and then the door at the far side of the room. It was impossible to tell whether both chairs had been used recently, for they both sported permanent indentations in the fabric. But if Alfred was hiding here, he was likely through that door. "You can take a look," Miss Galloway told me, following my gaze. "But I assure you, there's no one there." I wanted to believe her, but I also knew I needed to at least peek inside. Crossing the small space, I opened the door and quickly scanned the contents of the room. They were few, naught but a bed covered in a faded quilt, a dresser, a rug, and a few dresses hung on hooks. Though I felt silly and somewhat embarrassed doing so, I lifted aside the quilt and peered under the bed. There was nothing but a few boxes, just as I'd expected. Still, as unobtrusively as possible, I sniffed the bedding and the air, trying to detect if a man's scent lingered here—his cologne, his musk, anything that was unlikely to belong to Miss Galloway. But the sheets smelled of lavender, and the flowers sitting in a vase on the dresser concealed most of the other odors. Returning to the main room, I noted that the drying herbs also perfumed the air, overpowering even the scents of any recent cooking. It was obvious this had not been done with intention, but if Alfred had been here it would be a happy coincidence. Miss Galloway stood next to the table, patiently watching me as I took all of this in. "I apologize," I told her as my skin tingled with embarrassment. "But Lord Langstone has been missing for so long. His family is growing a bit frantic." I hoped that was explanation enough for our prying. Her eyes dipped to the wood of the table as she trailed her fingers over the grain. "I was under the impression they were not so caring." I studied her downturned face, wondering just how well she knew Alfred. How much had he shared with her? "But I suppose a missing heir does constitute a problem," she added, lifting her eyes to meet mine again. "Yes, well, I've learned sometimes those who care the most also exhibit the gruffest demeanors. They simply don't know how to express it." Despite my animosity toward him, I hated to think that Alfred believed none of his family cared for him. And then I thought of Gage, of the family's callous, brusque treatment of him, and sighed. "And sometimes things are exactly how they appear." Miss Galloway tilted her head, sensing there was more to my statement than I admitted, but she did not press. Before she could change her mind, I nodded toward the plants hanging from the ceiling. "This is quite an impressive collection of herbs. Do you grow them yourself?" "Many of them. I have a small plot on the eastern side of the house. The others I gather from the moor and the riverbeds." "We found a brown tincture in one of the drawers in Alfred's chamber. Did you prepare it for him?" I tried to word my question in as conversational a manner as I could, which seemed to amuse Miss Galloway, for her lips quirked upward at the corners. Her shoulders relaxed and her brow smoothed of its last pleats. Apparently she had decided to trust I meant her no harm. "I did. It was a receipt I learned from my mother. I mix a batch every few weeks, for I always have villagers asking for it." "What is it used for?" "Stomach ailments." My eyes widened, though this somehow shouldn't have surprised me. "It contains things like chamomile, catmint, aniseed, fennel seed, dill weed, and a few other ingredients. Nothing particularly unusual." She crossed the room and reached into one of her cabinets and extracted a bottle similar to the one we'd found in Alfred's room. "This is from the same batch if you wish to test it." I took it from her, opening the lid to smell the contents. "Was this the first time he'd purchased a bottle from you?" "Yes. Though . . ." She hesitated and I arched my eyebrows in question. Her lips compressed in an awkward grin. "It wasn't the first remedy he'd purchased from me." She cleared her throat, dropping her gaze. "Though, the first was done more in jest than actual need." I frowned in confusion, examining her averted eyes and the pink tinge of her cheeks, until comprehension dawned. "You mean . . .?" She cleared her throat again. "Yes. He purported to have . . . masculine difficulties." It was my turn to blush. "Is that how you met?" "Yes. I discerned immediately he was doing it as some sort of jape. He wasn't the first man to think such a ruse would be amusing and cause me no end of discomfort." I scowled, annoyed on her behalf. "But he was the first to return and apologize." My surprise must have been evident, for she actually laughed. "I take it you haven't heard very complimentary things about him. Perhaps justifiably, I might add." "Well, he was quite cruel to my husband growing up, and he's done nothing in the years since to make me believe he's any different. So you'll have to excuse me if I'm not inclined to think good things about him." Her smile turned wry. "I well believe it. And if it's any consolation, I wanted to slap his smug face the first time I met him, as I'm sure you wish you could." "Oh, I'd like to do a bit more than that." Her grin widened. I inhaled. "But I shall restrain myself." I grimaced. "If I ever get the chance." Her smile vanished as she nodded, acknowledging the fact that he was still lost. And for the first time genuine concern crossed her features. "So you became friends?" I guessed, slipping the tincture she'd given me into the pocket of my dark charcoal gray riding ensemble. "Of sorts." Her gaze strayed toward the window where a beam of sunlight had broken through the mist. "Actually, I found him to be quite amiable, once he stopped behaving like such a wretch. I shall be sad if I hear something unfortunate has happened to him." There was something in her voice, something fraught and apprehensive. She opened her mouth as if to say more, but then restrained herself, casting me a humorless smile. I wasn't quite sure what to make of her reaction, but I suspected she was being honest about one thing. She had grown to like Alfred. But as merely a friend, or something more? "I know you don't know me," I began hesitantly. "But . . . if you know something . . . if you need someone to confide in, I will do my best to keep what you tell me in confidence." Her eyes widened, making me certain I'd guessed correctly. There was something she was not saying. But was it about her personal relationship with Alfred or something to do with his disappearance? She seemed to consider my offer, but ultimately only nodded. Then her gaze fell to my chest, and I realized she was staring at my amethyst pendant. I reached up to finger it, curious at her interest. "Someone who loved you gave that to you," Miss Galloway murmured with quiet certainty. "Yes, my mother. Just before she died." She'd claimed it would protect me, and being only eight years old I'd believed her. Now I wore it as much as a way of keeping her near as for security. Her gaze lifted to bore into mine. "Keep it close. Don't take it off." I blinked, startled by her pronouncement. "Why?" Her eyes clouded with trouble. "There is a darkness that hovers over that house. A shadow that seems to touch every life that falls within its reach." A chill swept through me as I continued to try to make sense of what she was saying. "I can't explain it. But I sense it. And I can tell you that Lord Langstone is not the first person from Langstone Manor to go missing." "What do you mean?" She shook her head, unwilling to say anything more about it. "Just wear your pendant. And keep that tincture. You might have need of it." She turned toward the door, dismissing me, and I glanced up to see a drying bouquet hanging over the entry—one just like the flowers we'd found in Alfred's chamber. "That's why you gave Lord Langstone the herb bennet," I guessed, before she could open the door. She pressed her hand flat to the wood, turning her head to speak over her shoulder. "Yes, it's for protection. Among other things." She exhaled heavily. "But apparently it didn't work." Before I could ask her anything further, she pulled open the door and stepped to the side to allow me to pass. I accepted her dismissal this time without demurral. Gage and Rory, who had finally dismounted, stood by the horses, staring up at us quizzically. Before I could join them, Miss Galloway stopped me with a hesitant touch to my arm. "If . . . if you should like to come again . . ." She glanced at the men. "Just you. You would be welcome." Her voice was timid, as if she was uncertain how I would accept such a proposition and wary of giving it because of that. I couldn't help but wonder how many times she'd made similar overtures of friendship over the years and had them rebuffed. "You could bring your sketchbook. I can show you some beautiful settings." So she definitely knew my past, for we'd made no mention of my talent as an artist. And yet, she still wanted to befriend me. I smiled, having no trouble making it genuine. "I would like that." Her eyes brightened and she nodded, leaving it at that. Gage arched his eyebrows in question as I approached, but he said nothing as he turned to help me remount. In sharp contrast, Rory was practically bursting to ask me what had happened. I ignored him, lifting an arm in farewell to Miss Galloway as we turned our horses and rode back down the path in the direction of the manor. As much as I liked Miss Galloway, she was still a puzzle. Rory had led me to believe her mother had come from a lowly birth, but Miss Galloway's manner of speech said otherwise. She was intelligent, articulate, and poised. Isolated out here on the moors in that small cottage, she could only have learned such comportment and enunciation from her mother. She must have come from a family that was gentry, if not nobility. Which meant her family had almost certainly disowned her. But who were they? Before I could contemplate the matter further, questions and accusations burst from Rory's lips. "You were in there quite a long time. Could you tell if Alfred had been there? Was she brewing more potions?" I cast him a quelling look. "No, there was no sign of Alfred. And she wasn't brewing anything. Her cottage appears perfectly common, perfectly normal. She has an impressive array of herbs, but that's to be expected considering she makes medicinal cures for the villagers." I elected not to mention the bottle of tincture thumping against my leg in my pocket. I wasn't sure I wanted Rory to know I had it. As for the rest, I decided it was best to keep what I'd learned to myself until Gage and I were alone. "Well, then if Miss Galloway is not hiding him or conscious of his whereabouts, I suppose we shall have to try elsewhere," Gage declared, spurring his horse forward to lead us down the track leading to the river. "Surely you don't believe her?" Rory protested. "The woman is as skilled a liar as they come." I scowled over my shoulder at him as I urged my mare to follow Gage's. "Why are you so determined to distrust her? I was under the impression you were barely acquainted with her." I didn't have a chance to view Rory's reaction, as my concentration was needed to maintain my seat as the path steeply dropped down to the stream. In any case, Rory didn't try to answer, but seemed to be ruminating on something unpleasant when I glanced back at him again just before we forded the river at the same calm pool. It wasn't until our horses had climbed the slope out of the valley and back onto the higher part of the moor that he drew up alongside us. "I wasn't going to say anything, but perhaps it's best if I do." Still, he hesitated. His eyes almost looked stricken, and my stomach tightened in dread, somehow knowing I wouldn't like what he was about to say. "I distrust Miss Galloway because . . . because we always suspected her mother was the person who sold Annie the poison she used on Gage's mother." My gaze flew to my husband. I felt sick with shock, but I was more concerned with how he would take this revelation. He sat stonily in his saddle, his hands gripping his reins as he struggled to keep his feelings in check. It was evident that Rory's admission was as new to him as it was to me. He'd known his mother's maid, Annie, had poisoned her, but I'm not sure he'd ever contemplated where Annie had gotten the poison. "You said 'suspected,'" I said when it became obvious Gage was not capable of making a reply. Not at the moment. My heart squeezed at his distress. "So you have no proof it was Miss Galloway's mother?" "No. But there simply wasn't anyone else." Rory shrugged. "Not unless Annie traveled far afield to obtain it." Which was possible, but not very likely. And all but impossible to discover now—fifteen years later. Not to mention the fact there was no way of knowing if Miss Galloway's mother had known what Annie intended to use the poison for. With Annie having been hanged long ago for her crime, and Miss Galloway's mother dead, there was really no point in stirring it all up again. But Rory's warning was duly noted. Just because I'd felt empathy for Miss Galloway didn't mean I could trust her. I pressed a hand to the fabric concealing the bottle of tincture she'd given me, curious whether its contents would match those inside the bottle we'd found in Alfred's room.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 18	Upon our return to Langstone, Gage set off to visit his grandfather. He invited me to join him, but I demurred, figuring the two of them needed to spend some time alone. Maybe Lord Tavistock would feel more comfortable delving into private matters without me hovering in the background. Rather than remain in our chamber where Bree was puttering around, I elected to explore the manor. I could have dismissed my maid, but it was already difficult enough for her to complete her tasks in a strange house without my impeding her just so I could be alone. Besides, I'd been eager to poke my nose into some of the other rooms and corridors ever since our arrival. The unsettling sensations I'd experienced outside Alfred's chamber had dampened my enthusiasm somewhat, but I was still determined to discover what I could. So armed with a candle and a tinderbox tucked in my pocket, just in case a stray wind—or mischievous ghost—blew it out, I set off down a corridor I'd yet to traverse. My progress was slow, as I took my time to examine some of the treasures—or lack thereof—gracing the walls. I was surprised to find valuable and exquisite paintings by Vermeer and Titian interspersed with other poorly executed works of art. Had the worthless pictures all represented the same style, I would have attributed them to a family member, but it was clear most of them had been created by different people. I couldn't decide whether that meant Lord Tavistock and his ancestors had been clueless about art, or they hoped to flummox any would-be thieves. I nearly gasped at the sight of a Rembrandt hanging haphazardly above a mahogany side table with a bust in one corner. This masterpiece should be hung with more care, taking pride of place high on the wall of the dining room or drawing room, not tucked next to a stand filled with spears that could topple over and tear the canvas. The only thing reassuring about the random placement of these artworks was that the corridors were so dark, at least sunlight certainly couldn't damage them. I found dusty bedchambers with their contents covered in white sheets, and private sitting rooms with their writing desks still stocked with stationery. I even stumbled into an old garderobe with its hole carefully covered by a plank of wood. Down a flight of stairs at the back of the house, I stumbled into a billiard room with its balls racked, ready to be played. It appeared less abandoned than many of the chambers, making me suspect it had seen more recent use. Retracing my steps, I turned right down the next corridor, hoping to locate the library, and found myself at the end of a long passage that overlooked some shadowy chamber below. I realized, with a start, that this was the portrait gallery. Peeking over the railing spanning one length of the corridor, I could see down into what I presumed to be some sort of great hall or ballroom. Turning back toward the portraits, I inched my way down the gallery, examining each one. Before my eyes, the Trevelyan features regressed through the centuries. A large portion of the males seemed to have inherited the same striking silver eyes Lord Tavistock possessed. Though I pondered if maybe the artists had exaggerated the intensity of their sheen in several of the pictures. One painting in particular drew my attention, for it boasted three people as its subjects. The man held pride of place, glowering down at me with his silver eyes, while a rather dowdy woman hovered behind him. Then almost in the background stood another woman, her face averted as if she were looking over her shoulder. She appeared as if she weren't supposed to be in the portrait at all, as if she'd accidentally meandered into the background, but, of course, the artist would have had to have added her with intention. But why had he painted her thusly? I recalled what Miss Galloway had said about Alfred not being the first person to have gone missing from Langstone Manor, and I couldn't help but wonder if this woman was the other vanishing resident. Lifting my candle higher, I studied all of the portraits with renewed interest, curious which of these people might also have disappeared. Had they ever been found, or was this the last trace of their existence? I shivered in a stray draft. My sense of foreboding and the flickering light of the candle combined to eerily magnify the emotions captured in the faces of Gage's ancestors, making them all the more intense. So that the jaded Georgian gentleman in his curled wig seemed to roll his eyes; the laughter of a simpering debutante in a golden gown with large hoops almost tinkled aloud from behind her fan; and the fiercely scowling Roundhead all but leapt out at me. His glaring visage made me startle and nearly drop my candle. Or perhaps it was the sharp realization that I was not alone.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 19	I spun around to see the Dowager Lady Langstone step out of the shadows at the other end of the gallery. How long she'd been watching me, I didn't know, but I felt a pulse of irritation at her for behaving so. She could have announced herself. She wore a gown of chartreuse silk—another dress that was elegantly fashionable and all but put my simple forest green gown with bows at the shoulders to shame. Her thick hair was arranged in ringlets on either side of her head and topped with a thin gold diadem. I couldn't help but admire her cool beauty, though it made me wonder why she'd not remarried. Though I couldn't say much for her personality, her attractiveness and impeccable breeding should have attracted a second husband. In my experience, most gentlemen never looked past the exterior and the basic niceties. I assumed she'd not wished to enter into matrimony again, but why? Was she all consumed with her sons' inheritances, or was there another reason? Her dark eyes gleamed at me in the candlelight like hard gems. "Admiring our artwork?" I scrutinized her features, trying to tell whether she was slyly implying she'd been observing me for even longer than I suspected. But I already knew if I asked her outright she would deny it. Instead I turned back to the portraits on the wall. "Some more than others," I replied indifferently. She stepped up beside me, gazing up at the fine lines etched into the face of a woman attired in an Elizabethan ruff. It was one of the oldest paintings in the collection. Possibly the wife of the first Baron Langstone, long before Viscount Tavistock was added to their titles. "They say she was mistress to the king. Another lady-in-waiting plucked from the queen's service. And that's why her husband was granted the title and these lands." She could only have been talking about Henry VIII, for no other king would have been the right age, though she spoke as if she were gossiping about the current monarch. "How many titles do you think have been won thusly? By a woman on her back." Her piercing gaze turned to meet mine before returning to the portrait. I suspected she'd just insulted me, and that I was supposed to respond with righteous indignation. Contrarily, a bubble of amusement rose inside me. After all the dreadful names I'd been called, all the gruesome acts I'd been unjustly accused of, being charged with seducing Sebastian Gage, the golden lothario, into marriage was almost laughable. It certainly wasn't worth getting ruffled by. Not when it was what Lady Langstone clearly wanted. I smothered a giggle and strolled on to the next portrait, trusting she would follow. "I understand Lord Tavistock is hopeful of an engagement between Lord Langstone and Lady Juliana Maristow." "Yes." She paused for so long after that single statement that I thought she was going to refuse to elaborate. Whether she'd been weighing her words, or my silence had prodded her into saying more, I wasn't certain, but it seemed far more likely to be the former. "It is a good match." "Was Alfred pleased by it?" Her chin arched a degree higher as she replied almost in challenge. "Why would he not be?" I turned to look at her, finding her answer interesting. Lady Langstone seemed to me a very deliberate person, and though she could be startled into giving a reaction or response that hadn't been first carefully considered, I didn't think this had been one of those instances. If she had believed her son was pleased by the engagement, would she not have said so? Did that mean she knew better? That Alfred had not liked it. Had she joined Lord Tavistock in pressuring him to accept the match regardless? As if aware of the topic of my contemplation, she switched to another topic. "I trust your rooms have been satisfactory." "Our rooms are lovely. Though . . ." I hesitated, uncertain whether to mention the pranks to Lady Langstone. In the end, I decided I was more curious what her reaction would be than worried she would dismiss my concerns as silly. "I believe some of your staff might be intent on making mischief." "The missing trunks?" she surmised without removing her gaze from the portrait of a mother and her five children we were standing before. She sighed. "It is so hard to find good staff in this area. Especially since the manor presses into the heart of Dartmoor. It's always been this way," she added as we sauntered down to the next painting. "Maids coming and going. And the ones that do stay often aren't of the best quality. As Mrs. Gage found out." I blinked at the portrait before me, shocked she'd referred to the maid who poisoned Gage's mother in such a conversational manner. However, I refused to give her the satisfaction of seeing she'd disconcerted me. But Lady Langstone wasn't finished. She sighed again, rather affectedly. "I told her to get rid of that maid. There were plenty of other girls from the villages nearby she could have employed. But she wouldn't listen. And look where it got her." "Buried cold in the ground?" I couldn't help but retort, made furious by her casually cruel remarks. She flinched, but then recovered. "Well, yes." I silently fumed, trying to keep my temper under control, and almost missed what Lady Langstone said next. "She brought that maid with her from Plymouth, you know. She wasn't a local girl." I turned to her quizzically. "Annie wasn't Mrs. Gage's maid before she married?" "No," she scoffed. "She couldn't afford the woman her father employed for her. Her husband hadn't yet attained his riches." She spoke with distaste, as if Lord Gage had been a privateer, pillaging and looting, not the captain of a Royal Navy vessel who'd captured a number of large ships for the Crown as war prizes. Ignoring the tone of her voice, I tried to focus on the content of her words. "So life in Plymouth was rather less grand than here at Langstone, especially in the early years of her marriage." She wrinkled her nose. "I suspect it was downright squalid." Coming from her, such a description could imply any number of conditions, so I did not concern myself with the details. A Royal Navy captain might not boast of impressive accommodations, but he also wouldn't live in ramshackle lodging. However, it was plain Gage's mother had come down in the world. Greatly. "When she returned here with young Sebastian and that maid in tow, she claimed it was her illness that convinced her to make the move, but I didn't believe it." She sniffed. "It was evident to me she was simply tired of her life in that tiny house by the sea, doing much of the work she was accustomed to the servants managing. That's the real reason she showed up here without warning. She wanted to come home, but she couldn't. Not really. So she claimed she was only here for a visit, just until her health improved, until her husband came back from the sea." I didn't want to give her story any credence, especially not when it was delivered in such a self-righteous tone. But there were elements of it that struck me as being perhaps more accurate than what I'd always assumed given the little information Gage had relayed to me. "Wasn't she ill?" I asked, turning to face her directly. She brushed this aside with a flick of her wrist. "No more than a convenient cough when it suited her. She didn't truly become ill until a year or two later. And then . . . I suppose you know the rest." About the poisoning. About how her maid, Annie, had feared she would be replaced and so began dosing her mistress with poison from time to time to prolong her illness. It was heartless the way Lady Langstone spoke of it as if it were merely a trifling matter. It made me angry, and determined that she wouldn't escape this conversation unscathed. "We visited Lord Glanville yesterday." Had I not been watching for it, I might not have detected the way her eyes flinched. "Did you," she replied with an admirable amount of nonchalance. "Then I assume he confirmed the information I already relayed to you." Her eyebrows arched in accusation. "Yes . . . and no." I furrowed my brow as if she had confused me. "Why did you tell us Lord Glanville visited you when it was you who went to him?" I elected not to mention the flurried state Glanville had described her being in. "Did he tell you that?" she asked with cool reserve. She shook her head as if in bemusement. "The man is a drunk, and likely can't recall one day from the next." "Are you saying you didn't visit him?" Her smile tightened to something akin to pity. "I'm saying the man can't be trusted." Once again, she hadn't really answered my question, and her implication that I was to be pitied for my naïveté was grating. "Does that mean you think he's involved in Alfred's disappearance?" "No," she huffed. "It means you shouldn't believe everything you hear." She started to turn away, but paused to offer me one last bit of advice. "Lady Darby, if I were you, I would spend less time worrying about the veracity of Lord Glanville's memory and more time concerned with the violent man you married." I blinked in astonishment. "Ask him about the dagger," she said, and then swept from the room before I could recover from my state of shock to demand she explain. I didn't believe for even one second that Gage was a violent man. I'd known violent men. I'd seen the way they operated. I'd survived a marriage with one. Yes, it had only been three months since Gage and I wed, but never during that time or the eight months before had he displayed any sign of those characteristics. Not to mention the fact that two of his closest friends were also my brother-in-law and an old family friend. I had no doubt Philip and Michael would have warned me if Gage exhibited any forceful tendencies. That being said, Lady Langstone evidently wanted me to find out about something. She'd mentioned a dagger, and I could only assume it was the Bray ceremonial dagger referred to at dinner two evenings prior. I'd perceived then how the mention of it affected Gage, but I hadn't yet asked him about it. I supposed now was as good a time as any. Unfortunately, when I returned to our chambers, Gage was nowhere to be seen. And by the time I heard him return to the connecting room, I was already dressing for dinner. I was curious where he'd been all afternoon, and told him so when he joined me to escort me down to the dining room. "Hammett arranged for me to speak with several members of the staff, including the gardener who last saw Alfred." He glanced at me in puzzlement. "Did a servant not relay my message asking you to join me if you were available?" I shook my head. He frowned. "An oversight, I suppose." But I could tell neither of us really believed that. "In any case, the gardener no longer had the newspaper clipping Alfred dropped." Frustration tightened his voice. "Said no one told him it could be important, so he burned it as kindling. He seemed genuinely distressed when I asked for it, so I don't think there was any malice intended." "Did he read it?" "He couldn't. He's only literate enough to recognize his own name and a few place names and such. But he said he noticed the words Langstone, Tavistock, and Gunnislake, which is a small village southwest of Tavistock. Beyond that, he couldn't make anything else out." "That's not much to go on." "No, it's not. But perhaps my grandfather will have some idea what the article was about." He exhaled wearily. "Barring that, I suppose I could search for an intact copy of the edition of Woolmer's Gazette we found in Alfred's chamber." I lifted the skirts of my claret red evening gown with black braid as we descended the stairs, lowering my voice so as not to be heard by anyone hovering in the entry hall below. "That might require an awful lot of effort to discover something we're not even certain has anything to do with your cousin's disappearance." He grimaced. "That's why I'm hoping Grandfather can enlighten me instead." I wanted to ask him about his visit with his grandfather earlier that day, but we were nearly to the bottom of the staircase and would soon be joining Lady Langstone and Rory. In that little time, I knew I wouldn't receive a satisfactory answer. Not to mention the fact that I wished a few moments to prepare myself before seeing Gage's aunt again. I'd wanted to plead a headache, except I'd known it simply wouldn't do for either of us to miss two dinners in a row. My suspicion that Lady Langstone would view my absence as some sort of triumph also steeled my resolve. That being said, I did not dally over dinner. There were only so many of Lady Langstone's venomous looks and sly cutting remarks I could endure, especially when Rory did little to help direct the conversation elsewhere. I might have felt annoyed with him, except that he seemed so apologetic when I did manage to pull his attention away from whatever preoccupied him. Clearly something was bothering him, and I hoped he would take the opportunity to confide in Gage when I slipped away, claiming fatigue. In any case, I had something much more interesting to devote my evening to. Lifting the skirts of my dress, I hurried back to my bedchamber. I was pleased to see Bree had found the items I'd requested. After tugging on the bellpull to summon her, I hurried over to the dressing table to examine the platter, clear glasses, and sieve. I pulled the key out from where I'd secured it inside my corset and leaned over to unlock the bottom right drawer. Inside sat my jewelry case, as well as the two bottles of Miss Galloway's tincture. I set the bottles on the table and rose to fetch some sheets of foolscap to jot down my notes when Bree arrived. She'd merely arched her eyebrows earlier when I relayed the list of items I needed her to procure for me, accustomed to my odd requests. But now she studied the arrangement on the dressing table with mild alarm. "Dinna tell me that's poison in those bottles," she chided. I glanced down at them and back at her. "Most likely not." Then I narrowed my eyes, curious what she might have heard belowstairs, and from whom. "Why did you suspect poison?" She scoffed and pushed away from the door. "Because why else would ye be intent on examinin' their contents? Yer no' tryin' to duplicate a recipe." Her mouth quirked wryly. "You an' Mr. Gage do investigate murders, m'lady. That means poison." I smiled at her logic and allowed myself to be spun around. Her fingers deftly began working their way down the buttons. "I hope ye werena plannin' to strain potions in this dress. One splash and the silk would be ruined." "Of course not," I lied. "I was just getting everything prepared." Her quiet harrumph told me she didn't believe me for a second. "What's supposed to be in those bottles? Something Lord Langstone drank?" "A tincture for a stomach ailment. At least, that's what Miss Galloway claims. We found the nearly empty bottle in Lord Langstone's chamber. Miss Galloway gave me the full bottle this morning and claimed it was from the same batch." "And you want to compare their contents to find oot if she's tellin' the truth?" "Exactly." With little warning, Bree whisked my gown up over my head. "Who's this Miss Galloway?" "She's the illegitimate daughter of Lord Sherracombe. Lives out on the moor in the same cottage she grew up in with her now-deceased mother." I swiveled so I could see Bree's image in the looking glass as she began loosening the strings of my corset. "Actually, Mr. Trevelyan tried to convince us she's a witch." It turned out I hadn't needed to see my maid's reflection to observe her reaction, for she tugged so sharply on the corset strings I nearly lost my balance. "My apologies, m'lady." "If anything, I would say she's more of an herbalist," I continued. "Or simply a hedge witch, as Gage says they're called on Dartmoor." I turned to glower over my shoulder at her. "Now, tell me why the suggestion that she's a witch so startled you." "'Tis nothing. Only..." I arched my eyebrows, waiting impatiently for her to explain. "The other servants have been tellin' me some o' the local folklore." "I imagine there are quite a few colorful tales connected with Dartmoor." The land was too isolated and atmospheric not to be the subject of myth, especially when one considered the high number of deaths connected to its natural hazards. Combine all that, and the moors must be rife with legends. She nodded, removing my corset. "Aye. Pixies bent on mischief, vanishin' cottages, beasts protectin' treasures, even a lady who turns into a black dog every midnight and runs alongside a coach made from her husband's bones." I sat on the bench and leaned over to remove my shoes and stockings. "Is she the witch you're so concerned about?" "Nay," Bree assured me as she returned with my nightdress. "Least no' 'til she removes every blade o' grass from her castle. 'Tis only then she can be at rest. Or free to cause more mischief." I looked up at her, trying to tell if she was serious or pitching the gammon. She seemed to be in earnest, but that still didn't explain her reaction. I cast her a long-suffering look as she lifted my night rail to drop it over my head, refusing to raise my arms until she acknowledged it. "But they did tell me another tale that was aboot a witch," she hastened to add. "Named Vixana." I let the folds of the nightdress settle around me and swiveled to allow Bree to remove the pins from my hair while she related the tale. "She lived in a cave at the foot o' a tor to the south, no' far from here, and she hated people. Despised 'em. Though no one could remember why. Anyway, she spent her days perched on top o' her tor, waitin' to cause harm to any who passed. Near her tor lies a bog, and when travelers would try to take the track past her home, she would summon a thick mist to disorient 'em, so that they would stumble into the bog, ne'er to be seen again. Because of it, locals took another trail, which led through the roughest part o' the moor, miles oot o' their way, just to avoid goin' past Vixana's home." Bree picked up a hairbrush, running it soothingly through my hair before she began to plait it. "This went on for many years. No one kens how long. Until a young moorman who'd been given special powers because o' a favor he performed for the pixies decided to investigate Vixana's tor. When Vixana saw him walkin' along the track toward her, she summoned the mist as she always did. But because o' the gift o' clear sight that the pixies had given him, the moorman was able to stay to the path and cross the bog unharmed. When Vixana saw this, she screamed in frustration and began to weave another spell. But the moorman heard her shriek, and realized he was in danger. So he slipped on a ring that would make him invisible—his other gift from the pixies. Vixana was baffled when she could no longer see the man she wanted to direct her spell at, so she moved closer to the edge o' the rocks, leanin' over to search for him. But while she was distracted, the moorman crept aroond to the other side o' the tor, climbed the rocks, and snuck up behind her to push her o'er the edge to her doom. Vixana no longer lives there, but the tor is still named after her." I studied Bree in the mirror as she tied the ribbon to secure my braid. "That's a very affecting story, but . . . what does that have to do with Miss Galloway?" Bree shrugged. "Probably nothin'. But one o' the servants muttered something aboot Vixana's descendants still bein' aboot before Mr. Hammett could shush her. Just be careful." Her eyes met mine steadily in the mirror. "I ken ye like to believe the best o' ladies who've been wronged, an' goodness kens I think that's admirable. But . . . they're no' all innocent. Sometimes where there's smoke, there is fire. And sometimes when there's blather, the rumors are true." I considered her words as she turned to gather my clothes and straighten the room. She was right. After hearing Rory's speculations about Miss Galloway's mother's involvement with Annie, I'd already decided I needed to proceed with caution. Hearing Bree—someone I trusted almost implicitly—say the same thing only drove the matter home. That being said, I knew listening to folktales wasn't the only thing Bree had been doing with her time belowstairs. "Have you made any progress with Lady Langstone's maid?" Bree sighed and shook her head. "She's a prickly one. No' easily charmed. But I'm workin' on her." "Anderley told me he asked you to try to cozen Cooper, Alfred's valet." "Aye. Noo, he's more promisin'. Just wants someone to listen to his complaints, and I can do that." Her nose wrinkled. "Even if he does whine more than my three-year-old nephew." I chuckled and she smiled. "Leave the dishes on the dressin' table when yer done. I'll take care o' 'em in the mornin'." She glanced between me and the bottles, as if debating whether to issue another warning like a little mother hen. "Mr. Gage will be up soon?" My brow furrowed in irritation. "I imagine so." Wisely sensing she'd pushed me far enough, she bobbed a curtsy. "Good night, m'lady." "Good night," I replied, waiting until the door was firmly shut before spinning around to begin my analysis of the tinctures.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 20	I was perched on the bench, dabbing my pinky fingers into each of the two tinctures and touching them to my tongue to try to decipher any difference in taste, when Gage entered the room through the connecting door to his chamber. "What the devil are you doing?!" I startled as he strode closer to stand over me. His eyes flicked furiously over the contents of the dressing table. "Testing the tinctures." "Are you mad?" he demanded, reaching for the ewer of water and a clean glass. "It could be poisoned. Wait." He halted abruptly in pouring the water, making it slosh onto the floor. "Tinctures?" He emphasized the plural. "Yes," I replied calmly. "Miss Galloway gave me a bottle of tincture she claimed was prepared from the same batch as the bottle we found in Alfred's room so that I could compare them." "And you decided to drink them?" He thrust the glass of water into my hands. "No! I was merely tasting them. And I already have a glass of water. How do you think I've been cleansing my palate?" "Kiera, they could be poisoned!" He pushed the glass toward my lips. "Drink that." I scowled, but obliged, restraining myself from pointing out that drinking the water would force more of the tincture down into my stomach. "I highly doubt it," I said when his hand moved away. "Besides, even if they were, drinking nearly an entire bottle didn't kill Alfred. So there's little chance a few small tastes is going to harm me." "Maybe not. But it might harm . . ." He stopped himself before he said the words, his eyes dipping to my abdomen and then back to my face. My face flushed with warmth at the implication and I couldn't stop myself from pressing a hand to my flat stomach. I wasn't yet expecting. Or, at least, I didn't think I was. It was too early to tell if any of our most recent efforts had yielded results. But there was the possibility. And I hadn't even considered the effect my examination of the tinctures might have on him or her. That thought made me go cold. Possibly days into motherhood and I might already be doing an abominable job. Considering all the uncertainties I'd been wrestling with recently, this was not a welcome revelation. I set the glass of water carefully on the table, trying to calm my suddenly swirling stomach. Courtesy of my anxieties or the tinctures? "Well, I haven't noted anything suspicious that might lead me to believe these contain poison." I spoke evenly, trying to use reason to allay my own concerns as much as Gage's. "I compared their appearance, their texture, their scent, and . . . and even their taste. In addition to the gin the ingredients are dissolved in, I was able to distinguish all the herbs Miss Galloway mentioned, as well as a few more. As far as I can tell, there is nothing to cause alarm." Gage rested a hand on my shoulder in comfort, sensing my distress despite my attempt to hide it. Following my gaze, he read over the list of suspected ingredients I'd noted on the paper before me. "What did Miss Galloway say the tincture was used for?" His voice was still edged with tension, but kinder than it had been moments before. "Stomach ailments." His eyes dipped to my face, not missing the irony of dosing such a substance with poison. "Did she know why Alfred needed it?" "No. At least, she didn't share the specifics. Though she did mention she sells this particular treatment to the villagers. Says she makes a new batch every few weeks." He cupped my elbow, helping me to my feet, and guided me toward the bed. I perched on the edge while he moved about the room, checking the locks on the windows. "What else did Miss Galloway have to say?" He glanced back at me over his shoulder. "You were in her cottage longer than I expected." "Preparing to storm the castle, were you?" I quipped, trying to lighten the mood. "Actually, yes." His reply made my tentative smile vanish. "And Rory didn't help matters. Toward the end, I practically had to restrain him." "He truly believes she means us harm?" "He does." The last set of drapes closed with a snap, but when he failed to join me on the bed, I looked up from where I'd been worrying my hands in my lap to find him studying me. "But what do you think?" I paused to sort through my impressions of her before I spoke, waiting on Gage to sit by my side. The silk of his dressing gown brushed against the cotton of my nightdress. "I rather liked her. She's not responsible for the hand she's been dealt, and yet, I think she's made the best of it she can." "She could have let her father arrange a marriage for her." "And be made to feel grateful her entire life that her husband condescended to take her as his wife?" I shook my head. "They don't all turn out that way," he reminded me quietly. "And some of them end up quite worse." I stared up at him through my lashes, reminding him how I felt about arranged marriages. After all, my first marriage had been arranged, and had turned out to be the worst mistake of my life. "Regardless, you cannot blame her for wanting to retain control of her own fate." I propped my foot up against the mattress, clasping my hands around my bent knee as I considered my observations of Miss Galloway. "She's intelligent and capable. She doesn't seem to tolerate nonsense, and yet she's not without empathy, even for the likes of Alfred." Gage laid back, turning to his side to face me, and propped his head on his hand. "What do you mean?" I reclined beside him, staring up at the bed curtains. "From the little she said, I could tell she was better acquainted with him than I'd expected. I think they were friends, of a sort. If not something more." I turned my head to look at my husband. "He seemed to confide in her." His pale blue eyes glistened with interest. "About?" "His life here at Langstone. His perception that no one truly cared for him." Gage's eyebrows shot skyward briefly before furrowing in a frown. "If so, it's his own fault." Amusement curled my lips. "Oh, she was well aware of that. And I've no doubt she pointed that out to him." His eyes trailed over my features as he mulled over what I'd said. "You think there might have been something between them?" I shrugged. "Stranger matches have been made." His face softened at my obvious reference to our own union, and he reached out to roll me onto my side closer to him. His fingers lifted to toy with the end of my braid. It was only a matter of time before he removed the ribbon and destroyed all of Bree's efforts to keep my hair tame. "If that's true, do you think she would have helped him? Either to hide or escape, if the situation merited it?" I chewed on my lip in contemplation, not failing to note how Gage's eyes became riveted to my mouth. "If the motive was solely to escape your grandfather's wrath, then no. But . . . if the reason was good enough, perhaps if he was in danger, then yes." It was my turn to scrutinize him. "What are you thinking?" He frowned. "Nothing as of yet. I'm just . . . curious." I raised my eyebrows, hoping he intended to elaborate. "Do you remember the bouquet we found in Alfred's room?" "The herb bennet? Miss Galloway claimed it's for protection." "She admitted to giving it to him?" "Yes." "Interesting," he murmured as his gaze drifted to my right ear. When he didn't explain, I prodded him. "Why? Is it not true?" "No. She's right. It's traditionally used for protection. What I find interesting is that it's often used for a specific type of protection." He settled in closer, as if imparting a secret. "Herb bennet has religious associations, namely that it can ward off the devil and evil spirits, in particular the venom of any beast. This is because St. Benedict, for whom the plant is named, was once given a cup of poisoned wine. But when the saint blessed it, the glass shattered and a demon emerged, exposing the giver's evil intentions." My eyes widened. "How did you find this out?" "I had a few extra minutes to spare this afternoon, so I looked it up in the library." I pressed a hand to the warm skin revealed by the gap in his dressing gown. "Well, then, if that's true, it would hardly make sense for Miss Galloway to have given Alfred a plant to protect him from poison if she intended to dose him herself." Gage nodded, gripping my hand to quell my excitement. "But that also means she may have suspected he was being poisoned by someone else." I subsided deeper into the bedding, recalling something else she'd told me. "She might be concerned for us as well." "What do you mean?" "Before I left, she . . . she told me not to remove my mother's pendant." I reached up to feel its solid weight hidden beneath my nightdress. "And she told me to keep the bottle of tincture because I might have need of it." His eyes flashed. "Was she trying to frighten you?" "No, I don't think so. She seemed genuinely concerned. The same as she looked when we discussed Alfred." I hesitated, suspecting he wasn't going to like what I had to say next even more. "She warned me there's a shadow over this house. And suggested Alfred isn't the first person to disappear from Langstone Manor." But contrary to my expectations, Gage didn't even recoil from the possibility. In fact, he looked pensive. "You're not surprised," I remarked in astonishment. "There are . . . rumors. I heard them when I was young. About some ancestor before my grandfather's time. Someone who went walking on the moors and never returned." "So you don't know if it's true?" He shook his head. Had Lorna merely been repeating popular lore, or did she know something? Something maybe Alfred uncovered? "Would your grandfather?" I asked, pressing the tips of my fingers against his skin to recall his attention. "Maybe." He grimaced. "But will he share it?" "Perhaps I should press Miss Galloway for more information." His eyes searched mine, understanding what I was really asking. He exhaled, as if answering against his better judgment, and touched his forehead to mine. "Yes, perhaps you should." I moved my head back so that I could see him better, surprised he hadn't objected to my suggestion I revisit Miss Galloway. "Truly?" His lips tightened in irritation. "I feel like I should be insulted. I know I'm protective of you, but I've never stopped you from taking reasonable actions, especially in the pursuit of an investigation." I wanted to argue that statement, for we seemed to have differing opinions on what constituted "reasonable actions" in the past, but I overlooked it in favor of a more interesting point. "I thought you'd be less inclined to trust Miss Galloway's intentions given the accusations Rory leveled against her mother." "Yes, well, we have no way of knowing whether that is true or not, and as you already pointed out, it's not fair to fault her for the sins of her mother. Heaven knows, I don't want to be saddled with my father's," he muttered almost under his breath. I brushed a stray golden curl back from his forehead, empathizing with that sentiment. "To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure we should give any credence to Rory's claims." His jaw hardened. "He never displayed an ounce of loyalty toward my mother in the past. Not even at her funeral. It seems a tad too convenient that he should claim to now." Not knowing what had occurred at his mother's funeral, I couldn't respond with any confidence, but I felt I should try. "Yes, but you said yourself he seems to have changed in the fifteen years since you last saw him." "But enough for him to become outraged at an accused woman's daughter on my mother's behalf?" The ribbon in my hair gave way as he tugged on the end. "That's too far." "You think he dislikes her for a different reason?" "I don't know." He lifted the white ribbon, gazing at it without really seeing it, and then tossed it aside. "But I trust your intuition more, and if you think she's not out to harm you or Alfred, then I think we should ask for her help. If she'll give it." "She's invited me to visit again. Offered to show me some places I can sketch." I bit my lip. "But perhaps tomorrow is too soon. She's canny. If I show up on her doorstep so quickly she might be too suspicious to talk." Gage's fingers combed through my hair, unplaiting my braid, though from the faraway look in his eyes I knew his mind was elsewhere. While he was distracted, I leaned closer, inhaling deeply. "So you spent all of your afternoon interviewing the staff and in the library?" I murmured as I smoothed my hand over the silk of his dressing gown's lapel. His eyes met mine briefly before sliding away again. "Mostly. Tomorrow won't work for you to call on Miss Galloway again anyway. I have other plans for us." "Oh?" I replied, baffled by his decision to omit the fact that he'd been working with wood. The faint smell of sawdust still clung to his skin beneath the cleaner scents of his soap and his spicy cologne. I knew his grandfather had been the one to teach him such a hobby, while at the same time admonishing him to keep quiet about it, for gentlemen simply didn't work with their hands. It was only natural that he should be drawn to the woodworking shed where he'd first learned, so why the secrecy? "I want to visit the farmers and tenants bordering the moor to the north of White Tor. I can't help but think that if Alfred walked away from the manor, it must have been in that direction. Perhaps some skilled questioning will yield more details than the men Grandfather sent were able to gather." "You're going to go against your grandfather's wishes?" I asked in surprise. "Not entirely. I don't intend to ask them directly about Alfred, or to let it slip that he's missing." His voice firmed with resolve. "But I'm not going to stay away when those people are the likeliest to hold the key to my cousin's location." "I suppose you know many of them." If so, that would make our surreptitious interrogations that much easier. "If they're the same landowners as fifteen years ago, yes. And land in this part of the country doesn't change hands often, so I suspect so. The Seftons, the Porlocks, the Brays." The last name he listed sent a jolt through me, though I never moved. I'd hoped for an opening to ask Gage about the dagger, and I hardly believed he'd given me one. But still I hesitated. He would not welcome the query, and it would likely cause him discomfort. There was also the chance I would hear something I wouldn't like. But still, the question needed to be asked. "Sebastian," I murmured, knowing my use of his given name as I did only when we were in private would draw his attention away from wherever his thoughts had gone. He stilled his fingers and shifted his gaze to meet mine. Could he hear the uncertainty in my voice? "What happened with the Brays' ceremonial dagger?" His eyes searched mine, perhaps trying to ascertain how much I already knew. For a moment, he seemed about to feign ignorance, but then one corner of his mouth quirked upward sardonically. "I wondered when you would raise that specter. I knew it was too much to hope you'd missed Aunt Vanessa's mention of it." I refrained from telling him that she'd made certain of it that afternoon in the portrait gallery. Nothing would be gained from relaying her hurtful accusations. He sighed heavily, rolling onto his back to stare up at the bed curtains. "Thaddeus Bray was a boy my cousins and I played with on occasion, oftentimes at their farm northwest of White Tor. Thad's father was a sort of squire, so Grandfather, and Aunt Vanessa, deemed his son fit enough to befriend us." I shifted closer to his side, allowing him to work his way around to revealing the most pertinent details. I knew from experience that it was easier to share disquieting things once you'd placed them in context, as if somehow that softened the sting. "The Brays weren't wealthy. Not like we were. But they did have a few priceless possessions that had been passed down through their family for many generations. One of those items was a ceremonial dagger. Mr. Bray kept it in a glass-fronted cabinet behind his desk." His frame grew tenser with every word, and his eyes gleamed with anger. I couldn't stop myself from resting my hand on his abdomen where his chest rose and fell rapidly with each irate breath, but I didn't offer him any further comfort, knowing he didn't want it. At least not until he'd finished his story. "One day after we'd been at the Brays' home, the dagger went missing. I knew who'd taken it. He was always taking things that weren't his simply because he wanted them. But I kept my mouth shut, knowing no good would come of my making an accusation. So you can imagine my surprise when Alfred instead accused me of stealing it. He even claimed to know where I'd hidden it. And lo and behold, that's exactly where we found it." Outrage raced through my veins. I opened my mouth to express my indignation on his behalf, but something in his eyes arrested me. This time it wasn't anger, but shame. "I was so furious!" "Rightly so," I assured him. "I couldn't believe Alfred had done something so underhanded. And that Grandfather and Aunt Vanessa were going to believe him, and report it to my mother. Rory knew the truth. I could see it in his eyes. But he would never stand up for me." The remembered anguish he'd felt as a boy resonated through his body. "I tried to tell them the truth, but they wouldn't listen. And Alfred stood there so smugly, his eyes filled with laughter. I felt so helpless. I always had so little control over what was happening, and I didn't want to be powerless anymore. So I . . . I grabbed the dagger and I . . . I stabbed at Alfred." I stiffened in shock and Gage's gaze lowered to meet mine for the first time since he'd begun his story. His face twisted with self-loathing. "Nicked him in the arm. It was barely a scratch, but when I saw the blood, I was horrified. I dropped the dagger and ran." "Oh, Sebastian," I crooned, lifting my hand to touch his face. He grimaced. "Funnily enough, that's exactly what my mother said when she found me hiding in the old stable at the edge of our cottage's garden." "What did she do?" "Dried my tears and took me home. She had no need to scold me. She knew her disappointment in me was punishment enough. Particularly when I practically had to carry her back to bed because she was so weak from her illness." I frowned. "How old were you?" "Eleven." No wonder he'd lashed out. Not only had his cousin played an unconscionably cruel trick, but he was almost alone in carrying the burden of his mother's illness. His father had been away at sea, so it fell to him to care for and shield his mother with only the help of the maid who, it later would be discovered, was also poisoning her mistress. Something Gage blamed himself for. He believed he should have realized what was happening, that he should have been able to stop it. Had there ever been a time when he wasn't responsible for himself and everyone else around him? When someone had shielded him rather than the other way around? "That's when my father almost had me enlisted in the Royal Navy." This was not a shock, for he'd mentioned it before, but it still made me sick to my stomach to think of him placed in such danger when he was so young. Particularly with the war against Napoleon raging. "What stopped him?" "Mother. She fought him tooth and nail to keep me with her. Said my banishment from Langstone Manor and my lessons for a month were punishment enough. And Father relented. I think because Mother asked him for so little. How could he deny her?" I nodded, but I was really pondering why his mother could fight so hard on that point, but not fight to protect him from her family's barbs. Perhaps such a reflection was unfair, for she couldn't be with him all the time, particularly in her illness. But all the same, I couldn't help feeling a bit vexed that Emma Trevelyan Gage had not sheltered her son more. What would I have done if I were in her shoes? It was a legitimate question, for given my scandalous past and my current unorthodox involvement in my husband's inquiries, my children were certain to face some scorn. When that happened, how would I respond? Would my children bring such slights to my attention or, like Gage, would they try to shield me? I didn't know the answers, but I would have liked to think I would protect them any way possible. If they would let me. I studied my husband's face, wondering if that was the problem. Maybe Gage hadn't let his mother protect him. I quickly discarded the notion. When he was an older boy, that was possible, but at some point when he was young, he'd learned he couldn't rely on others to defend him. Maybe in some ways I should be grateful for that, for it had made his enduring the gossip attached to me easier. But sometimes I worried he too easily fell back on old habits, sheltering me when he shouldn't. I leaned over to kiss the honorable man I'd married, pouring all of my regret that he'd had to endure so much pain, and gratitude that he'd chosen me for his wife, into my caress. When I lifted my mouth to stare into his eyes, my chest tightened at the vulnerability reflected there. Gage so rarely showed weakness. Even in our private interactions he was usually so confident and self-assured. To see him expose his pain and insecurities in such a raw way made me want to wrap him up in my arms and never let him go. Instead I settled for soothing as many of his hurts as I could with my love. Perhaps if I kissed every square inch of him, if I whispered enough words of love into his skin as I held him as close to me as humanly possible, it would be a start.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 21	True to Gage's intentions, we spent much of the next day visiting the farmsteads and homes that bordered the moor around White Tor. Gage was at his most charming, setting even the guarded and cantankerous men at ease. It helped that many of them knew him and seemed to respect him, having followed some of his more daring exploits in the newspapers. Even Thaddeus Bray, who had inherited his father's property when he passed, appeared pleased to see him. At the very least, I sensed no rancor from that affair with their family's ceremonial dagger long ago. The same could not be said of Alfred. Though Gage was as discreet as his grandfather could wish, approaching the matter of his cousin in as indirect a manner as possible, we had no trouble finding out the information we truly sought and much more. From the beginning, it was evident that Alfred was not well liked. Either these residents didn't care whether their uncomplimentary comments got back to Alfred or they trusted me and Gage to keep their words to ourselves, for they were brutally honest. In truth, I wondered if perhaps they hoped Gage would report some of their disgruntlement back to Lord Tavistock. The complaints were much the same. Alfred was snide and reckless, uncaring of who or what got in the way of his own pleasure. Just as Gage had feared, there was no end of angry fathers, brothers, and husbands who claimed his cousin had trifled with their female relations in some way. Much of the time it appeared to be mere flirtation, but there were a few more troubling incidents. One farmer claimed Alfred had gotten his daughter in the family way but had refused to admit it. Apparently the allegation had been believable enough, or Lord Tavistock was merely kind, for he had given the girl a handsome enough dowry to attract a decent husband willing to accept her illegitimate child. Regardless, no one admitted to having seen Alfred in almost a month, and as voluble as they'd been on his sins, I doubted they were withholding anything. No one confessed to witnessing anything out of the ordinary either. Which meant that, while the information we'd uncovered might be important, the day's efforts proved useless in getting us any closer to finding Alfred. There was always the possibility that one of these wronged men—or women—had decided to take the matter of Alfred's appalling behavior into their own hands, but that seemed rather far-fetched. By the time we'd finished our last interview, the warmth of the afternoon had begun to wane and a stiff breeze picked up over the moor. I was weary from the hours of riding and maintaining interest in the others' conversations, even when it had nothing to do with our inquiry. Contrarily, Gage appeared invigorated, sitting tall on his horse as we ambled down an old bridle path deeper into the moor. Today he had been in his element, giving me a glimpse of the type of lord he would be when he inherited his father's title and estate. The soft evening light washed over the heath around us, revealing swaths of gorse and milkwort flowers, and prickly bracken intruding on some of the drier slopes. Before us to the east, we were treated to a sweeping view of some of the tors, their craggy formations stark against the azure sky. Skylarks and meadow pipits circled overhead before soaring back toward the woodlands behind us. To the west, tucked into the shadowy folds of a valley, nestled the slate rooftops of two villages. The southern hamlet boasted a stolid gray church tower, and I wondered if it might mark the churchyard where Gage's mother was buried. I scowled in irritation as another gust of wind blew the wayward strands of my hair about my face. If not for the blustery breezes, the weather would have been perfect. I struggled futilely to tuck my straggling hairs back under my jaunty riding hat, nearly missing the sight of a jagged stone pillar positioned near the intersection of our bridle path and another narrower track. It appeared too small to be another standing stone. Reining my mare to a stop, I glanced at Gage in question. "This is Stephen's Grave," he said. Recalling how he'd told me Rory claimed this Stephen's ghost haunted the manor, I surveyed the moss-studded grave marker with more interest. "I sense there's a story behind this." Given the fact that historically suicides had been buried at crossroads, it wasn't a great leap of logic to conclude such a thing. Gage rested his hands on the pommel of his saddle and turned his head to gaze off over the ridge to the south where the roof of Langstone Manor was just visible above a line of trees. "The legend says that a man named John Stephen, who lived in one of the villages nearby, fell in love with a local girl. However, her parents didn't approve of the match and so she was forced to break his heart." He gestured to the empty, windswept heath around us. "She met him out on this bleak part of the moor to tell him she no longer wished to see him, and he gave her an apple as a parting gift. But the apple was poisoned. And after she fell victim, he also ate of the same apple, in hopes that their bodies would lay side by side for eternity." "Given the fact that this is called Stephen's Grave, I'm guessing his wish did not come true." His lips curled humorlessly. "They buried Stephen here at the crossroads, as was the custom for suicides. But the girl was interred in the village churchyard, albeit at the north end since no one could be certain she hadn't also taken her life in a fit of despair, though most agreed she must have been murdered." His eyes narrowed on the lopsided stone, which seemed to be sinking into the fescue beneath it. "His ghost is said to haunt this area on dark nights, searching for his missing love." "I suppose such a belief isn't surprising considering one of the reasons suicides were buried at crossroads was because it was supposed to confuse their spirits." I glanced toward Langstone. "But why did Rory suggest his ghost was haunting the manor?" I studied Gage's bronzed features. "Was he simply being cruel given your father's name is Stephen?" "Probably." But I could tell there was more. I waited patiently for him to continue, watching the darting flight of a rook overhead. When Gage's eyes finally shifted to meet mine, it was evident he didn't like what he had to reveal next. "There are also ludicrous rumors that a relative of mine is connected to the affair. Alice, my grandfather's older sister. Some say she was the girl Stephen loved and murdered." My eyes widened in surprise. He shook his head. "But although Alice did die a young woman, there is no proof she had anything to do with this Stephen. The one time I asked my mother about it, she told me Alice had died from an illness." His gaze turned distant. "She wouldn't say more, and I assumed that was because of her own precarious state of health." What he didn't say, but I could hear in his voice, was that he wondered now if he'd been wrong. If his mother had refused to share anything more about Alice because she didn't want him to know the truth. "Have you ever asked your grandfather about her?" "No. It seemed cruel somehow." "Do you think Rory did?" A sharp gust of wind whipped over the moor, almost knocking his hat from his head. He reached up to secure it and then spurred his horse forward, forcing me to follow suit. "If he did, I can't imagine my grandfather answered him," he replied, eyeing the fast-moving clouds with misgiving. "The weather is shifting. Let's not dawdle. There will be heavy mist on these moors before nightfall."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 22	True to Gage's prediction, thick mist engulfed the manor before we even sat down to dinner. It was rather disconcerting to peer out the windows and discover that the blustery day had suddenly given way to an almost preternatural calm. It wasn't that I hadn't believed Gage and his grandfather when they tried to explain how capricious the weather on Dartmoor could be, but I had questioned whether they'd exaggerated. It was no wonder so many people had become lost and disoriented over the centuries. How many bodies lay as yet undiscovered in the vast nothingness of the moors or sunken in her bogs? I could well imagine how the legend of Vixana the witch and others like it had sprung up. In a less rational age, it must have seemed as good an explanation as any for the rapid shifts in weather. Somewhat surprisingly, the Dowager Lady Langstone sent her regrets, claiming a megrim kept her from joining us for dinner. Pleading a headache had been used by women for centuries as a polite way to excuse oneself from an engagement, so I didn't worry she was actually suffering a poor turn in her health. She'd seemed a woman of remarkable fortitude, and I decided it was far more likely she simply didn't wish to dine with us that night. Apparently we weren't the only ones who found the present company trying, though for distinctly different reasons. In her absence, Gage and I enjoyed a rather companionable meal with Rory. His sulky resentment from the day before had subsided, and he returned to the amiable, easygoing nature he'd displayed during the first days of our arrival. I was tempted to ask him how much more, if anything, he knew about Stephen's Grave, but I didn't want to risk lowering the mood. After days of tense, morose exchanges, we were all in need of a bit of lighthearted conversation. Seeing the good it did Gage to reminisce with his cousin about happier times, I wasn't sorry I'd elected not to press for more information. His shoulders relaxed and his eyes lost that hard edge they'd so often exhibited since our arrival. He even threw his head back and laughed several times as they recounted some of their bouts of innocent mischief. Rory took care not to bring up any incident that might recall the ill-treatment Gage had received, and I was grateful. It was a relief to hear that not all of Gage's childhood had been unhappy. As we left the dining room, Hammett approached Gage to give him some correspondence that had been delivered earlier. Gage turned each letter over, examining the outsides before breaking the seal on the second one while we all still stood in the entry hall. He quickly scanned the page and then sighed. I could almost see the weight he'd shrugged off during dinner settle back onto his shoulders. "Alfred is not in Plymouth," he relayed to Rory and me. He slid the first letter out from beneath the other and frowned, but refrained from opening it. "Please excuse me. I must see to this at once." "Of course," I replied, having already recognized the handwriting on the second note as his father's. He was also the only person I knew who could put that conflicted look in Gage's eyes. I watched him stride away, wishing the timing of the arrival of his father's letter could have been better. Even from far away, Lord Gage was still able to disrupt his son's good humor. "I hesitate to do so now," Rory murmured, recalling my attention. "But I have some matters I really should attend to myself." He grimaced in apology. "Though I suppose if they wait another hour, it won't make much of a difference." "So you can entertain me? No, no. Go on," I assured him. "I shall find something to occupy myself." "Are you certain?" "Yes." I smiled when he still hesitated and waved him away. "Now shoo." He laughed. "Far be it from me to disobey a lady's orders. Thank you." I nodded, watching him hurry away. I'd assumed those matters had to do with the business of the estate, but perhaps I should have politely inquired. Would he have been honest? Would I have been able to tell? Shaking my head at my rampant suspicion, I turned to survey the chilly entry hall, wondering what I should do with myself. Perhaps I should take the opportunity to finally locate the library. I was sure Hammett could point me in the right direction. As if beckoned by my contemplations, the butler materialized in a doorway behind me. "M'lady?" I swiveled to face him. "If you're not otherwise engaged..." I almost arched my eyebrows at that comment, for obviously he'd been listening and was aware I was not. "Perhaps you'd be willin' to sit with his lordship for a time. His illness is troublin' him this evening. 'Tis the damp. It gets into his lungs." The same complaint Gage's mother had suffered from. Was it something that ran in the family? Or was it merely this dismal, drafty old house? "T'would give his valet a chance to eat some dinner and gather any supplies he needs for the night," Hammett added in his creaky voice when I didn't immediately respond. "Of course, I would be happy to." I turned to go and then paused. "Though, you might need to remind me how to get there." I'd mastered the path from our bedchamber to Lord Tavistock's, but not from the entry hall. His eyes twinkled with suppressed humor. "I'll show ye the way, m'lady." I followed him up the staircase, finding myself curious about this longtime retainer. He was plainly more than a majordomo. In fact, I would venture to say he was almost a friend to the viscount, though I was certain both men would have balked at such a designation. Hammett also seemed to have eyes and ears all over the house. I suspected little went on that he didn't know about. "You've been a servant here a long time," I ventured to say, hoping he would pick up the conversational gauntlet. "Yes, m'lady. Almost my entire life. Started as the stable boy when his lordship was not much more than a boy himself." That was quite a precipitous rise from stable boy, one of the lowest-ranking male servants, to majordomo, even if it had been done over several decades. The family must have sponsored his education in some way. As if he could hear my thoughts, he confirmed this. "His lordship's father took an interest in me. Had me instructed and given a bit o' polish." It also explained his more common accent, which I'd attributed to his being a Devonshire man. "Did you know the viscount's sister Alice, then?" Hammett's head swiveled to glance over his shoulder at me, not missing the obvious connotation of such a question. "Aye. But only in passing. I helped with her mount a time or two." "Gage showed me Stephen's Grave today," I offered by way of explanation. "And told ye the legend, and the Trevelyan family's possible connection to it," he deduced. "Aye, well, 'tis only natural then you'd be curious about his lordship's sister after that." He paused, turning to face me. "But leave those questions for another night. I'm sure his lordship will tell ye the tale if ye ask, but it's bound to upset him. So save them for a time when maybe he's not so weak." His words were gentle, but firm—his priority being his employer's health and well-being. I couldn't fault him for that, so I nodded in agreement. He led me around the corner even though I was now familiar with our surroundings, and came to a stop outside Lord Tavistock's bedchamber door. "I'll have some tea sent up. Is there anything else I can get ye?" "My sketchbook and charcoals." If the viscount was able to rest, I would need something to occupy my time. "If you send my maid Bree for them, she'll know where to find them." He bowed in understanding and then opened the door to beckon the valet forward. I switched places with the short, somber man, settling into the chair he'd positioned near the bedside. A blazing fire crackled in the hearth, but as before it did almost nothing to alleviate the chill trapped within these cold stone walls or to drive out the damp seeping in through the windows. The light flickered over Lord Tavistock's features, making the hollows of his cheeks and the knife-blade thinness of his nose all the more pronounced. The extremes of light and shadow almost made him appear as a caricature of himself. Listening to his rasping breaths, each one an agonizing rattle, there was no doubt that his illness was worse than he let on. Whether this was because he didn't wish to acknowledge it or he didn't want others to write him off so soon, I couldn't say, but I suspected it was a bit of both. Hammett returned with the tea, my sketchbook, and a warm shawl. I wasn't sure if he or Bree had thought to send the garment, but regardless, I was grateful to them. I settled the woolen wrap around my shoulders and wrapped my hands around my cup of the hot brew. Once my fingers no longer felt like ice, I kicked off my slippers and tucked my feet up under my skirts before picking up my sketchbook. I sat that way for some time, comfortably ensconced in my chair, drawing from memory a few of the farmers we'd encountered that day, with nothing but the ticking of the clock on the mantel for company. Then I ventured to sketch what my fingers were truly itching to—Lord Tavistock. He would've hated to be captured in such a feeble position as he lay in now, so instead I drew him as I imagined he was before this illness had forced him to take to his bed. I didn't immediately notice when the viscount woke, but it couldn't have been long. Not when I'd been flicking my gaze up to study his features while I sketched. When I caught sight of his silver eyes staring back at me, I set my book aside and rose to my feet. "Would you like some water?" "Yes," he croaked. Perching on the bed, I helped him to drink, trying not to react to the evident pain it caused him to swallow. When he finished, he waved me away, lifting the counterpane to smother a wet cough that rattled up from his chest. "A bit of warm tea might help," I coaxed, lifting my pot. "My nursemaid used to tell us it was the best thing for us when either my siblings or I were ill. Especially if a cough was rasping our throat." He shook his head stubbornly. "Were you drawing me?" "Yes." There was no point in lying. He knew the answer. But I also wasn't going to explain myself. I could draw who I very well pleased. His brow furrowed in what appeared to be displeasure, but he didn't castigate me as I'd expected. Instead, he lifted his hand and asked politely, "May I see it?" I considered refusing, but that seemed petty. The least I could do was remain civil. So I passed him my sketchbook. I tried not to watch him as he studied the drawing of himself and then began perusing the rest of the book. Part of it was filled with depictions of the people who populated Langstone Manor and the area around it, while the rest were sketches from our time in Ireland. Preliminary illustrations of the Irish people I hoped to paint for an exhibit in London—my first since my marriage to Sir Anthony at twenty-one. However, it was impossible not to sneak glances at him even though his expression revealed little. If anything, he struggled to look disinterested. So instead I crossed to the windows and lifted aside the drapes to stare out at the swirling haze of darkness. I didn't want to care what Gage's grandfather thought of me or my artistic abilities, and yet my rib cage tightened as I awaited his judgment. Breathing deeply, I told myself it didn't matter, but the truth was I wanted someone in Gage's family to approve of me. His father certainly didn't. I'd essentially had to blackmail him just to convince him to attend our wedding for Gage's sake. Lady Langstone plainly objected to our association, and while Rory seemed to like me, I was never quite certain of him. He'd proven more difficult to read than perhaps any of them. But perhaps most troubling was the fact that the more I learned about his mother, the less certain I became she would've accepted me either. I'd comforted myself with the impression that she would've been pleased by our match—a balm against Lord Gage's malice—but now I wasn't so sure. If she'd brought him back here to be educated as a gentleman, to live among such society, then perhaps a scandalous outcast like myself wouldn't have been her choice in a bride for her only son. It was useless to speculate. After all, had Emma lived, Gage would not be the man he was today. Our paths probably never would've crossed. But that didn't stop me from contemplating it. Lord Tavistock cleared his throat, recalling my attention, and I turned to see him closing the sketchbook. "You have talent." "Thank you," I replied, recognizing it for the great compliment it was coming from the cantankerous viscount. "Lord Gage said you were a woman of rare ability," he said, handing me back my book. I was so stunned by this comment that I almost missed the seat of my chair. "He did?" I stammered, making an awkward recovery to prevent myself from sliding to the floor. "He says he has it on good authority that the Duchess of Bowmont is eager to have you paint her portrait." This was news to me, though who knew what sort of correspondence we'd missed after setting off for our latest inquiry in Ireland. However, I was confounded by Lord Gage's willingness to pay me a compliment. Or was it truly praise? I found it far easier to imagine him describing me as a "woman of rare ability" with a sardonic edge of irony rather than genuine admiration. But why had he written to Lord Tavistock about me at all? "You seem perplexed." His sharp eyes didn't miss anything, even when his eyelids drooped with fatigue. "Yes, I suppose I am," I replied, deciding I didn't owe Lord Gage my silence or my loyalty. Not when he'd always treated me so dreadfully. A spark of humor lit the viscount's eyes. "I take it you and Stephen Gage are not as close as he would have me believe." I arched my eyebrows. "Not unless you think I find condescension and disdain endearing." He chuckled. "From all I've observed, Lord Gage can barely stand me. And I merely tolerate him for Sebastian's sake." He folded his arms over his stomach. "Well, don't let it bother you too much. Stephen Gage has always been overly concerned with social status. Though I suppose one can hardly blame him when his ancestors were so quick to throw it away. He married a viscount's daughter, so I suspect he wasn't willing to tolerate anything less than the daughter of an earl for Sebastian." I wasn't sure whether Lord Gage had written to boast about the alliance he hoped to secure for his son or Lord Tavistock simply knew him that well, but the viscount's inkling was correct. Gage's failure to obey his father's wishes and wed the debutante he'd chosen for him had been the main source of contention over our improbable match. "If I know anything, sooner or later Gage's father will come to terms with your marriage and work his way around to trying to charm you. He simply can't abide the idea of a female who isn't enamored of him." That was not the impression I'd been given. He seemed quite content with my animosity. His throat rattled as he spoke again. "But let's forget him. I'm not really concerned with his opinion. Only mine." He began to cough and gestured toward the water glass. I sat on the edge of the bed next to him, waiting for his rasping breaths to settle, and then helped him to drink again. But when I would have risen to return to my chair, he stopped me by touching my arm. "I want you to paint a portrait of Sebastian. One I can have hung in the gallery with all the others." He sank back deeper in his pillows, his face twisting with a pain he tried to repress. "I should have had it done years ago, but..." But Gage had never returned after his mother's funeral. He sighed and shook his head. "So many mistakes." "It's not too late to remedy some of them." "Maybe." But I wasn't going to let it go so easily. "There is no maybe about it." He looked up at me, perhaps surprised by my adamant tone. "The right words go a long way to healing hurts, even when they are late in coming." I studied his wizened features. "Just don't wait too long." I thought he might argue with me or take offense at my stating the blunt truth. That he wasn't long for this world. Not unless he drastically improved. Instead, his eyes twinkled with the same repressed amusement I'd seen earlier. "You remind me of my Edith. She would have liked you." The words were spoken so tenderly I felt a catch in my throat. As if sensing we were both in danger of turning maudlin, he cleared his throat. "So will you paint Gage's portrait for me or not? I may not be here to see it, but I'll have my solicitor add to my will that the painting should be hung in the gallery beside his mother's when it's moved back to its customary place." His brow furrowed. "They should be hung together." I nodded. "Yes. I would be happy to." He patted my hand where it rested beside him on the bed. "Good, good." Then he closed his eyes, seeming more at peace than before. "I think I'll rest now." I took that as my cue to move back to my chair. Picking up my sketchbook, I opened it to a fresh page. But when the viscount's valet returned to relieve me half an hour later, I'd still not put charcoal to paper.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 23	A shriek pierced the air and I jumped, almost spilling tea on the lilac apron covering my white jaconet morning dress. I set my cup in the saucer with a clatter and glanced across the table at Gage. He'd lowered the newspaper he'd been scanning with a sharp rustle and now cast it aside to rise to his feet. Leaving the breakfast room, we followed the sound of raised voices to the entry hall where the Dowager Lady Langstone stood at the base of the stairs shouting. "Where did you get this?" she demanded, pointing at something one of the men before her held. "Where did you get this?" Hammett stood between them, trying to calm her ladyship while the two men seemed to almost cower under her vehement questioning. I recognized one of them from the day before as a farmer Gage had spoken to. He owned a small farmstead north of White Tor. The second man was unfamiliar to me, though from the manner of his rough dress I surmised he was likely employed as a laborer. Whatever the case, he clutched in his hands the source of Lady Langstone's distress. As we drew closer, I realized it was a cloth of some sort—a deep blue superfine fabric with gold buttons. It must be a coat. A gentleman's frock coat. I stiffened. And it was stained with something dark. I glanced up at Lady Langstone's wild eyes. Her reaction left little doubt she'd recognized it. "Mr. Porlock, what brings you to Langstone on such a murky morning?" Gage said, stepping into the fray. "Mr. Gage, sir," the farmer gasped, turning to him to explain. His eyes kept darting toward Lady Langstone as if she might pounce on him. "I came as quick as I could. Ye said ye wished to be notified of anything odd or suspicious right away." "Yes?" He nodded over his shoulder at the man holding the coat. "Plym here showed up at the farm late yesterday afternoon with that, but with the weather turned, I decided it best to wait 'til mornin' to make the trek here." Gage stepped forward to take the fabric from Plym's hands, swiveling so we could all examine it better. "Where did you find it?" "'Tween Cocks Hill an' Lynch Tor, a bit off the bridle path what leads between," the laborer answered hastily. "'Twas my hound who found it. Snagged on some heather near a boggy bit." My stomach dipped. Gage lifted the cloth toward Lady Langstone, who seemed unable to move except for clenching and unclenching her hands. It was as if she both wanted and didn't want to touch it, to verify it was, in fact, her son's. "It's Alfred's?" he asked her gently, acknowledging what we could already see was true. She blinked and then nodded. Gage lifted his gaze to Rory in question where he stood behind his mother on the stairs, having come clattering down moments before. His expression somewhat dazed, he also nodded. My husband caught my eye for a brief but significant moment as he turned back to Mr. Porlock and Plym. "Thank you for bringing this to our attention." The farmer's face was white with apprehension. "Does this mean ...? Is Lord Langstone . . .?" He clearly didn't want to say the words, not with the dowager present. "Lord Langstone is missing," Gage replied succinctly. "There was some cause for confusion, so we couldn't be certain that was the case. Which is why we elected to proceed with such delicacy." He frowned. "But it appears now we can no longer deny that fact." Nor could his grandfather insist we keep the matter quiet. The men accepted this explanation without further question and allowed Hammett to escort them out while Gage led the rest of us into the drawing room. Shoving aside the objects on the top of a round table near the corner, he spread the coat out across the wood. I moved to his side as he leaned over to examine it. Something had caused a tear in the seam at the shoulder either before or after it was removed from Alfred's torso, and one of the ornate buttons was missing, leaving behind a loose string. But it was the stain splashed across the fabric I found most disturbing, for it was plainly neither mud nor bog water. "Kiera, tell me your opinion," Gage declared as he flipped the coat over to inspect the back. "Do you think this is blood?" Trying to ignore Rory and Lady Langstone, I gingerly lifted the fabric to study the stains. The deep blue obscured some of the substance's true color, but hints of dark red showed on the most heavily saturated parts. When I pressed my finger into a swath that was still damp, it came away coated in carmine red. Lady Langstone turned away as I lifted my finger to my nose and sniffed it. The distinctive metallic odor assailed me, as well as the musty stench of marsh water and rotting vegetation. "Yes. Though . . . I can't say with any certainty that this blood is from Lord Langstone. It could be another person's. Or an animal's. But given the fact that it's staining his frock coat . . ." I didn't need to finish that sentence, for why would someone else's blood be coating Alfred's garment? And in such large quantities. Gage's eyes were solemn as he passed me his handkerchief. "Given the size of the stains, do you think whatever caused this was survivable?" I wiped my fingers, but continued to clutch the handkerchief to cover the red still tinting my skin. "I don't think there's enough evidence here to argue for certain. After all, head wounds bleed like the devil. But I still find the quantity to be worrying." Whatever Alfred's injury had been, it hadn't been minor. Having heard enough, Lady Langstone strode from the room. We all turned to watch her go and I thought Rory might follow her, but he remained fixed to his spot, waiting to hear what we said next. In any case, without her present, it was easier to speak frankly. "Perhaps if we could discover where the injury occurred, we might have a better idea of how severe Lord Langstone was hurt." I sighed. "Though after a fortnight, the rain and mist must have washed away most of that evidence." "I'll speak to Mr. Porlock and Plym again," Gage replied. "Perhaps they can lead us to the spot where Plym found the coat." "What the blazes was he doing all the way out beyond Cocks Hill?" Rory finally interjected. "There's nothing there." Gage evidently wondered the same thing. "Maybe that wasn't his final destination," he suggested. "Maybe wherever he was headed was beyond that." Rory shook his head in frustration. "That still doesn't make sense. There's nothing out there but old tin-mining remnants." Gage didn't say the words, but I knew he was contemplating the same thing I was. Alfred might not have gone there of his own volition. It was just as possible someone had taken him there, either still alive or already dead. But there was also another possibility. "If he sustained a head injury of some sort, he could've become disoriented and lost his way," I ventured to say. "If so, who knows where or how far he wandered." "He could be miles from here," Gage added, picking up my train of thought. "Further north toward Lydford or even east toward Postbridge." "Or lying dead out in the middle of the high moor," Rory stated bluntly. Gage's brow furrowed. "Yes." Rory's eyes dropped to the floor, staring bleakly at something we couldn't see. When he lifted them again, his jaw was set, as if he'd made some momentous decision. "Are you going to see Porlock this morning?" "Yes. After I tell Grandfather." He nodded and swiveled to go, speaking over his shoulder. "I'm coming with you to search. Give me a quarter of an hour to prepare. I'll have Hammett pack us some supplies." Before Gage could respond, he was gone. "That was quite a reversal," I remarked. While Rory had seemed baffled by his brother's continued absence, he hadn't appeared all that concerned. At least, not enough to take the initiative to do any investigating or searching himself. Though he'd said he'd begun to worry something bad had happened to Alfred, I'd gotten the sense that part of him still clung to the belief that Alfred was merely off on some lark. "Yes, well, this changes everything," Gage replied, gazing down at the bloodstained coat. Because now we had proof that something unpleasant had befallen Alfred. Something that had prevented him from returning home. Or had it? "I suppose so," I said, unable to shake the feeling we were still missing something. He must have heard the uncertainty in my voice. "What is it?" I scowled, unsure how to explain what was bothering me. "It's just . . . why did Plym only find Alfred's frock coat? Why would it have become separated from the rest of Alfred and his effects?" "Maybe he dropped it. Or maybe an animal carried it away from wherever he is. There are voles and foxes and such about." I shrugged, conceding his point. But I still wasn't satisfied. "Did the men your grandfather sent to search not look out near Cocks Hill?" "I'm sure they did. At least, to a certain point. But the moor is massive, Kiera. There's no way they could have covered every square foot." When still I didn't perk up, he frowned. "You're not trying to suggest he faked his death or some such thing? Because while I can imagine Alfred hiding for a time, this is simply taking things too far. Even for him." "I'm sure you're right," I relented, deciding I was being silly. After all, Gage knew his family and Dartmoor far better than I did. If he saw nothing peculiar, then there probably wasn't anything. "Perhaps we'll discover more after we search the place where Plym found the coat," he suggested. "After all, it doesn't sound like he made a very wide search, wanting to hurry home before the weather worsened." I nodded, wanting him to forget I'd expressed any doubt. "Did you want me to come with you to inform your grandfather?" His expression grew troubled. "Thank you, but I think it might be best if I do it alone." I pressed a hand to Gage's arm in comfort. "I'll make ready, then." But instead of going straight to my chamber when we separated at the top of the stairs, I turned my steps toward Lady Langstone's rooms. I'd stumbled upon them two days before while exploring and found them again with relative ease. I knew I risked receiving a scathing set down, but I felt it only right that someone should check on her. After all, she'd just been confronted with her missing son's bloody coat. I could imagine all the terrible scenarios filtering through her mind. When I reached the door to her sitting room, I found it ajar. Giving it a peremptory rap, I pushed it open to peer inside. A startled curse met my ears and I swung my gaze around to find Lady Langstone kneeling before the hearth, clutching her hand. "My lady," I gasped, hastening toward her. She recoiled at the sight of me, stumbling to her feet. "What are you doing here?" she demanded. "How dare you enter my chamber without my permission." She sucked in a pained breath. "Your door was open. Please, my lady. You've injured yourself. Let me take a look." "It's just a minor burn," she retorted, continuing to back away. "Minor or not, you should have it seen to." I held out my hand, demanding she show me her palm. She glared back at me, but I did not budge, letting her know I was not going to yield on this. Reluctantly, she lowered her hand toward me. Until her maid appeared in the doorway. "My lady?" she murmured uncertainly, her eyes darting between us. Lady Langstone snatched her hand back. "Webley, there you are. I appear to have burned my hand. We have some ointment for that, don't we?" She arched her chin in triumph, and it was all I could do to keep from rolling my eyes. As if I cared whether I was the person to attend to her wound. So long as someone saw to it, that was all that mattered. "Of course, my lady," Mrs. Webley replied, moving swiftly toward the connecting door that must lead into her ladyship's bedchamber. "Right this way." Lady Langstone hesitated a second, her gaze flicking toward the fireplace behind me. It returned to meet mine squarely. "You can show yourself out." She didn't add the word now, but it was implied. I moved slowly toward the door, catching the glance she darted over her shoulder before disappearing into the next room. Once she was out of sight, I retraced my steps to the hearth, squatting to see what had so concerned her she'd risked injuring herself. In the midst of the blaze lay the ashes of a stack of papers, their entirety almost consumed. Grabbing the fireplace poker, I stabbed at the documents, trying to save any small bit of them I could. Except for one singed corner, they were all past redemption, crumbling to dust before my eyes. Hazarding my own flesh, I reached out to snag it, and waved it in the air to extinguish the flame licking at it. I dropped it to the floor and stomped on it for good measure. Worrying I'd made too much noise, I snatched it up and slipped from the room. Once I'd rounded the corner, I paused to examine the tiny remnant in the light of the wall sconce. It was the beginning of a letter. Naught but a greeting and a few words. My dearest Vanessa, I am mo . . . The rest was burned away. However, it was not as useless as it seemed, for I recognized the handwriting. I'd seen it many times before, and the same as now, the sight was never pleasant. But why had Lord Gage been writing to her? And why was he calling her "my dearest Vanessa"? For that matter, why had the dowager burned them? What about them had made her rush back to her chamber to destroy them after seeing her missing son's torn and bloody coat? I supposed these letters could have been from two decades ago when Gage witnessed them carrying on some sort of affair. But then why the urgency to rid herself of them now? I frowned, unhappy with this latest development, for it would hurt Gage deeply. Why did his father's involvement always seem to harm him? Even when Lord Gage wasn't present, he still managed to find a way to wound his son. Not this time. Not if I could prevent it. Glancing around me to be certain no one was watching, I tucked the singed paper into my pocket. I would find a way to figure out what those burned letters meant without telling Gage. Maybe they had nothing to do with Alfred's disappearance. Maybe Gage never need know his father might have been carrying on with his viperous aunt for all these years. Maybe was a fickle word.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 24	The village of Peter Tavy straggled out along a gently wooded valley running along the western edge of the moor in a long, thin line. Having come from Plymouth to the south, we'd not passed through it on our way to Langstone Manor. So although I'd seen its rooftops from our vantage at Stephen's Grave several days prior, I'd not actually visited the village proper. The granite buildings with thatch or slate roofs clustered around a single meandering road over which the tall buttressed tower of the medieval St. Peter's Church loomed at the north end. A short distance to the west flowed the River Tavy, for which the village had been named, though the buildings had been built at some distance. Instead they sat nearer to a spring and the banks of a brook which flowed east toward Langstone, passing over several lovely little waterfalls. It was a charming setting, thick with summer green and bright, blooming flowers that teemed with butterflies, but I scarcely paid it any heed. Exhaustion plagued me from days already spent in the saddle. I'd hoped the pleasant aspect of the lush coombe would revive me after so much time out on the bleak high moor, but the warm sun and burbling brook we followed into the village only made me drowsy. If not for my sore body, I might have actually fallen asleep to the mare's gently rocking gait. For two days we'd searched the most desolate stretches of Dartmoor for any sign of Alfred. From the boggy cotton grass of Cocks Hill, we'd swept north and south as far into the interior as we could manage, with the assistance of several members of the staff and even a few neighboring farmers, but all was fruitless. We found nothing to suggest Alfred had ever passed that way, not even the missing gold button from his coat. It truly did seem as if he'd vanished. Fearing the worst, the men even prodded the mossy bogs, but to no avail. If he'd stumbled into one of those morasses, I wasn't certain the moor would ever give him up. It didn't help that I continued to dream of the shadowy man watching over us while we slept. Given the fact we now suspected Alfred could be dead, that presence had taken on a new, more menacing edge. If only I could see the figure's face. Maybe then I could uncover what the dream meant, and lay some of my wilder imaginings to rest. The discovery of his grandson's torn and bloody coat had understandably upset Lord Tavistock, but at least it had convinced him of the need to end the secrecy. We'd finally been able to reveal to the landowners and laborers we'd spoken to only days before exactly what we'd been hinting at, and most had willingly agreed to help with the search despite their aversion to Alfred. I couldn't help but note their relations to Rory, who circumstances seemed to indicate would be the next Viscount Tavistock. Although their exchanges with him were somewhat stilted, they seemed to accord him an amiable deference. I also noticed after so many hours together that Rory envied Gage's easy interaction with the other men, and the genuine esteem they seemed to hold for my husband. Most people reacted to Gage thusly, so I rarely paid any heed. But Rory was evidently not accustomed to seeing his cousin in such a light. Though he readily allowed Gage to lead the search, directing the others on where to look and hearing their reports, as the hours wore on his expression grew sourer when he looked at my husband. Perhaps Rory had changed for the better, but there were still traces of the seeds of resentment his mother had sown in him earlier in life. As such, I wasn't surprised when Rory decided to remain behind when we ventured to the village. We hoped to discover what we could about the villagers' dealings with Alfred, as well as learn about any unrest that might be festering. We had no way of knowing who had sent Lord Tavistock those Swing letters, or if they'd come from Peter Tavy, but we intended to at least find out how sympathetic the villagers were to the cause. As such, we elected to divide and conquer. After stabling our horses, I left Gage at the Peter Tavy Inn, where he planned to confer with those in the bar, a room I wouldn't even be allowed to enter as a woman. Instead, I retraced our route through town on foot toward the church and its rectory, thinking the rector or his wife might have information they would be willing to share. When no one answered my knock at the door, I decided to continue on into the village. But first, unable to resist, I pressed up to the stone wall to peer past the shield of thick trees into the old churchyard. I'd thought Gage might wish to stop there, to visit his mother's grave, but he'd kept his face pointed resolutely forward, as if he could ignore the graveyard's existence. I'd tried to ask him about it, but whenever I drew breath to speak, he suddenly had words of his own to impart. Eventually, I'd stopped trying, for it was obvious he knew what I wanted to know, and just as obvious he did not want to discuss it. The trees overshadowing the churchyard blocked much of the sun's direct light, giving the space an atmosphere of somber reverence even on such a warm day. Scattered among the vegetation stood crooked rows of crosses and weathered gravestones, their bases sinking and twisting in the soft, mossy soil. And somewhere in that jumble of graves lay Emma Trevelyan Gage, the stone marker over her shaded resting place as cold as her grave. Even though I imagined it to be far more grand than the average gravestone, finding it would take more time than I could spare. "Can I help you?" I whirled about, pressing a hand to my chest. I flushed in embarrassment that I'd been so startled by the sound of the woman's voice who stood behind me. She was not much older than I was, and her puzzled frown didn't appear particularly welcoming. Her gaze flicked up and down the epaulet front of my smart plum riding ensemble while she bounced a young dark-haired girl on her hip. "My apologies," I replied. "My mind was elsewhere. Yes, you could." I adopted my most concerned expression, hoping to disarm her. "I hoped I might speak with the rector, but he appears to be gone." "Yes, my father was called away. He won't be back for several more hours." She paused before begrudgingly adding, "Is there something I can do for you?" "Perhaps. I've come for information, really. My husband and I are here on behalf of Lord Tavistock to find out if anyone might know anything about the whereabouts of Lord Langstone." This pronouncement caused a swift change in the woman's impatient countenance. Her eyes hardened and her mouth tightened into a disapproving moue. But still I pressed on. "He's been missing for over a fortnight, and we have reason to believe he may have come to some harm." "Likely no more than he deserved," she snapped. "If justice was served, you'd find him in hell." I stared wide-eyed at her, uncertain how to respond to such an acrimonious statement. That her hatred of Alfred was real, there was no doubt. And I could only surmise such ferocious animosity came from personal experience. My eyes flicked to the little girl again, wondering if she might have a bit of the look of the Dowager Lady Langstone in her. As if in confirmation, the woman's scowl deepened and she clutched the girl tighter. Had her expression been pleasanter, I realized the woman would have been quite pretty, if a bit jaded. I could well imagine her catching Alfred's eye. "You're Sebastian Gage's wife, aren't you?" she demanded. "We heard he was up at the manor, though not all of us believed it. When he swore he'd never return, none of us blamed him." Her mouth twisted bitterly. "But I suppose now we know why. Blood is blood, even when half of it is rotten." Several of her assertions stunned me. Namely the fact that the entire village seemed to be aware that Gage had sworn never to return to Langstone Manor. I could only assume they also knew why, even though I, his wife, did not. But I didn't have time to contemplate that further. Not when this woman glared at me as if I were somehow responsible for Alfred as well. "Yes, I'm Mr. Gage's wife," I murmured softly, hoping by remaining composed I might also calm her. "And you are?" Her brow furrowed as if she was considering not answering. "Philinda Warne." She nodded down the lane from which I'd come. "My husband owns the inn." I suspected this last was added to make sure I knew she was wed and that the little girl I'd scrutinized, who watched me curiously, was legitimate. But just because the child had been born in wedlock didn't mean she'd been conceived thusly. If Alfred had trifled with Mrs. Warne and refused to rectify the situation, her marriage to another man who would accept her, either knowingly or unknowingly in her expectant state, would be a natural next step. This little girl would not have been the first healthy, purportedly eight-month-old baby born in England. "We've heard Lord Langstone was something of a scoundrel when it came to women. Do you think any of the women he's wronged or their relatives might have gone so far as to physically harm him, deservedly or not?" I added, echoing her words. She considered my question, intelligence as well as vengeance glinting in her eyes. "If they did, I'll not help you find out who. I'll only silently applaud them for giving him his just deserts." I thought it more likely she would be the one clapping loudest. Regardless, the only information she was going to provide me was that Alfred had, indeed, had enemies in this village, and some of them had been angry enough to take action against him if the occasion arose. Had one of them found him wandering the moor alone that day and seized the opportunity? I thanked Mrs. Warne and took my leave of her, feeling her eyes bore into my back as I returned to the road and resumed my stroll toward the heart of the hamlet. There along the stone bridge that straddled the trickling brook congregated the villagers, old and young alike. The older women sat in chairs in the shade of the oak trees overhanging the water to knit and gossip while the littlest children played at their feet. Splashes of water and the shouts and laughter of older children echoed up from the banks of the stream. A few young girls were put to work carrying pitchers of water up from the brook and down the road to the houses where their mothers worked to hang sheets on a line. Most of the males old enough to wield a thresher would be out working in the fields or their shops, but a pair of stooped elderly men sat along the opposite verge of the road, nattering at each other in the sun. I assumed the rest of their aged number were enjoying some ale at the inn on such a warm day, and hopefully conversing with Gage. Unfortunately, I didn't have the opportunity to observe this altogether common yet thoroughly fascinating picture of rural life for long. The first woman who saw me striding up the road in my fine clothing, the train of my riding habit draped over my arm, turned to her companions and pointed. Soon everyone had paused in their activities to watch me. All but one small child who continued to poke at something in the dirt and the children playing in the brook, whose cries seemed all the louder in the silence that had descended. Instinctively, I wanted to check my steps, but I forced myself to keep moving forward and paste a pleasant smile on my lips. Perhaps I should have rejected Gage's suggestion that we separate. He would have felt no qualms about approaching these women and charming them into sharing all they knew. I squared my shoulders, determined to do my best. I gravitated toward the woman seated near the center of the line of chairs, the woman to whom the others seemed to defer, each darting glances in her direction as I neared. Her gray hair was tightly restrained and her clothing crisply pressed, and I surmised she would be someone who valued plain speaking. "Good morning," I greeted them. "Such a lovely day." "And a hot one," the matriarch replied. I nodded, seeing I'd guessed correctly. But before I could explain my reason for being there, another woman spoke up in a softly melodic voice, though it creaked at the edges with age. "Would ye like a cool drink, m'lady?" Her eyes were so sweetly earnest beneath her crystal white hair I could hardly say no. "Yes, thank you." She called out to one of the young girls clutching a pitcher of water, her steps having been arrested by the sight of me. Apparently, dawdling to hear what I had to say was worth risking a scolding from her mother. The child hurried forward, holding the pitcher out to me as if I were some sort of royalty. I flushed, flustered by such treatment, and smiled as I expressed my gratitude. Perhaps another lady would have sent one of the women to find her a cup to drink from, but these villagers reminded me of the people of Elwick—the tiny Border village where I'd grown up. It seemed silly to send them scrambling when I could drink the cool, crisp water from the pitcher as any less grand person would do. Maybe this meant I'd failed some test of gentility, but I was content with that. I must have done well enough, for the sweet-faced woman nodded in approval. The girl practically beamed under my praise, and when I returned the pitcher to her she cradled it close as she stepped back. "Yer from the manor? From Langstone?" the stern woman prodded, growing impatient. "I . . . yes." "She be the one what married Master Gage," one of the women leaned forward to whisper, and the others nodded and clucked in approval. "I've got eyes, now, don't I?" the matriarch snapped. "None o' those other Trevelyans 've been sharp enough to get themselves a wife. Shoulda known Emma's boy would be the first." "And Master Gage is so nice to look at," the woman with the melodic voice cooed. I was forced to fight back a bubble of amusement at the avid look in her eyes. Did Gage know he had so many admirers among the village women? "I don't think herself is here to talk about her husband's fine figure, Pasca." The matriarch narrowed her eyes at me against the glare of the sun. "What trouble has young Langstone gotten himself into now? The men 've been sayin' he lost himself out on the moor." I wasn't sure why I was surprised she knew. After all, gossip traveled faster than even the mail coach, whether it was high society or a small country village. "Yes, Lord Langstone has been missing for more than a fortnight. He was last seen walking out onto the moor, and his torn and bloody coat was found two days ago near Cocks Hill." Several of the women gasped, leaning toward each other to whisper in speculation. The girl with the pitcher blinked at me with wide eyes, and one of the little ones looked up, as if sensing the tension, and began to cry. His grandmother scooped him up, shushing him absently as she waited to hear what I would say next. Only the matriarch seemed unconcerned. "Have any of you heard or seen anything? Anything that might explain where he's gone or what has happened to him?" I looked to each of them in turn, but they said nothing, just slid their eyes toward the stern woman to whom they deferred. All but Pasca, whose brow furrowed as if she was contemplating something unpleasant. When none of them spoke, I decided to try a different tack. "Mrs. Warne suggested Lord Langstone had many enemies." The matriarch scoffed. "That girl makes her own trouble," she muttered before lifting her chin in confirmation. "Aye, 'tis true his lordship hasn't exactly inspired our trust. He's trifled with one too many o' our girls. But only those who were saucy bits o' muslin askin' for it." My eyebrows arched at such a harsh pronouncement. It wasn't the first time I'd heard such an assertion, and unfortunately it wouldn't be the last. Sadly, it was more often the women who paid for men's lasciviousness, in more ways than one. She turned to look down the road in the direction I'd come. "I suspect he has a few sideslips, but word is his grandfather always makes certain them and their mothers are looked after." She shook her head, glancing at the others. "But none o' our lot would be muttonheaded enough to harm Tavistock's heir. 'Specially not the rector." I could tell that none of the other ladies would naysay her pronouncement, even if they happened to disagree with her. None of them except perhaps Pasca, who was eyeing me with speculation. So it was to her I voiced my next question. "What about Lord Tavistock? Has anyone taken issue with him? I heard there was some discontent over his adoption of the new horse-powered threshing machines." "Now that would be a question for our menfolk," the matriarch declared with a hard glint in her eye, as if she knew what I was doing and was not going to allow it. Realizing I wasn't going to receive any satisfactory answers, not with this stern woman present, I thanked them and turned to stroll back toward the inn. I'd initially intended to continue on through the village, speaking to people individually, but I could see more than one person watching from the front of their homes and businesses. The chances that any of them would break rank and tell me what I wanted to know were slim. I'd traveled about two dozen steps when a voice called out behind me. I swiveled to see Pasca hobbling toward me carrying the pitcher. "M'lady," she gasped. "Please, ye must be parched in this heat. Take another drink afore ye be on yer way." Her eyes flared wide, coaxing me to cooperate. "Oh, yes, thank you." The other women watched us suspiciously as I accepted the pitcher and drank more of the cool water. "I like ye, m'lady," she announced. "I can tell ye be one o' the good ones, despite all that nonsense the servants at the manor be spreadin' about ye. An' so I'm goin' to warn ye. Drink again," she ordered, as apparently I'd stared at her too long without sipping. "There be rumors surroundin' Langstone Manor. Ones that've been whispered since I was but a girl in braids. Whispers o' dark secrets that reach out and touch every life that passes through its halls." The cold water turned to ice, settling like a lump in my stomach. This wasn't the first time someone had cautioned me about the manor. "What secrets?" She shook her head. "I don't know 'em all. But I do know that family be cursed. That a terrible fate befalls any member who dares defy their kin." I searched her face, trying to understand. "Like Emma?" "She defied 'em. And she suffered a terrible fate." The manner in which she replied, with a shrug and an unemotional recitation of facts, was chilling. But Gage's mother was only one person. "Who else has fallen victim to this curse?" She took the pitcher back from me. "Two others that I know of. Now maybe three." Her direct gaze made it clear what she believed had happened to Alfred. But before I could ask her why she believed this, or how he'd defied his family, she murmured a parting warning to "take care," and turned to shuffle back to the other women. I wanted to stop her, to force her to tell me the rest, but instead I forced myself to look away. She'd already risked the others' censure by telling me that much; I wouldn't cause her further trouble. But whether it had been the cool water or her unsettling pronouncement, I no longer lamented the heat of the sun. I welcomed it. For I suspected it was all that kept the ice in my stomach from spreading through my veins. I returned to the inn to find Gage standing at the edge of the carriage yard, staring out toward where the River Tavy flowed. From this vantage, we couldn't see it, but the sound of its rushing water echoed off the trees. From the vexed look in his eyes, I gathered his discussion with the local men had gone no better than mine had with the women. By unspoken agreement, we remounted our horses and set off toward Langstone Manor, waiting until we reached the edge of the village before speaking. "I could get no answers to my questions about the Swing letters or who might have disputes with Grandfather's acquisition of the new machines. But their very silence makes me suspect there is someone they wish to cover for." "I encountered more or less the same response." I glanced up at a curlew as it flew overhead issuing its distinctive cry. "Do you have any idea who those disgruntled parties could be?" "Some of the other landowners had names to suggest, having also received letters. Mostly the laborers who've been the most vocal about the cuts to their wages. The other farmers felt they could hardly blame them for that." He frowned. "But despite the threats, no one has encountered any violence or loss of property. One farmer over past Brentor had his hayrick burned, and there was talk of a gathering of dissenters in Launceston, but that's all anyone could tell me." He sighed. "It seems rather impulsive to skip over destroying threshing machines and move straight to possible assault or murder." "I agree. That does make little sense." I tilted my head. "Unless the purpose of those letters was to obscure their real intent." "Killing Alfred?" Gage asked in surprise. He shook his head. "No. Had the letters only been sent to my grandfather, perhaps. But to send them to all the landowners in the surrounding countryside? That's a great deal of effort, all of which might have gone wasted had Glanville not mentioned the letters to us." I nodded in acceptance. "I met a Mrs. Philinda Warne." Gage looked up in interest. "The rector's daughter? She's the only Philinda I remember." I nodded, relaying what she'd told me, as well as the village matriarch's comments on the subject. When I finished, he didn't appear very shocked. "Well, Philinda always was a bit . . ." He seemed to struggle to find a polite word. "Eager. But that doesn't mean she was asking for what happened to her," he quickly added. "Alfred was far more worldly-wise than her. Than most of those girls. He knew better than to trifle with them." We fell silent, picking our way through a narrow part of the trail. When it widened again, I drew up beside Gage once more, venturing to introduce the subject I truly wanted to discuss. "I had an interesting exchange with a woman named Pasca." Gage perked up, recognizing the name. "Is she still alive?" He shook his head, a fond smile creasing his lips. "She must be almost ninety." "She doesn't look it." "Yes, well, she never has looked her age. But I know she's older than Grandfather by several years. What did she have to say?" My lips quirked in remembrance. "She commented on your good looks." Gage threw his head back and laughed. "Saucy old girl." I hesitated, knowing what I had to say next would dim that amusement. "And she warned me to be careful." His head swung around so fast I worried he might have hurt himself. "She told me there are dark rumors surrounding Langstone Manor and your family. That a terrible fate befalls those of you who defy your kin." His expression closed off and he looked away. "Nonsense." "She . . . she even went so far as to suggest your mother and now Alfred were victims of the curse," I pressed, trying to stop him from retreating behind the walls he so often threw up around himself. I'd believed we were moving beyond that, but apparently not. "It's nothing but nonsense," he restated firmly. "Are you certain? Because she said there were two more Trevelyans who suffered a similar fate. Do you know—" "There is no curse," he barked, cutting me off. However, the very fact that he was angry told me there must be something to it. He inhaled a deep breath so that when he next spoke, his voice was level again. "As I said, it's all a lot of nonsense the villagers dreamed up. Superstitious drivel to explain what they don't understand." I studied his profile, confused why he refused to discuss this. Perhaps there wasn't a curse, but some more human agent could be at work. We knew Annie had steadily poisoned Emma, but what or who had given her the idea to do so? If there was a pattern of tragic deaths in his family, then shouldn't they be examined and compared with Alfred's disappearance? "Is your grandfather's sister Alice supposed to be one of them?" I ventured to ask. But Gage only sighed wearily. "Kiera, let it go." "Why? Obviously this is important, or you wouldn't be refusing to even discuss it." "I'm not refusing to discuss it. There's simply nothing to discuss. As I said, it's nonsense." He'd adopted his I'm-being-perfectly-reasonable-and-you're-not tone of voice, the one that was certain to make me lose my temper. "I see," I bit out. "Then I suppose I'll have to speak to your grandfather." I spurred my horse forward, but his hand shot out to snag my reins. "Do not disturb my grandfather with this. He's ill enough. I won't have you making him worse." I wanted to refuse, but behind his frosty stare I glimpsed genuine apprehension for his grandfather. I'd witnessed myself his steady decline. Would unhappy reminiscences precipitate that further? I'd thought him sturdier than that, but I supposed if the memories were particularly troubling, it was possible. So I gave a sharp nod of acquiescence. For now. But that didn't mean I was giving up. For in spite of what Gage said, there was something to this talk of a curse. Something disturbing enough to rattle him. And if he wouldn't explain it to me, then I would just have to find my answers elsewhere. I pulled my horse's reins from his grasp, and spurred my mare on ahead of him, uncaring whether he followed.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 25	I inhaled a deep breath of bracing air and boosted myself up on top of one of the exposed pieces of granite to survey the moor laid out before me. Gage had said the view on top of White Tor was a lovely one, and he was right. My lips twisted in remembered aggravation. If only he'd seen fit to tell me what his plans were for today, he might have enjoyed the sight with me. We'd mostly avoided each other since our quarrel the day before. I'd even retired early to our chamber in order to avoid speaking with him, though I'd still been awake when he entered my bedchamber and climbed into bed. My heart had softened when, after a moment's hesitation, he'd rolled over to curl his long, warm body against my back and wrapped his arm around my middle to pull me close. I had felt his fretting, his uncertainty, and unable to endure it, I turned to face him. But before I could speak, the ache in his eyes had arrested my words. So instead I'd kissed him. The fervency with which he kissed me back had surprised me. There was an urgency to it different than he'd ever displayed before, and I had been helpless to resist it. I think in that moment if he could have consumed me and made me permanently part of him, he would have. Whether it was painful memories or fear of the future, I didn't know, but I knew without hesitation he had been trying to communicate with his hands, his mouth, and his body what he couldn't find the words to say. So I'd responded in kind. Words could wait until morning. Except morning had come, and when I reached over to touch him, all I'd found was the cold depression where he'd lain. With the light of a new day, and a good night's rest, I realized I'd been rather insensitive to Gage. After all, who wants to hear talk that their mother was killed as some part of a curse, let alone seriously consider it? I prided myself on my intuition, my perception, yet I'd ignored the signs of Gage's distress. I well knew he closed off his emotions when he was upset or threatened. I should have raised the subject more delicately, and allowed him to retreat for a short time to mull it over before addressing it again. Then I might have been able to coax the information out of him. At least then I wouldn't have been seated on this cold rock by myself. I closed my eyes and tilted my face up to the sun as it broke through the clouds, welcoming the warmth of its rays up on this blustery tor. When after I'd prepared myself for the day Gage had still not returned to our chamber, I'd gone searching for him. I'd thought I might find him with his grandfather, but instead I stumbled into the end of an argument between Lord Tavistock and Rory. Neither man could tell me where my husband was, and I'd quickly taken myself off, deciding I didn't need to be in the middle of their altercation no matter how curious I was what had caused the charge in the air between them. Hammett also protested ignorance of Gage's location, though his stilted response made me suspect he had a guess, but one he was unwilling to share. Thus thwarted, I'd abandoned my quest and decided to go for a walk. If nothing else, it would help me clear my head and sort my thoughts. The day was a fine one, and I figured if I remained close to the manor I wouldn't risk becoming lost even if the weather began to shift. Since I'd yet to climb White Tor, I set off in that direction first. From my vantage at its top, I could see the western edge of the moor stretched out before me across to Great Mis Tor and up to Cocks Hill and the expanse of nothingness beyond. I still couldn't puzzle out what Alfred had been doing out here that day he vanished. Could he have been meeting someone? But if so, wouldn't he have chosen a recognizable marker? Perhaps the Langstone? But then why had he continued on beyond it out into the moor where his coat was found? Surely if he were just out for a stroll, he would have taken a different route. Maybe he'd needed space to think, as I was doing perched up on this tor. Somehow being above it all made my thoughts clearer. I'd learned that fact when I was but a girl. It was why I'd so often retreated to the attics at Blakelaw House, my childhood home. Why I'd turned the loft in the library at my brother-in-law's Highland castle into my own personal sanctuary during the months after Sir Anthony's death and the ensuing scandal that had erupted. But perhaps Alfred thought better while moving. Perhaps in his distraction, he'd tripped and fallen, striking his head somehow, and become muddled. But then why couldn't we find his body? Had a bog truly swallowed him whole, leaving no trace? "Oh, good morning." I blinked up at the sandy-haired man who had rounded the shattered granite stack I was seated on. I'd been so absorbed in my own reflections that I'd failed to note his approach. "Good morning," I replied, tilting my head in recognition. "It's . . . Mr. Bray, isn't it?" He nodded. "It seems we've had the same idea this fine morning, Mrs. Gage." He gestured toward me. "Do you mind if I join you?" "Not at all." I smiled in invitation and slid over to make room for him next to me. "Where is your husband?" he asked, settling beside me. "Out making more inquiries?" "Yes," I lied, not wanting to admit I had no idea where he was. "He's concerned for his cousin." "Understandable. He is family, after all." I found it interesting he should phrase it as such, narrowing in on the aspect of it being more of a duty rather than a matter of familial affection. But then I remembered he'd grown up with them. They'd run across the moor together, likely climbing this very tor. And, of course, there was that other matter with the dagger. In the interaction I'd observed between them, Mr. Bray hadn't seemed to harbor any ill will toward Gage, but I wasn't about to dredge up the affair. I studied the amiable man out of the corner of my eye. Mr. Bray might be an invaluable resource of information about the Trevelyans without my having to ask the Trevelyans themselves. "My husband says you used to play together as boys." "Oh, aye." His lips curled upward in a broad grin, revealing deep dimples. "He and I more than Langstone and Rory. Those two were a might too high in the instep for the likes of us at times. But that was fine by us. It was usually more fun without them." "I've heard that same refrain quite often about Langstone. It seems he liked to lord it over everyone." "Comes from his mother. From what I remember of his father, he would never have tolerated such behavior had he lived to see it." "But his grandfather hasn't stopped it." "I think he's tried." He sighed. "But Langstone just refuses to listen. Always has." "Do you think that's what got him into this trouble? Whatever this trouble might be," I added in exasperation. Mr. Bray's eyes were sympathetic. "I don't know. It's possible. Maybe he pulled his high-handed routine with someone he shouldn't have. Maybe they drew his cork for it. Or maybe he made empty promises to the wrong person." He fell silent, his brow furrowing. "Or maybe he took something that wasn't his." I straightened in surprise. "I don't mean to imply he's a thief," he hastened to explain. "At least, of anything more than a woman's virtue. But . . . he's taken things before." I hesitated to say the words, but the question had to be asked. "You mean the dagger?" He gazed solemnly out at the moor where cloud shadows raced across the billowing heather. "We knew all along that Langstone had been the one to take it, and Gage was merely the scapegoat." His eyes lifted to meet mine, dulled by cynicism. "You'll recall I knew them. I knew how Langstone was." He turned away. "And I had some inkling of what it was like for Gage in that house." His scowl deepened. "But how does one tell Lord Tavistock you know he's lying, that his heir is lying?" "You think Lord Tavistock knew the truth?" The look he cast my way was rife with skepticism. "If not, he was willfully allowing himself to be fooled." I hadn't considered the possibility that the viscount had been aware of Alfred's cruel trick, but Mr. Bray was right. Gage's grandfather seemed to have deliberately turned a blind eye to some of his heir's actions. I'd witnessed as much since our arrival. And yet he was so hard on Gage. I wondered if Gage had noticed this contradiction. I grimaced. But of course he had. How could he not? I felt a pulse of empathy for Gage, and another stab of fury at his rotten family. "One of the old women in the village mentioned a family . . . well, I guess you would call it a curse," I said, deciding it was time to change the subject. "That those who rebel within the family will suffer a terrible fate?" He nodded. "I've heard it before. It's the reason why, in addition to his notorious reputation, it's never made any sense to me that all the local girls should be so eager to fall prey to Langstone's charms." I could answer that. It was the thrill of the forbidden, the lure of danger. It gave Alfred, who was already reputed to be attractive, an even more heightened allure by turning his rakehell persona into one of possibly tragic destiny. I suspected we could blame Shakespeare for that. He shook his head. "After all, I know they've all heard the legend of Stephen's Grave." "That the woman he fell in love with was Alice Trevelyan, Lord Tavistock's sister?" I asked in confusion. "Aye. And the reason he killed her and then himself was the curse. It made him do it, for she'd dared to defy her parents' wishes by agreeing to run away with him. And then he couldn't live with what he'd done." I stared wide-eyed, shocked to have my vague suspicions confirmed with so little prodding. "And Gage's mother?" I murmured weakly. He winced, as if he'd forgotten whom he was speaking to. "Her, too. Though in her case, it certainly took its time enacting itself." True. Gage had been eighteen when his mother died, nineteen years after she'd married Stephen Gage and rebelled against her family. But perhaps death by slow poisoning was far more terrible than a quick demise. I frowned. Poison. Was that what connected them all? Even Alfred? Miss Galloway had given him a tincture for a stomach complaint, as well as a bundle of herb bennet for protection, particularly against poison. Rory had reported that Alfred had suffered from some sort of ailment in the days before he vanished. Had he been poisoned and finally succumbed? But if so, once again, where was he? I stared across the moor toward Great Mis Tor rising in the distance. From this vantage, I couldn't see Miss Galloway's cottage, for it was hidden behind another rise that concealed the lower slopes of that tor. However, I believed I could make my way safely there. It was not so far, even on foot, and I'd been there before. Taking my leave of Mr. Bray, I set off across the moor, following the track Gage and Rory had speculated Alfred might have taken when they'd believed he might have gone to visit Miss Galloway the day he disappeared. It wasn't so difficult to follow, for their description had been good, and soon I was at her door. There was no sign of life as I approached, no twitch of the curtains like the last time we'd called. And when I rapped on the door three times, there was no answer. I tested the handle and the door easily opened. "Miss Galloway," I called, peering inside. "Miss Galloway." The cottage appeared much as it had before, though the fire was banked. She must have gone out to run an errand, perhaps visiting a village or gathering more herbs. I glanced in every direction from the porch to see if I could spot her, and even peered around the corner into the garden, but she was nowhere to be found. Hesitant to venture into her home uninvited, I paused on the threshold. In the tumult of the last few days, hunting for Alfred, I wasn't certain if anyone had informed her about the bloody coat. I'd meant to come sooner, but then it had slipped my mind. I didn't want to leave without letting her know, so I stepped inside. Leaving the door open, I tentatively began to search through the drawers in the cabinet by the door for a piece of paper and a pencil so I could leave a note. I located the sheets of foolscap in the second drawer, but as I pushed them aside to see if a pencil lay underneath, something gold caught my eye. It was a shiny button with ornate swirls. One, I realized with a start, that I'd seen before. It was the missing button from Alfred's coat. But what was it doing here? I tried to tell myself there was a perfectly rational explanation for its presence at the bottom of Miss Galloway's drawer, and for the fact she hadn't brought it to our attention. He could have dropped it during a visit prior to his going missing. Or she could have found it on the moor and not realized who it belonged to. But those explanations didn't sit quite right. I stared at the button, uncertain what to do. Should I take it with me, or leave it here and hope she mentioned it during our next meeting? In the end, I elected to put it back, as sort of a test. After all, the button wasn't evidence of wrongdoing. But if she remained silent about it, even after I mentioned it on my next visit, then that would tell me more than direct confrontation. I jotted down a short message, along with a promise to call again soon, and left it on the table. But just when I'd turned to go, a soft thud came from the direction of the bedroom. I slowly straightened, feeling the skin along the back of my neck prickle as if a stray draft had blown across it. "Miss Galloway, is that you?" I inched forward in the heavy silence that followed my query, eyeing the gap below the closed door. "Is anyone there?" I paused with my hand hovering over the knob. Should I grab something to defend myself with? I'd left my reticule and the percussion pistol tucked inside back at the manor. But then, if it was only Miss Galloway in distress, I would feel foolish for scaring her. My breath fluttered in my chest as I turned the handle and thrust open the door. I gasped as an orange tabby cat leapt off the bed and streaked past me. Pressing a hand over my pounding heart, I laughed. I knew full well what mischief-makers felines could be. I'd left my own cat, a gray tabby I'd dubbed Earl Grey, under the care of my sister's children in Edinburgh. There were times when I missed his companionship, but it had been for the best that I'd left him behind. Earl Grey would have despised the boat trip to Ireland and the journey here. And I could only imagine the look the dowager would have given me if I'd arrived at Langstone with a cat on my lap. Although further contemplation almost made me wish I'd done so. The orange tabby leapt up on the chair nearest the hearth, circled once, and curled into a ball to go to sleep. I smiled. Obviously he was comfortable here. My smile faded. I didn't remember seeing him during my last visit. Maybe he'd been outside, lolling under the garden flowers in the sunshine. I glanced into the bedchamber, but there was nothing there. Nothing that hadn't been before, anyway. However, I couldn't quite shake the feeling I wasn't alone. Something seemed to fill the space behind me with an almost audible silence. I closed the bedroom door and crossed back through the cottage, allowing my gaze to trail over the contents. It was all as clean as it had been before. No cup unwashed by the basin. No embroidery set to the side with the needle poised for its next stitch. No shawl draped over a chair. I wished I were familiar enough with Miss Galloway to know whether she was always this fastidious. Feeling I'd outstayed my welcome, and vaguely guilty for prying despite my discovery of the button, I left the cottage. I closed the door firmly behind me and stood at the corner of the porch to survey the small vale in which the home was set. All was peaceful, with nothing but the wind and the trickling water of the River Walkham in the distance to break the silence. I looked up the slope at the mammoth granite outcroppings at the peak of Great Mis Tor and decided now was as good a time as any to climb it. I imagined the views from its heights were even more impressive than those of White Tor. By the time I reached the top, I was panting from the exertion. But it was well worth it. My suspicions had been correct. Not only were the granite formations massive, spilling over each other like towering stacks of crumpets, but the panorama was breathtaking. Now I understood why Miss Galloway, and her mother before her, were willing to live on the lower slopes of this isolated spot. To be able to have such a vantage point almost on your doorstep was ample compensation. I slowly circled the outcroppings, examining the fall of light over the landscape below, and enjoying the view across the moor from different angles. So when I paused to gaze out toward the north over Greena Ball and the bleak desolation of Cocks Hill, at first I was shocked to find I wasn't alone. From this distance, I couldn't see very clearly, but there was definitely a man with no hat striding across the moor from west to east, moving deeper into the moor. His dark hair—the only recognizable feature—ruffled in the wind. Instantly I thought of Alfred, and in my astonishment, I called out to him. The man swiveled to look up at the tor where I stood, shielding his eyes from the sun. Whether he saw me or recognized what I was saying, I didn't know, but he lifted his hand and then turned and continued on his way. I called out again, but he didn't stop. Perhaps he couldn't hear me at such a distance, but I thought it unlikely he hadn't seen me when he looked up at the tor. I was wearing a bright maize yellow gown, which should have stood out starkly against the gray, brown, and green landscape. Whatever the reason, he moved away swiftly to the east. If it was Alfred, I wasn't about to let him get away. Lifting my skirts, I dashed down the slope of the tor as fast as I dared. Every twenty or thirty feet, I continued to call out, until I was too short of breath to do so. At the base of the tor, the rocky ground gave way to deer grass and heath, and I was able to stretch out my stride, almost running in my haste. The earth was soft beneath my feet, squelching with each step, but I paid it little heed. I had gained on the man slightly, and I was intent on catching him. So oblivious was I to everything else around me that I didn't hear the person behind me until their arm snagged me about the waist, wrenching me to a stop and driving the air from my lungs. I gulped, trying to inhale as I sagged back against the man who had grabbed me. I thrashed weakly, attempting to free myself from his grasp, but he held on tenaciously. "Have you lost your mind?! That's Mistor Marsh you were about to blunder headlong into," Rory scolded, and then proceeded to ring a peal over my head for my foolish recklessness while I struggled to regain my breath and my faculties. When finally I could speak, I lifted a hand to point in the direction I'd been moving. "But the man. He's getting away." Rory glared down at me as if I were talking gibberish. "What man? What are you talking about?" I turned to look, lifting up onto my toes in my eagerness, but he'd vanished. "What? Where did he go?" I continued to scan the horizon, wondering if somehow I'd gotten turned around. "He was just there! Didn't you see him?" I demanded, not understanding how he could have disappeared in such a vast expanse of nothingness. There were no valleys or hills for him to hide behind in that immediate direction. No large rocks or tall vegetation to duck behind. When I glanced back at Rory, it was to find him watching me with a strange light in his eyes. His anger mellowed into something more guarded, more wary. "I'm telling you, I saw a dark-haired man striding across the moor in that direction. I thought maybe somehow it was your brother, and . . . and I didn't want him to disappear again." I broke off, scowling up at him in frustration. "You don't believe me." He shook his head. "It's not that. It's only . . . I don't think it was really a man." I narrowed my eyes. "I see." My words were clipped. "I'm hallucinating, then, is that it?" "I . . . I think you were being pixie-led." "I beg your pardon?" "That's what the locals call it. They believe pixies inhabit these lands, and sometimes they like to make mischief—playing tricks on travelers out on the moor, leading them into trouble." I frowned, not knowing what to say to that. I felt vaguely insulted. My mind was perfectly clear, as were my eyes. I knew what I'd seen. And yet, I'd grown up with tales of pixies and sprites, bogies and selkies, and the fae. Just because I'd never encountered them didn't necessarily mean they didn't exist. I turned to look back across the marsh toward where I'd seen the man. How had he vanished so quickly? If he was real, then where was he? Rory's feet shuffled backward, gurgling the boggy ground beneath our feet. "I don't know if I believe that. But . . . Dartmoor is different. The usual rules don't apply here. Maybe it's the light, or the peaty soil." He shrugged. "Who knows? But strange things do happen here." I understood what he was trying to say. This mysterious place did feel different. The moors were almost a place out of time, somehow older than the rest of Britain, than the rest of the earth. If I stood still, and the wind stopped blowing long enough, I just might hear it humming beneath me, sharing its secrets. Or maybe that was the pixies. "Well, thank you," I told him, recognizing how close I'd come to literally stepping into a quagmire. "Had you not been here to stop me..." I didn't finish the thought because the consequences were too dire. But also because I couldn't help but wonder why he had been here. Was he following me? Was he the one I'd sensed at Miss Galloway's cottage? The look in Rory's eyes said he knew what I was thinking, but he didn't address it. He merely tipped his head in acknowledgment and offered me his arm to lead me out of the bog. "If you should ever feel you're being pixie-led again, they say if you turn your coat inside out, that'll break the spell." I couldn't tell if he was mocking me or in earnest. What I did know was that, despite his saving me from, at the very least, some troubling difficulties, I didn't trust him. That, if nothing else, was quite clear. "Good to know."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 26	Upon our return to the manor, Rory and I found ourselves ushered into the drawing room. I expected to find Lady Langstone imperiously awaiting our attendance, but she wasn't alone. Across from her sat Gage, listening attentively to a lovely young woman with soft red curls, while beside her hovered a man sporting gray at his temples. I halted just inside the door, acutely embarrassed by my appearance. Had I known we had company, I would have insisted on changing out of my mud-splattered frock and kid boots, and repairing my windblown hair. Rory seemed similarly discomfited, rooted to the spot beside me. Lady Langstone was, of course, the first to notice our arrival, narrowing her eyes in disapproval. I fought a blush and forced my feet forward to meet our visitors. Gage had risen to greet us, a question in his eyes as he took in my disheveled state, but I shook my head, conveying I would explain later. "Lady Juliana, may I present my wife," he swiveled to announce, performing all the necessary introductions. So this was the Duke of Bedford's daughter, the young woman Lord Tavistock wanted Alfred to marry. Gage had said she was soft-spoken and gentle, and I could see that was true. Her voice was so quiet I had to lean closer to hear her. However, whatever affection, or lack thereof, Alfred felt for her, it was evident she held some sort of fondness for him, for her eyes were rimmed with red from recent tears. The other man was her brother, and had obviously been pressed into accompanying her on this errand. He spoke only when required, and didn't seem at all concerned with the whereabouts of his sister's near intended. Apparently, Lady Juliana had heard about Alfred being missing, and the bloody coat we found, and had come to ask for answers. "It's just so terrible," she repeated, sniffing into her handkerchief. "Ah, don't cry, Lady Juliana," Rory murmured gently. "There's still hope yet." "Is there?" "Of course there is," he exclaimed with far more conviction than I'd yet seen him exhibit. For certain, this was for Lady Juliana's benefit, but I also couldn't help but notice the way he flushed under her regard as she gave him a grateful smile. Alfred might not have been interested in her, but I would have wagered a tidy sum that Rory wasn't averse to the idea of marrying her. If his brother was presumed dead, would he get his wish? "Lady Juliana was just telling us about the last time she saw Lord Langstone, a month ago," Gage explained as we all sat. "She said he seemed distracted." She nodded. "It wasn't like him. He was normally quite attentive. I . . . I asked him whether something was troubling him, and he insisted it was merely concern for Lord Tavistock, since he's been so ill. But . . . I wasn't so sure." Astute girl. "Did he seem himself otherwise, in manner, appearance . . .?" She tilted her head, gazing up at the ceiling. "I did notice he seemed a bit tired and, well, pale." She smiled in remembrance. "He kept yawning, and then apologizing, though it was obvious he couldn't help it. Mother suggested later he might have been suffering from some sort of illness himself, but, of course, it would have been impolite for him to speak of it." Gage's eyes met mine over her head. Was this confirmation that Alfred had been suffering from some sort of complaint weeks before he disappeared? We needed to speak with his odious valet about the matter. Unless Gage had already done so and not told me. After all, he'd questioned some of the members of the staff. "In any case, he didn't visit with us long. He'd hoped to speak with my father." A tinge of pink colored her cheeks, letting us know what she'd believed that conversation would be about. "But Father had already left for London. Though he did spend a quarter hour with my father's steward. He said his grandfather had some questions about the mine partnership." "Mine partnership?" Gage repeated. "Between the duke and Lord Tavistock?" "Yes." She glanced uncertainly at her brother, who was looking at his pocket watch for the second time since my arrival. "I assumed you were aware. It was announced in the newspapers and everything." "It was," her brother confirmed. "Some men near Gunnislake uncovered a copper vein, and the duke and Lord Tavistock bought up the land to open a mine." Was this, then, what that newspaper article Alfred dropped in the garden had been about? But why had such a partnership concerned him? Unless he recognized it meant there was no backing out of marrying Lady Juliana. Was their union supposed to seal the deal, so to speak? "Juliana, we really must leave soon or we'll be late," her brother reminded her, already half rising to his feet. It was evident he expected compliance now and not in five minutes. "Yes . . . of course." She lowered her face to hide how flustered she'd become as she gathered up her reticule. I recognized the move because I often employed it myself to cover some social blunder I'd made. Except she'd done nothing wrong but inconvenience her brother. "Must you leave so soon?" I demurred, feeling a pulse of empathy for the girl. There was also the investigation to consider. I'd barely had time to even begin to develop an impression of her, and it sounded as if she might know more about Alfred and his possible whereabouts than she realized. She glanced up, her eyes lighting with something akin to gratitude. How rarely was this girl's presence sought after or missed that she should so appreciate my eagerness to talk to her? It left me feeling rotten that all my motivations hadn't been so altruistic. "I'm afraid so," she replied, glancing at her brother again, who was tapping his leg in impatience. "We're traveling to London today. Father wants us all there for the king's coronation, and there's much to do to prepare." I suspected this was somewhat of an exaggeration. The coronation was scheduled for early September, and it was not yet August. Though as Lady Juliana was the daughter of a duke, I'm sure there were many arrangements to make—gowns to be ordered, soirees to plan, endless rounds of calls to make. There was nothing we could do to make them stay, so we thanked them for coming and promised Lady Juliana we would keep her apprised of our progress in our search for Alfred. Lady Langstone soon followed them from the drawing room, but not before offering me a parting quip. "A word of advice. Perhaps in Scotland, society is accustomed to such slovenliness, but here in England we prefer that our ladies make their appearances looking a bit less like heathens." I scowled at her back as she swept from the room in all her understated elegance. Insult aside, she was cognizant I'd grown up on the English side of the Borders. Though, I realized many in the south viewed the wilder counties of the far north as essentially foreign soil. Rory mumbled some excuse and ducked out after her, leaving me alone with Gage—a state I'd been endeavoring all morning to achieve. But I found, as I turned to face him, that suddenly I felt unaccountably tongue-tied. Perhaps it was Lady Juliana's reserved, apologetic behavior, or maybe it was Gage's perfectly groomed appearance, a glaring contrast to my rumpled, unkempt state, but I was starkly reminded of the person I'd been only a short year ago when I'd first met him. A frightened, lost, downtrodden woman feigning bravado and in desperate need of a reason to push beyond my pain and fear. If not for Gage, if not for our first inquiry together, I might still be hiding away in the Highlands. Whether Gage could sense this, I didn't know. He'd often teased me about being able to read my expressions like an open book. Whatever the case, he flashed me one of his smugly knowing looks, ever aware of his potent effect on me and every other female in near proximity. It was an expression certain to annoy me, and this time was no different. His eyes lit with a gleam that told me how much he enjoyed riling me, and he leaned close to murmur, "Don't you know I'm the only one allowed to render your appearance to such a state?" My body flushed at the implication, and my breathing quickened even as I continued to scowl. "Whatever the cause, I hope it wasn't as pleasant as I would have made it," he added with a wicked grin. Had we been in our bedchamber, I'd no doubt how our exchange would have ended. But since we were standing in the middle of the drawing room with the door open, Gage kept his hands to himself, though not his gaze. I wasn't sure that didn't make our exchange all the more titillating because of it. I inhaled a deep breath. Two could play at this game. "I've been looking for you." His pupils widened. "Have you?" I nodded, stepping nearer to smooth his already straight collar. "I was sorry to see you'd already risen from our bed before I woke." I flicked my gaze up at him through my lashes. He inhaled a swift intake of breath and pressed a hand against the small of my back, drawing me ever closer. "Yes, well, that was my mistake." The gust of his breath and the brush of his lips against the tender skin behind my ear nearly made me forget myself. But I hadn't forgotten the words we hadn't said to each other. The words that would be harder to say the longer they went unsaid. I pushed against his chest, reluctantly urging him to stop nuzzling the side of my neck. Evidently he'd forgotten where we stood. Or perhaps he didn't care if we shocked his aunt or the staff. "I'm sorry I lost my temper yesterday," I told him, growing serious again. "I should have recognized what talk of a curse would mean to you, to your mother's memory." I smiled sheepishly. "I think sometimes I become so determined to find the truth that I become blinded to the affect that truth might have on others." Gage exhaled a long, slow breath, and lifted a hand to brush a stray tendril of hair back from my face. "But you weren't wrong. It is something we should explore." I could see how much it cost him to admit such a thing. He looked as if he would rather do anything else. And so he did. "But first, what did you think of Lady Juliana's revelation of the mine partnership?" I shook my head at his blatant attempt to change the topic of conversation, but allowed him to do so. After all, the discussion of his mother and the curse was far too fraught to be conducted in such a public place. "I suspect, the same as you, that the partnership was the subject of that newspaper article Alfred dropped. The gardener did say he recognized the words Tavistock and Gunnislake, didn't he? But I think your grandfather could tell us more." "My thoughts precisely. What of Lady Juliana? Did you find her trustworthy?" "You spent far more time with her than I did. But from the little I observed, yes. She seems a caring, agreeable girl. And as terrible a match for Alfred as you feared." His mouth flattened in sympathy. "I worry the duke is only interested in seeing her married off to someone with the right lineage. She's but one of six daughters." "Do you think the coronation was simply an excuse for the duke to remove her from the vicinity of Langstone Manor and whatever scandal might erupt now that he knows Alfred is missing?" "It's probable." He sighed. "Though royal events do require a great deal of preparation." I studied his exasperated expression, trying to decipher what he wasn't saying. Normally such a countenance meant only one thing. "I'm surprised your father hasn't remarked on the coronation." He grimaced. "He has. He's been pestering me about it, insisting we return from 'rustication' in time to attend." I frowned. Well, that explained Gage's reaction to his father's last letter. Lord Gage knew very well we weren't off on some lark. "He said we're to be special guests of the king." My eyes widened. "Even me?" First the letter to Lord Tavistock praising me and now this. What was Lord Gage up to? Perhaps he was bent on reforming my image, for purely selfish reasons. But if I'd learned anything from my encounters with Gage's father, it was that there were always hidden barbs. "Yes, well, William is a bit different from past monarchs," Gage replied, linking my arm through his to guide me out to the hall. That was true. Much of society was all abuzz about the rights and privileges he'd recently bestowed upon the numerous illegitimate children he'd had with his longtime mistress, as well as the fact he included them in royal events. "I suspect if he has any interest in your past at all, it's more out of curiosity than scorn," he added. "Hammett, just the man I wanted to see," he declared as the butler appeared before us. "Are you aware whether Grandfather is feeling well enough for visitors?" The butler's expression was so sour, I wondered what on earth could have made him pucker so. "Aye, sir. Though . . ." He hesitated, looking at me. "Ye might want to retire to yer chamber first." I stiffened, thinking at first he was disparaging my appearance. "Yer maid requested she see ye." Hammett's mouth barely formed around the words. His eyes darted to Gage. "Mr. Gage, too, if he's available." So this was what the old retainer found so distasteful. A servant beckoning her mistress to attend her. Such things weren't done. But, of course, Gage and I weren't normal employers, and Bree and Anderley weren't merely servants. "Thank you, Hammett," Gage said before leading me toward the stairs. We entered our bedchamber to find Bree puttering about the room. She never was one to sit idle. "Bree, you wanted to see us?" I asked. In answer, she dipped her head toward the connecting door. "This way." I shared a look with Gage before we followed her. Upon seeing Anderley waiting for us, I assumed at first she was leading us into the other room because he also needed to be included in the conversation. After all, her waiting in Gage's assigned chamber, particularly with his valet present, would have been highly improper. But when his eyes flicked to the side, bright with derisive humor, I realized he wasn't alone. Before the wardrobe stood a fastidious man of middling height with an intricately tied cravat. He sported an impossibly trim waist that made me suspect he was wearing a corset. This was the man whom Anderley believed was responsible for playing pranks on us. I would never have guessed. And from the manner in which he stared down his nose at us all, I suspected he would sooner go to the gallows than admit his culpability. "This is Lord Langstone's valet, Mr. Cooper," Bree explained, offering the man a smile of encouragement. "He has something he wishes to tell ye." He cleared his throat. "Yes. I . . ." He rocked forward on his heels before trying again. "In light of recent developments, I thought it best I inform you of what I know." His eyes lifted to meet Gage's and then mine. It was clear he didn't wish to do so, but something had impelled him to trust us. I glanced at Bree. Or someone. "You're speaking of Lord Langstone's coat," Gage inferred. "Yes, sir." He nodded. "Go on." Cooper's eyes slid toward Anderley, rife with animosity. It was apparent he wished for the other valet to be sent away, and just as apparent Anderley was not about to be budged. "Lord Langstone confided in me that, for reasons of his own, he did not wish to marry Lady Juliana." I couldn't decide whether to be irritated or amused at the valet's dissembling. From everything I'd learned about Alfred, it was doubtful he was the type to take his servant into his confidence. It was far more likely that Alfred had grumbled about the matter, either too foxed or too angry to care that his valet heard. "However, Lord Tavistock and the Dowager Lady Langstone were eager for the match. Very eager," he stressed. "I believe they were exerting some pressure on him to comply, but he said he was determined not to. He . . . he said he had other plans." None of this was news to us except the last. "What plans?" Gage asked. Cooper straightened even taller. "I don't know. He was quite secretive about them. But . . . I'm astute enough to comprehend they would not be welcomed by his lordship or her ladyship." "You think they might have decided to stop those plans had they known about them?" "Maybe." I wasn't sure exactly what he was trying to imply, and I'm not sure he was either. But something about the situation must have worried him enough to bring it to our attention. I didn't know how shrewd Cooper truly was, and I certainly wasn't going to trust only his word on it. However, I did know that the body often sensed things that the mind could not necessarily explain. If his intuition had been strong enough to impel him to overlook his dislike for Anderley and Gage and share his suspicions, then I was inclined to listen. "But that's not all." He cleared his throat again more forcefully. "Lord Langstone was blackmailing someone. Perhaps they're the person who did him harm."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 27	"I don't know who," Cooper hastened to say before Gage could ask. "But I believe it was someone in this house. He instructed me that if something untoward should happen to him, I was to retrieve some items he'd hidden underneath a loose floorboard in his chamber and destroy them. When I heard about the state of his frock coat, and that no other trace of him had been found, I decided I should follow his orders. But when I went to retrieve the items, they were already gone." Gage and I stared at each other through much of this recitation, already acquainted with this hiding place. "Do you know what items he'd hidden?" Gage asked, and then before the valet could reply added sternly, "It's important that you be honest with us. In order to help Lord Langstone, we need to know what he was concealing." But Cooper shook his head sharply. "I don't know. He never told me." "Did you ever peek?" The valet drew himself up in affront. "Of course not." Gage glared at him in challenge, but I pressed a hand to his arm, letting him know I believed the other man was being truthful. Cooper didn't know. But I wondered if I did. I frowned, recalling the sight of the dowager kneeling before her fireplace, frantically burning those letters from Lord Gage. I'd not yet had time to do much investigating into the matter, but I'd not forgotten. But if they were the items Alfred had used for blackmail, why hadn't she burned them as soon as she found them? She must have reclaimed them at least several days before, since the letters had already been missing from the hiding spot when Gage and I searched Alfred's room. Or had she wanted to keep them, but grown fearful when Alfred's bloody coat was found that Gage and I might discover them in the course of our inquiry? "Do either of you know what it was he might have hidden?" Gage asked, turning first to Anderley and then to Bree. Both shook their heads, though Bree's appeared less than definitive. Once Gage looked away, her gaze met mine, telling me she had something she wished to share with me. If she'd uncovered the same thing I had, I could understand why she didn't want to admit to it in front of Gage. "Perhaps Mrs. Webley knows," Cooper suggested. Gage frowned. "The dowager's maid?" "Yes. She's been a servant here for longer than many of us." He paused, but I could tell he had more to say. "And she has a decided talent at uncovering things the other servants wish she hadn't." I couldn't decide whether he admired this about her or he was purely intrigued. "We'll speak with her," Gage said. Cooper bowed. "Then, if there's nothing more..." "There is." Gage's words halted his steps, though the tiny crease between his brows told me he wanted to disobey. "Had Lord Langstone been ill recently? We understand he was suffering from a stomach ailment in the days before his disappearance, but what about in the weeks and months prior to that?" The valet's eyes were wide with mild surprise. "Yes, actually. Numerous times. Enough that I'd suggested he might wish to see a physician about it." If he'd offered such advice, then clearly he'd not believed his sickness to have been caused by overindulgence, and I was given to understand that a good gentleman's valet knows the difference. Gage tipped his head in consideration. "Did he accept your advice?" "Not that I'm aware of, sir." He nodded. "Thank you. You may go." Cooper bowed again stiffly and hurried from the room. "I have to say, McEvoy," Anderley remarked once the door closed behind him, "I'm impressed. Never thought you'd convince the fussy toad to talk." Bree's eyes sparkled with mischief. "Yes, well, that's because ye dinna ken what I promised to tell him aboot you in return." Anderley's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "My valet's odd grooming habits aside . . ." Gage began. I smothered a giggle behind my hand as Anderley turned to him in affront. "What odd habits?" His eyes glinted with teasing. "I'm sure Mrs. Gage doesn't want me to explain how you sometimes rinse your hair with ale." A tinge of pink crested Anderley's cheeks. "Well, maybe I should share the method with Miss McEvoy. It's quite effective." "Oh, aye," Bree agreed. "Does make your locks wondrously shiny." "Why, thank you," he replied, turning back to Gage. "Though, I've heard the smell of hops on a woman can be quite tantalizing. Perhaps you wouldn't wish Mrs. Gage to attract so much attention." At this, I could no longer contain my mirth and laughed out loud. The others joined me, possibly driven to such hilarity by our present frustrations. When our laughter faded, I found myself perched on the edge of the bed, swiping tears from my eyes. Anderley stood with his arms crossed, looking at ease despite being the cause of such glee. "What do we make of Cooper's assertions about Langstone having made other plans to avoid marrying Lady Juliana, and the possibility he was blackmailing someone?" Gage asked, recalling us to the matter at hand. He leaned against the bedpost beside me, lifting his eyes to the ceiling overhead. "Do we believe him?" "Well, we've heard from several people that claim Alfred didn't wish to marry Lady Juliana," I pointed out. "But what plans could he have made to counter that?" Gage's brow furrowed. "Grandfather has been ill. Perhaps he hoped he would die before Alfred was forced to propose." "Yes, but I gather that's the reason for all the extra pressure they were exertin' on him to wed in the first place," Bree said. I tapped my fingers against the mattress. "And what of the mine partnership your grandfather formed with the Duke of Bedford? Does that in some way force Alfred's hand? Is that what so upset him about it?" "For that matter, why is he so against marrying her?" Anderley scoffed. "He must know he would be expected to wed sometime. He is the heir." "Aye," Bree chimed in. "And Lady Juliana is a duke's daughter, and from all accounts, attractive and pleasant. He could do far worse." "Is this the general opinion belowstairs?" I asked, for it sounded as if they'd shared these views before. Anderley glanced toward Bree before shrugging. "More or less." "I'm thinkin' there's another girl." Bree arched her eyebrows in emphasis. "Someone he'd rather tie the knot wi'." Miss Galloway's face appeared before my eyes. Bree might not be far off. Though there was a great deal more information to be gathered before such a suspicion could be deemed as more than rampant speculation. Had Rory debated the same thing? Was that the real reason why he didn't like Miss Galloway? "Continue to keep your eyes and ears open." Gage scowled at the wall across from him. "I still think some of the staff know more than they're saying." He glanced at Bree. "And find out, if you can, whether any of the servants saw someone slip something into Lord Langstone's food or drink. If he was being poisoned, he was most likely ingesting it." Bree nodded and turned to me. "Ye have need of me, m'lady?" I knew this was her polite way of telling me I looked a dreadful mess. "Yes. I'll be there in a moment." While she moved through the connecting door, I looked to Gage to confirm he still wished to speak with his grandfather. I could see the questions about my disheveled state forming in his eyes—questions I didn't particularly wish to answer at the moment. Not when they would result in a scolding for my carelessness. So I hurried across the room after Bree before he could voice them. "If you can give me a quarter of an hour, I'll join you." With the door shut firmly between us and the men, I swiveled to allow Bree to begin unfastening the buttons down the back of my dress. "Now, tell me what you know about the blackmail." "I don't ken anything," she insisted. "But..." I heard in her voice that she didn't want to admit whatever she knew. "Tell me," I urged gently. She inhaled swiftly. "I overheard some o' the maids talkin'. One o' 'em swears Lord Gage and the dowager used to . . . carry on wi' one another." "Did she say why she thought that?" Bree's hands stilled as she registered my lack of surprise. "She said she saw him take her hand in the drawin' room when they thought no one was lookin'. And that he used to send her letters." She resumed her movements. "You knew." She sounded relieved not to be the bearer of troubling news. "I was told something in confidence that made me suspect the same thing," I admitted, pondering whether I was willing to take a risk. When Bree finished, rather than let her push my gown off my shoulders, I swiveled abruptly to face her. "May I assume you also think the item Lord Langstone was using for blackmail was those letters?" "I did wonder." Her voice lowered and she glanced back at the door. "'Tis why I didna wish to say anythin' in front o' Mr. Gage." "Then I need you to do something for me." I explained how I'd seen the dowager frantically burning papers, and about the singed corner of one letter I'd managed to save. Retrieving it from between the pages of the book where I'd hidden it, I passed it to her. She gasped. "It's true, then?" "It's probable," I replied sadly. Her face blanched in misgiving. "Does Mr. Gage know?" Unwilling to betray my husband's knowledge of the matter, I brushed her question aside. "You leave that to me. What I need you to do is show that around belowstairs. Make certain the maid who claims she witnessed their . . . affaire de coeur sees it. I also want Mrs. Webley to know you have it." Her eyes lit with comprehension. "You want to try to flush her or her mistress out. See what they'll reveal." "Precisely." "I'll do my best," she declared, tucking the scrap of paper into her pocket. Her determined gaze then fell on my hair. "Now let's tend to this bird nest."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 28	"I didn't tell you about the mine partnership because I didn't think it mattered," Lord Tavistock snapped back at Gage. The viscount appeared a bit haler today. A welcome ruddy tinge had entered his cheeks, and his breathing sounded less labored. But that also meant his words held more bite. "It's public knowledge. Appeared in most of the local newspapers and probably a few in London." "Newspapers that were published while we were in Ireland," Gage retorted to his implied criticism that he hadn't been keeping abreast of the latest news. "That's hardly my fault." "No, but it is your fault you never mentioned the mines." Gage narrowed his eyes. "In fact, I believe you deliberately neglected to tell us because you knew Alfred had been upset about it. He didn't wish to marry Lady Juliana, and he felt trapped into the union by this deal you'd made with the Duke of Bedford." The manner in which the viscount looked as if he were chewing on something unpleasant told me Gage had hit the nail on the head. "Alfred has always been a stubborn and recalcitrant boy." Gage snorted. "I wonder who he inherited those traits from." His grandfather's scowl turned blacker. "He needed to be made to see reason. He's nearly thirty-six. It's high time he wed an appropriate girl and produced an heir." "An appropriate girl?" I interjected, latching on to what I deemed the most important words in that sentence. The viscount's silver eyes flicked to meet mine. "Yes. One of suitable family and lineage. I'm not ignorant to the sorts of women he courted while in London and at his friends' debauch gatherings." Yes, but was that all he meant? I couldn't tell whether he was aware of Miss Galloway or any attachment that might have formed between Alfred and her. If one even existed. "What did you threaten would happen if Alfred didn't accede to your demands?" Gage persisted. His grandfather glared back at him, at first refusing to answer. Then he arched his chin like an obstinate child. "I told him I would strip everything I could from his inheritance. All he would be left with were those things that were entailed—Langstone Manor and its attached lands." "The estate isn't self-sustaining," Gage replied, grasping the implications before I did. "Without the mines and other tracts of land, in short order, he would be crippled with debt." "Only if he refused to wed Lady Juliana." I watched as fury transformed my husband's face. "Is that why you really asked us here? You suspected Alfred had gone into hiding, and you needed us to find him so you could bring him to heel?" He flung his hand toward the window. "You never truly feared foul play. You simply needed a way to convince us to investigate." "At first, yes. I thought maybe he was ducking me and his responsibility," he grudgingly admitted, shouting back. "But after a week, when he couldn't be found, I began to worry I'd been wrong. That something had happened to him. I never lied about that." "Maybe. But you certainly summoned us with that letter under false pretenses." Gage moved closer to the bed, looming over his grandfather. "What else have you neglected to tell us? What other means were you using to persuade Alfred?" I knew to what he was referring, but Lord Tavistock shook his head. "Isn't that enough? Power and money always did motivate Alfred more than anything." "What about fear for his life?" The viscount's eyes widened in shock and then his face suffused with red. "Are you accusing me of harming my own grandson?" "Someone was. Someone has, if that bloody coat is any indication." The old man blanched. "I am not responsible for that. Nor would I ever condone such an action." Gage's eyes weighed and assessed him. "Maybe. But regardless, you've gotten your alliance. With Alfred out of the way, Rory will be a much more tractable heir, won't he? And I wager he'll be happy to wed Lady Juliana." "You think he's dead?" he wheezed between coughs. "I suspect we'll know soon enough."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 29	"Do you really think he's dead?" I asked as we strode down the corridor away from the viscount's chamber. Gage's arm was tight beneath mine, still holding in the anger and disillusionment he must have been feeling about his grandfather's actions. "I don't know. But the longer this search stretches on with no answers, the more I think we have to face the very real possibility that he has perished, either by natural or unnatural means." At the end of the corridor, he glanced to the left and then the right before guiding me through a doorway two doors down and shutting it behind us. It was the library I'd failed to locate on numerous occasions. "Is anything in this house designed in a traditional manner?" I groused. It was no wonder I'd missed it. Tucked off a corridor among rooms I'd assumed were more bedchambers, it didn't appear anything like a normal library other than the shelves filled with books. Had I not known better, I would have called it a men's reading parlor, for it was filled with heavy leather furniture and stark tables bearing lamps. I suspected it had once been but another bedchamber until it was converted to this use. Ignoring my comment, Gage crossed to the window, pushing aside the drapes to allow more light into the shadowed room. "Let's review the facts, shall we. We've searched for miles in every direction, spoken to all the people who live on the neighboring lands and in the village, interviewed Alfred's friends, and yet we haven't been able to locate him. Barring the possibility that someone is either a brilliant liar or that Alfred has fashioned himself some unknown bolt-hole—both options that are unlikely, but not impossible—I think we have to face the truth. Alfred truly has vanished." He exhaled as if making this pronouncement was almost a relief. "He's not in Plymouth." He ticked off on his fingers. "He's not in London. Father was almost certain of that." "Then where is he, Gage? I know we all keep saying he vanished, but that's impossible. Unless you believe the pixies led him away, and I know you don't." He planted his hands on his hips, shaking his head. "I honestly don't know. Unless a bog actually did swallow him up." He frowned. "Or someone buried him in a place where freshly turned soil wouldn't give us pause." I considered this suggestion, but he rushed on before I could respond. "Everyone in this family has purposefully led us astray, making this inquiry far more complicated than it needed to be. But I think it's time I faced a truth I haven't wanted to accept." He exhaled forcibly. "That Alfred has likely been murdered." I'd considered murder to be a very real prospect almost since the beginning, but it was apparent Gage had not. After all, Alfred was his cousin. No matter their tussles in the past, he still cared about him. And it was obvious he found this shift in his approach to the inquiry to be troubling. I wrapped my arms around his middle and rested my head against his chest, offering him what comfort I could. He continued to stare out the window, lost in disquieting thoughts, but he lifted his arms to embrace me back. We stood that way for some time with nothing but the clock ticking on the mantel to disturb the silence around us. From this vantage, I could see out into the front walled garden. Even in bright sunlight it still looked hopelessly forlorn. "You know, I used to wish something awful would happen to Alfred," he murmured. "He was just so dreadful to me, to Mother. I wished he would go away and never return." I looked up at his face, at the evidence of his tightly restrained emotion in the lines at the corner of his eyes and the brackets around his mouth. "You were just a boy," I reminded him. "I know." His eyes dipped to meet mine. "But now I'm a man. And I owe it to him to find him." "Then we shall," I replied, infusing as much confidence as I could into my voice. "Even if we have to dredge every bog between here and Okehampton." His lips curled into a tight smile. "Well, let's hope it doesn't come to that." His gaze fastened on something on my right temple, and he lifted a finger to wipe it away. Lowering his hand, we stared down at a speck of mud. "Care to explain now what happened to you this morning? And who's been talking to you about pixies?" "Rory." I briefly explained what happened that morning, including his cousin's part in saving me from an ignoble fate. As expected, my husband was not amused by my carelessness. "Kiera," he began sternly. "I know. I know. My only defense is that I genuinely believed the man I'd seen could be Alfred. But I shouldn't have lost my head." "If it had been Alfred, and you were able to catch up to him, what did you think you would do? Insist he return home with you? I don't like to think it, but if Alfred is alive and he's gone to such lengths to remain hidden, he could be dangerous." "I'll be more careful," I assured him. "In any case, Rory claims there was no man, and he was close enough he should have seen him as well. Though I didn't appreciate his trying to tell me I'd been pixie-led." "No. That doesn't sound like him." His voice trailed away as he turned toward the window again. I waited for him to say more, but when he didn't I redirected him to the more urgent matter at hand. "How do you wish to proceed?" "Well, I think you should visit Miss Galloway again." He shifted so that he could see me more fully. "Provided you can avoid running into any more bogs." "What if it's the same one?" I replied tartly. He arched a single eyebrow at my pitiable jest. "I believe I'll try to speak with the Duke of Bedford's steward at Endsleigh House about these Swing letters. I would have liked to speak with the duke himself, but now that we know he's in London, I suppose that's not possible. And I shall pay Mr. Glanville another visit. I'm curious if he knows anything about the blackmail, or if he can direct me to any of Alfred's acquaintances further afield." "He was certainly forthcoming the last time we spoke," I remarked, feeling slightly guilty for not sharing my suspicions about the blackmail. But I didn't want to raise the matter until I knew. Until I was sure. There was also the matter of the gold button I'd found in Miss Galloway's cottage, but I wanted to give her the chance to inform me of it herself, and Gage might not allow that if he were aware. "Yes, well, let's hope he doesn't decide to share too much without your presence to rein him in." "My presence reined him in?" I asked dubiously, recalling all the shocking things he'd said and done. Gage nodded. "You do not want to see him when there are no ladies present." "So long as you don't share his brandy, or any of his companions," I added pointedly, "I suspect you shall survive." He pulled me close. "Have no fear there. Just listening to him will be unenjoyable enough."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 30	The weather the next morning was not quite as auspicious as the day before, but Gage seemed certain I shouldn't encounter any sudden shifts in the next few hours. Given his protective inclinations, I trusted he was correct. Thin clouds wisped across the sky, blocking much of the sunlight, but the air was warm and dry, urging me to tuck my shawl into my shoulder satchel with my sketchbook and charcoals. I rapped on Miss Galloway's door, and was met almost immediately by her relieved expression. "I'm so glad you called," she exclaimed, gesturing me inside. "I read your note. Have you any news on the search?" "I'm afraid not." I placed my bag on the floor and settled onto the bench before her table as she set a kettle over the fire. "There's still no sign of Lord Langstone or any more of his possessions. Not even the missing button from his bloody coat." The last felt a bit heavy-handed, for I hadn't intended to even mention the button. But then I realized she might not be aware the button she possessed belonged to Alfred. Her eyes flared wide. "Oh, a button?" She crossed to the cabinet and began rummaging through the drawers. "Was it gold? I found one outside my cottage about a week ago. Now, where did I put it?" Her hands rifled through the drawer in which I'd found the button, and then moved on to the one above it. "Yes," I replied, trying to keep the wary confusion from my voice. "Gold with a series of ornate swirls." "I believe I have it, then." She grunted in frustration. "Or I did." She returned to the original drawer, pulling all of the contents out of it and setting them beside her where she knelt on the floor. "I'm sure I put it in here." I moved forward to study the items she'd removed, but there was no sign of the button. She frowned down into the empty drawer. "I don't understand. I know I put it in this cabinet. Where could it—" Her voice broke off abruptly as her eyes flitted first toward the herb shelves and then toward the door. "Do you normally leave your door unlocked?" I asked. "Yes. So few people venture out this way, and it's not as if I have much to steal." Her tone tightened as she stared down into the empty drawer again. "Maybe you mislaid it," I suggested, though I knew very well she had not. Not unless she'd moved it since the day before when I'd found it. Of course, it was possible she was lying. Perhaps she'd slipped the button into her pocket or discarded it in the hours since I was last here. But then, why had she mentioned it at all? "Maybe," she murmured, replacing all the items in the drawer. There was another distinct possibility. Someone had taken it. Someone who'd known where it was. Perhaps someone who'd watched me remove it. An image of Rory in his mud-splattered trousers standing beside me in the bog appeared before my eyes. Would he have done such a thing? I resumed my seat at the table and Miss Galloway stiffly joined me. "Well, at least you know what became of the button." She frowned, clearly bothered by the missing object. "Even if we don't know where it is now." She inhaled a deep breath, settling herself. "Have they given up looking?" "Most of the farmers and laborers have returned to their work, but my husband and I are still searching." She nodded, her brow heavy with worry. Impulsively, I reached out to touch her hand. "We won't stop looking until we know what happened to him. Whatever that might be." Her pupils dilated, telling me she understood the implication I was trying to convey. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that," she murmured. The harried look on her face, the telltale brightness in her eyes, and the discovery of the button outside her cottage all seemed to indicate more than a simple acquaintance, so I decided to venture a delicate question. "Miss Galloway—" "Please, call me Lorna." I flashed her a brief smile. "Lorna, forgive me if I'm treading where I shouldn't, but . . . are you and Lord Langstone . . . is there something between you? Something other than friendship?" Her eyes lowered as she reached up to toy with an oblong piece of what appeared to be amber with some sort of leaf or feather trapped inside hanging from her necklace. I didn't know if she was aware, but the fact that she hadn't immediately denied it already gave me my answer. "It's not so easy to define," she began tentatively. Her gaze darted up to gauge my reaction, and then back to the scarred surface of the table. "I didn't like him at first. I thought he was just another pompous, self-absorbed lordling out for his own amusement." Her brow furrowed. "But after I got to know him better, I realized that wasn't quite right. He was still a self-centered, vainglorious clunch," she jested with a small smile. "But there was more to him than that. Much more." It was apparent she didn't quite comprehend it herself, but there was a softness that came over her features when she spoke of him that made one thing perfectly clear. "You genuinely do care for him," I remarked, trying to keep any trace of my disbelief from my voice. I must not have succeeded, for she laughed. "Don't sound so surprised. He's not a monster. Even if he behaved like one toward your husband in the past." I flushed. "It's only . . . after all the things I've heard about him, I find it hard to believe . . . well, that someone like you . . ." I broke off, struggling to explain, and feeling I was only making it worse. "He just doesn't seem very likable." But she seemed to understand what I meant, and fortunately she didn't take offense. "It's true what they say. My mother was Lord Sherracombe's chère-amie, and I am his natural daughter. But she chose to live here, just as I have. He wasn't hiding us away. My mother was too ashamed to live in town, even though they loved each other until the day she died. She could have wed a wealthy squire or a minor baronet, but instead she chose to follow her heart, and it had fallen in love with a married man." She sat taller, showing me she was unashamed of her mother's decision. "My father's marriage was an arranged one. The contracts were drawn up before he was even out of short pants. And it was not happy. So he and his wife amicably agreed to find their contentment elsewhere. No one was hurt in the arrangement. Lord and Lady Sherracombe never had children. His title will pass to a nephew." She claimed no one had been hurt, but I could see the faint lines around her eyes that indicated otherwise. "What of you?" I murmured. She stared at me, as if surprised I'd given her that much consideration. A shrill whistle broke the silence, and she rose from her seat to fetch the kettle. "I cannot complain," she said. "There are many whose lives are far less ideal than mine. At least I had a father and mother who loved me, and a warm home to grow up in. One that is now mine." She crossed to the cabinet, rising up onto her toes to lift down a delicate teapot painted with yellow roses and two cups. "I'm grateful for what I have, and I'll not begrudge the rest." I studied her profile in admiration as she spooned tea leaves into the pot and poured the boiling water over them. Hers was an example I could follow. For I'd struggled for some time to reconcile myself to the events of my first marriage, and to accept the knowledge that had been forced on me and turn it to good. Only recently had I truly begun to come to terms with it, and yet this woman had so humbly reconciled herself to a past that had not been of her making, determined to make the best of the present. Perhaps the events of her life had been less tormented than my marriage to Sir Anthony, but it didn't make her acceptance any less commendable. It saddened me to think of how she was shunned and belittled purely because of the circumstances of her birth. I knew such was typical treatment of all by-blows, particularly those living in the countryside, and not Lorna specifically. It was society's way of discouraging such behavior, even if men of a higher rank were given leniency for keeping mistresses and their children in London. But it still galled me to see her derided thusly. "As for Alfred, I'm not sure he's made himself very likable to most." She sat across from me again as we waited for the tea to steep. "He's certainly handsome and charming. Though, he hasn't the reputation your husband does. But those traits are superficial, aren't they? One can be handsome and charming and still an utter wretch." I smiled, having met several such men. "True." "And Alfred undoubtedly has a terrible habit of trying to dodge his troubles rather than face them." "You know about his grandfather pressuring him to wed Lady Juliana?" She tipped her head. "Among other things." She frowned at her hands folded before her. "But that's just part of who he is. Believe it or not, beneath all that bluster and past debauchery is a decent man he's rarely been forced to show." "Until you?" I guessed. "Well, I doubt I'm the first and only. But yes. I won't tolerate nonsense." She frowned. "I never intended to like him. I certainly never intended to welcome his company or the possibility of . . . something more. My parents were devoted to each other, but I also saw the way it tore my mother apart when my father had to leave us and return to his life, to his wife." She shook her head. "I never wanted that for myself. I'm still not sure I do." Her gaze strayed toward the window. "And now there may no longer be a choice to make." It was evident whatever had happened between them, Alfred had made no promises to her. Which made his refusal to wed Lady Juliana all the more confusing. I would have thought Alfred was the type of man who would've been content to wed the duke's daughter and still visit Lorna here in her cottage as long as she continued to welcome him. However, it might explain something else that had puzzled me. "Did Alfred's brother Rory know about the two of you?" I asked. "Is that why he's taken such a decided disliking to you?" Her mouth pressed into a thin line as she picked up the teapot to pour. "Mr. Trevelyan has never liked me. I suspect for the obvious reason—my being born on the other side of the blanket. But his aversion only increased after I sent him away with a sharp refusal." "He made advances toward you?" I gasped, seeing now how that made perfect sense. "Not very subtle ones either." "Did Alfred know?" "At the time, I don't know. But since then, yes." She didn't share who had told him or how he reacted, and her firm answer did not invite questions on the matter, so I decided not to ask. Not when there were other topics to discuss. My eyes lifted to the bouquet of herb bennet over the door. At some point since my first visit, it had been replaced. A fresh bundle of the flowers now graced the wall. "Did Alfred suspect he was being poisoned or did you?" Lorna's hands stilled, and she followed my gaze toward the bouquet. "He did." She handed me my cup of tea, holding on to it a moment longer than necessary to make me look her in the eye. "And knowing what I did about Mrs. Gage's poisoning, and that of Alice Trevelyan before her, I had to agree." My skin prickled, sensing the importance of what she was trying to impart. Lorna didn't say anything further, but I could sense that she was urging me to make the connection myself. "You think they're related?" She shrugged, lifting her own cup. "Three poisonings in one family? Don't you think that's suspicious?" "I do." I frowned. "Though . . . Mrs. Gage's maid was proven responsible for hers." She sipped her tea. "Yes, but did someone give her the idea?" I wanted to ask her about her mother's possible role in that incident, but I struggled to find a tactful way to do so. Fortunately, Lorna knew what I was thinking. "Perhaps someone has implied otherwise," she remarked coolly, "but my mother had nothing to do with it. I know because I remember that maid calling here and asking my mother for such a concoction, but when she couldn't give my mother a satisfactory answer for why she needed it, my mother refused." Relief flooded through my veins. There was always the possibility Lorna was lying, but I didn't think so. What reason had she to do so? If I hadn't held her responsible for her birth, I certainly wouldn't hold her responsible for her mother's actions when Lorna had been but a child. "Thank you for telling me that," I said. "I didn't want to think it, but it was mentioned." "Of course it was. By Mr. Trevelyan, I wager." I didn't confirm this. I didn't need to. "So if Alfred believed he was being poisoned, did he know by whom?" I asked, curious to hear what his opinion had been. "He didn't know. But you have to ask yourself, who was alive for all three deaths?" I stared at her in astonishment as my stomach dipped, threatening to bring up my tea. "You think it was Lord Tavistock? But he's been ill for months." "Yes, but he has servants willing to do his bidding. And he's desperate to have his heir wed to the Duke of Bedford's daughter." "Because of the mine partnership." She arched her eyebrows meaningfully. "Is that all?" "I don't know," I replied, scrambling to reconsider everything I thought I knew. "Do you?" "No. But it's difficult not to wonder." I nodded. How on earth I was going to suggest such a thing to Gage? That his grandfather might be in some way responsible for his mother's death? It was horrifying. Something rubbed along my leg and I glanced down to find the orange tabby begging for my attention. Lorna leaned forward to see beyond the table. "Is that Sherry? If you don't like cats, just shoo him away." She smiled. "My father brought him to me. He thought I could use the companionship. And occasionally a good mouser." I ran my fingers over his soft fur. "I didn't see him the first time I visited." I laughed. "So he startled me terribly yesterday when I stepped in to leave you a note. I heard a sound in the bedroom and thought maybe you were in need of assistance. When I opened the door, he shot past my legs." But rather than joining me in laughing, Lorna stiffened. "Oh, did I shut him into the bedroom?" she remarked lightly. "It happens from time to time. The little devil is always underfoot, it seems." "Yes, cats are like that, aren't they?" I studied her face, trying to decipher what had unsettled her. She must have known I'd entered her cottage, for she'd gotten my message. Was she upset I'd done so? Particularly now that it appeared I wasn't the only one who'd come inside her home without her present. I opened my mouth to apologize, but she cut me off before I could speak. "Did you bring your sketchbook?" She gestured toward the satchel at my feet. "I did." "Then, if you've finished your tea, I'll take you to some of my favorite vantages." She rose to her feet. "I need to gather some fresh watercress anyway." I gave Sherry one last scratch behind the ears and allowed Lorna to lead me from the cottage, though my mind was still puzzling over her uneasy reaction and her unwillingness to talk about it, as well as that missing button.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 31	Several pleasant hours later, though the sky looked no different to me, Lorna suggested I should return to Langstone. She insisted the weather would soon turn, and I wouldn't wish to be caught out in it. Trusting her better knowledge of our surroundings, I obeyed, sticking to familiar paths I'd already trod lest I stumble into a bog again. The bright colors of a butterfly caught my eye as I was fording the River Walkham, and I paused to pull my sketchbook from my satchel. I had one last page on which to capture the image of the insect. Though I didn't have my paints with me, in the margins I noted the vibrant hues and the approximate mixture of pigments I would need to recreate them later. So absorbed was I in the task that the shift Lorna had warned me about began to happen. One moment the blue sky was streaked with wispy white clouds, and the next a dark gray ceiling slid into place over them. Tendrils of hair lifted from my temples in the blustery wind, and I realized I needed to hurry if I was going to escape getting soaked. I scrambled up the bank of the river, stuffing my charcoal case and sketchbook back into my satchel as I went. My book tumbled to the heath, but before I could bend to pick it up, another hand grabbed it for me. I gasped and whirled around. "Rory! You startled me." He gazed down at the drawing the book had fallen open to. It was a rendering of one of the views from Great Mis Tor, though I hadn't been able to resist including Lorna in the foreground, staring pensively out at the landscape before her. "My apologies," he murmured as he passed it back to me. He didn't sound very apologetic. He fell in step with me as I resumed my hastened trek back toward Langstone Manor. Studying him out of the corner of my eye, I couldn't help but note this was the second time he'd snuck up on me unawares. I'd speculated he might be following me, and now I really had to wonder if it was true. But why? Because of Lorna? "Miss Galloway warned me, but I'm still amazed by how swiftly the weather changed," I observed, curious how he would respond. "Yes. Even the most experienced can be fooled." "Does that include you? I had no idea you were so fond of the moor." In fact, I would have wagered he was more like his brother, rarely venturing this far out into the heath. "I don't know that I would say I'm fond of it." His eyes slid sideways to meet mine. "But those of us who are more conversant with its hazards have an obligation to look after those who are not. After all, we wouldn't want something unfortunate to happen." I nearly tripped over a rock, and by the time I recovered my footing he was already several paces ahead. Had I just been warned? Or was he rather clumsily trying to say he was concerned for my safety? Either way, the swelling wind wasn't the only thing that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 32	We returned to the manor just as the first drops of rain began to splutter from the sky. However, Rory didn't follow me inside; instead he peeled off to circle the house toward the stables. I didn't wait to see where exactly he was going, but scurried inside to keep dry. With the storms rolling in, effectively trapping me inside, and Gage still gone in the carriage, I set about amusing myself for the remainder of the day as I waited for him to return. I explored the remaining rooms in the manor, and then sat with Lord Tavistock, sketching while he dozed. I'd not forgotten the portrait he'd commissioned me to paint, and so diligently worked on a number of drawings of Gage in different poses. Not that drawing my attractive husband was any hardship. Several hours later I'd filled the front of the new sketchbook I'd retrieved from my room with various images of him, but I was no closer to puzzling out Lord Tavistock. Lorna's suspicions continued to circle around in my head. Could the viscount be responsible? Was it really possible he'd helped poison three people—his sister, his daughter, and his grandson? I didn't want to believe it, but the particulars were too troubling to be ignored. And Lorna was right, he was the only person connected to all three incidences, even indirectly. However, I was not looking forward to raising that specter with Gage. He returned to the manor just in time to dress for dinner, saving me from an awkward meal alone with his relatives. Unfortunately, Rory had elected not to join us, leaving us in Lady Langstone's chilly company. What she did with her time, I didn't know, for I rarely saw her during the day. I suspected she avoided us as much as we avoided her. But she almost always appeared at dinner elegantly attired and armed with more sly insults. As such, Gage was not in the most amenable mood when we retired to our chamber. It didn't help that Mr. Glanville had given him poor directions to the home of a mutual acquaintance of his and Alfred's. Not only had the coachman wasted precious time searching in the driving rain, but the carriage had also become mired in the acquaintance's muddy lane and had to be pushed out. "What of Endsleigh House?" I asked as I rubbed a hand consolingly up and down his arm. "Was the steward able to tell you anything about the Swing letters?" The furrows in his brow deepened. "The puffed-up peacock kept me waiting for nearly an hour. And when he did finally deign to see me, he denied their having received any. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. But as supercilious as the man behaved, I doubt he would have admitted it if they had." He exhaled heavily, sinking deeper into the cushions of the fainting couch. "Regardless, I think we need to set aside the Swing letters as the reason for Alfred's disappearance. There's been little indication of violence otherwise, and as has already been pointed out, it's quite precipitous to jump from written threats to deadly assault or outright murder." I turned to the side, curling my legs up under the skirts of my bright rose evening gown with white lace trim before reaching over to cradle my warm teacup between my hands. The turn in the weather had brought cooler temperatures, making the stone manor's rooms even colder than usual. "I agree. That doesn't preclude the possibility they were used as an excuse for carrying out their own agenda. But I don't think they're the real motive." He pulled at the ends of his cravat, loosening it so that it dangled around his neck. "I hope your visit with Miss Galloway was more fruitful. What is it?" he asked, reacting to my sound of disgust. "This tea." I set the cup aside with a cringe. "Either the milk is curdled or Cooper is playing another prank on us." "Do you want me to ring for another pot?" I waved it away. "No. I've had enough today as it is. I don't know if my visit was fruitful, but Miss Galloway did give me some interesting prospects to consider." "Oh?" I'd been running this conversation over and over in my head all afternoon, but I still needed to take a bracing breath before I dived in. "First of all, she admitted she and Alfred were more than friendly, though she didn't delve into specifics. But I wouldn't be surprised if they were lovers. She also knew about Lady Juliana, and how Alfred didn't wish to marry her." Gage's eyebrows arched in surprise. "Had he made promises to her?" "None that she mentioned. From the manner in which she spoke, I don't think she even expected them." "And no one would accuse Alfred of being too honorable to keep a mistress a short distance away from his wife after he wed," Gage remarked wryly. I shifted closer. "Perhaps more interesting, you were right about the herb bennet. She did suspect Alfred was being poisoned. And more importantly, he did, too." Gage's expression darkened. "But who would do such a thing? And why?" He'd neatly provided me with an opening, and yet my words felt clumsy on my lips. "Have you noticed there's something of a pattern here?" He stared at me blankly. I couldn't tell whether he wasn't following or he simply refused to react. "Of poisonings in your family." His eyebrows twitched with irritation. "Because of my mother?" "And your great-aunt Alice." "There is no proof that Alice was the girl from that legend or that she was poisoned," he insisted. "Yes, but if she was, you must admit there's something troubling going on here. And it all seems to center around that curse." He sighed in aggravation. "Kiera, there is no curse." "But you said we should consider the possibility—" "I said we should explore the ramifications. Not seriously give credence to the possibility there is such a curse." I pressed a hand to his leg, imploring him to listen. "Well, then what if someone else believed in it? What if someone was certain enough to help it along?" "What are you saying?" he bit out. "I'm saying that curse or no curse, there is a disturbing pattern of poisonings." I paused. "And your grandfather is the only person who was alive to witness all of them." His eyes turned to icy chips. "You must be jesting." "I don't want to believe it, Sebastian." My voice was tight with distress. "But it has to be considered." "It's utterly ridiculous!" "Then convince me of it." "First of all, Annie poisoned my mother, not my grandfather." "But who gave her the idea?" He glowered. "Second of all, he was not the only person alive for all three. Hammett was here, though he was a young boy at the time Alice died. Or do you suspect he was Grandfather's accomplice?" "Maybe." He scoffed in derision. "You actually think my grandfather is malicious enough to poison all of them simply because they defied the family's wishes? That's mad." "I know," I replied solemnly, having expected such a vehement response. I couldn't even blame him for it. I would have done the same. But the way he glared at me, like I was the most loathsome person he'd ever seen, was almost too difficult to bear. It made my heart shrivel inside my chest. "Can't we speak with him about it?" "And accuse him of committing three murders?" "No. We'll merely ask about Alice and the curse, that's all." He shook his head. "No." "Why?" "Why what?" "Why won't you ask him?" "What kind of question is that?" He shifted forward, ready to leap to his feet. "The man is deathly ill. I'm not going to send him to his grave with this nonsense." I studied him, unable to ignore his alarmed movements. "Is that really the reason? Or are you more afraid of hearing his answers?" The frantic glimmer in his eyes told me I was not far from the truth. But rather than face it, rather than face me, he stormed from the room, slamming the door. I stared at the cold wooden door and wrapped my arms around myself. Had I just destroyed my marriage? And for what? A suspicion I couldn't prove? To punish a man who already wasn't long for this world? Perhaps I was a loathsome person. I was certainly a fool.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 33	Though I lay awake for hours, Gage never returned. I considered going to him and apologizing, but the one time I worked up the nerve to do so I found the connecting door locked. I wasn't about to pound on it and beg, so I lay back down, clutching my stomach. It churned with pain and anxiety, making my head spin. I curled into a ball under the sheets in my cold bed, eventually falling into a fitful slumber. For the first time since our wedding, I slept alone. That is, until sometime during the wee hours of the morning when I vaulted out of bed, barely reaching the chamber pot before I was violently ill. When I'd finished emptying myself of everything I'd ever possibly eaten, I crumpled to the cold floor, moaning in pain and exhaustion. My insides felt like they were being shredded with broken glass. I'd presumed my agony over hurting Gage had caused my nausea, but I didn't think love alone could cause such forceful sickness. Moments later, I was back up on my knees. I thought someone said my name, but the sound of my retching blocked most everything else. Then I felt a warm, solid presence at my back, helping to hold me up. "I'm here, darling," Gage crooned, smoothing my stray tendrils of hair back from my face. "Let me help." When I collapsed to the floor again, he brought me a cool washcloth to bathe my face. Then he sat and held my hand as I begged God to make it stop, before scrabbling back up to my knees. How many times this process was repeated, I don't know. I lost count. But at some point, the roiling subsided and Gage carried me back to bed. He climbed in next to me, though I must have looked and smelled like something my cat, Earl Grey, would have left as a present to proudly display his hunting prowess. When I blinked open my eyes again it was to find morning had come. And from the look of the light filtering through the open windows, it was well advanced. I turned my head on the pillow to find Gage seated on the fainting couch with a book in his lap. When he saw me looking at him, he quickly crossed the room to perch on the mattress next to me. "You're awake," he sighed in relief, reaching for my hand. "Can I get you anything?" "Water," I croaked. He poured me a glass, and then helped me to sit and drink it. The water was cool and refreshing, and I would have gulped it, but he forced me to take sips. When I'd had my fill, I lay back down, panting as I tried to gather my breath to speak. Gage's eyes scanned me fretfully. "I think I'm recovering now," I assured him. "I'm tired, and thirsty, but it doesn't hurt anymore. At least, not like before." "That's good. The physician told me that would be a welcome sign." "Physician?" I tried to push to a seated position, but he pressed me back down. "Slowly. I'll prop you up a bit more if you like." I waited impatiently while he added another pillow behind mine. "When did a physician examine me?" "Yesterday." I stared at him wide-eyed. "How long have I been asleep?" He glanced at the clock on the mantel. "About twenty-eight hours." I couldn't fathom it. I'd slept an entire day, completely unaware time was passing? "Did the physician know why I was so ill?" Gage reached for my hand again, rubbing his thumb against mine as if he recognized I would need his support. "Poison." Whether my mind had sustained all the shock it could for one morning or somewhere inside me I'd already figured this out, I wasn't as surprised as it seemed I should be. "From the tea?" I quickly deduced, realizing now why it had tasted wrong. "More than likely. No one else has fallen ill." "Do we know who—" He shook his head before I could finish the question. "No one will admit to it, and all of the kitchen staff, as well as the maid who delivered the tea, swear they had no idea how it was poisoned." "Do you believe them?" He sighed. "I don't know. But the fact of the matter is, someone slipped the poison in. So someone is lying." He squeezed my hand tighter, his eyes stricken. "Thank heavens you didn't drink any more of it than you did. The physician said much more and . . . and it would have killed you." I wondered if the poison was still coursing through me, for that seemed the only explanation for the numbness I felt upon hearing I'd almost died. Then I saw Gage's eyes dip ever so briefly to my abdomen. My body went cold. "What of a possible child?" His eyes stared into mine, stricken with uncertainty. "The physician said it's too early to know, but . . . if you are with child, and the child has been affected, then..." I stared at him mutely. Neither of us seemed to be able to say the words to finish that thought. "But the doctor assured me you would recover fully," he assured me. I turned aside, not sure how I felt. If there was, or had been, a child growing inside me, I hadn't yet known it, hadn't yet come to terms with what that meant. And yet, there was a sharp twinge in the depths of my heart that told me I wasn't unaffected. But instead I returned to a safer topic. "Do we know what the poison was?" "Not for sure. There are several possible candidates. But . . . I'm ready to admit now that you were right. There may be some connection between all the poisonings. There's certainly one between yours and Alfred's." I lifted my hand to touch his face, feeling my heart twist at the raw tone of his voice. "I'm sorry." He shook his head, removing my hand from his face to clasp it between his. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have stormed out like I did. Or, at least, I shouldn't have stayed away." "Well, I might have handled matters better myself. Especially as another thought occurred to me." He arched his eyebrows in question. "Maybe your grandfather isn't doing the poisoning. Maybe he's being poisoned, too. After all, your mother's illness masked what her maid was doing for years." I watched as the implications of such a possibility played across his face. "Then that would mean Rory has the strongest motive to be our poisoner. With Grandfather and Alfred both out of the way, he'll not only become the heir, but the viscount." I grimaced in sympathy, not liking the possibility any more than he did. His eyes glinted with determination as he rose to his feet. "You're right. I need to speak with Grandfather." "I'm coming with you." Gage scowled down at me. "No, you're not. You are not rising from this bed." "Of course I am. I may be a trifle weak, but I'm sure I can manage to walk fifty feet. After I've eaten something and bathed, that is," I remarked, lifting my soiled nightdress away from my skin. His expression was adamant, but I was not about to let him do this alone. "Sebastian, let me do this for you," I pleaded earnestly. "I promise. The moment I feel faint or too overwhelmed, I'll let you carry me back to my bed, scolding me the entire way." He glared at me a moment longer before relenting with a heavy sigh. "Agreed. The moment you feel too unwell, you'll tell me?" "I will," I agreed, resolved that would not happen. Fortunately, before Gage could challenge me further, Bree entered the room. "Yer awake, m'lady," she exclaimed, setting her stack of linens aside and hurrying forward. She pressed a hand to my brow and reached for the glass of water, urging me to drink. Gage nodded to me and slipped out of the room. I trusted he would wait for me as promised. However, convincing Bree of the necessity of my rising from bed would be another matter. So I chose to omit my intentions until I had to. "Are ye hungry? Shall I send for some toast?" I wasn't sure why she asked, for she'd already bustled over to tug the bellpull. "Yes, please." I pushed my covers down and slowly sat up, pausing when my head began to spin. "And send for hot water. I'm sure I'll feel even better after a bath." "Aye," she agreed. But when I tried to swing my legs over the side of the bed, she shooed me back in place. "No need to rush. It'll take time for 'em to prepare it." I sighed, resigned to being coddled. "Ye gave us all a right scare," Bree said, folding the blanket back over me. I was touched by the concern etched across her brow. "Well, had I any say in the matter, I wouldn't have caused it." Bree smiled tightly. "So tell me what I've missed while lying abed? Any thawing from Mrs. Webley?" Her eyes lit with eagerness. "Nay, but she did show a great deal o' interest in that scorched scrap o' paper I let fall from my pocket." "Did she?" "Aye. She recognized it. O' that, I'm sure." "Well, then, I wouldn't be surprised if I receive a visit from the Dowager Lady Langstone in short order. But don't let her enter until I've finished my bath."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 34	Like clockwork, almost to the second Bree inserted the last hairpin, a knock sounded on the door. My maid looked up to meet my eyes in the reflection of the looking glass and I held up a hand, forestalling her. It simply wouldn't do to let Lady Langstone, if it was indeed her, think I was overeager to speak with her. Let her wait. I turned my head, examining the simple coiled chignon Bree had fastened at the back of my head, forgoing the hot tongues and side curls that were fashionable as of late. In truth, I preferred this smoother arrangement, but as Gage's wife it wouldn't do for me to completely ignore what was stylish. When enough time had passed, I nodded to Bree. I examined my reflection one last time and then swiveled on the bench to face whomever entered. I bit back a smile of wry triumph when the dowager strolled into the chamber. Coolly composed as ever, she glanced first at the bed, where no doubt she expected me to still be lying, and then to where I was seated before my dressing table. I used my prerogative as an invalid recovering from being poisoned to remain seated. In truth, my legs might have shaken if I stood for long. I nodded to Bree, who hovered near the door, and she departed to give us some privacy, though I knew she wouldn't go far. "I wished to offer my apologies that you suffered harm while under our roof, but I see you're making a swift recovery." Her eyes glinted with cynicism. "To hear Sebastian talk, you were practically at death's door." I refused to acknowledge such a remark with a response—not when it was clear she wished to rile me. "Lady Langstone, what can I do for you?" She pressed her lips together tightly, considering me. It was clear she was unhappy I hadn't taken the bait, and just as clear she didn't want to say what I'd already guessed she was here for. "I believe you have something of mine." "Do I?" "Yes. You instructed your maid to be certain my maid knew she had it." I flashed her an arch smile, giving her credit for recognizing such a ploy. She held her hand out. "I would like it back." "Now why would I do that?" I asked, tilting my head. Her gaze sharpened. "Because I don't think you want your husband to know about it." "And if he already does?" This finally succeeded in unsettling her, for she stiffened. I decided to press my advantage. "Just as your son Alfred did, or he would not have been blackmailing you." Her eyelids lowered to half-mast as she glared down at me. "And is that what you are attempting to do now? Extort something from me? I should have expected as much from the butcher's wife," she sneered, harkening back to one of the cruel epithets the newspapers had called me once the scandal of my involvement with my late anatomist husband's work had broken. But she would have to do better than that if she wished to upset me. "Actually, I'm more curious whether you had him killed because of it." If not for the horrifying nature of our discussion, I would have enjoyed Lady Langstone's stunned expression. "You cannot be serious?" she gasped before lifting her chin in righteous indignation. "I've never been so insulted in all my life." "And yet I know he was blackmailing you." "That may be," she begrudgingly admitted. "But I would hardly kill him over the matter. Especially when all he wanted in return was for me to try to persuade Lord Tavistock that Lady Juliana would not be the best bride for him." I arched a single eyebrow skeptically. "It's true." "Do you have proof?" "My word should be proof enough," she sniffed, but then some of her umbrage faded. "Do you truly think he's dead? I thought . . . you and Sebastian had hopes otherwise." "I don't know," I said, finding it difficult not to soften under the signs of her obvious distress. "But the longer he's missing, the greater chance we have to face that possibility." She looked away, swallowing hard as she worried her hands before her. I gave her a moment to compose herself, hoping my kindness would encourage her to confess what she knew. But I should have known better. "Well, I had nothing to do with . . . with whatever has happened to him. And neither had that letter." She held out her hand as if she fully expected me to comply with the implied demand. "You keep referring to the letter in the singular, as if I didn't witness you burning a whole stack of them." She scowled. "I don't know what you're talking about. Those papers you so rudely barged into my chambers to see burning were merely old bills." I sighed and rolled my eyes, annoyed with her ridiculous pretense. "Regardless, I'm not returning it. Why are you indulging in an assignation with Gage's father anyway? I would have thought he was unworthy of your charms." If she could have stamped her foot and not looked like a petulant child, I suspected she would have. "There was . . . is no assignation. There never was. That letter was from a long time ago." She crossed her arms over her chest. "I can't be faulted with the fact that the man developed an unhealthy attraction to me while his wife lay ill. One I certainly never welcomed. I always said he was a toad-eating scoundrel." "Then why did you keep his letters?" She stewed for a second before huffing. "If you're not going to be reasonable, then we have nothing to discuss." If she thought I would call after her and try to persuade her from leaving, she was sadly mistaken. Her words and actions had already given me ample information to ponder. As did her flustered retreat.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 35	Apparently Lord Tavistock had been kept apprised of my situation, for his first reaction upon seeing Gage escorting me into his chamber was to admonish his grandson for allowing me out of bed. "She should be tucked up resting," he scolded. "Not traipsing about the manor." Gage pulled a chair closer to the bed and then helped me to sit. "She has a mind of her own, Grandfather." "Well, whose fault is that?" "God," I retorted despite being winded and a bit light-headed from the walk. I appreciated the evident affection that underlay his reproving words, but that didn't mean I was going to condone them. "I am well enough. And tired of lying in that bed." The viscount grunted in disapproval and then turned to Gage. "Why are you here plaguing me, anyway? Have you found Alfred?" "I'm afraid not." He pressed a steadying hand on my shoulder. "But we do have some questions for you that might help us locate him." His grandfather sat back with his hands folded before him. "Then ask." Gage glanced down at me, as if uncertain how to start. "This may sound unrelated, but can you tell us how your illness began?" The viscount frowned. "With a slight cough and some wheeziness. As it always does." "No stomach complaints?" "No." His shrewd eyes flicked back and forth between us. "You're wondering if it was set off by poison. Like your mother." "We thought it might be possible," Gage replied carefully. "Particularly given the fact it looks like Alfred was also being poisoned." All the blood seemed to drain from the old man's face, and I sat forward in concern. "By whom?" he gasped. Gage shook his head. "We don't know. But one can't help but notice a pattern." His grandfather turned his head to the side, staring at the open window. The fact that he hadn't refuted this suggestion spoke volumes. "Can we add Alice to that list?" The viscount jerked his head back around to stare at him. "My sister?" Gage nodded. For a moment, I didn't know what his grandfather would say. He sat so still, so motionless, but then he exhaled as he sank deeper into the pillows behind him. "Yes." My husband's hand tightened on my shoulder, and I knew he was restraining himself. "The legend they tell about Stephen's Grave is true. I'm not sure why the family was so intent on denying that fact." He nodded toward the window. "She met that madman at the crossroads where they erected a stone. She was there to tell him she didn't care for him, and then he poisoned her and himself. I was away at school at the time. Learned about it in a terse letter from my father. It was never to be discussed. Not even among the family." My breath caught at the long-buried hurt creeping along the edges of his voice. To be informed of his sister's death by letter and then never allowed to ask questions about it? It was heartless. Perhaps his parents had found it too painful, but I suspected it had more to do with shame. "Is that the origin of our family's supposed curse?" Gage asked. "A curse? Yes, I suppose it is, though I've always thought of it as more of a family motto." He shook his head. "No, that's much older." He studied each of us in turn again. "You think someone is out for vengeance against our family?" It was more likely someone within the family was enacting their own agenda, but Gage did not say this. Not when it would point to his grandfather as an obvious suspect. "We don't know. But it has to be considered." The viscount's gaze strayed toward the window again, as if seeing something in the distance, or perhaps the past. "Yes, I suppose it does."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 36	I was still contemplating his enigmatic reply several hours later while Gage and I enjoyed a quiet dinner in our rooms. Exhausted from my illness and the afternoon's exertions, I'd been too weary to descend to the dining room and fend off Lady Langstone's barbs. Gage, Lord Tavistock, and Bree—who still scowled at me for not listening to her earlier—had all been right. I should have stayed in bed. But how could I do so when I was certain we were so close to the key to figuring all of this out? In any case, I was hesitant to eat any of the prepared dishes or beverages at the manor until we understood who had tried to poison me. So we requested a cold supper and an unopened bottle of wine—items we could examine and deduce with some confidence whether they had been tampered with. A knock sounded on the bedchamber door while I nibbled on a piece of apple Gage had sliced with his own knife for dessert. Gage and I shared a look of mutual confusion and then he called out for them to enter. I nearly choked when Lady Langstone tentatively opened the door. She was dressed for dinner in a gown of aubergine silk with garnets glistening at her throat and wrist. "I apologize for interrupting your evening," she murmured far more politely than I was accustomed to. I scrutinized her in suspicion, pondering if she was here to discuss Lord Gage's letters again. This time with her goal being to hurt her nephew. "What can we do for you?" he asked, unaware of my trepidation. She clasped her hands tightly before her. "I merely wondered if either of you have seen Roland today." "I haven't." Gage's eyes flicked toward me. "And I assume Kiera hasn't." I nodded in confirmation even as a trickle of unease slid down my spine. "I haven't seen Rory since we returned from the moor two days ago, just before that storm began in earnest." "I see." She fidgeted. "What of you, Sebastian? Did you see him yesterday?" He frowned as if the same disquieting sensation was also settling over him. "No, I can't say I did. I was too concerned for my wife." He glanced up at his aunt. "I take it you haven't seen him since then either?" "No. Not since the incident Lady Darby mentioned. I happened to be looking out the window when they came striding in from the moor." "But Rory didn't enter the house with me," I recounted, thinking back. "He turned to go around the side of the manor. Where to, I don't know. It had begun to rain and I was concerned with staying dry." Lady Langstone nodded. "Yes, I saw that." Her eyes flickered with something I thought might be fear. "And I saw him return a few moments later and go back out through the gate onto the moor." "With a storm bearing down?" Gage said incredulously. "Yes." He set the knife and apple aside and rose to his feet, taking command of the situation. "Have you questioned the staff yet?" "No," she replied. "I . . . I didn't want to unduly alarm them." "Well, go do so now. Given the fact that Alfred is still missing, if Rory hasn't been seen in over forty-eight hours, I think we need to assume he may also be in trouble. I'll speak with Grandfather." I pushed to my feet, shock and concern driving away much of my weariness. "And I'll search the study. Perhaps he made note of an appointment or some other affair that would explain his absence." My husband's eyes scoured my face, as if to ascertain whether I was capable of the task given my evident exhaustion moments ago, but he didn't protest. "Send a servant if you find anything of importance."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 37	The same neatly arranged piles covered Lord Tavistock's desk as before, so I set to work sorting through them. Everything seemed in order. Letters, bills, contracts, purchase agreements, crop-yield reports, repair estimates—all the things you would expect to find on such an estate. I paid particular attention to the letters at the top of the stack made up of miscellaneous correspondence, but nothing of note caught my eye. No new Swing letters. No complaints of any kind. If Rory or the viscount had kept an appointment book or agenda, I couldn't find it. I was about to give up and return to our chamber when the bottom right drawer in the desk yielded something of interest. It was my sketchbook. The one I'd used the last page of to capture the image of that butterfly two days prior. The one Rory had handed back to me when I dropped it. I stared down at it in bewilderment. I hadn't even known it was missing. Why was it in this desk? And who had taken it? Thus far we assumed Rory had disappeared immediately after escorting me back to the manor, but perhaps we were wrong. If Rory had been the one to take my book, then he would have had to enter my room sometime after I returned, but before Gage and I retired for the night. Of course, there was always the possibility someone else had nabbed it and stashed it here to keep suspicion away from them. But once again, why? I flipped through the pages, trying to comprehend what the culprit had hoped to find, and wondering if they'd found it. No pages were marked or missing. Nevertheless, I still felt vaguely violated. As if someone had tried to use my art for nefarious means. If only I knew what they were.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 38	When I returned to my bedchamber, I found Gage pacing back and forth. "I was just about to come looking for you," he said, lowering his hand from his hair where he'd been raking his fingers through it in agitation. "Did you find anything?" "Just my sketchbook," I replied, passing it to him. "Your sketchbook?" "I'm as perplexed as you are." I reached up to smooth down his hair. "How did your grandfather react?" He sank down on the edge of the bed with a heavy sigh. "Not well. The truth is, I've never seen him like this. He seemed to shrink in on himself before my very eyes." I sat beside him, taking his hand. "This could kill him," he whispered, as if saying the words too loud would make them come true. "We'll find them," I told him, not able to bear the stricken look in his eyes. "And . . . and if they aren't able to tell us themselves, we'll find out what happened to them." "Will we?" I infused all the determination I could into my voice. "Yes." He offered me a weak smile of gratitude, but I could tell he didn't believe me. Not yet. "So tell me the obvious, who is next in line to inherit after Rory? Your grandfather had three children, correct? One son and two daughters?" He inhaled, furrowing his brow in concentration. "Let's see, it would have to be Grandfather's younger brother. Or one of his sons or grandsons. But the last I heard they still lived in America." I worried my lip. "I'm assuming this information is at least fifteen years old." "Yes." "Then perhaps at least one of them has returned to England." "It's possible," he admitted, though he sounded doubtful. "Are you certain his brother had sons?" He shook his head in frustration. "I don't know. To be honest, I never paid much attention." "So what happens if none of them are alive or exist to inherit? Does it go back another generation?" "That's normally the law." I racked my brain, trying to think of any alternative possibilities. "You mentioned a cousin Edmund, your aunt Harriet's son. That they live in a cottage near here." Gage shook his head. "I know what you're thinking, and the answer is no. I don't believe Edmund is capable of killing his cousins on the chance that if he requests a special dispensation from the Crown he might inherit." I grimaced in apology. "I meant no offense. I'm just trying to understand why someone would harm both Alfred and Rory." He wrapped his arm around me and pulled me close. "I know." Then he sighed again. "I'll speak to Grandfather tomorrow, and if he doesn't know the whereabouts of his brother and any of his descendants, then I suppose I shall have to write Father asking another favor." "Is he keeping tally?" His voice was wry. "He's always keeping tally."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 39	Gage and I made the same rounds we had before, visiting all the adjoining landowners and searching the moor closest to the manor. Lady Langstone had already spoken to the house staff, and Hammett handled questioning the gardeners and stable workers. No one admitted to seeing Rory. No one knew where he might have gone. It was eerily similar to Alfred's disappearance. The only difference was that Lady Langstone had witnessed Rory striding back out onto the moor, while a gardener had been the last to see Alfred do the same. Beyond that, there was no trace of him. Not even a bloody coat. Or had we simply not found it yet? While Gage rode on to speak with some of the farmers who worked the land southwest of Langstone Manor, I spurred my horse to Lorna's cottage. If possible, she seemed even more distressed to hear of Rory's disappearance, but perhaps it was the cumulative effect. After all, if she'd been holding out hope that Alfred would return, the disappearance of his brother must make that hope seem even more forlorn. When I returned to the manor, I climbed the stairs toward our chamber, planning to change out of my riding attire and wait for Gage to return. But the shrill sound of a raised voice made me stumble to a stop. "This is your fault! Your sole purpose in being summoned here was to find Alfred, and you couldn't even do it!" Despite the strident tone, I recognized the voice as belonging to the Dowager Lady Langstone. Ascending two more stairs, I could see around the bend in the staircase to the landing above where she stood berating Gage. I'd never seen her in such a frenzied state, and the way her arms flailed about, gesturing dramatically, I believed for a moment she might actually strike him. "And now . . . and now Roland is missing, too! Some sort of inquiry agent you are," she scoffed. "The great Stephen Gage's son, foiled by a simple disappearance." She reared closer. "Or don't you want to find them? After all, with your cousins gone you stand to inherit more of Tavistock's estate, even if you'll never achieve the title." Gage held up his hands in a staying gesture. "Aunt Vanessa, I'm doing all I can—" "Are you?" she shrieked. "It doesn't seem that way to me." She stabbed her finger behind her. "You should be out there scouring every inch of the moor. You should be demanding answers. You should be . . ." Her voice broke on a sob, and she quickly inhaled, turning her head to the side. Gage reached a hand out to comfort her, but she shrugged it away. "Is this your attempt at revenge?" she sniffed, masking her fear with fury. "For what happened to your mother. After all, I know how softhearted you were when it came to her. Always ready to defend her over the tiniest slight, even if it meant violence. If only she'd deserved such loyalty," she sneered under her breath. "Leave my mother out of this," Gage snapped, his aunt having finally succeeded in riling him. "Why should I? She's part of all of this. Even if, like always, she's not here to get her dress dirty." "She's dead." She shook her head as if in disbelief. "You still can't see it. And you're purported to be so clever. Yet your mother pulled the wool over your eyes and you've never removed it." I was startled to hear Lady Langstone voice the same doubts I'd harbored about Emma Gage. The same misgivings about her failure to protect her son, though my view was tinted with outrage on his behalf while hers was tinged with scorn. The realization was not a welcome one. "Well, fifteen years hasn't changed the fact that Emma got exactly what she deserved." I knew Gage. I knew how honorable he was. He'd never raised a hand to me, and I believed he never would. But my first husband had. So even at this distance, I could tell the moment the idea gripped Gage. The moment his hand clenched, seeking to take out his fury on the person who'd caused it. I flinched, bending my knees and bracing for what was to come. Except it never happened. His body fairly vibrated with the desire to do it, but he never lifted his hand. He simply glared at her as if by a look alone he could turn her to ashes. Unfortunately, his aunt didn't recognize how close she'd come to being struck. "Such a waste. She could have wed a duke if she wanted to be such a convalescent. She would never have had to lift a finger." "You speak as if she had a choice." She shook her head in contempt before pointing at his chest. "Find my sons! Or else I'll be forced to take my own revenge. Perhaps on your dear little wife." Gage stepped forward to tower over her. "Did you . . .?" "Don't be such a fool," she retorted, not backing down. "I didn't poison your wife. But don't imagine I won't harm her." She tilted her head. "Do you honestly think the family approves of your marriage to her?" He stiffened. "Your father isn't the only one who can make their discontentment known." With this parting comment, she turned on her heel to march away. I watched Gage. Watched the agony and disillusionment flicker across his features. Should I go to him or give him a moment to compose himself? Before I could decide, the decision was made for me. "M'lady?" I gasped in surprise, whirling to see who had snuck up on me. "I beg yer pardon, m'lady." Hammett's expression was carefully neutral. "I thought ye heard me climbing the stairs." "No, I was just . . ." I stumbled to form a response, but I could think of no plausible explanation as to why I was standing halfway up the staircase seemingly staring into space. So I opted for the truth, guessing the butler had already deduced it anyway. "I was eavesdropping," I replied with a sheepish grin. The old retainer's eyes lit with humor. "Yes, well, if the dowager was part o' the conversation, I'm sure yer ears are blistered." My distress must have been evident, for his amusement fled. "Badgering Master Sebastian again, was she?" He sighed. "She never could mind her opinion with the boy." I glanced toward Gage, worried he would hear us talking about him, only to find he was no longer there. I frowned. "Why do you think that is? Gage was hardly a worthy target for such vehemence." "Well, I suspect it's something to do with the fact that Emma was never around the manor enough for her to sharpen her tongue on her, so she took it out on the nearest thing. And also the fact that Sebastian was so much more intelligent and better behaved than her boys. He bested 'em at everything." He turned to gaze down the staircase, his eyes narrowing. "In a perfect world, the dowager would've been a more fitting mother for Master Sebastian. She so protective and anxious for him to achieve, and he so determined and eager to please." He shrugged. "But then, would Sebastian have turned out that way if he hadn't had a mother who was continuously ill and scorned by her family for her choices, and also dogged at avoidin' confrontation and unpleasantness?" That was an interesting observation. For better or for worse, Emma had to some extent been responsible for the good, noble man Gage had become. Given his less-than-devoted relatives and belittling father, it was somewhat amazing that he had grown to be the confident, self-assured man he was today, and I suspected much of that was due to Emma's influence. "I'll say one thing for Lady Langstone," Hammett remarked. "She does an admirable job actin' as his lordship's hostess and lady of the manor, and she receives little credit for it. Most of the servants see her haughty, exacting nature, which certainly doesn't endear her to anyone. But they fail to recognize the underlying care she has for 'em." I didn't think Hammett was asking me to feel sympathetic toward her ladyship. After all, his previous actions had demonstrated how little he liked her himself. But he did seem to be reminding me there was usually more to a person than one first assumed. That every action, good or bad, could be motivated by something opposite. I couldn't help but wonder if while making this point he was really thinking of something, or someone, different. "You said you recall Lord Tavistock's older sister Alice?" Given his talkative mood, I hoped this time he might share more about her. He searched my face, as if weighing something in the balance before he spoke. "Aye. She was lovely. And headstrong. Though, remember I was only a stable boy back then. I only ever saw her from a distance, but she had a reputation." "Do you remember when she died?" He drew himself up even taller. "I do. And I suppose you'd like to know if the official story is the truth." He shook his head. "But that's not for me to reveal. Though . . ." He nodded as if making a decision. "I do think you and Master Sebastian should know it. Tell his lordship I said if he doesn't tell ye all, then I will." My brow furrowed in mild frustration, wishing the butler would simply share what he knew, but I didn't press. It was clear Hammett believed this was a tale best told by Lord Tavistock, and would not be budged unless the viscount refused. "I need to speak with Gage, then," I remarked, turning to look in the direction where he had once stood. "M'lady, if I may," Hammett murmured tentatively. "If Lady Langstone was indeed harassing him, I should look in one of two places for him." Seeing the concern in the old retainer's eyes, I quickly deduced the first. "His mother's grave." "Aye. Or the woodworking shed. 'Tis where he always disappeared to after his lordship began teaching him." His own personal sanctuary. Nodding my thanks, I set off toward the shed first, following Hammett's directions. I had to admit, beyond locating my husband to be certain he was well, I was curious to see this place where he and his grandfather had always related best to each other. I remembered him telling me the woodworking shed was the only place they hadn't fought. I imagined it was something like my art studio in the conservatory at my childhood home, or the tower room I utilized at my brother-in-law's estate in the Highlands, where I'd escaped to whenever my emotions or my memories became too much to bear. Following a path that led out of an ivy-covered door in the wall surrounding the front courtyard, I walked about a quarter of a mile into the woodland part of the Langstone property, which extended away from the moor. I hadn't paused to change, so I still carried the train of my riding habit looped over my arm, trying to keep the fabric from tripping me up. The land was pitted with stones and riddled with tiny streams, all sheltered under the branches of tall oak, birch, and hazel trees. Mosses and lichens grew on some of the barks and rocks, making them slippery underfoot. A dormouse scurried out from beneath a fern I trod near, almost tripping me. I'd begun to wonder whether I'd taken a wrong turn when suddenly the trees parted to reveal a squat stone building—the gamekeeper's cottage. And next to it stood an even smaller structure, this one made of wood. The door was propped open to let in what sunlight penetrated through the branches above, and I knew I'd come to the right place. I approached slowly, certain to make an ample amount of noise. The last thing I wanted to do was startle him while he was wielding a saw or driving nails in with a hammer. When at last I reached the door and peered in, it was to find him bent over a long piece of wood, running a plane over it again and again. He had discarded his frock coat, waistcoat, and cravat, and the force required to push the cutting blade over the wood made the muscles in his back and shoulders bunch and stretch. I stood watching his almost elegant, rippling movements, and my breath grew short as I waited for him to acknowledge me. Surely it wasn't wrong to ogle one's own husband. "Hammett told you where to find me, didn't he," he grunted as he pushed on the tool once again. I swallowed. "Yes." He looked up at the wall before him, panting from the exertion. "You overheard part of my conversation with Aunt Vanessa." It wasn't a question, but I answered him anyway. "Yes. I didn't know whether to speak up or go away, so I . . . eavesdropped." He resumed his task. "It doesn't matter." But I could tell it did. Though I didn't think he was truly angry with me for listening in on their conversation. It was more to do with the things his aunt had said, specifically about his mother. "You know she was only out to wound you however she could," I said. "I'm fairly certain she would have said just about anything to make you hurt as much, if not more, than she's hurting." It didn't matter what the truth was, I realized now. Emma was long dead, and completely unable to defend herself. It did no good questioning her motives, especially when doing so did more harm than good. What mattered were Gage's loving memories of her, the ones he so jealously guarded as if someone might steal them away. Except doing so also locked away the pain with them. He needed to share them, to let them breathe again. I didn't know how to convince him to do that, but I had to try. "Your mother was a good woman. I know this. Even without ever having met her." His movements stopped, as he stood hunched over listening to me. "She is part of you. One of the best parts. It's simply not possible that she wasn't a wonderful woman. Yes, I'm sure she had her flaws. But so do we all. To suppose she was perfect only does a disservice to the complicated, caring woman she was." "So you think my aunt was right?" he challenged. I sighed. "Sebastian, how could I know? But does it really matter? Does it truly change who she was? Does it change how much she evidently loved you?" "I . . ." He paused and spluttered, almost as if he were choking on his own thoughts. Then he shook his head. "I can't talk about this." "You can't . . . or you don't wish to?" I replied gently. He finally turned to look at me for the first time since I'd entered the shed, and there was a brittleness in his eyes I'd never seen before. I worried if I pressed too hard, he might shatter. "Why haven't you visited her grave?" He stared at me, refusing to answer. I tilted my head. "Or have you, and you just didn't want me to know?" As fiercely as he protected everything else about her, I wouldn't have been surprised. He looked away. "I haven't." But he wouldn't elaborate or answer my original question. Eventually I had to concede. "I see." His head snapped up. This comment for some reason ignited his smoldering temper. "No, you don't." "Then help me understand," I pleaded. "You told me not to let you retreat. You said I needed to force you to provide answers." He stood tall, turning full toward me almost in challenge. "But I didn't promise to give them." I exhaled, acknowledging his point. He was right. He hadn't promised, and I couldn't force him. Not really. My eyes dipped to the hollow of his throat, visible above his white lawn shirt now damp with his sweat. I didn't want him to see the hurt his refusal caused me. If he wouldn't speak to me of his mother, then I would just have to resort to discussing the inquiry. "Hammett knows the truth about Alice's death, and he told me to tell your grandfather that if he doesn't reveal it to us, Hammett will." He stared at me blankly. "The truth?" I turned to the side. "I'm going to speak with Lord Tavistock now. Do you wish to join me?" When Gage didn't answer, I took that as dissent and began to leave. But he grabbed my arm, halting me. "Wait." I glanced over my shoulder at him. "Yes, I'll come. Just give me a moment." However, he made no move to gather his discarded clothes, just stood gazing down at me. I arched my eyebrows, waiting for him to speak. For a moment, he seemed about to confide in me. The words seemed poised on his lips. But instead he pulled me into his arms and kissed me. At first, I didn't resist. As fascinating as I'd found the play of his muscles under his shirt moments ago, it wouldn't have been difficult to forget my disappointment and let him direct this where he wished. But deep inside, I knew by doing so not only would I be losing, but perhaps more importantly, so would Gage. So after a feverish minute, I pushed against his chest, breaking our embrace. "You can't always make everything better with kisses," I whispered, peering up into his eyes. "I'm not going to let you hide behind physical distraction." I stepped back. "I'll wait for you outside." I whirled away so I wouldn't have to witness the shocked confusion mixed with frustration that radiated across his face. Though I knew I'd done the right thing, it still made a knot form in the pit of my stomach. A knot I suspected was only going to grow tauter with our next conversation.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 40	I'd not visited Lord Tavistock since Gage delivered the brutal news about Rory the evening before, so the sight of him left me in shock. Gage said he'd seemed to shrink in on himself, and a truer description could not have been made. The proud, stalwart man appeared to have collapsed into the mattress, all but being swallowed by the blankets and pillows surrounding him. His gleaming silver eyes were tarnished with pain, and perhaps dulled by the medication his valet had been dosing him with upon our arrival. Seeing him in such a state, I hesitated to relay Hammett's message. But then I reminded myself the best, and possibly only way we might help the viscount recover was to find his grandsons. If forcing him to address disturbing facts enabled us to do that, then any discomfort they caused was worth it. I'd hoped he might rage against his upstart butler for forcing his hand. Anything that might show a spark of life in him. But he merely sighed, his lips curling upward at the corners in reluctant amusement. "Hammett never did abide by the normal boundaries of master and servant." He waved a hand limply. "Come sit. I'll tell you." He stared up at the bed curtains as if peering into the past. "Everything I told you the other day is true. I was away at school when it happened, and my parents did forbid us to speak of it." He sighed again. "But it wasn't for the reason I led you to believe, though I didn't learn the truth until many years later. From Hammett, of all people." He glanced at us. "Servants know everything. Don't forget that." Gage and I shared a look. "My sister Alice was often willful and stubborn. And when she decided she wanted something, she wouldn't rest until she got it. Usually that meant a new dress, or embossed stationary, or some other inconsequential thing." He frowned. "But for some reason, she fixed her heart on John Stephen. No one knows why. The man wasn't rumored to be particularly attractive or accomplished, and he certainly wasn't wealthy or titled. But whatever the reason, when my father ordered her to sever the attachment, she did the exact opposite. She agreed to run away with him." His face contorted as he began to cough, his body crumpling up under the force of it. I slid forward in alarm, ready to summon his valet to dose him with more medicine. But then the racking coughs began to subside. Seeing my posture, he urged me to sit back. However, he didn't reject Gage's offer to help him drink a bit of water. I noted how little he swallowed, and my concern grew. "My father was not a stupid man. And he knew his children well enough. He was aware of the possibility that Alice would disobey him. So he instructed the cook, under a strict veil of secrecy, to leave a bowl of poisoned apples out in the kitchen, and order the staff not to touch them." I pressed a hand to my mouth, already guessing what had happened. "If Alice listened, if she broke Stephen's heart, there would be no cause for concern. But if she snuck out to meet him, and if she stopped in the kitchen to grab what food she could find for the journey, knowing the man she loved owned little . . . well, then, as Father saw it, she would have her just punishment." "That's . . ." Gage seemed incapable of coming up with a word horrible enough to describe such an action. "Yes." The viscount inhaled a rattling breath. "As I'm sure you've guessed, she took the apples, and she ate one. I can only assume that when Stephen realized what happened, he also ate of the apple, killing himself rather than going on without her." "That poor man," I murmured, shaking my head. Buried at a crossroad for his suicide, his name smeared for a murder he hadn't committed. But Gage was focused on something more immediate. "So Mother wasn't the first poison victim in our family?" His grandfather's eyes were stricken. "No." He hesitated and then added, "And Alice might not have been the first one either." This startled both of us. "Who?" I demanded. "My great-uncle." "The man who supposedly walked out on the moors, fell over some rocks and bashed his head?" Gage asked. "I always thought drink was to blame for that." "That was the official story, yes. But our old nanny used to always warn us we'd best listen to our parents or we might die from a bash to the head as well." My eyes widened. Lord Tavistock coughed into his fist. "I assumed it was an idle threat until I grew older. Then I began to wonder. After all, my great-uncle was the original heir, and there were whispers he'd been indulging in . . . immoral acts." What exactly that meant, I didn't know, and it was clear he wasn't about to elaborate with a lady present. Gage leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. "Is that the origin of the curse? Is that when it all began?" "As far as I know," the viscount admitted with reluctance. The viscount's great-uncle, Alice, and Emma. That was a suspicious string of deaths. And now Alfred and Rory were missing. We knew Alice's and Emma's deaths had been spurred along by human aid. I presumed the great-uncle's death had also, perhaps by his parents or the younger brother who would inherit. But what of Alfred? Who had poisoned him? And what about Rory? What had he done that constituted defying the family? Then I remembered something. Several days before when I'd come to sit with Lord Tavistock, I'd interrupted an argument between him and Rory. I'd thought nothing of it at the time, deciding it was likely some estate matter they disagreed on, but now I had to wonder. "You and Rory had a disagreement a few days before he went missing," I remarked, watching him carefully. Gage sat tall, alarm radiating through him, but his grandfather never reacted. "Can you tell us what it was about?" I asked. If he was offended, he didn't show it. "He wanted me to write to Lord Sherracombe and ask him to forbid his natural daughter, a Miss Galloway, to sell her herbal remedies in the village." I reached out a hand to clasp Gage's arm. The viscount coughed. "I take it you're familiar with her." "He truly does believe she poisoned Alfred," I told Gage. "Yes, I gathered as much." Lord Tavistock frowned at Gage. "He also seemed convinced her mother supplied your mother's maid with the poison she used on her." "Miss Galloway said that's not true." "Well, even if so, it seems rather harsh to saddle the girl with her mother's crime." Gage turned his hand over, reaching for my hand, which I gave to him. "And Rory was angry you wouldn't do as he asked?" "I told him I preferred to wait until you finished your investigation before I took any action. He called me a fool, and told me it would be on my head if more deaths followed." His bleary eyes fastened on me. "To tell you the truth, when I first heard you'd been poisoned, I worried he might have been right." I was grateful for Gage's hand in mine, for I needed his support as I reeled with shock at such a suggestion. "You're sure the poison was in the tea you drank here?" he clarified. "I . . . yes. At least, I think so. It tasted wrong. I only had the one sip." But what if I was wrong? What if the poor taste of my evening tea could be attributed to curdled milk or another factor? After all, I had taken tea with Lorna earlier in the day. The same day I asked her about the button. And now Rory was missing. The possibility that it might have been Lorna who poisoned me left me feeling as cold as ice.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 41	The dream began like all the times before. A sense of uneasiness slowly crept over me, prickling my skin all the way up to my scalp. Part of me wanted to open my eyes to see what was there, while the other part of me urged them to remain closed. But eventually, curiosity outweighed fear, and I peeled open my eyelids. There, at the end of the bed, stood a man, his face cloaked in shadow. I supposed it could have been a woman, but somehow the presence felt masculine. Whether he could see me watching him, I didn't know, but his gaze bored down on me. Normally he held me pinned thusly for a few seconds and then suddenly disappeared into the darkness swirling around him. But this time his feet shifted. That tiny movement roused me more than any of the other times before, and I sensed a change in Gage's breathing at my side. I was awake, not dreaming. Which meant . .. Before I could finish the thought, the figure lifted something over his head and swung downward. Gage pushed me out of the way as he rolled in the opposite direction. The object struck the mattress with a jarring impact, narrowly missing us. It was heavy, and from the rending tear it made in the bedcoverings, also sharp. Gage allowed his momentum to carry him out of bed. His feet hit the floor and he ran around the bedpost, knocking our assailant back as he raised the object for another swing. In the darkness, I could see little but shadows, but I could hear the impact of fists hitting flesh. Who was winning, I couldn't tell, as they crashed about, knocking into the walls and furniture. I dodged past the men, racing toward the dressing table where my reticule was stored. It was impossible to know which shadow to aim at with my pistol, if, that is, they even separated for me to take a clean shot. But perhaps if I fired it into the floor or ceiling it would startle both men long enough for me to distinguish. Before I could pull my reticule from the drawer, a sharp yelp pierced the air. I glanced over my shoulder, to see one shape disentangle itself from the other and limp toward the connecting door to the other bedchamber. A moment later, the other man, who from the grace of his movements I could tell was Gage, pushed himself up to follow him. I cursed as my fingers caught in my reticule strings and I struggled to open the bag and extract my pistol. With it finally in hand, I picked my way across the floor, stepping through the puddle of water spilled out of the washstand they'd knocked over. Peering through the connecting door, I saw Gage hastily donning a pair of shoes. "He's darted through an entrance into the secret passages I didn't even know was there," he retorted. Anger rippled through him as he rose to his feet and crossed the room to his dresser. "And you're going after him?" Alarm made my voice rise in pitch. "Yes." I heard the click of metal, and I realized Gage had lifted his pistols to check if they were loaded. "But this time I won't be unarmed." He strode across the room toward the wall panel near the wardrobe, which I now realized stood open. Before he darted inside, he turned back. "You have your pistol?" "Yes," I replied, lifting the gun in illustration. "Good. Close this behind me, and shoot anybody who comes through it who's not me." My eyes blinked wide, and before I could form a response he was gone. I inched closer to the opening. The scent of must and damp issued from its interior, much like I imagined a crypt smelled. Shaking my head at the macabre thought, I pushed the panel shut as instructed and then crossed to the bellpull. Should Gage not return in short order, I would need Anderley's help. Fortunately, it didn't come to that. Only moments after I'd managed to light a few candles to counter the darkness, I heard a snick and swiveled to see the wall panel opening. I raised my pistol, aiming it at the ever-widening slit, but lowered it at the sight of my husband's golden head. I hurried forward, anxious to determine if he was harmed. "Only a few cuts and bruises," he replied, feeling his cheekbone. "What of your bullet wound?" I asked, reaching for his right arm. The wound he'd received in Ireland had been only a graze, and the skin had mended well, but I suspected it was still sore. "Well enough." He pulled away, apparently having endured enough of my wifely concern. "Did you catch him?" I asked, knowing full well he must not have, given the fact he'd returned emptyhanded. His voice was tight with frustration. "No. Either he darted out of the passage through another door I'm not aware of, or that blow to his leg I dealt him wasn't severe enough to slow him down as I'd hoped." "This one was a surprise, then?" I nodded at the opening that still stood ajar. He pushed it shut. "Yes, or you can be certain I would have blocked it off as well." He shook his head. "I thought I knew all the entrances and passages. How many more are there?" At that moment, there was a rap on the door and Anderley peeked his head through the opening. "You wished to see me?" Gage glanced at me. "I sent for him," I explained. "I thought it prudent to have help . . . should it be needed." "Yes. Good thinking. Come in," he told his valet. I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling awkward standing there in my nightdress in front of Anderley. Sensing my discomfort, he crossed to the wardrobe while Gage explained the night's events and pulled out a second dressing gown, this one made from midnight blue silk. I smiled in gratitude as he passed it to me. I swiftly wrapped it around myself, being enveloped in Gage's scent. "What did he attack you with?" Anderley asked. "Let's go see, shall we?" Gage replied, picking up a candle and leading us into the other room. All told, for as much commotion as they'd made, there was little damage. Anderley righted the washstand and tossed a towel over the puddle while Gage bent over to pick up the wooden handle protruding from underneath the bed where it must have been kicked. He lifted it high for us all to see the weapon was an ax. "Well, that could have easily disemboweled you," Anderley remarked almost offhandedly as he stared up at the sharp edge. I scowled at him. As if we needed the reminder. "Who do you think was so intent on killing you?" Gage's eyes were hard with fury. "I don't know. But maybe we should speak with Alfred's valet, Mr. Cooper. I realize it's quite precipitous to escalate from a few harmless pranks to murder, but he would be as good a place to start as any." He turned to Anderley. "Perhaps you'd like to rouse him?" Anderley's teeth flashed. "With pleasure." After his valet left, Gage picked up his burgundy dressing gown where it was flung over the corner of the bed. He pulled it around his frame, knotting it with a sharp tug. My eyes fastened on the long rip in the counterpane where the ax had struck between our vulnerable bodies. "I suppose this would be a good time to tell you this isn't the first time I've woken to find someone standing over us while we slept." Gage whirled around to stare at me. "What?!" I shoved my hands into the pockets of his blue dressing gown, which hung around me like a sack. "I thought I was dreaming. The figure would just stand there and then disappear. He never made any other movement. Until tonight." The excuse sounded pitiful, but it was all I had to offer. "When did this start?" I looked up into his angry gaze. "Our first night here. The night the windows were opened." "And you said nothing?" "I was going to, but then the windows seemed to be explained away, and I couldn't imagine how someone could have snuck in here without us knowing after you blocked the entrance to the secret passage. When it kept happening without any change, without my ever seeming to really be awake, I decided it was just a dream. And I didn't need to burden you with that." He scowled. "Well, you should have told me anyway." I conceded he was right. Had I known it would come to this, I certainly would have. He glanced at the clock still ticking away on the mantel. "Let's see what Mr. Cooper has to say. And whether he enters with a limp."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 42	"I had nothing to do with it," Cooper protested anxiously as Gage and Anderley stood over him. I would have felt apprehensive too if confronted with their livid countenances and tightened fists. Both men were fit and well muscled, and their eyes said their intent was deadly serious. "I went to my room immediately after dinner to read and then fell asleep. I haven't visited your chamber, except the other day when I told you about Alfred and his blackmail." Gage narrowed his eyes, nudging his left leg. When the man didn't flinch, just cowered in alarm, this seemed to satisfy him that Cooper wasn't the man with whom he'd tussled. "What of all those petty little pranks you pulled when we first arrived? As we understand it, those would be typical of your modus operandi." "I . . . I don't know what pranks you're referring to, but if you mean the misplacement of your trunks, that was Moffat's doing." Gage straightened. "You mean Mr. Trevelyan's valet?" I had no idea who this Moffat was, but Gage appeared at least familiar with him. Cooper nodded briskly. "He was the one who suggested we put them in the attics, and, well . . . none of us objected." Gage arched a single eyebrow. Apparently, our arrival had not been welcomed by most. "Do you think he's capable of poisoning Mrs. Gage's tea or attacking me with an ax?" he demanded. The unctuous man swallowed. "I wouldn't put it past him." I frowned, suspecting Alfred's valet would say just about anything to save his own skin. The look in my husband's eye told me he was thinking the same thing. Nevertheless, with Alfred and Rory missing, and Cooper seemingly out of contention, Moffat was our best suspect. "Let's question him," Gage instructed Anderley.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 43	But Moffat was nowhere to be found. Gage had spoken to him two evenings prior about Rory, and some of the staff had seen him throughout the day before. However, following dinner, no one could recall his whereabouts. This did not make matters look good for him. It was perplexing. The meddlesome pranks aside, why would Rory's valet attempt to kill Gage or poison me? Had he been directed to do so by Rory, or was he acting on his own? And if Rory was behind the attack and poisoning, did that mean he wasn't actually missing? Then where was he? And why was he hiding? The only sliver of hope for Moffat came when one of the maids suggested he might have gone into the village. She claimed he seemed extremely distraught about his missing employer, and that perhaps he'd gone in search of forgetfulness in the form of a bottle. To this end, Gage sent Anderley to Peter Tavy and the other villages nearby to ask after the man. Gage and I were about to set off across the moors on another search when I spied the figure of Lorna Galloway striding rapidly toward us. We spurred our horses in her direction, slowing them to greet her. Her face was tight with distress. "There's something I need to show you." My stomach dipped, thinking she must have stumbled across a body. "You found one of them?" Gage asked urgently. But Lorna wouldn't answer him. "Just, please. Will you come with me? You need to see for yourselves." Gage and I shared a look of confusion coupled with dread, but we agreed. I helped Lorna to mount behind me, and we set off toward her cottage as she instructed. When we reached the structure, she slipped from Eyebright's back and gestured for us to follow. "Please, it's inside." Given my recent poisoning and the doubts our conversation with Lord Tavistock had raised the evening before, I was hesitant to enter. Had I been alone, I think I might have refused. But knowing Gage would be beside me, I complied. He pressed a hand to my back, ushering me forward as Lorna opened the door. I searched her face for any sign of duplicity, but I could see no deviousness, only dismay. And I soon understood why. Seated at the table was an attractive man with dark hair and eyes. The structure of his face and the shape of his eyes left me in no doubt who he was. Gage's cursing only confirmed it. "Fiend seize it! Is this your idea of some appalling jest?! We've been scouring the entire bloody moor for your moldering corpse. Your family is worried sick." "Are they?" Gage stiffened and then charged forward, pulling Alfred to his feet by his collar. "You rotten bastard! Grandfather is practically at death's door because of you and your brother. Or was that your plan?" "No, that wasn't the plan. But I hardly think Grandfather, or my mother, or my brother are brokenhearted by my absence." Gage shoved him, releasing his lapels in disgust. I looked toward Lorna, who stood rigidly by the door, crossing her arms over her middle. "He's been here the whole time, hasn't he?" Her eyes shifted to meet mine and she nodded, at least having the grace to appear abashed. "There's a trapdoor in the floor of the bedchamber." So he'd likely listened to every conversation we'd ever had without my even knowing it. I turned to glare at him in accusation. "It was you I heard in the bedchamber that day, not the cat. And you on the moor." He finished tugging his coat back into place, eyeing both Gage and me with wary displeasure. "Yes. Both of those were near things." I narrowed my eyes. "So Rory did see you that day?" I glanced around. "Where is he?" Alfred's expression tightened. "I don't know." His eyes flicked toward Lorna. "That was what convinced me to show myself to you. In truth, I thought I might be hiding from him. But now that he's missing . . . that seems questionable." Gage huffed, his face still flushed with anger. "What on earth are you talking about?" But my head was clearer than his. "The poison," I guessed. Alfred nodded. "Someone kept dosing me with poison, and each time they increased the dosage, for the stomach pains were growing worse." Having experienced my own bout with poison, likely the same one, I could empathize. He sank back down on the bench, staring at the herb bennet above the door. "That last time, just before I vanished, I realized they were intent on killing me. And eventually, they were going to succeed. I . . . I couldn't help but think of your mother," he told Gage. His gaze dropped to Lorna. "So I came here, and we decided I should hide for a time. At least until the poison had completely left my system and I could formulate a plan to uncover the culprit." He glanced over his shoulder at Gage. "But then you arrived and I decided it would be best to stay put. You're an experienced inquiry agent. You and your father are purported to be the best. I figured if anyone would be able to expose the truth, it would be you." As far as compliments went, it was a fairly weak one, but from the look on Gage's face, I suspected it was the only one he'd ever received from his cousin. "That's all well and good, but why did you bloody your own frock coat and leave it out near Cocks Hill? You had to know that would set everyone into a frenzy." He dropped his gaze somewhat shamefacedly. "That was a miscalculation on my part. When you and your wife showed up here with Rory, I worried Rory had convinced you I was off somewhere merrily enjoying myself. Lorna assured me otherwise, but I wouldn't listen. So I smeared the coat with pig's blood and planted it for you or someone else to find, hoping that would convince you to keep investigating." "But you didn't realize you'd dropped a button," I guessed, drawing his gaze. "And when you or Lorna found it, you tucked it into the drawer." Gage scowled at me in confusion, but I ignored him, arching a single eyebrow at Alfred in contempt. "You must have panicked when you realized I was hunting through the cabinet for paper. I assume you removed the button then without telling Lorna. Hence her confusion the next day when she was looking for it." Alfred's mouth turned downward. "Yes, Lorna has already berated me for that foolish move as well." "Maybe next time you'll listen to her," I couldn't resist remarking. "So this wasn't about Grandfather's pressuring you to wed Lady Juliana?" Gage interjected. His tone conveyed doubt. Alfred tapped the table before him and looked up at Lorna, his eyes sharp with anguish. "I would be lying if I didn't say that was a consideration. But no." He sighed. "Hiding here would not make that problem go away." I was already heavily predisposed not to like Alfred, and this meeting had not altered that. But I also believed he was being truthful. He'd not tried to make himself sound better or more noble than he was, and I suspected this was Lorna's influence at work. However, the question of Rory's whereabouts was another matter, and Gage seemed to feel the same way. "Assuming all of this is true, why should I believe you didn't decide to take things into your own hands and kill Rory before he could kill you?" Alfred's expression turned bitter. "I suppose you can't. Except that I didn't. Had I known for certain he was the one poisoning me, I would have enjoyed nothing more than making that clod suffer. But I don't know who is trying to kill me. Given that fact, harming Rory would be pointless." Gage turned to meet my gaze, silently asking my opinion. But Alfred must have viewed this as disbelief. "I didn't have to come forward and tell you all of this," he snapped. "I only did so because whoever it is must have turned their sights on Rory." The petulant tone of his voice more than his words convinced me he was being honest. I nodded and Gage stepped toward his cousin. "If I'm to believe you, there's one thing I need to check." He bumped his left thigh with his knee. "What the bloody hell was that for?" Alfred groused, but he didn't flinch in pain. Rather than answer, Gage gestured toward the opposite side of the room. "I need to see you walk." Alfred's face contorted with rage. "I'm not some dashed hound to do tricks at your bidding." "This isn't a jest," Gage retorted. "Do it." "Just do it, Alfred," Lorna murmured. Alfred huffed an aggrieved sigh, but with Lorna's urging finally complied. There was no noticeable limp. "Thank you," Gage replied, ignoring his cousin's venomous gaze, so like the dowager's. There was no doubt where Alfred had learned it from. "My wife and I were attacked last night in bed." Lorna gasped. "I was able to land a serious blow to the assailant's leg, but he got away." At this explanation, much of the malice drained from Alfred's face. "So either the culprit has moved on to other members of the family, or you're getting too close to the truth?" "It certainly seems that way." Gage crossed to the door. "Either way, you're returning to the manor with us." His cousin opened his mouth to protest, but Gage would hear none of it. "You can eat unprepared food like Kiera and I, and lock your doors until the culprit is caught. But I'm not going to be the one to explain to Grandfather and your mother where you've been." "You should go," Lorna agreed, though her brow furrowed with worry. "At least with Mr. and Mrs. Gage now aware of what is happening, you won't be alone." Alfred moved forward to take her hands, his eyes soft with concern. "But what of you?" he leaned close to murmur. "I don't like your being out here in this cottage by yourself." "I'll be fine," she assured him. "They're not after me, remember." "Yes, but . . ." He began to lower his hand, but she held to it tightly. "What if they knew?" She shook her head. I glanced at Gage, wondering if he'd witnessed the same thing I had. But he'd politely averted his gaze, staring out the open door toward the sun-dappled moor. His stance was rigid, his gaze conflicted, and I could only imagine what a tumult his emotions were at the moment. I turned to watch Alfred and Lorna again as he urged her to take caution. His voice was thick with affection even if the words he spoke were not particularly tender. If this entire affair was, in fact, about the inheritance, then it appeared whoever was behind it truly did have cause for concern. But only if Alfred proved to be honorable. That remained to be seen.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 44	The dowager saw us first upon our return to the manor. From the manner in which she hurried down the rear staircase, I suspected she'd been gazing out her bedchamber window again and seen us enter through the garden gate. She stopped short four steps from the bottom, staring down at Alfred with wide, hopeful eyes. I thought he might go to her, but he scarcely spared her a glance as he moved deeper into the house. "Yes, Mother, I'm alive. You may rejoice now," he drawled acerbically. Sharp pain radiated across her features before being squashed in the face of my and Gage's observant gazes. She lifted her skirts and whirled about, marching back up the stairs. Gage and I hastened to overtake Alfred as he strode toward the entry hall, where we mounted the main staircase, which was situated nearer to Lord Tavistock's chamber. It was almost as if now that he was here he was determined to have all of these awkward encounters over and done with. I wondered if he was also set on leaving as much damage in his wake as possible. Gage tried to stop Alfred from entering their grandfather's chamber ahead of us, undoubtedly concerned what such a shock would do to him in his weakened state. But Alfred wouldn't listen. He charged through the door with barely a knock and threw his arms opened wide. "Here I am. Alive. Shall we kill the fatted calf?" However, even Alfred wasn't immune to the sight of his grandfather's shrunken form sunken into the mattress before him, his face gaunt with illness. His words died away as his face paled. Lord Tavistock stared up at him in mute shock. I'm not sure what he believed he was seeing, but the sight of Gage and me entering the room after Alfred made some of the alarm fade from his expression. He tried to speak, but a cough overtook him—possibly brought on by surprise—and he crumpled forward, trying to restrain it. When his coughing subsided, Gage stepped forward and began to explain. Such was Alfred's astonishment that he all but had to be prodded to deliver each aspect of his confession. I don't know how I expected Lord Tavistock to react, but apparently after the surprise of Alfred's appearance nothing else could unnerve him. He turned to Gage, some of the steely resolve returning to his eyes. "You intend to get to the bottom of this?" "I do." He nodded and then resumed his scrutiny of Alfred. "Then it's more important than ever that you should wed Lady Juliana, and quickly. There's more than yourself to think of. There's the future of the viscountcy and all the people who depend on it." Alfred scowled. "Do you think I'm not aware of that? You've been hammering it into my skull since the day my father died." "Yes, well, we always had Rory to fall back on should you fail to do your duty. That might no longer be true." Alfred clenched and unclenched his hands. "I'm not going to wed Lady Juliana simply to beget an heir, your partnership with the Duke of Bedford be damned." I wondered if Alfred would admit he might have already accomplished that responsibility. So long as he wed Lorna. But he remained silent about her. Lord Tavistock lifted his head up from his pillows by his own will for the first time in days. "You will. You must. All of Langstone is relying on it. I'll not let you throw it all away with your stubbornness, not while I still have breath in this body." He collapsed back, a cough rattling up from his chest. I waited for Alfred to snap something back about how he wouldn't have long to wait. The thought burned in his eyes. And given the fact that he'd not held back from making his previous cutting remarks, I didn't anticipate him having any qualms about throwing his grandfather's encroaching death in his face. But he kept the words bottled inside, though his body shook and he had to press his lips together not to speak. Then he turned on his heel and charged from the room in much the same manner as he'd entered it. Gage watched his cousin leave and then turned back to his grandfather. The old man lay with his eyes closed, his face tight with what I suspected was a mixture of pain and frustration. From the line that had formed between my husband's eyebrows, I could tell he wanted to say something, but he backed away from the bed instead. "I need to find out if Anderley has returned." When I didn't immediately follow, he paused. "Are you coming?" "I'll be along in a moment," I said over my shoulder. Gage's footsteps crossed the room and then receded down the hall. Lord Tavistock blinked open his eyes as I moved closer to the bed, pouring some more water into his cup. "I know that face. My Edith used to wear the same expression when she had something on her mind she was determined to say whether I would hear it or not." His voice was rough from all his coughing. I refused to be rushed or bullied, setting the ewer back down and turning to him with the cup. "I don't want any of that," he groused. I met his hard gaze with a stern one of my own. "You will drink it, as much as you can. Or I'll pour it over your head." He glowered at me a moment longer before relenting. I helped him to sit up and then coaxed him to take as many sips as he could bear even as he flinched at each swallow. When he'd managed all he could handle, I helped him sit back again. "Out with it," he snapped between panting breaths. "Now that you've tortured me, you can tell me what you stayed behind to say." "I only wondered why you're so intent on seeing your grandson unhappy." "Happiness has nothing to do with it. The boy needs to wed. And he needs to do it soon." "But does it have to be to Lady Juliana? What if there were someone else? Someone he genuinely cares for." "If you're referring to Sherracombe's natural daughter, then it's out of the question." I wasn't surprised he knew about Lorna. If not Rory, then someone else had likely been happy to apprise him of Alfred's visits to her. He sniffed. "I'll not see my heir wed to a bastard." "That's it, then. You're determined for things to end with enmity between you? I know we dance around the truth, but I can tell you're well aware that you're dying." He grunted, turning his head away from me. "You lie there, hell-bent on making your grandsons toe the mark when you could do so much more good by speaking to them like the grown men they are and healing the rifts that are already between you." He looked up at me wearily. "You don't understand. It's not my choice. You've already discovered how things end for those who defy the family. You know what it did to Emma." I tilted my head, confused by this remark. "So you're trying to save Alfred by making him do the family's bidding?" "Yes." "But who is the family?" I asked, trying to make him realize his logic was faulty. He stared up at me in irritation, clearly not following my reasoning. "Are Gage and I doomed as well because the family does not approve of our match?" My chest clenched, even as I waited for the answer I hoped he would make. "Of course not." I exhaled. "Why?" "What do you mean, why? Because I approve of you." I felt a pulse of affection for this old man, even hearing his words issued in a tone that said I was a fool to think otherwise. I wished Gage could have heard it, too. It might have blunted the sting of his aunt's earlier comment. Something of the point I was trying to make seemed to seep into his understanding, for his scowl softened. "Then why can't you approve of Alfred's choice in a bride as well?" He stared up at me. His mouth was still set in that thin line, but his eyes said he was considering what I said. "Change the family's wishes," I pleaded softly. "Give Alfred your blessing, too. Before it's too late."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 45	I entered the room assigned to Gage through the connecting door to find him and Anderley standing over a man with a great crop of fiery hair, much the same way they'd loomed over Cooper. The sight of them standing shoulder to shoulder, working in accord to interrogate a suspect, always made me wonder just how many times in the past they'd done this. Not that the man before them seemed to require much coercion. I suspected the maid had been right, for Moffat looked as if he'd spent the night dead drunk on a bench. His face was unshaven, his hair stood on end, and the ashen hue of his skin made me want to urge Gage and Anderley to back up a step lest they be soiled if he should cast up his accounts. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he stammered, rocking back and forth. "I didn't want to do it. I knew I shouldn't have done it. But I did. I did." He was all but sobbing, and I looked to Gage for an answer to what exactly he was confessing to. However, Gage and Anderley appeared perplexed themselves. Perhaps the man was still half-sprung. "You admit to committing the pranks?" "Yes." "Were they your idea?" He sniffed and began to shake his head, but then abruptly stopped, pressing his hand to it. "Mr. Trevelyan told me to make trouble. That he needed you to leave." Gage frowned. "But then two days later, he told me to stop," Moffat continued. "That we shouldn't hinder your investigation." So Rory had been behind the pranks? Why? Had he not trusted us? But clearly there was more. Otherwise, why the maudlin tears? "What about the rest?" Gage pressed. "He . . . he . . ." Moffat swallowed, either fighting nerves or nausea. Possibly both. "He told me to sprinkle some sort of herb he gave me in a jar into Lady Darby's evening tea." I withheld a gasp. "Said it would just make her feel a little queasy." He began to snivel again in earnest. "Except I got startled, and I dumped in too much. And then a maid almost caught me." He looked up to plead with Gage and caught sight of me standing in the doorway. His eyes widened, and his already pale face lost all color. "I'm sorry, so sorry," he repeated again and again. I stayed where I was, worried if I moved any closer he might keel over in his chair. So Rory had been behind my poisoning as well? Was he also responsible for Alfred's? His valet claimed Rory only intended to make me queasy. Was that true? But to what end? He'd seen me leaving Lorna's cottage earlier that day. Had he hoped the blame would fall on her and shatter whatever trust I held in her? Except based on everything we knew, Rory had gone missing immediately following that. He wouldn't have had time to tell his valet to put the herbs in my tea. Clearly pondering the same question, Gage snapped his finger, surprising Moffat enough to make him stop apologizing. "When did Mr. Trevelyan instruct you to poison my wife?" "Earlier that day, just after midday." The man was so cowed, there was little chance he was lying. "You told us you hadn't seen him," Gage argued. "I . . . I hadn't. I was out on an errand. I found a note from him and the jar when I returned." Gage's voice was sharp with anger. "Had he asked you to sprinkle herbs or poison on anyone else's food or drink?" "No! Just . . . just Lady Darby's." My, wasn't I lucky. Gage narrowed his eyes, scrutinizing the ruddy man. Then he jostled his left leg as he had with Cooper and Alfred. Moffat recoiled further, but he didn't wince. "What of last night? When did you leave for the tavern?" Moffat's Adam's apple worked up and down. "A-after dinner." "So you didn't try to disembowel me with an ax in the middle of the night?" The valet's eyes bulged. "N-no! No, sir. You can ask the publican. I-I was there all night." Considering the state he was in, I had no trouble believing that. Or his earnest promise to inform us immediately if he saw or heard from Rory again. Then Anderley helped him to his feet as Gage sent him on his way. "What do you think?" Gage asked, pulling me close to his side. "Honestly?" I shook my head. "I don't know what to think. Is Rory behind all of this or just another victim? Was he intent on hurting me or protecting me, in admittedly his own flawed way?" I leaned back to look up into his face. "But what do you think? He's your cousin. You know him better than I do." His eyes were troubled. "Maybe when we were boys. But fifteen years is a long time. None of us are exactly the same people we once were." The manner in which he spoke made me wonder if he was talking about more than Rory. "Including Alfred?" I guessed. His gaze flicked down to meet mine. "Yes. Though, he's still capable of being the same unmitigated jackass he always was." He sighed. "The truth is, I never thought I'd see him treat a woman with as much esteem as he showed Miss Galloway. He seems to truly care for her." "I thought he was going to wish your grandfather to the devil there at the end." "Yes. There's that, too. He's never shown such restraint in the past." His expression communicated he was confounded, and perhaps maybe even a little uneasy about witnessing this new side to his cousin. "It troubles you?" I prodded cautiously. Having been so abruptly denied answers to my queries about his mother, I was sensitive to the possibility of it happening again. He seemed to reflect on my question. "Yes, I suppose you could say that." I waited, hoping he would say more. "Alfred was always so horrible. I can't remember a time when he wasn't acting as my tormentor. Even my good memories of us playing together always end with him making some snide remark or shoving me out of a tree. And now I'm confronted with a man who's different, but also the same. I'm hesitant to believe he's actually changing. And I'm not sure I want him to." He huffed a breath. "Which troubles me. Shouldn't I want him to be better?" "In a perfect world, yes. But Alfred treated you terribly in the past. You knew how to categorize him, and now you don't. It's understandable that you would find his possible transformation—let's not get ahead of ourselves—difficult because of the past you can't forget. A past you've never forgiven him for." His voice hardened. "Because he's never apologized. He's never asked for my forgiveness." I stepped away, recognizing it might be best for me to retreat, lest he shut me out again. "True. I can't blame you for your dislike and mistrust. Based on what you've told me, I'm none too fond of him either. But continuing to stoke all that anger is hurting no one but yourself. Alfred certainly isn't bothered by it." "My mother—" "Your mother is gone," I gently interrupted him before he could begin a tirade. "She's past caring about your loathsome cousin or his mother. And if she could speak to you now, I'm certain she would tell you the same thing." His eyes gleamed with all the conflicting emotions about his family he'd been carrying inside him for so long. "Just think about it," I murmured, pressing a kiss to his lips before I slipped from the room. I wanted to stay, to hold his hand through the maelstrom swirling inside him. But I was beginning to apprehend that with Gage sometimes retreat was the better virtue. For if I wasn't there to argue with, then he had only himself to rage against.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 46	I decided to take a walk in the garden to clear my head and focus on the conundrum at hand. After all, Rory was still missing, either by misfortune or by choice, and someone seemed intent on harming the members of Gage's family, be it by poison or ax. As the person most on the outside, I suspected I might have the best chance of unraveling the truth. I rounded the corner to descend the stairs and spied Alfred seated on a bench placed before the window at the end of the corridor. His gaze was directed outside, so I could have slipped by without saying anything, but he seemed so pensive, so agitated, I realized I couldn't. Not even knowing I risked receiving one of his scathing snubs. He glanced up as I approached, and I couldn't help but think of the conversations he must have overheard between Lorna and me while hiding beneath her cottage. He knew I didn't like him. I'd said so. However, he didn't seem the least bothered by this fact. But given the way he treated others, he must have been accustomed to people's animosity. If ever given the chance, I'd fully intended to ring a peal over him for the dreadful way he'd treated Gage when they were younger. But since meeting him, I decided he would probably enjoy it, so I kept a civil tongue. "You don't have to be polite," he told me before turning back to the window. His forehead furrowed. "Your family may be different, but the Trevelyans have never found such niceties to be necessary." "Then perhaps that's your trouble," I replied, perching on the opposite end of the bench. "After all, kindness and courtesy go a long way. And oftentimes family members need it to fall back on more than anyone." "But then our family gatherings would be so mundane. Much better to dance a quadrille trying to avoid all the hidden daggers." I studied his handsome face, intrigued by the similarities to Gage. When he drawled sarcastically like that, they sounded much the same. And yet, they were so very different. Though Alfred seemed to have been wounded by someone much the same way he in turn mistreated his cousin. But who had hurt Alfred? His mother? His father before his death? He turned to meet my gaze, his mouth curling into a sneer I suspected preceded a vicious set down. But the insult never came. Instead, a curious light entered his eyes and the scorn slowly drained away to something more thoughtful, something harder to define. I waited patiently for him to speak, wondering what, if anything, he would tell me if I allowed him to take the lead. In truth, I didn't expect him to reveal anything significant. So I was genuinely surprised when he posed a question. "What do you think? Should I yield to Grandfather's pressure and wed Lady Juliana?" My astonishment must have been evident, for he smiled in reluctant amusement. "What of Miss Galloway?" I asked before he changed his mind about asking me. His humor fled. "We . . . we could still be friends." I arched my eyebrows, letting him know I realized friends was merely a euphemism for lovers. "Is that fair to Miss Galloway?" I paused before adding, "Is it fair to your unborn child?" This time it was Alfred's turn to be startled. "I'd heard you were unnervingly observant. Lorna said you would notice." He glanced out the window toward the garden below and the moors beyond, agitation thrumming through him once again. "No, it wouldn't be fair." "You genuinely care for her, don't you?" "I like myself better when I'm with her." He frowned. "No, it's more than that. She makes me want to be better because she deserves better. Does that make sense?" "It does." "I'm trying to do the honorable thing, for perhaps the first time." His shoulders drooped. "But maybe it's not so honorable after all." A large portion of society would, indeed, agree with his grandfather. That Lorna Galloway was perfectly acceptable as a mistress, but definitely not viscountess material. That Alfred owed it to his family to wed the daughter of a noble house, especially now that his brother was missing and his grandfather was so ill. But I didn't happen to be among their number. "Well, you should appreciate that I don't hold much respect for society's opinion on such things. And neither does Gage." "Yes, but wedding an anatomist's widow is a bit different than marrying another lord's by-blow." I glared at him incredulously. "Even when that widow was forced to participate in her anatomist husband's dissections, and accused of macabre solicitation, cannibalism, and more in the penny press?" This seemed to give him pause. "Yes, well, I'd forgotten about that." My skepticism did not wane. His gaze skimmed over my features. "You're much different than I thought you would be." I didn't know whether to view this as a compliment or an expression of disappointment, so I returned to the subject at hand. "I suppose your grandfather will argue that Miss Galloway should be treated like Philinda Warne?" His face crumpled into resentment. "The vicar's daughter? Yes, I suppose so. Though the chit lied about my seducing her." "I'm well aware of your reputation." "Yes, and it's well deserved. I know I'm a rogue. But I'm not so bad as to get the rector's daughter with child." He scoffed. "Give me some credit." He nodded his head in the direction the village must lie. "She was also dangling after the innkeeper. And she married him. I imagine he was in on the scheme to inveigle money out of my grandfather." A notion suddenly occurred to me. "Does he pay something to them every month?" "No. Gave them a tidy sum upon the child's birth. He might give them a bit more from time to time." His lip curled. "If they make him feel guilty enough. But nothing regular." "But anything they hope to get in the future will go away once you're the viscount and hold the purse strings." His expression darkened as he realized what I was suggesting. "If they had anything to do with my poisoning, they would need a conspirator among the staff." "What did Rory think of the matter? Did he believe Mrs. Warne's story?" "I imagine he believed whatever Grandfather told him to." "So he would have been more sympathetic to them." I tilted my head. "Unless he discovered what they were doing." Even so, such a theory seemed far-fetched at best, though technically possible, regardless of who was telling the truth. Both Alfred's and Mrs. Warne's outrage seemed genuine, so I didn't know whom to believe. Except Alfred had no reason to lie. He readily admitted he was a scoundrel, and that he'd gotten Lorna with child. Why would he deny fathering Mrs. Warne's baby, but not refute the other accusations? "What do you think happened to Rory?" I asked, curious if he'd formed any other opinions on the matter since we'd returned to Langstone. I considered telling him what Gage and I had learned from Rory's valet, Moffat, but decided it would be best to keep that information to ourselves for the moment. "I haven't the foggiest. As I said earlier, I was almost convinced he was the one behind my being poisoned, but I can't see how his going missing fits into that scenario. He was never one for theatrics. He would be more likely to bide his time, or claim that given the amount of time that had passed the bloody coat must indicate my death." And he might have, at that. Except Gage and I had been here to examine the coat and raise doubts that the blood on the fabric was enough to clearly indicate death. But I agreed on one point. Rory did appear to be a very patient, methodical man. Alfred, on the other hand, was not. I only hoped that whatever occurred in the next few days, he would not do something rash. Life-changing decisions should not be rushed. And neither should his bid for his grandfather's goodwill.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 47	The morning of Gage's thirty-fourth birthday dawned grim and dreary, but I was not going to let that keep me from making his day as enjoyable as possible. I would be glad I ensured it began in such an agreeable way, for I would have no control over everything that came later. We still lay in bed, wrapped in each other's arms pleasantly dozing, when someone rapped on the bedchamber door. I yawned and lifted the sheets to be certain I was sufficiently covered while Gage pulled his dressing gown over his broad shoulders. After our disagreeable visitor the night before, we'd elected to lock all the doors and place chairs under the handles. This meant the hearth was still cold, for the maid could not enter to tend it, but that was a small price to pay for peace of mind. It simply meant we had to rely on each other for heat. He removed the chair and unlocked the door to admit Bree, who hovered uncertainly near the door, glancing back and forth between us. Such timidity was not normal for her, and I sat up straighter, puzzled by her reaction. A closer look at her face made my heart begin to beat faster. "What is it? What's happened?" "'Tis Lord Tavistock." She turned to Gage. "He's taken a turn for the worse." Gage turned on his heel and strode toward the connecting door while I scrabbled for my dressing gown. "Anderley's waitin' for ye," she called after him. I hurried over to the dressing table. "Help me dress. Something simple," I ordered her. Ten minutes later, we reached the corridor outside his grandfather's bedchamber only to find Alfred and the dowager badgering a footman to let them enter. "I'm sorry. Mr. Hammett gave me strict instructions that no one was to enter until the physician finished his examination. Not even family." "This is an outrage," Lady Langstone protested. "Since when does a butler issue orders that supersede the wishes of the family?" "Be calm, Mother," Alfred drawled, leaning back against the wall opposite the door. "I'm sure Hammett's only following Grandfather's instructions or the physician's request. After all, who wants a woman pacing back and forth, flapping her arms while you're trying to do an examination?" I felt quite certain this was meant to be directed at his mother and not women in general. In either case, the insult hit its mark. "I do no such thing," she snapped. "But I would make certain this physician is doing a thorough job." I suspected she must have already been up for hours. What else explained her perfectly turned-out appearance and elaborate hairstyle at such an unsocial hour? Alfred, on the other hand, looked as if he might never have been to bed. At the least, the dark circles under his eyes and wrinkled clothing spoke of a restless night and hasty dressing. He was opening his mouth to make another quip when the bedchamber door opened. We all swung about to hear what the brawny man dressed in a rough coat had to say. However, Lady Langstone seemed intent on slipping past, until Hammett closed the door firmly, standing in its way. The physician didn't look much like one expected a medical man to appear, even a country one, nor did he sound like one. But I had no doubt he must have been competent. Lord Tavistock was not the sort of man to suffer fools gladly, and even without a great deal of medical knowledge he would have recognized slapdash practicing. "Lord Tavistock's illness has worsened," the physician pronounced in a gruff voice with little inflection. "The ague has settled into his lung tissue, inflaming them and making it difficult for him to breathe. He needs rest and little excitement." His gaze swung toward Alfred. "Which I understand there's been a great deal of in the past few weeks." "Will he recover?" Gage asked anxiously. "If he were a younger man, perhaps. But at his age, it's not expected." Gage nodded, his mask of indifference carefully in place, but when I offered him my hand, he gripped it tightly. "May we see him?" Lady Langstone intoned in a manner that wasn't really a question but a demand. The physician shared a glance with Hammett. "Only if he wishes to see you. And only if you do not rile him. As I said, he needs peace and quiet." He nodded to us all. "I'll stop by again this evening. Send for me if I'm needed before then." Before the physician had even turned the corner, following the footman who was to show him out, Lady Langstone stood toe to toe with Hammett. "I will see him." Hammett drew himself up to his full height and dignity. "I'm sorry, my lady, but he's already said he doesn't wish to see you. Not just now," he added, softening the sting he must have seen his words had caused her. His eyes shifted over her shoulder. "He's asking for his grandsons, Lord Langstone and Mr. Gage." Gage's hold on my hand tightened and then released as he stepped forward. He and Alfred shared a look filled with mutual apprehension. "I want to see him," Lady Langstone repeated. Her voice was so brittle I thought it might crack. Hammett shook his head. "I'm sorry, my lady." She huffed and spun about to stride off down the corridor. I watched her go. Didn't the others realize she was masking her hurt at the viscount's refusal to see her with anger? I turned back to find Hammett studying me as he shuffled to the side to usher Gage and Alfred into the bedchamber. The look in his eyes made me recall our previous conversation and the things he'd said about her. Before I could reconsider, I set off down the corridor after her, lifting my pomona green skirts in my haste to catch her up. She was about to turn another corner, headed toward I knew not where, when I called her name. Her steps halted abruptly as she glared over her shoulder at me. "What is this?" she sniffed, arching her chin upward. "Come to gloat?" But all of her venomous disdain could not hide the gleam of tears in her eyes. "No, my lady," I replied gently. "I merely wanted to know if there's anything I can do for you." Her eyes widened in surprise. "For me?" she snarled. "Yes. After all, Lord Tavistock is your family, too. You've lived with him for over thirty-five years, and served as his hostess since Lady Tavistock died. This must be difficult for you as well." She stared at me in shock and then almost in horror as her bottom lip began to quiver. "I-I can't . . ." she choked and spun away, continuing to walk in the same direction she'd been headed. But now her steps were more of a stagger. I followed her uncertainly, not wanting to leave her alone, but unsure of my welcome. When she pushed through a door, leaving it open as she went inside, I decided she wanted me to join her. I'd not yet explored this room, for it had been locked, and now I understood why. It was a tiny stone chapel adorned with stained glass windows and an altar arranged with gold holy objects. A handful of wooden pews lined the floor, their surfaces polished to a sheen that was evident even in the dim light. I smelled the lemon wax. Lady Langstone sat on one of the benches, her head bowed. But from the manner in which her shoulders shook I realized she wasn't praying. Or, at least, not only praying. I slid into the pew next to her, offering up my own silent prayer for Lord Tavistock, Rory, and the entire family as I waited for her to speak. She sniffed and then dabbed at her eyes as she inhaled a quivering breath. "I've been a good hostess for him, you know. And a good mother. I've seen to everything with nary a word of complaint. And what thanks do I receive? A son who sneers at me and a father-in-law who won't even . . ." She hiccupped on a sob. "Who won't even see me on his deathbed." Her voice constricted with tears again as she broke off. I moved closer, silently offering her what comfort she would take. "I've given them everything," she murmured breathlessly. "I could have remarried, you know. Even to this day, I still receive offers. Instead, I chose to devote myself to my sons and the Tavistock estate. Fool, I've been." She snapped open her handkerchief and then folded it again and again, as if she could straighten her tangle of emotions like she could the piece of cloth. "I can't blame you for feeling hurt and angry," I replied. "I would be, too. But perhaps Lord Tavistock will ask to see you later." She scoffed. "Perhaps he merely felt an urgency to speak to his grandsons first." She shook her head. "Lord Tavistock has never been fond of me. He approved of my marriage to his son well enough because I came from a good family and I comported myself perfectly. My parents made certain of that," she added almost under her breath. "But he has never liked me. Not with anything that comes close to the affection he showed his own daughters, particularly Emma." She spat Gage's mother's name as if she'd just bitten into something sour. "Why did you dislike her so?" I had to ask, not understanding this extreme animosity to her sister-in-law. "Because she always did as she very well pleased, regardless of anyone else's feelings, and yet no one else seemed to see that. Or if they did, they never reproved her for it." She gestured toward the door. "Even her own son, who suffered the most because of it, still believes she was this blameless, perfect woman ruled by elements out of her control. Her poisoning at the hands of her maid only underlined that image." "Well that was certainly out of her control." "Was it?" she challenged. "She brought that incompetent girl with her from Plymouth and kept her on rather than let her go. She could have given her a good reference. One that would have helped her easily find a position elsewhere. But she didn't, because it suited her to be coddled and thought generous. When she first moved back here, her illness was never terrible enough to prevent her from doing the things she wanted to—attending dinner parties and local soirees, or traveling on shopping excursions to Plymouth and Exeter. It wasn't until later, I suppose when her maid had begun dosing her with poison, that it truly afflicted her in any way. Unless she was deluding herself as well, she would have noted the change." I had no idea if any of this was true or simply the vitriol of a spiteful, resentful woman, but it said much about the state of affairs here at Langstone when Gage was growing up. "You were jealous of the others' blind devotion to her," I remarked lightly, coming to the crux of the matter. "Of course I was. She insisted on marrying Stephen Gage, despite her family's wishes. Got herself with child just to insure it would happen. Only to realize after she moved to Plymouth what life would really be like as the wife of an officer of the Royal Navy while the country was at war. This was before Gage made his fortune. She lasted all of three years before she came crawling home, blaming her illness when the truth was she simply couldn't stand it anymore. I suppose she also recognized what that life would mean for her son—shipped off to sea at a tender age," she begrudgingly admitted. "But that was only a secondary consideration." She scowled, clenching her hands in her skirts. "She did all this and more, and yet Lord Tavistock still adored her." She sounded as if she just couldn't fathom such a thing. Such unconditional love. I felt a pulse of sympathy for her. "I take it your parents were not like that." She stared blankly ahead. "One did as one was told, to perfection. And if you were lucky, they told you they were pleased." I wanted to ask her about her marriage to Emma's brother, whether he had loved her, but I didn't dare. There were certain things an acquaintance didn't encroach upon, and that was one. However, there was one thing I was willing to risk broaching. "But I suppose Emma Gage got her just deserts when her husband attempted to initiate a relationship with you? You must have relished informing her of his infidelity." Lady Langstone's mouth pressed into a thin line and I wondered if she would actually tell me the truth or continue to choke it down like bitter medicine. Then she exhaled, almost in resignation. "No. I never told her. Because . . ." She turned to look at me as if facing her own execution. "Stephen Gage wasn't the only one who wrote letters." "But I thought you despised him?" "I did." She frowned. "Or it was more I despised the fact that Emma had married someone of such a lower rank and little fortune and not been ostracized for it. But Stephen Gage was a very attractive man and extremely charming, even to one such as me." She stared down at her lap where she fiddled with her handkerchief. "And I was lonely. It was after my husband died, and I felt so very . . . unwanted at times here. At first, I was shocked by his flirtation. But then I began to flirt back, and I enjoyed it." She blushed either in remembrance or shame. "I knew it was wrong, but . . ." She shrugged. But she felt isolated and unloved, and here was her chance to perhaps take some of that affection Emma received with so little effort, and perhaps even less appreciation. "We began to exchange letters. Webley acted as our go-between when Gage was here. And she mailed my letters and collected the ones he sent to an abandoned cottage at the edge of the estate after he'd gone back to sea." "How long did this go on?" "The better part of seven months. And then . . . and then he returned to Langstone on his next leave." "Is that when you met in the emerald chamber?" I ventured to ask. She blinked at me in surprise. Perhaps I shouldn't have revealed I knew as much. I could see a dozen questions forming in her mind, but she didn't ask them. Perhaps because she didn't wish to know. "Yes. He convinced me we should meet. Before that we hadn't . . . I hadn't . . ." She cleared her throat. "He said he wanted more than words from me, so I agreed to meet him." She paused. "I suppose you already know about the secret passage?" I nodded. Her voice dropped practically to a whisper, perhaps because we sat in the chapel. It must have felt rather like a confession. "Well, he entered that way, finding me waiting for him, as requested, though I had half a mind not to come." She clasped her hands together, the knuckles turning white. "I should have listened to my conscience, for when he arrived, he threw the entire affair in my face." Her cheeks burned with remembered indignation. "It had all been a ruse, retribution for my treatment of his wife." Shock radiated through me, for I'd not foreseen such an explanation for Lord Gage's actions. In my defense, Lord Gage had never given me any reason to think well of him. So imagining him as a philandering husband had fit my already negatively formed opinion of him. But apparently I was wrong. Apparently he had loved his wife, though I was sure guilt over his continual absence might have also played some part. Nevertheless, to enact his revenge in such a cruel, protracted way, and on a woman who was so vulnerable? It was difficult to fathom such malice. Lady Langstone had certainly deserved a stern set down, but not that. She must have sensed my uneasiness, for she met my gaze solemnly. "You should understand just what sort of man your father-in-law is. If you have his loyalty, then you have nothing to fear. But otherwise..." She didn't need to finish that sentence, for I already felt the chill of the possibilities. We turned to stare at the altar, perhaps both reeling from the implications of our conversation. "There's one more thing that confuses me," I murmured. "His letters?" she guessed. "Why did I keep them?" "Yes." "For leverage. He told me he would be keeping mine to ensure I remained civil to his wife, and so that if I ever showed anyone his letters he would have a counter." "And then Alfred found them," I surmised. "Yes." Her gaze turned wary. "Are you going to tell Lord Gage about them?" "I'm not going to tell him anything," I admitted with full honesty. She exhaled in relief, and then straightened again. "What about Sebastian?" I considered what, if anything, I should reveal to her that Gage already knew. It seemed unnecessarily unkind to tell her he already suspected the affair. I fully expected she assumed my claim during our last conversation had been a bluff. However, I did think Gage should know the truth about what he'd seen all those years ago. He needed to know his father had not been conducting an affaire de coeur with his aunt under his mother's very nose. But perhaps, in this case, a bit of deceit was in order. "Are you going to quit treating him like he's the scourge of the earth?" I countered. "After all, he's done nothing to offend you except draw breath." "You're right," she admitted. I was surprised to hear genuine remorse in her voice. "I can treat him better. I will." I met her gaze, letting her know I would hold her to that. "Then Gage never need know," I replied, crossing my fingers behind my back.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 48	Somehow it seemed appropriate that today of all days Gage should finally decide to visit his mother's grave. Even though I knew it had been his grandfather's worsening illness and whatever words he'd imparted to him this morning that drove him here, and not the fact it was his birthday. But whatever the rightness, my breath constricted and my heart clenched at the sight of him kneeling before the ornate grave marker topped with a cross. Upon leaving the dowager in the chapel, I'd returned to our bedchamber, thinking to find Gage there. However, Anderley told me Gage had changed into his riding boots, though he'd not said where he intended to go. Given the distressing events of the morning, as well as the fact that he wouldn't need his riding boots to visit the woodworking shed, I had a fairly good idea where I would find him. The leaden skies of early morning had lightened somewhat, but not enough to make the heavily shadowed churchyard appear any cheerier. And not enough to clearly illuminate Gage's expression, though I imagined it well enough from his slumped posture and bowed head. The air was ripe with the scents of moss and damp earth, and thick with the lingering sense of time lost. I waited a dozen feet away under the heavy branches of a yew tree, worrying the train of my charcoal gray riding habit between my fingers. My eyes stung as I struggled to suppress my answering emotions. It didn't matter that my own mother was buried hundreds of miles away. She was still with me, at least in my memories. When finally Gage lifted his head, I decided this meant he was ready for me to approach, though he never looked at me. Stepping up next to him, I turned to face his mother's grave and the stark letters of her name carved in granite. He clutched his hat between both of his hands, spinning the brim round and round between his fingers. There were no flowers planted before her grave, but then there were few in the entire graveyard. The overshadowing trees didn't allow enough sunlight through their branches for them to grow. However, the grave had evidently been carefully maintained, and I supposed he had Lord Tavistock to thank for that. "When Mother died," he began softly, "I was so furious. Furious with Father. Furious with them all." He heaved a sigh. "But later, I realized I was mostly furious with myself." "Oh, Gage," I murmured, my heart breaking to hear the pain, the self-recrimination in his voice. "Why?" "Because I didn't do more to protect her, to shield her. And this was before I ever knew she'd been poisoned." "But darling, you were so young. Just eighteen upon her death. You take too much on yourself." "I know that now," he admitted. "But at the time, I was just so angry, so overwhelmed by it all. All I could do was lash out." "You were grieving, with no one to help you through it. Your father was away at sea—not that he would have been very consoling had he been there. But at least you wouldn't have been on your own." I studied his face, and reflected on all the things that had been mentioned in passing during the last few weeks, all the things I hadn't understood. "Is that what happened at her funeral? You lashed out?" He nodded. "I . . . I didn't behave in a very becoming manner." "Well, I imagine not. It was your mother's funeral, after all." I found it difficult to imagine the amount of composure such a thing would take. Having been only eight years old, I'd been deemed too young to attend my mother's funeral, as had my ten-year-old brother. But we'd snuck away from our governess to visit her grave just a few days later and stood immobile before it for hours, unable to fully contemplate or accept our loss. If our father hadn't found us and taken us away, I'm not sure we would've ever torn ourselves from the spot. "Yes, but . . ." He faltered as if he didn't know how to put his recollections into words or if he even wanted to. "Tell me," I coaxed him, hoping this time he would trust me. He closed his eyes and exhaled a ragged breath. "The entire event was one long torment. I was already struggling to maintain my composure. I'd traveled by coach for days from Cambridge in order to escort my mother's casket. I'd barely slept since her death." His face tightened in remembered pain, and I couldn't help but wonder why his cousins, who would've also been up at university, had not ridden with him. What a lonely final vigil. "And then . . . I heard Alfred and Rory whispering with one another, jesting about how perhaps she should've been buried in a plot in a Royal Navy graveyard. And then . . . and then they made some rather crude insinuations." "That's horrid!" I gasped. The insensitivity, the cruelty. "I . . . I swung around in the middle of the rector speaking words over her grave and told them to shut their mouths." He shifted his feet. "Though I used rather more vulgar language than that. Then Rory tried to justify his comments by saying they were only thinking of my father. How he was unlikely to be buried in the family plot next to his wife." "Oh my," I replied, guessing how this stray comment would have ignited Gage's smoldering temper already made raw from grief and lack of sleep. He grimaced. "Yes. In the end, I had to be escorted from the graveyard before I pummeled my cousins before my mother's open grave." "Oh, Sebastian." I threaded my arm through his, pressing my body to his side to offer him what comfort I could. "No wonder you never wanted to come back." "I visited her grave alone the next morning and then left for good." "Until now." His expression was bleak. "Yes." We stood silently side by side, sharing our warmth as we gazed down at the cold grave. The only sound to break the hush of the churchyard was a small bird of some kind, tweeting from the upper branches of one of the trees. "Tell me about her," I murmured, feeling the weight of her memory pulling Gage into the grave with her. Perhaps if he shared them, perhaps if he released some of them into the sunlight, the load might be lighter. When he didn't respond, I decided he might be at a loss for where to begin. "What were some of her favorite things? Her favorite food, for instance? Or color? What made her smile?" "She . . . she loved strawberries," he began tentatively, gaining strength and momentum as he talked. "With cream. She . . . she used to say she could eat them at every meal. Her favorite color was violet. And that was her favorite flower, too. Father never realized that. He always brought her grander bouquets. But she loved the shy violets that grew in the tiny garden behind our cottage the most." His brow furrowed momentarily at his mention of the cottage, but then he pressed on. "She loved to receive the post. I think because it brought letters from Father and friends both far and near. But when days would go by without even a short note she would grow sad. So sometimes I would write her a letter and post it, just so she would have something to open. That always made her smile." He paused. "Or when she was really sad, I would do this silly dance for her. She claimed I began doing it the moment I could walk." I smiled at the image of Gage dancing just to make his mother happy and at the pink cresting his cheeks at such an admission. Arching up onto my toes, I pressed a kiss to the underside of his jaw. There was a light dusting of stubble there from the hasty shaving he'd performed earlier that morning. He glanced down at me in surprise. "What was that for?" "Nothing. Everything. For reminding me how much I love you." His lips pressed together and his eyes grew suspiciously bright. Wrapping his arm around my waist, he pulled me to his side and tucked my head against his chest, jostling my bonnet. I heard the telltale sniff of someone fighting tears, but I didn't speak. If he didn't wish to be seen openly weeping in a graveyard, I couldn't blame him. So I held him just as tightly and waited for his grip to loosen. In the end, it was a light rain that staved off Gage's brimming emotions and propelled us out of the graveyard. In our haste to leave the manor, neither of us had grabbed an umbrella. Not that they would have proved very useful on horseback anyway. Resigned to a little dampness, we paused for a moment beneath the covering of the lych-gate. "If I may be so bold," I said, "what did your grandfather wish to speak with you and Alfred about?" Gage turned to stare at the horses tethered outside the gate. "He told Alfred to quit dodging his responsibilities and find the courage to decide what he really wanted." He paused, furrowing his brow. I leaned in to catch his eye. "And you?" "He asked for my forgiveness." He sounded uncertain and still slightly shocked. "He said he hadn't made my mother live at Windy Cross Cottage, that it was her choice to reside there. And after he learned she'd died from being poisoned by her maid, he tore it down because he was ashamed not of her, but of himself. That if he'd made her live at the manor, perhaps she wouldn't have been made ill so often in our drafty, damp cottage. That someone would have realized what her maid was doing." "It sounds like he blames himself for her death," I murmured, just as surprised by his confession, though I'd suspected something of the sort. He nodded numbly. "I think he does. He also apologized for not stepping in more often to halt my cousins' teasing and Aunt Vanessa's spiteful gossip. He said he thought it would make me stronger, that it would better prepare me for society's slights and insults. Except they never came. Father proved to have even higher-ranking friends than himself, and I was accepted based on them and on my own merits. It never mattered that Father held no rank. And then he was given a barony, so the point was moot." All of this should have made Gage feel relieved, but instead he still seemed troubled. "I would have thought your grandfather's apology would please you, or at least reassure you, but it doesn't," I prodded, hoping he would explain. "No. It does. It's only . . ." He reached out a hand to touch the rough wood of the arch holding up the lych-gate, running his gloved fingers over a set of initials carved there. "I believed hearing those words was what I wanted, more than anything. To prove my family wrong, for my sake, and for my mother's. To show them I'm as worthy a descendent as any of them. Worthier, even. And yet..." "It rings hollow?" He nodded. "What does any of that matter? I know I'm worthy. You know it. Those I count closest to me do also. I'm glad Grandfather and I reconciled. But . . . now he's dying. Why couldn't it have happened sooner? Would he have confessed all of this if I'd come home sooner?" "Darling, you can't punish yourself like that." I urged him to face me. "There's no way to know whether coming home would have made any difference. It's just as likely it could have made relations between you even worse." I pressed a hand to his chest over his heart. "You know as well as I do that life doesn't always turn out like one would wish. You have to embrace the good when it comes and let go of the bad. And your reconciling with your grandfather, no matter how late it came, is good." He inhaled a shaky breath. "You're right." He might say he agreed with me, but it would be a long time before he truly believed it. I tucked my arm through his again and pulled him toward where the horses were tethered. "The important thing now is that you should spend as much time with your grandfather as you still can. Let me worry about coordinating the continued search for Rory." "You're not planning on searching the moors in this weather, are you?" he protested. Our eyes lifted to the sky where the latest cloud bank had slid past, allowing a sliver of sunlight to pierce through before the next one smothered it again. Normally I wouldn't have been overly concerned with such weather. Rain was more often than not a daily occurrence in Britain. But the wary manner in which Gage watched the skies, like they were a portent to something worse, gave me pause. Perhaps the fast-moving clouds were even more indicative of the capricious shifts to come. "Not unless it clears. And not alone. If I do set out from the manor, I'll be certain to take a few servants with me." "Speak to Hammett. He'll know which men would be best."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 49	"Is that Anderley?" I asked in surprise, as our horses cantered into the courtyard upon our return to Langstone Manor. The valet stood next to the stables, chatting with one of the groomsmen. But as soon as he caught sight of us, he swiftly moved forward. Gage's expression turned stony, anticipating poor news about his grandfather. As we brought our horses' heads around, he vaulted from his steed's back. "What news?" "We've uncovered some information you should know straightaway. Miss McEvoy's waiting for us in your chambers." I could see relief tremble through my husband as he exhaled. This was about the investigation, not his grandfather. I scrambled to dismount, allowing Gage to assist me, and then led the men through the manor and up the stairs to our rooms. Bree stood inside my bedchamber next to the young maid who tended the fires. The same one who was infatuated with Anderley. Her skin flushed a fiery red the moment the valet entered the room behind Gage and me. "Tell them what you told us," he coaxed her. He smiled encouragingly when she seemed to falter. "Go ahead. I assure you, they don't bite." But the smirk he displayed next plainly said he might. Bree rolled her eyes. "Give the lass some time. Yer flashin' yer charms aboot 'll only make her stammer more." The maid swallowed, glancing at each of us nervously. "I . . . I just finished sweepin' out the hearth in Mr. Trevelyan's room when I saw Lord Langstone hurry past. He looked like he was goin' out, so I . . . I decided I'd best sweep his, too." She worried her fingers. "I hadn't done so in a while, with him bein' missin' and all." Her eyes communicated she was worried she would get in trouble for this dereliction. I nodded. "Go on." "But when I got to his room, I . . . I found this lyin' on the ashes in his hearth." She pulled pieces of paper from the pocket in her apron. "I normally would never 've taken 'em," she hastened to say, flicking her eyes toward Anderley. "But . . . but Mr. Anderley told me I should tell him if I saw anything strange, and I thought this might be what he meant." "Indeed, it is," Anderley confirmed. I took the paper from her grasp as she beamed shyly at the valet, and turned to allow Gage to read over my shoulder. The paper had been torn in only four pieces, so I was easily able to fit it back together to tell that it was a letter. One hastily jotted off. Alfred, I know where your brother is. Meet me at my cottage as quickly as you may. Lorna I looked up at Gage, seeing the same dawning worry in his eyes. There was no indication whether Rory was alive or dead, but if he were dead, why would she have phrased it so? In that case, she would've come to the manor to share what she'd uncovered. Which meant Rory was likely alive. "You don't think Alfred would do anything hasty, do you?" I asked Gage. He shook his head. "I don't know. But it would be best if we didn't give him the chance to." He turned to the maid. "How long ago did you see Lord Langstone leave?" Her eyes widened in alarm. "I . . . I don't know." "She came to me about half an hour ago," Anderley interjected. "Straight after finding the note?" She nodded in confirmation. "How long did that take?" he asked her. She flushed again. "Not long." "So maybe three-quarters of an hour," Anderley deduced. Gage's expression turned grim. "Too long." He moved toward the window, staring out at the swirling cloud-strewn sky. "Gather as many men as can be spared," he told Anderley. "Then have the groomsmen saddle horses." Anderley nodded and hastened out the door. "I'm coming with you," I said when Gage swiveled to face me. I wasn't about to be left behind, not when Lorna was somehow mixed up in all of this. He glowered at me for a moment, but did not protest. "Dress for rain and wind," he replied as he strode toward the connecting door. "It's not going to be a comfortable ride."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 50	Gage was right. No sooner had we set off across the moor toward Lorna Galloway's cottage than the rain began to fall in earnest. That wouldn't have been so bad had the wind also not decided to kick up a fuss. Our range of vision swiftly deteriorated as the rain blurred the landscape, making it all too easy to become disoriented. Out of necessity, we were forced to slow the horses to a steady walk, bowing our heads against the periodic gusts that flung icy raindrops into our faces. By the time Lorna's cottage came into view, my cloak was thoroughly soaked and my cheeks stung with cold. We must have looked a sorry, bedraggled sight, and Lorna's wide eyes as she emerged from her cottage with a shawl draped around her shoulders only confirmed it. "Where's Alfred?" Gage demanded to know as we drew our horses to a stop before her porch. She blinked, glancing at me. "I . . . I don't know." "What do you mean?" "I haven't seen him since he left with you yesterday." Her skin appeared extremely pale in the dim light. "Why? Has something happened to him?" But Gage was not so easily swayed. "We found your letter." "What letter?" "The one you sent him today, telling him to meet you here. That you know where Rory is." Her mouth gaped slightly as she looked to me and each of the other men in turn. "I . . . I never sent him a letter. I've been here all day." "Is Alfred inside?" "No!" Her voice grew agitated. "He's not. But he could have been." She glared at me and Gage. "You said he would be safe. You said nothing would happen to him while you were there to keep watch." Gage's voice softened with concern. "He truly isn't here?" "No." She shook her head, clutching her shawl tighter as she turned to stare out at the rain drumming down on her roof. I could almost hear her anxious thoughts, for this was not the sort of weather to be caught out on the moors. "Well, we know he took a horse and set off in this direction." Gage glanced around him. Even if Alfred was hiding inside, he couldn't very well conceal a horse. "Then where is he? I haven't seen or spoken to a soul all day. Until you. And I haven't heard the sound of a rider." Her voice rippled with panic. "I think the more important question is, who actually wrote that note luring him here?" I grunted, guiding my horse around, so that I could use the edge of the porch to dismount. "For if they elected to do so by falsely impersonating Miss Galloway, then I doubt their intentions were noble." That was the gentlest way I could think of to phrase the fact that Alfred was in serious trouble. Lorna's eyes were stricken with alarm. So much so that she didn't even balk at my offer of support as I draped an arm around her waist. "If someone were going to . . . surprise one of your visitors coming from Langstone, where would they lie in wait?" Gage asked. "Near the river." She inhaled a deep breath, lowering her shoulders and smoothing the fear from her features. "You mean if they wished to ambush someone?" she replied, recovering her usual cool insouciance and insistence on calling a spade a spade. "Yes. I suppose the river would be best. Though I don't know which path he took—the drier one that loops to the north or the boggier trail you used." "We'll search both." Gage's eyes flicked to mine. "You'll stay here with Miss Galloway?" He was asking more than that simple question, but all I did was nod. "Keep a sharp eye out," he added before ordering Anderley to take two of the men to search the path on which we'd come for any signs of a struggle while he took the other servant and rode north to the shallow river crossing there. As we watched them canter away, I was grateful for the solid weight of my pistol pressed against my side inside the pocket of my deep sapphire blue redingote lest we should encounter any trouble. Then Lorna and I turned as one to enter her cottage and escape the cold and damp. She bustled forward to set a kettle of water over the fire while I tried my best to shake the damp from my outer garments. Though Gage's unspoken urging had been clear, I didn't expect to find Alfred inside the cottage. Lorna's reaction had been too genuine, and far more pronounced than her almost taciturn answers to our questions during our first visit when she'd known all the while Alfred was hidden under her trapdoor. Even so, I glanced around for signs of his presence. I thought my searching had been unobtrusive, but Lorna turned to face me with a resigned expression. "I suppose you need to see beneath the cottage." My lips curled into a humorless smile. "I'm sorry. But yes." It was always difficult to tell a person you genuinely liked, whom you wanted to believe, that you didn't entirely trust them. But such was the lot of an inquiry agent. However, perhaps more distressing than people's usual annoyance or outrage was Lorna's easy acceptance of the matter. It was clear she was used to others' mistrust, and that made me squirm with remorse. I looked around the bedroom and peered underneath the cottage in the small space revealed by the trapdoor, though I didn't go down inside. That seemed excessive. In any case, Alfred would've had to squeeze up into the joists located below where we were standing and lift his feet for me not to see him. Lorna closed the trapdoor and spread her rug back over it before joining me back in the main room, where the water in the kettle had begun to boil. She busied herself with the tea things, moving to and fro and fretting over small details. It was so unlike her that I knew she was mulling over something troubling. "What is it?" I finally asked. She looked up at me blankly. "What's put that furious furrow between your eyebrows?" I reiterated, letting her know I wasn't fooled. She glanced down, her mouth working as if she didn't know how to voice the thoughts inside her. Or perhaps she sensed what significance she would give them by actually putting them into words. "Do . . . do you think Alfred might have gone missing on his own?" I considered her words. "You mean, that he forged that note and left it for someone to find?" She nodded, her eyes stark with dread. The suggestion had some merit. After all, he'd only ripped it into quarters—tears that were easily mended—and thrown it into a cold hearth. He might have even known the maid who handled such tasks was nearby and likely to visit his rooms soon. But more pertinent was the implication. "So that he could avoid all the difficulties, avoid his . . ." my gaze dropped to her abdomen ". . . responsibilities." She lifted a hand to timidly touch her still-flat stomach. If she was surprised I knew, she didn't show it. But then again, she'd told Alfred I would figure it out. "Yes. I . . . I don't want to think it. Not after everything. But..." "But this is Alfred." The man didn't exactly have the most dependable history. She sighed. "Yes." I deliberated over the last time he'd "vanished," the spontaneity of it, and about my conversation with him the previous day. He didn't tend to plan for things. He did them when he thought of them. And the looming decision he had to make, whether to give in to his grandfather's wishes and wed Lady Julianna or defy him and choose Lorna, definitely troubled him. Troubled him enough that he might decide avoidance was a better option. But I highly doubted he would pause to forge a letter from Lorna—one he must know would swiftly be proven false—and then tear it up, hoping it would be brought to our attention. I glanced at the rain-splattered window as another gust of wind flung the icy pellets at it. "No, I don't believe this time Alfred vanished by choice." Lorna nodded, and although her shoulders lowered I could still see a glimmer of uncertainty in her eyes. We both sat straighter at the sound of a horse's hooves striking the earth. Rising to our feet, I followed Lorna toward the door, taking my redingote and the pistol tucked in its pocket with me. However, we discovered it was only Gage hunched inside his sodden greatcoat. He reined in just short of the porch, and Lorna opened the door wider. "There are signs of a scuffle just to the north, near a large outcropping of exposed granite," he shouted. "Do you know the place?" Lorna nodded. "If I were planning an ambush, that wouldn't be a bad place to choose. There are horse tracks leading from that spot in several directions, so we're going to split up and follow them. You're certain you would have heard someone ride by your cottage?" "Yes," she confirmed. "I suppose a pounding downpour might drown out the sound, but while the rain has been steady, it hasn't been falling that hard. Nor has the wind been gusting continuously enough." "Then we can rule out this trail." His gaze flicked to meet mine. "Are you going to remain here with Miss Galloway?" I knew what he wanted my answer to be, though I appreciated the fact he was allowing me to make the decision. At least ostensibly. Fortunately, this time I was in complete agreement. "Yes, I think that would be best." "Stay together, and stay inside the cottage." He glanced toward where my horse stood, tethered to the porch. "If, for whatever reason, you should you have to depart, leave us a note." If the situation weren't so serious, and water weren't dripping from the brim of his hat, emphasizing how miserable he must feel, I might have found the tense mixture of both insistence and restraint he exhibited amusing. If our past inquiries had taught us anything, trouble had a way of finding us, no matter how much care and caution we took. Gage had learned he couldn't swaddle me in cotton padding, and I had accepted that the nature of our exploits often placed him in dangerous circumstances. Instead, I simply offered him a word of loving caution. "Be careful. We don't know exactly what we're dealing with." His pale blue eyes stared into mine for a long moment of silent affection and solidarity. "We will." We watched him ride away, though this time it wasn't long before the rainy mist that had descended swallowed him up. A shiver trembled through my frame. One I wanted to attribute to the chill wind and not a yawning sense of foreboding. To ease her anxieties, Lorna pottered around the cottage doing small tasks, cleaning things that didn't need cleaning, while I paced fretfully about the small space and tried to stay out of her way. Our tea sat cold and untouched on the table. I couldn't stomach the idea of even that panacea, though I wasn't certain why my nerves were so raw. Alfred was the one in imminent danger, and I knew Gage was highly capable and vigilant. But I couldn't shake the sense that something was very wrong. Lorna seemed to feel it, too, for she would glance up at me from time to time as if she had something to say and then resume whatever chore she'd begun. Finally the silence became too much for her. She threw down the cloth in her hand and planted her fists on her hips. "Who could have done this?" she demanded. "I don't know," I admitted with a frown of genuine frustration. "But I keep returning to the question of whether Rory is truly another victim or the villain of this whole piece." She sank down on a stool. "What do you mean? You don't believe he's missing?" I shrugged. "He could be. Or he could be hiding like Alfred did before. But if so, the question is where? And why? It's not as if he's here, and we've searched the usual other places. As for why . . ." I sighed, turning to stare out at the rain-soaked moor, at least the small portion I could see that wasn't shrouded in mist. "I can only think of two options. Either he felt he was in danger like Alfred, or..." "Or he suspected the truth about Alfred's 'disappearance,' and vanished himself in an attempt to draw his brother out," she finished for me. I nodded grimly. Neither scenario was good. "If the latter is true, then . . ." She gasped. "Then forging that note from me could have been his final ploy to lure Alfred somewhere secluded and . . . and finish him off." "Yes." Her shock turned to outrage. "Ooh, I knew there was a reason I never liked him." I held up my hands. "Hold on. We don't know yet that that scenario is true." "Yes, well, the more I think about it, the more I believe it." She picked up her cloth and began wiping the surface of a table again. "He was lurking around my cottage during the days before he 'vanished.' Alfred had to remain inside much of the time, lest he be found out. Said he saw Rory following you about the one day." "I must admit, his actions have been suspicious. I suppose you could say I wouldn't be surprised to learn he's behind it all. But until we have proof..." She scoffed. "I don't know how much more you could need." Worry tightened her voice, and I knew she was speaking more from fear than anything else. However, she did have a point. If not Rory, then who else could it be? I resumed my pacing, watching an hour tick by on the clock and then another. Gage and the other men could be gone until nightfall, and I was beginning to feel I might go mad before then. Meanwhile, Lorna continued to clean and shuffle items about the cottage, finding it as impossible as I did to sit still. Having tired of dusting and organizing her already perfectly ordered shelves of herbs and tinctures, she turned to the cabinet near the door and tugged open the top drawer. Then she unceremoniously dumped the contents on the table behind her and began sorting through what appeared to be mostly a stack of correspondence. I cast a disinterested glance over the papers as I pivoted, but then something caught my eye as Lorna lifted the top page to crumple it into a ball. I reached out to grab her arm, preventing her from hurling it toward where the cat lay curled up on the rug before the hearth. Her eyes widened in surprise as I took the paper from her hand. "What is this?" I asked as I unfolded the paper and smoothed it out. "A letter I received yesterday." My back stiffened as I read over the contents. "And it didn't alarm you?" She shrugged. "No more than the others I've gotten." "You've received more than one?" Her mouth twisted wryly. "One gets delivered to my door every few weeks or so to remind me they know I'm a witch, an abomination. And warn me that someday I'll get what's coming to me." "What?! Someone actually writes such things to you?" "Oh, yes." She sighed. "And worse." I glanced down at the stack of papers. "Where are the others?" "I usually burn them as soon as they arrive." She frowned down at the letter. "But I kept this one for some reason." Whatever the cause, I was glad she had. "Are they usually addressed this way?" She stepped closer to peer over my shoulder at the offending missive. "Well, no," she replied uncertainly. "I suppose I didn't pay much heed to the contents, simply wanting it out of sight." I grimaced in commiseration. "Take a closer look now and see if anything leaps out at you." Vixen, You and yours will get what's coming to you. A short, swift drop. Lorna inhaled sharply, grasping the same implication I had. An implication that would not have been so clear the day before. "You and yours." "Precisely. What did you think they meant by 'a short, swift drop'?" "I . . . I suppose hanging or some other witch trial. I tried not to give it much consideration." I couldn't blame her. Not if her receipt of these letters was a common occurrence. Not when there was nothing she could do about them. I would want to ignore them, too. "And what do you make of the fact they addressed you as 'Vixen'?" I asked, curious if she would come to the same sneaking conclusion I had. She began to shake her head and then stopped. "Wait. Are they referring to that witch Vixana?" "I've heard the legend and I wondered . . ." I let my words die away as I saw the light of comprehension in Lorna's face. "What is it?" "Rory has been very vocal in calling me a witch." "Yes? I've heard him say so. But—" "And he's accused me more than once of being the descendant of Vixana." I turned to face her. "You think Rory wrote this?" She scowled. "Who else?" I had to admit, I could think of no one. And Rory had a history of using notes to carry out his mischief, given the fact he'd instructed his valet to poison my tea with a note. Then I recalled something else Bree had mentioned in her retelling of the legend. "Isn't there a tor named after her?" "Yes. Vixen Tor. It lies a few miles south of here." Her eyes widened. "And there's rumored to be a small cave below it, though I've never visited to see if that's true. Do you think . . .?" I understood what she was asking even without her saying the words. "I think that if there is a cave there, that might be an excellent spot to hide. So long as one isn't afraid Vixana's spirit haunts it." "Rory would believe himself immune to such things." I suspected she might be right about that. "We need to go there," she insisted, grabbing her boots from beside the door and sitting down on one of the benches to remove her slippers. "Hold on." I glanced at the window, where outside the rain fell and the mist swirled unabated. "I understand your urgency, but in this weather? I've been told over and over how dangerous the moor can be even with fair skies." I gestured toward the door. "These conditions are far from favorable." "Yes, but you forget I've lived out on these moors all my life. I've traveled to Merrivale many times, even if I've never gone beyond to Vixen Tor. All we have to do is follow the river. We can't get lost if we do that." I deliberated over what she'd said, not doubting what she claimed, but still hesitant to go. Was this a risk worth taking? Particularly when we didn't know what sort of threat we faced at the other end, and with Gage and Anderley miles away. Alfred could already be dead. And if he wasn't and I didn't try to go to his aid? Could I live with that? Could Gage? "Please." Lorna sat up. Her eyes pleaded with me. "We can't just let Rory kill him." I inhaled, still torn about what to do. Her eyes hardened. "I'm going whether you will or not. And short of tying me up, you won't stop me from taking your horse." She'd called my bluff. I wasn't very well going to tackle her. I could aim my pistol at her, but I suspected she knew I wouldn't pull the trigger. And I certainly wasn't going to let her go alone. "Very well," I relented. "Give me a sheet of foolscap and a pencil to write my husband a message. And pack us some food and water. We may have need of it." Minutes later, we both mounted my horse and set off down the trail to follow the River Walkham southward. Before descending the hill, I glanced behind us to see the cottage swallowed up by the haze of mist and falling rain. I could only hope it wasn't the last human habitation we would ever see, and that we weren't riding into a trap.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 51	There was one thing I could say for our journey. I now intimately understood what Gage and so many others had been trying to convey about the treacherous nature of the moors. Traveling through the swirling, eddying mist over such boggy, rocky terrain disoriented and terrified me. Not only could I not see beyond a few feet in front of me, but I also started to doubt if anything outside of myself was even real. It was like wandering through the fog of your dreams—or, more accurately, nightmares—uncertain where reality ended and illusion began. If not for Lorna's solid presence at my back, I was quite sure I would have panicked. It was no wonder so many people had died on the moors, swallowed up eternally by the mist. If not for the river and Lorna's keen sense of direction, we could have roamed forever until either bog, or dehydration, or mysterious beast claimed us. It was also clear where the idea of being pixie-led had derived from, for if I'd been a slightly less logical person I could well have believed there was some supernatural force at work. I had to blink my eyes several times when the few buildings that populated the village of Merrivale emerged out of the mist, just to be certain I wasn't hallucinating. Much as I wanted to knock on one of those doors and demand sanctuary, we pressed on. At some point, the rain had slackened, but that only made the mist intensify. And now we had to contend with the falling darkness. Though we couldn't see the sun, we could still sense its setting, taking what little light it had afforded us with it. We clung to the course of the ever-meandering river like a limpet until about a mile south of the village. Then the most dangerous part of our trek began. At the river's junction with a trickling spring we struck out to the southwest along a little-used trail. Here and there, there were signs of recent usage, which was both encouraging and alarming. As such, we didn't dare light the lantern Lorna had enough foresight to bring out of fear that if Rory was at Vixen Tor, he might see us coming. Fortunately, the horse was a hearty soul and kept to the trail almost by instinct, avoiding the blanket bog that edged the path to the north. In this way, we inched our way onward, peering intently into the dim fog for any sign of the towering Vixen Tor. Making the matter all the more difficult was the fact that Vixen Tor was not situated as many of the other tors at the top of a stark hill. It was nestled on the upward slopes of a woodland area studded with trees and bracken. So there was no telltale rise in elevation, especially as we were approaching it crossways. In fact, we might have blundered right up to it if not for the sharp thuds emanating from the mist before us. I pulled Eyebright to a stop so that we could listen more carefully. The mare tossed her head, not liking the sound, and I reached forward to run my hand over her neck, to soothe her. "What do you think it is?" I whispered to Lorna over my shoulder. "It sounds like . . . stone hitting stone." I paused to listen. "I think you're right. But what does it mean?" Was Rory building something? "I don't know." We sat listening for a moment longer before I spoke again. "The ground here looks less boggy, yes? Perhaps it's time we approach on foot." "I think you're right." She slid off Eyebright's back and I followed suit, gripping her reins to draw her off the path toward the right where I spied a stand of trees peeking out of the mist. Leading her to the farthest rowan tree, I tethered her to a branch and rubbed her flank before rejoining Lorna on the path. We slowly edged our way toward the sound, straining to see anything ahead of us. At first there was nothing but trees and the occasional rock. Somewhere off to the left, I could hear the jangle of a horse's harness. Then the craggy stones turned into boulders, growing in size, until suddenly the massive tor loomed up before us. We turned sharply to the right, drawing closer to the granite outcropping. From this position, I could tell the sound was coming from the other side of the tor. "Let's see if we can climb up onto the rocks to get a better view from above without being seen," I suggested. She nodded, following my example as I reached between my legs and drew the now-sodden hem of my skirts through my legs and tucked them into the belt of my redingote at the front. Then I carefully began to pick my way up onto the tor toward the direction of the thuds. The climb was not as difficult as I'd anticipated, what with all the ice-shattered grooves and ridges to place my hands and feet into, but it was by no means easy. At one point, a wrong step sent a cascade of tiny pebbles down the face of the tor. I dropped down against the rock, fearing discovery. But the sounds on the opposite side of the tor never abated, I supposed drowning out the softer noise of the shingle. I began to climb again, slower this time, but even so, I gained the summit within a minute. The stone there was worn smooth from the wind and elements. I crawled across it before lying down to peer over the edge. At first, the mist seemed too thick, but then the wind shifted, billowing some of the smoky haze away from the figure who stood before the gleam of a lantern. My breath caught and Lorna smothered a gasp with her hand as she crept up beside me. "Isn't that . . .?" She couldn't seem to form his name. "That's Mr. Hammett," I whispered, still reeling from the revelation. "Lord Tavistock's majordomo." She turned to look at me, her eyes still wide with shock. "But why?" "I can answer that. Or we can stop him from doing what I think he's doing." We peered over the rock face again to see Hammett stacking another stone on the pile before him. "If that's the cave we've heard mention of . . ." I leaned closer to her ear to murmur ". . . and he's attempting to close it off, then there must be something inside worth hiding. Something, or rather someone, he doesn't want found." The butler was about seventy, and while hale and hearty, I couldn't imagine him eagerly undertaking such backbreaking labor without very good reason. "Alfred," she gulped. "And perhaps Rory. We won't know until we can get down there." We wouldn't know if they were alive or dead either, but I wasn't about to mention that. Her eyes flashed with fear, but I could hear resolve ringing in her voice as she turned to ask, "What should we do?" I glanced behind me and then below once again. "How do you feel about channeling your supposed ancestress?" She blinked and then smiled with vicious glee. "Tell me what to do."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 52	Pressing my back against the cool outcropping, I leaned to the right to peer around it at the man who'd fooled us all. I'd believed him a steady bulwark of the family, a sympathetic figure to Gage, but if I was correct, his duplicity stretched back much further than the past few weeks. The thought of his high-handed, self-righteous deception made me want to slap his face and more. Instead, I tamped down my anger and turned to hurl the pebble I had chosen up toward the top of the tor. I hoped my aim was true, but not too true, lest it strike Lorna where she lay in wait. Then I transferred my pistol to my right hand and pressed close to the rock, waiting to see how Hammett would react. I only hoped he would prove himself a proper Dartmoor man about superstitions so I wouldn't have to use it. A hair-raising shriek pierced the air, making me jump even though I'd been expecting it. "How dare you use this place for your own purposes," Lorna screeched, glaring down at Hammett from above. Hammett startled, dropping the rock he hefted. He howled in pain and stumbled back a step. "You have no right to meddle in my domain, or with my people. Begone from here!" "I knew ye were in league with the devil. An eye-biter to tempt our young." He fairly spat the words, though he trembled with evident terror. "I warned 'em not to have anything to do with ye. That naught good could come of it." The sound that issued from Lorna's throat, a sort of hiss-shriek, made my heart rise into my throat. Had I not known any better, I would have been tempted to believe her act. "I said begone! Or that first stone won't be the last to strike you," she shrieked. "I'll hurl this entire tor down on you if I must." Hammett shuffled backward. "Keep 'em. There's naught you can do now. For either o' 'em. The Trevelyans' honor is restored." My stomach dipped. Were they dead? Both Alfred and Rory? I wanted to charge around the rock and discover for myself, but I forced myself to remain still. Revealing myself would not help. It was safer to let Hammett believe what he would and escape rather than have to confront him now. There was no telling how he would react. Or whether he would do something to precipitate Alfred's and Rory's demises sooner if they were not in fact dead. I felt Lorna's answering scream in the pit of my stomach, and I instinctively shrank away from all the fury and distress it contained. It was far too genuine. Hammett recoiled and turned to hobble off toward his horse, whose harness we'd heard jangling. His body moved in an awkward shamble, his shoulders hunched in discomfort. The foot he'd dropped the rock on visibly pained him, but the other leg also appeared to do so. I realized then the other leg must have been injured during his scuffle with Gage in the middle of the night. He had been our intruder. Once Hammett moved out of sight, I dared to skirt around the rock and pick my way around the face of the tor to the place where Hammett had been at work. At first, I didn't understand what he'd been endeavoring to conceal. The tor was riddled with cracks and crevices. But then I saw it. Just below the base of one of the outcroppings was a hole. If I hadn't known something was there, I would have assumed it was merely another ice-shattered fissure in the granite. However, when I placed my hands inside, I could pull back the stones below it. Working quickly, I wrenched as many rocks from their places as I could. I started at the sound of a horse's whinny somewhere in the distance, but when I turned about I could see nothing but the swirling mist. It must have been Hammett, setting back off across the moor. I resumed my frantic work, and moments later Lorna arrived to help. We scrambled to remove the stones, panting from the exertion. All the while we called out to both Alfred and Rory, praying one of them would answer. Regrettably, the lower in the pile we progressed, the heavier the rocks became, until neither of us could budge them, even working in concert. I sat back, gasping for breath. "They're too big." I touched her arm when she continued to strain. "Lorna, stop. You'll only hurt yourself. They're simply too big." She leaned against the side of the outcropping. "We can't stop. Alfred could be in there." "Then let's see if he is." I stood to examine the opening we'd created. "I think I can squeeze through here. But I'll need the lantern to see. Do you think—" Before I could even finish the question, she hurried off into the mist, presumably to draw our horse and the lantern she carried closer. I pried at some of the other stones, but while a few shifted, they were too unwieldy to dislodge. That Hammett had managed such physically demanding labor, and at his age, amazed me. Clearly I'd underestimated him in more ways than one. Or had he purposely been misleading us all with his shambling walk and creaky voice? I heard the clack of the horse's hooves before I saw the light of the lantern Lorna had lit. She held it before her as they emerged from the fog, its light refracting the water droplets to form a sort of fuzzy halo around them. We lifted the lantern up to the small entrance to the cavity under the tor, but the light couldn't penetrate deep enough to illuminate anything. Reaching up to remove my hat, I glanced up at Lorna and paused. "Perhaps you should be the one to climb inside. The space might only be large enough to fit one of us, and if the men require medical attention, you might be more skilled at giving it to them." Her eyes were stricken. "I only know how to use herbs. I don't know how to stitch up wounds and . . . and such." She swallowed, gazing up at me hopefully. "Surely you would know better than I." A strange feeling gripped me, for this was the first time I found myself wishing my late husband had actually taught me more about practicing medicine. Chiefly, the skills that pertained to his work as a surgeon rather than an anatomist. I passed her my hat, breathing deeply to settle the nerves roiling around in my stomach. "I'll do my best. But remember, my first husband more often diagnosed ailments after the fact rather than treating and saving people's lives before it was too late." I could only pray the former skills would not be called upon. I stared into the darkness of the tiny crevice, refusing to let myself contemplate what other creatures might be dwelling inside. Then I squared my shoulders and crawled inside. The gap was narrow and difficult to navigate, particularly in my skirts, but I wasn't about to remove any layers of clothing unless necessary. Not when my cheeks and nose already stung from the cool mist. The space smelled of dirt and stagnant air, making me suspect this was the only opening. Once inside, I reached my hand up to ask for the lantern. Together, Lorna and I were able to manipulate it through the opening without dousing the light. "What do you see?" Her voice was shrill with desperation as I turned to survey my surroundings. The cave sloped downward, opening up into a space about eight feet wide by four feet high. Not tall enough for me to stand up in, but at least high enough for me to sit or kneel comfortably. It was impossible to tell how deep the cave went, nor did I truly care. For immediately before me, at the base of the slope, lay the sight we were looking for. "I see them," I replied, clambering forward, anxious to check for signs of life. "What?! Are they alive?" Lorna gulped. "Tell me what's happening!" "Give me a moment." Alfred lay closer to the entrance, and as I drew near I could hear him breathing, pained though it sounded. "Alfred is alive," I reported. She sobbed in relief. "I'm checking Rory now." Of the two men, he definitely looked worse. His skin was ashen, his eyes were sunken in their sockets, and his lips were dry and cracked. When I passed a hand under his nose, I could scarcely feel his breath. "And Rory is, too. But barely." I moved back toward the entrance. "Pass me the water." If he'd been down here since the evening after he was last seen five days prior, he could be close to death simply from lack of water. I tried rousing Rory, but when it became apparent he wasn't going to wake, I parted his lips and dribbled a bit of water into his parched mouth, careful not to give him so much he might choke on it. Then I rubbed his throat, hoping I might stimulate his muscles to swallow. For a moment, it seemed futile, but then his throat worked as it should. So I poured a bit more into his mouth, repeating this process two more times. I shifted over to Alfred. When I patted his face, he moaned. "Alfred," I said. "Alfred, can you hear me?" His eyes slit open to peer up at me. "Lady Darby?" he croaked. "Yes. Here, drink." I lifted his head, helping him to sip the water. When he lay back, he sucked in a harsh breath, clutching his chest just below his shoulder. I moved closer to him, urging his hand aside. "Let me see." He reluctantly complied as I hefted the lantern to better see his injury. Peeling back his coat, I could see the blood-encrusted shirt beneath. It was now stuck to the wound, and loosening it would be difficult and painful, but necessary to prevent infection. "I don't know whether to be happy to see you or not," he grunted as I prodded at the cloth. "But I suppose if you're offering me water and examining my injuries, you don't intend to dice me up." I flicked my gaze up at him, realizing it was a jest. One made in poor taste, but a jest nonetheless. Rather than chide him, I elected to take that as a good sign. "What's happening? Is he drinking?" Lorna called in to me. "Who is that?" Alfred asked. "Lorna," I replied, before raising my voice. "Yes. Alfred is awake." "Oh, thank heavens," she gasped. "Alfred, are you well?" "Yes," he responded hoarsely, and then had to gather breath to speak louder. "Yes! Just a few bumps and bruises." This was a lie if ever I heard one, though I knew it was done with good intention. "He shot you," I pointed out. "Yes." He sucked in a harsh breath as I prodded a particularly tender spot. "But Lorna doesn't need to know that." I snorted. "As if you can keep it a secret." I sat back, turning toward the cave entrance where Lorna peered down at us, unable to see us past the low-hanging barrier of the ceiling. "He has a bullet wound, and though I haven't examined him yet, I suspect Rory is suffering from much the same. Without proper medical supplies I can only do so much. One of us needs to go for help." I didn't complete my thought, though Lorna must have understood the implication. If we didn't get help soon, one or both of them would die. She didn't respond immediately, and I remained silent, giving her time to absorb the information I'd just relayed. "I should go." Her voice was firm with resolve. "I know the way far better than you. Surely someone in Merrivale will be able to assist us." She was right. Much as the idea of remaining here with the two injured men frightened me, the thought of striking out across the mist-shrouded moor without Lorna to assist me was infinitely more perilous. "Pass me down one of the saddlebags," I told her. "Did you bring any of your herbs?" "No. I should have thought to do so," she fretted. "You couldn't have known," I replied. "But bring back some garlic to pack the wounds with to ward off further infection." "I'll grab some calendula as well." I accepted the saddlebag from her, reaching past it to grip her hand before she could withdraw. "I'll do everything I can," I promised her, hoping it would be enough. "You just focus on staying safe and finding help." "Thank you." Her voice shook with repressed emotion, but she smoothed it out as best she could as she called down to Alfred. "I'm going for help, Alfred." Then almost as an afterthought she added, "Don't die on me." "Is she out there alone?" Alfred asked as I heard the sounds of her moving away. "Yes." He shoved my hand aside, as I reached again for his wound. "You can't let her go alone." "We don't have any other choice," I replied. "She's certainly not going to let me leave you and Rory here alone." "Well, make her." I arched an eyebrow at his petulant tone. "I don't think you're in any position to make demands. Now lie still. This is not going to be pleasant." There was one positive thing about his peevish behavior. It made it easier for me to do what I needed to. I trickled cold water over the wound to loosen the encrusted fabric and then peel it upward. He winced and gritted his teeth. When I'd finished, he was breathing hard, and the sweat I'd already observed dotting his brow ran in rivulets down his face. "Maybe I spoke too soon," he panted. "Maybe you do mean to finish me off." "Hush," I retorted, prying carefully at the skin around the wound. It was red and inflamed, but the placement and the relatively minor loss of blood suggested the bullet hadn't hit any major organs or veins. If we could combat the infection and get him help soon, he should survive. So long as there weren't worse injuries. "Where are your other injuries?" I asked, sweeping my gaze over his form. "There are none." I glared at him. "From the labored sound of your breathing, I know that's not true. Did he crack your ribs?" "I don't know," he replied honestly. I leaned closer, inspecting the stain on his shirt and skin just above his shirt collar where his cravat had been removed. "Lady Darby, I hardly think this is the time," Alfred quipped weakly. I looked up past his dry lips a few inches from mine to meet his eyes. "What is this?" I demanded to know, ignoring his attempt at levity. "What is smeared on your neck? It's not blood." I moved even nearer to smell. "I think it's a plant of some kind." "I . . . I don't know. Hammett must have done it while I was unconscious." I flicked a glance at Rory's neck, seeing the same stain. Then a speck of something on his coat sleeve caught my eye. I reached across to pick it up, bringing it closer to the light. It was a cluster of leaves. Rue, if I wasn't mistaken. "Why would he rub rue into your skin?" I voiced out loud. "It's not a poison I know of." "Perhaps because it's supposed to ward off spells," Alfred surprised me by replying. He attempted to shrug, which resulted in a grunt of pain. "Don't ask me how I know that." I suspected Alfred knew a great deal more than he wished others to realize, but I didn't comment on that. "I suppose that makes sense given the fact he believes Lorna is a witch." He blinked up at the rock ceiling. "He kept babbling something about saving us from our own sinful inclinations and restoring the family honor." I didn't question him about it further, wanting to focus on what was most important here and now—keeping both men alive. I shifted across the cave again, settling next to Rory's side. "Has he woken? Has he spoken to you?" I asked Alfred while I searched him for injuries. "For a short time." His voice grew rough. "Though I'm not certain he was in his right mind. He kept trying to apologize. Said he swore Lorna was behind my disappearance. Then he saw me one day on the moor. Probably the same day you did. And he made the mistake of saying something to Hammett instead of you and Gage, thinking the butler might be an ally." He swallowed. "He was worried the two of you might not take him seriously, that you already knew he'd been hindering your investigation. I guess he initially hadn't wanted me found. He was angry, and wanted me to stew in whatever trouble I'd gotten myself into. But then he'd changed his mind, growing worried I might truly be in some sort of danger." Alfred coughed, gritting his teeth in pain. I lifted a hand to halt his flow of words, but he pressed on, urgent to relay it all. "He wanted to tell Grandfather what he'd seen, that I was alive and well, but Hammett insisted they needed proof. However, when he took it to him, Hammett attacked him instead." "What proof?" "He wasn't very coherent, but I gathered it was a drawing of Lorna. She was wearing a necklace with a piece of amber strung on a chain. The piece of amber I'd found one day on the moors when we were boys. He knew I always kept it in my pocket." The sketch of Lorna at Great Mis Tor. That's why Rory had taken my sketchbook. He'd noticed the distinctive amber necklace when my book fell open to that image that second day we met on the moor. It was something that, as an outsider, I'd had no chance of discerning. I frowned, unable to find the source of Rory's injury. "Did he tell you how he was attacked?" "Shot. Just like me." "Where?" Frustration tightened my voice, and I pressed my hand into the ground beside his arm in order to reach up by his head. It sunk into wet earth and I nearly recoiled. I must have made a sound, for Alfred's eyes snapped to mine in the darkness. I didn't spare time for an explanation, sliding my knee between the two men where they lay side by side in order to try to gain enough leverage to roll Rory onto his side. There I found the hole near the center of his back, and from the scent emanating from it, it had already begun to fester. My heart rose into my throat. I laid him back as gently as I could and turned to meet Alfred's gaze. I could see the same horror and pain I was feeling glimmering in his eyes in the lantern light. Placing my hand around his wrist, I felt for Rory's pulse. It was faint. I counted its beats, recalling something I'd overheard my late anatomist husband telling his assistant about the time he'd served as a surgeon during the Napoleonic Wars. He'd said that one of a field surgeon's most important skills was his ability to distinguish between those injuries which were survivable and those which were not. Not only could he save more lives by focusing his time and attention on those he could mend, but by staying his hand he also prevented further suffering for those who couldn't survive by not forcing them to endure an unnecessarily long and painful death when they could already be at peace. No matter how much I wanted to balk at the truth, somewhere inside me I recognized reality. This wound was not survivable. Even had the best surgeon in all of England swooped in at that very moment to attend to him, the chances of his recovering from such a wound while in such an advanced state of dehydration were infinitesimal. If the bullet had damaged an organ, the odds could be even smaller than that. He would lie in bed, slowly waiting to die. Perhaps even praying for it. It was far kinder not to do anything, but infinitely more difficult. I could see the moment Alfred recognized the same thing I had, though from the way his mouth worked, he seemed to want to fight it. "I'm sorry," I murmured, not knowing what else to say. After all, the men were brothers. Regardless of everything else, there was still that bond between them. His throat worked as he swallowed, and then he nodded in acceptance. I glanced at Rory one last time, blinking through a sheen of tears. I hated that I'd allowed myself to think the worst of him when the truth was he'd been trying to protect me. Those letters he purportedly wrote telling his valet to poison me and threatening Lorna almost certainly had come from Hammett, not him. If only he'd trusted us with his suspicions and not Hammett. All of this could have turned out differently. Tamping down my emotions, I returned to Alfred's side to try to clean his wound the best I could. If I couldn't save Rory, then I was going to do everything I could to save his brother. Sometime later, I looked up as Rory suddenly inhaled a deeper breath than those before. I tensed, as did Alfred, who lifted his head, hoping against hope that he was not as far gone as we'd feared. But then Rory exhaled one last, long sigh, and I sensed the change in him. His supine body went completely slack, and as the moments ticked by his chest never rose again. Cold crept over me, gripping my heart and making me want to curl into a tiny ball, but I forced myself to continue my ministrations on Alfred. I noticed then how he was holding Rory's hand, and I couldn't stop the tears I'd been fighting from overflowing my eyes and trailing down my cheeks. I recovered Alfred's wound as best I could with a strip of fabric torn from my shift. Then I settled onto the cold earth beside him, leaning against the stone wall. When I reached for his other hand, he quickly gave it to me, I supposed as anxious as I was to feel another person's warmth. To know that yours wasn't the only heart still beating. That was how Gage found us hours later.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 53	I don't recall much about the ride back to Langstone Manor except how cold and numb I felt. But I supposed sitting with a corpse would do that to you. Gage and the other men had returned to Lorna's cottage to find our note and then journeyed on to find us. They'd just stopped to ask after us at the inn in Merrivale when Lorna arrived. However, the mist had grown even thicker, further hindering their trek to Vixen Tor, which had taken three times longer than it had initially taken me and Lorna to reach it. Upon their arrival, they'd quickly cleared away the rest of the stones from the cave entrance to unearth us. I'd climbed out first to stand torpidly by Lorna's side with a blanket clutched around my shoulders while they extracted Alfred and then Rory's body from the cavity. Unable to hang back a moment longer, Lorna had rushed forward to kneel beside Alfred. She'd not been able to return to her cottage for the herbs we needed, but fortunately someone in Merrivale had already possessed a stash of calendula lotion and yarrow powder. I packed the wound with the yarrow to slow his continued bleeding, while she rubbed the calendula lotion into the inflamed skin surrounding it to combat the infection. Someone from the village had also produced a litter of sorts, which dragged behind Anderley's horse to transport Alfred to the inn at Merrivale. Most of us waited there for the Tavistock carriages to retrieve us and carry us the rest of the way to Langstone Manor. Rory's body was rolled up inside a blanket and carried on the shoulders of the men, to be loaded into the carriage. Between coordinating the others, Gage plied me with tea, which I dutifully drank without really tasting it. The warmth should have revived me, but it did nothing to thaw the cold pit yawning inside me. Apparently the entire household had been informed of what had happened, for when we returned to Langstone, despite our dawn arrival they were lined up waiting to be assigned tasks. The first footman stood in Hammett's customary place next to the housekeeper, so I assumed the duplicitous butler had been detained. A surgeon stood at the entrance to the drawing room, ready to attend to Alfred's injuries. But I barely had a chance to explain what I'd done to clean the wound and try to stave off infection before Gage and then Bree bustled me off to my bedchamber. I allowed my maid to fuss over me, letting her comforting chatter wash over me as I soaked in a steaming bath. Whether it was the warm water, Bree's soothing fingers in my hair, or a combination of both, the chill that had gripped me since Rory breathed his last began to thaw, and with it, my emotions. Before I knew what was happening, I found myself shaking with sobs, my head resting on my knees as my tears mixed with the bubbles. Gage appeared at my side and lifted me from the bath, wrapping me in a warm towel. He sat on the edge of the bed and cradled me, allowing me to weep into his collar. When my hiccupping sobs at last subsided to sniffles, I began to stammer an apology, but he wouldn't hear it. "Hush," he murmured. "I understand exactly why you're crying. If anyone should be apologizing, it's me." I reached up to fiddle with the buttons running down his shirtfront. "Yes, but I . . . I should be the one comforting you. After all, Rory was your cousin. And Hammett . . ." I whimpered. "Hammett..." "Shhh. Yes. I know." I heard the pain in his voice, even restrained as it was, and reached up to wrap my arms around his neck. Pressing my cheek to his, I whispered, "I'm so sorry, darling," trusting he would know what I meant. For surely he must realize now that Hammett had likely had some part to play in helping Annie to poison his mother. He inhaled a ragged breath and held me even tighter. When his grip began to loosen, I pulled back to look up into his face. "Has Hammett explained his actions?" He brushed aside a strand of damp hair clinging to my forehead. "He hasn't returned yet." I sat taller. "He hasn't?" "We don't know whether he realized his contemptible actions had been discovered, or he stumbled into some sort of trouble out on the moors, but no one has seen him since yesterday morning." I mulled over this information. "Is someone searching for him?" "Not yet." A sudden thought occurred to me. "What of Lorna? He might—" "I insisted she remain here," he replied, halting my harried words. "On the chance that Hammett would come after her next. Particularly given her delicate state." His lips curled into a tight smile. "I'm not sure I could have torn her away from Alfred's side anyway." "How is he?" Gage's expression turned grim. "The surgeon removed a bullet from his chest. His condition is serious. But he thinks he'll survive so long as we can keep infection from setting in." I exhaled the breath I'd been holding. "Lorna will make sure of that." "I suspect she will." He pressed his lips to my forehead, almost speaking into my skin. "Regardless, if it hadn't been for you and Miss Galloway, and whatever made you believe he and Rory would be at Vixen Tor, Alfred would not have survived. And Hammett's treachery would have gone undetected." I thought of the stone wall Hammett had been building, and how near to completing it he had been. Had Lorna and I arrived but half an hour later, we might never have found them. Gage shook his head. "What I can't understand is why he attacked Rory. It's clear he was obsessed with the curse, intent on carrying out what he believed to be the family's will. But Rory was doing his duty. He would have made an excellent viscount and cheerfully wed Lady Juliana. So why did Hammett shoot him?" "I think I know the answer to that." I explained what Alfred had revealed to me in the cave. "Rory was already too delirious to reveal everything to his brother, but I suspect Hammett tried to convince him to remain quiet about Alfred's survival so that he could find him and kill him. That he tried to bribe him with the promised inheritance of the viscountcy. But Rory balked at this suggestion, so Hammett realized he would also have to die. I also suspect it was Hammett who left the note instructing Moffat to poison me, not Rory. Nothing else makes sense." His brow furrowed. "He fooled us all," he murmured in horrified wonder. "I never would have believed he was capable of such things. I honestly believed he cared for me. He was always there—a silent bulwark of support against my family when I needed him. But all along, he was silently colluding with Annie to poison my mother." "We can't know that," I argued half-heartedly. "Not for certain. Not unless he admits it." His stare told me he knew very well I agreed with him. That my objection was only made in attempt to shield him from further hurt. "Are you going to try to argue he wasn't the one who tried to murder us with an ax?" "No," I relented. "He had an obvious limp. It was him." Gage absorbed this bit of information stalwartly, but the pain reflected in his eyes became a little more pronounced. "What of your grandfather?" I asked. "Has he been informed?" "I was trying to work up the nerve when Bree sent a maid to find me." His eyes strayed toward the door. "Actually, my aunt Vanessa asked to be the one to do it. She promised to do it gently." He sighed. "I hope I wasn't wrong to trust her with this." I pressed a hand to his chest to assure him. "You weren't." His eyes met mine, asking questions I knew it wasn't the time to answer. Instead I pressed a kiss to his cheek and rested my head on his shoulder. I was glad to hear Lady Langstone had stepped up to do what she could. I wondered if anyone had recognized the amount of power Hammett had subtly wielded in the house. He'd restricted access to Lord Tavistock, especially since he fell ill, though I didn't believe he'd poisoned the viscount. Given what we knew about Hammett's motives, such a move made little sense. But he had controlled who and what information reached the viscount whenever possible. Lady Langstone, in particular, had been blocked from his presence, and I couldn't help but wonder if that was because he'd feared her perception. Unfortunately, her sour demeanor toward most everyone had made such an action seem justified. But now I could see it for the manipulative move it was. Just as his defense of her had clearly been a ploy to keep my trust by making me think he was fair and impartial. "Will you go to him now that I'm recovered?" "Are you?" he asked, forcing me to look him in the eye. "Well enough," I responded honestly. "It will take some time for me to heal completely." I inhaled a shaky breath. "And I suspect the memory will always cause me some distress. But I promise I won't shatter." I sank limply against him. "I just want to rest." He searched my eyes as if ascertaining my truthfulness, and then nodded. "I'll send Bree to sit with you." I opened my mouth to protest, but he overruled me. "I'm not leaving you alone. Not after your ordeal." "I am fine, really..." He cupped my jaw gently with his hand. "Kiera, please. Just humor me." I sighed in surrender. "Wake me if there's news."
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 54	In the end, I was only allowed to sleep for three-quarters of an hour. Then Bree woke me with a shake. "My apologies, m'lady. Lord Langstone is asking for you." I pushed myself upright, trying to clear the sleep from my mind. Bree handed me a cup of coffee to sip as she coiled and pinned my hair. Even so, my thoughts still seemed a bit bleary when I descended the stairs a short time later. I found Alfred lying in a bed that had hastily been assembled in the drawing room. Lorna stood at his side, clutching his hand while Gage and the dowager lined up along the opposite side of the bed. At first, I feared the surgeon had been wrong. That Alfred's injuries had been even more severe than he realized. And the man in the clerical collar who stood at the end of the bed didn't ease my dread. But then I noticed the gentle smile on Lorna's face, and the glimmer in Alfred's eye, despite the pain he must have been feeling. "You needed me?" I asked in confusion. "Yes," Alfred answered feebly, beckoning me closer. He looked up at Lorna. "We wanted you here to witness our marriage." My eyes widened in shock. "Of course," I stammered, before adding more sincerely, "That's wonderful." I didn't understand how such a thing was possible so quickly, but I wasn't about to dispute it. I suspected there was a special license involved, but that meant Alfred must have obtained it from the bishop weeks ago. My gaze swung toward Lady Langstone, curious how she'd accepted this development. Her eyes were rimmed in red and her complexion pale, but she seemed reconciled to the match. Perhaps the loss of her other son had softened her and made her more willing to concede to Alfred's wishes. Or perhaps her reasons were far more practical. After all, we all knew Lord Tavistock wasn't long for the world. If the worst should happen, and Alfred succumbed to his injuries, the title and estate would then go to Lord Tavistock's younger brother or some other distant relative. However, if Alfred wed Lorna, making the child she carried legitimate, then if the baby was a boy he would be next in line to inherit after his father. And if it was a girl, at least they would have almost nine months to prepare for that eventuality. Interestingly enough, the dowager's silent acceptance of Alfred's marriage was not the most surprising discovery. It was the sight of her arm looped through Gage's as she leaned on him for support, and possibly even a bit of comfort. One glance at Gage told me how bewildered he was by this development, though he gave no indication he was averse to it. He was too good a man to deny a woman in need of his assistance whatever aid he could render, even his hitherto-acrimonious aunt. Neither was he opposed to Alfred and Lorna's marrying. He looked on with approval, standing tall at his cousin's side, even though just a short twenty-four hours before, the prospect of being asked to stand up with Alfred at his wedding would have seemed laughable to him. "Grandfather has given us his blessing," Alfred explained, his voice hoarse with fatigue and exertion. "And given the circumstances . . ." he squeezed Lorna's hand ". . . I decided it was best not to wait. Lest she change her mind." Lorna shook her head fondly, though I could see the lines of worry radiating from the corners of her eyes. It would be some days before we knew if he would suffer further complications, before we knew for certain if he would survive. Until then, she would not rest easy. I moved to Lorna's side, taking the small bouquet of flowers a maid handed me that someone had plucked from the garden. By necessity, the ceremony was swift, but for all that, extremely touching. I found myself dabbing at the corner of my eyes with my handkerchief even though I thought I'd cried myself dry just hours before. They would not have an easy time of it, for some would find it difficult to accept Lorna as the new viscountess, but I had hopes their affection was strong enough to outlast it. Once the deed was done, we all issued our congratulations to the happy couple and slipped from the room to allow Alfred to rest while Lorna sat by his side. The first footman was waiting for us when we emerged, and the look on his face told us he did not have happy news. "Mr. Hammett has been found." Gage stepped forward determinedly, his eyes hardening with resolve. "Where?" "Not far from Vixen Tor. Some men from Merrivale found him. Said it looked as if his horse had spooked and bumbled into the bog just north of there. They found the steed struggling to free itself from the muck. Mr. Hammett lay several feet away, his head bloodied from striking a rock." "He's dead, then?" Gage clarified, being the first to find the words to speak. "Yes, sir." I turned to look up at Gage, finding it impossible not to think of Lord Tavistock's great-uncle who'd supposedly died in a similar manner, perhaps beginning the curse. It was somewhat ironic, and downright eerie, that Hammett, the perpetrator of so much pain and sorrow, should die in the same way. "Good," the dowager sniffed, her eyes narrowed in spite. "It's better than he deserved, but at least it's a neat end to his wickedness." For once, I couldn't have agreed with her more.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 55	Later that evening as the light began to wane, Gage and I perched in our chairs next to his grandfather's bed. What stubborn will had remained in his old and ailing body had since drained away in the face of the news of his longtime majordomo's treachery. Whatever astonishment and anger the rest of us felt about Hammett's cold duplicity, it was clear the viscount endured it tenfold. He'd trusted the butler, had viewed him almost as a friend. Or as close to one as a nobleman and his servant could be. To then learn Hammett had murdered one grandson, attempted to kill two others, and likely helped orchestrate the death of his daughter, all in the name of a family curse, was devastating. His form had shriveled almost into nothing, leaving a gaunt, sticklike figure to lie in the bed looking up at us. My heart ached for the viscount and all the pain it was evident he felt, both physically and emotionally. And it ached for Gage, who was losing his grandfather after only just reconciling with him. I supposed if one blessing had come out of this entire sordid tragedy, it was that. But my heart also ached for myself. I'd grown fond of the cantankerous viscount, and I was sorry to lose him so soon after meeting him. We hadn't planned to push the viscount for any answers he could supply about his butler's actions, but Lord Tavistock seemed to want to discuss it, to try to understand what had happened, and why no one had realized it sooner. "My father groomed him, you know," he said. "Starting from a very young age, when he was but a stable boy." I recalled Hammett admitting as much to me. "When I was younger, I wondered at that interest. Wondered if maybe he was perhaps my father's by-blow or the product of another illicit relationship in the family. But then later I decided it didn't matter. Hammett was good at his position, indispensable even. So I never asked, I never pushed either my father or Hammett for the truth." He heaved a sigh, his eyes staring off into the twilight. "Perhaps I should have." Gage gently shook his head. "I don't think knowing whether Hammett was your bastard brother or not would have made a difference. In fact, it might have only made you even blinder to the possibility he could commit such horrible acts." He paused. "But it does give us some insight into why he was so recklessly determined to enforce what he saw as the family's will. Why he became obsessed with enforcing the 'curse.'" Whether or not Hammett had been the natural son of the previous viscount, after being in his position for so many years he must have felt part of the family, while knowing he was not truly one of them. To see those who had the full privilege of being a Trevelyan then squander it must have infuriated him, and so he had fallen back on what he'd witnessed the previous viscount do to his own daughter with those poisoned apples. "Yes, well, my illness certainly didn't help matters." The viscount coughed. "Had I not been bedridden, had I not been so weak, I might have realized what he was doing." "You can't know that," Gage protested. "Perhaps your illness precipitated matters, forcing him to act more quickly than he might have otherwise. If Alfred inherited the viscountcy, as well as the ability to do as he wished, he could wed Lorna Galloway or dismiss Hammett from his position. But you cannot blame yourself for that. All of the culpability falls squarely on Hammett himself." "I wish I could believe that, Sebastian." His eyes glinted with remorse. "But I know the truth. And I shall have to take that guilt, that knowledge that I've been a blind fool to my grave." Gage gazed back at his grandfather, his face a mask of pain and uncertainty. He was struggling with what to do, what to say to ease some of his grandfather's agony. When he finally spoke, his grandfather had already closed his eyes, though I knew not whether he slept or merely rested them. "Well, I do not blame you," he murmured. Such was the power of his simple statement that I felt an answering swell of emotion just to hear it, just to see the peace it gave my husband to utter it. And when I glanced at Lord Tavistock, I spied the tears glistening at the corners of his eyes.
A Brush with Shadows	Anna Lee Huber	[ "historical fiction", "mystery" ]	[ "female protagonist", "1800s", "Lady Darby Mysteries" ]	Chapter 56	Two days later, the family laid Rory to rest in St. Peter's Churchyard, not far from the site of Gage's mother's grave. And sadly, Lord Tavistock joined him a week later. The pain and shock had simply been too much, and he'd succumbed to his illness and his advanced age. The entire family—in fact, the entire household and surrounding communities—mourned his passing greatly. But it was not as distressing as it could have been had the viscount not made strides toward reconciliation with all his family members as best he could with such limited time left. Gage and the Dowager Lady Langstone had each spent an hour or more alone in his company during the days before he passed. And even Alfred had been well enough to be helped up to his grandfather's bedchamber two days before the viscount died. The effects of these reconciliations were felt all through the house as Gage, his aunt, and his cousin each became more civil with one another than I suspected they'd been their entire lives. I still doubted they would ever be close, just as I questioned whether Gage and Alfred would ever consider one another as friends, but at least their sharp tongues had been blunted and their cold glares had thawed. So when it came time for me and Gage to set off for London about a week after his grandfather's funeral, we departed with some sadness. I was sorry to say goodbye to Lorna, who I'd begun to consider a friend, and even Alfred, whose irreverent sense of humor reminded me of a marquess I was unaccountably fond of. There was also the matter of those hours we'd spent alone with Rory's body in the cave below Vixen Tor. That incident had forged a sort of bond between us. One I wasn't sure would ever fade. Perhaps most surprising, I was even reluctant to say goodbye to the dowager, for she had proven to be more intelligent, more thoughtful than her previously frosty demeanor revealed. As we turned from the manor's long lane onto the road that would carry us east, I settled back against the plush cushions of the Tavistock carriage Alfred had allowed us to borrow for our journey and sighed. Gage glanced over from the window he'd been staring pensively out of and reached for my hand. His thumb brushed against my skin. "It's many miles to Exeter if you wish to take a nap," he told me as the carriage jolted over a rut in the road. Anderley and Bree had gone ahead of us to secure rooms for the night in another carriage laden down with some of Gage's mother's belongings he'd never claimed. "Not yet," I replied, anxious to relay something I'd not yet revealed. Something I'd felt I owed his Aunt Vanessa my silence on until we'd left the manor. "I was pleased to see your cousin and your aunt embrace you so warmly before we departed." "Yes." He inhaled past a tightness in his chest. "I'm not sure I would have ever believed such a thing could be possible, but I'm glad, too." I squeezed his hand, smiling in empathy. "Perhaps they'll call on us the next time they're in London. I would like to see Lorna again. And I intend to introduce your aunt to the Duke of Norwich." Gage coughed, choking on his own astonishment. "Marsdale's father?" "Yes. She's already accustomed to impertinent sons. And as Marsdale has led me to understand, the duke is quite lonely. If he's even half the doctrinaire his son claims, he and your aunt should fare well together. So long as he's kind," I added at the end. After so many years of unhappiness, even partially of her own making, the dowager deserved some contentment. His brow lowered, and I knew his thoughts had turned to the very subject I wished to broach. I reached for his hand, threading my fingers through his. "Darling, your father was not having an affaire de coeur with your aunt." A flicker of hope sparked in his eyes. "How do you know that?" "Because I spoke to her about it, though you can never tell her I revealed such a thing to you." He scowled and opened his mouth to argue, but I hurried on before he could speak. "She said your father indulged in a flirtation with her and wrote her letters, making her believe such a thing. But when she finally agreed to meet with him, in the emerald chamber that night you followed your father, he threw the entire liaison in her face. He'd only feigned interest in her to avenge her treatment of your mother, and to prove her a hypocrite." Gage's face was slack with shock. "You're certain?" I arched my eyebrows. "Why would she lie about such a humiliating experience?" He continued to search my face, and then exhaled in acceptance. "You're right. She wouldn't. I just never could have imagined that was the truth." He grimaced. "How cruel. Unnecessarily so. Why didn't Father simply defend Mother like he should have? Or move us somewhere different." "Perhaps your mother wouldn't go." His mouth flattened in displeasure, but he nodded in agreement. "Whatever faults we can lay at his door, I don't think failure to love your mother is one of them," I said softly, resting my head against the side of his shoulder. It felt strange to defend his father after all the awful things he'd done, but in this case I knew it was right. He didn't speak for a long time, and rather than pry, I closed my eyes and let my thoughts drift. That morning and several before it had not begun in the most pleasant of manners, and I still felt somewhat drawn. However, the rustle of a paper brought my eyes open. "What's that?" Gage stiffened, and I wondered if he'd presumed I was asleep. "Something Alfred gave me. He said Grandfather made him promise to give it to me after he passed." He stared down at the letter almost as if it were a wild animal that might bite him. "Are you going to open it?" He didn't reply, and I began to wonder if he was afraid to. "Would you like me to open it?" "No. It's just . . ." He shook his head. "I thought we'd said everything we'd needed to say . . ." His voice trailed away. "And you're worried this will reveal something that will change that, something you don't wish to know." He smiled grimly. "Yes." When he still didn't move to break the seal, I gently prodded him. "There's only one way to find out." His finger slid beneath the folded paper and paused for a second before tugging upward, breaking the seal. I sat upright, affording him the privacy to read his correspondence without my interfering unless he wished me to. But I couldn't stop myself from observing his reactions. At first his expression was stony, braced for unpleasant news. But it quickly transformed into disbelief and then amazement. Although the further he read, the darker his countenance became, until I wished I'd never suggested he read the note. It might have been better if he'd simply ripped it up. "Grandfather has left me three of his mines," Gage suddenly declared without preamble. "As well as any artwork of your choosing." His eyes glimmered at me with affection. "He says that you would value and appreciate it more than any Trevelyan, heathens that we are." "That's generous," I stammered, touched beyond measure that he'd thought of me, and slightly overawed by the prospect of selecting from Langstone Manor's impressive collection of artwork. "He also says he wants you to honor your agreement to paint a portrait of me to be hung in the gallery alongside my mother." His eyebrows arched in question. I cleared my throat. "I may have failed to mention that. But in my defense, I thought it was something your grandfather should tell you." My eyes flicked down toward the letter. "I suppose this is his way of doing so," I remarked wryly. Gage's mouth curled in an attempt at a smile. I waved my hand. "Does all this mean we'll be returning?" But when Gage failed to respond or elaborate, I began to reconsider. "Or am I presuming too much?" After all, there was no guarantee Alfred would honor his grandfather's wishes in regard to my preferences in the artwork, and I hadn't the slightest notion how time-consuming or profitable the mines Gage had been given were. "It is generous. And I don't believe my cousin or aunt will begrudge us any of it. Not when Grandfather still left the bulk of his estate to Alfred," he replied. "Then what has brought that thunderous expression to your face?" He lowered the letter to meet my bemused gaze. "He also says he wrote to the king and asked him to consider granting me a title for my services to the nobility and the Crown." I blinked wide eyes. "Well, that hardly seems something to become angry over." He held up his hand to forestall me. "There's more. He also says he wrote to Father to ask if he would do the same, or at least consider doing so." This must have been what that letter Rory had referred to had been about, the one from Lord Gage he'd seen on his grandfather's nightstand. As far as I knew, Lord Tavistock had never explained it. "And?" His pale eyes gleamed with fresh hurt. "Father told him to mind his own business. That he had no concept of what he was speaking of." I gasped in outrage. "Grandfather thought I should know. He thought it was important that I be aware of . . . of..." "Of what a cad your father is," I declared furiously. "Of all the nasty, dirty, despicable..." Gage reached out to clasp my arm. "Don't get worked up, Kiera. I appreciate your indignation on my behalf, but it's doubtful the king would ever give me a title of my own, even if I had earned it. Which I'm not sure I have. Not when I'll eventually inherit Father's." "Yes, but your father could at least lend his support!" "Perhaps." He sighed. "But you know him. Are you honestly surprised by this information?" "Yes. I understood he was eager for you to rise in rank. I thought that was his main objection to our marriage. Or is he keen for that to happen so long as it doesn't take you completely out from under his thumb or overshadow him?" I sneered. "I'm sure that's part of it," he murmured wearily. I looped my arm through his, my temper abating at the sight of his evident distress. "I'm sorry, Sebastian. That's rotten." He frowned. "Yes, well, I've suffered worse insults when it comes to my father. I'm simply glad my inheritance from my mother allows me the freedom to ignore him when I choose." "Perhaps you should choose to do so more often," I retorted. He nodded, his gaze straying toward the window. "Perhaps." I sank my head against his shoulder, wishing there was some way I could ease this hurt. But short of miraculously transforming his father into a better man, there was little I could do. "Kiera, perhaps you should lie down." I glowered up at him. "Why do you keep insisting that? I'm not some fragile doll. I recovered from my ordeal in that cave weeks ago. Unless . . ." I gazed up into his soft, expectant eyes and felt my cheeks grow warm at the implication that he knew, or at least he suspected. I recognized I needed to say something, but my tongue stuck against the roof of my mouth, making speech impossible. Coherent speech, in any case. "Kiera," he murmured, cupping my face between his hands. "I had no intention of forcing the issue, but you do realize I'm an observant person." I swallowed and nodded. "Then, unless you're suffering from some sort of ailment or lingering effects of the poison, I can only assume your recent illness in the morning and uncharacteristic lethargy is from something else. Perhaps something happier?" I swallowed again, feeling tears begin to well in my eyes, though I didn't know why. "I . . . I think," I whispered. "But I don't know. Not for certain. I haven't..." He smothered the rest of my words with his lips, kissing me once, twice, three times, as his face broke into a wide grin that fairly made my heart burst from the joy it contained. I was glad I'd been forced to tell him, no matter my conflicting emotions over the discovery, for it had all but erased the pain of his father's disloyalty from his eyes. "But this is wonderful!" He stroked his thumbs over my cheeks, wiping the tears from my face. "Kiera, love, why are you crying?" "I don't know," I blubbered. "But Alana used to do the same thing when she was with child." He laughed, lifting me unceremoniously up from the seat and onto his lap in order to hold me closer. I started to object, and then subsided, nestling into his shoulder. After all, in his arms was exactly where I wanted to be, propriety be dashed. I wished I could say that the months that followed in London were as peaceful and uneventful as any expectant mother might wish, but that was not to be. Both our public and private lives would be shaken by turmoil, and before the end of the year we would face our most fraught inquiry yet. Gage and I had both worked hard to lay our shadows to rest. If only they would stay buried.
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Chapter 1	She stands alone at the jetty's end, watching the sky. In the moonlight, the planked boarding of the jetty is a shimmering silver-blue ribbon reaching back to shore. The sea is ink-black, lapping calmly against the jetty's supports. Across the bay, out towards the western horizon, there are patches of luminosity: smudges of twinkling pastel-green, as if a fleet of galleons has gone down with all lights ablaze. She is clothed, if that is the word, in a white cloud of mechanical butterflies. She urges them to draw closer, their wings meshing tight. They form themselves into a kind of armour. It is not that she is cold—the evening breeze is warm and freighted with the faint, exotic tang of distant islands—but that she feels vulnerable, sensing the scrutiny of something vaster and older than she. Had she arrived a month earlier, when there were still tens of thousands of people on this planet, she doubted that the sea would have paid her this much attention. But the islands are all abandoned now, save for a handful of stubborn laggards, or newly arrived latecomers like herself. She is something new here—or, rather, something that has been away for a great while—and her chemical signal is awakening the sea. The smudges of light across the bay have appeared since her descent. It is not coincidence. After all this time, the sea still remembers her. "We should go now," her protector calls, his voice reaching her from the black wedge of land where he waits, leaning impatiently on his stick. "It isn't safe, now that they've stopped shepherding the ring." The ring, yes: she sees it now, bisecting the sky like an exaggerated, heavy-handed rendition of the Milky Way. It spangles and glimmers: countless flinty chips of rubble catching the light from the closer sun. When she arrived, the planetary authorities were still maintaining it: every few minutes or so, she would see the pink glint of a steering rocket as one of the drones boosted the orbit of a piece of debris, keeping it from grazing the planet's atmosphere and falling into the sea. She understood that the locals made wishes on the glints. They were no more superstitious than any of the other planet dwellers she had met, but they understood the utter fragility of their world—that without the glints there was no future. It would have cost the authorities nothing to continue shepherding the ring: the self-repairing drones had been performing the same mindless task for four hundred years, ever since the resettlement. Turning them off had been a purely symbolic gesture, designed to encourage the evacuation. Through the veil of the ring, she sees the other, more distant moon: the one that wasn't shattered. Almost no one here had any idea what happened. She did. She had seen it with her own eyes, albeit from a distance. "If we stay..." her protector says. She turns back, towards the land. "I just need a little time. Then we can go." "I'm worried about someone stealing the ship. I'm worried about the Nestbuilders." She nods, understanding his fears, but still determined to do the thing that has brought her here. "The ship will be fine. And the Nestbuilders aren't anything to worry about." "They seem to be taking a particular interest in us." She brushes an errant mechanical butterfly from her brow. "They always have. They're just nosy, that's all." "One hour," he says. "Then I'm leaving you here." "You wouldn't." "Only one way to find out, isn't there?" She smiles, knowing he won't desert her. But he's right to be nervous: all the way in they had been pushing against the grain of evacuation. It was like swimming upstream, buffeted by the outward flow of countless ships. By the time they reached orbit, the transit stalks had already been blockaded: the authorities weren't allowing anyone to ride them down to the surface. It had taken bribery and guile to secure passage on a descending car. They'd had the compartment to themselves, but the whole thing—so her companion had said—had smelt of fear and panic; human chemical signals etched into the very fabric of the furniture. She was glad she didn't have his acuity with smells. She is frightened enough as it is: more than she wants him to know. She had been even more frightened when the Nestbuilders followed her into the system. Their elaborate spiral-hulled ship—fluted and chambered, vaguely translucent—is one of the last vessels in orbit. Do they want something of her, or have they just come to spectate? She looks out to sea again. It might be her imagination, but the glowing smudges appear to have increased in number and size; less like a fleet of galleons below the water now than an entire sunken metropolis. And the smudges seem to be creeping towards the seaward end of the jetty. The ocean can taste her: tiny organisms scurry between the air and the sea. They seep through skin, into blood, into brain. She wonders how much the sea knows. It must have sensed the evacuation: felt the departure of so many human minds. It must have missed the coming and going of swimmers, and the neural information they carried. It might even have sensed the end of the shepherding operation: two or three small chunks of former moon have already splashed down, although nowhere near these islands. But how much does it really know about what is going to happen? she wonders. She issues a command to the butterflies. A regiment detaches from her sleeve, assembling before her face. They interlace wings, forming a ragged-edged screen the size of a handkerchief, with only the wings on the edge continuing to flutter. Now the sheet changes colour, becoming perfectly transparent save for a violet border. She cranes her head, looking high into the evening sky, through the debris ring. With a trick of computation the butterflies erase the ring and the moon. The sky darkens by degrees, the blackness becoming blacker, the stars brighter. She directs her attention to one particular star, picking it out after a moment's concentration. There is nothing remarkable about this star. It is simply the nearest one to this binary system, a handful of light-years away. But this star has now become a marker, the leading wave of something that cannot be stopped. She was there when they evacuated that system, thirty years ago. The butterflies perform another trick of computation. The view zooms in, concentrating on that one star. The star becomes brighter, until it begins to show colour. Not white now, not even blue-white, but the unmistakable tint of green. It isn't right.
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Ararat, p Eridani A System, 2675	Scorpio kept an eye on Vasko as the young man swam to shore. All the way in he had thought about drowning, what it would feel like to slide down through unlit fathoms. They said that if you had to die, if you had no choice in the matter, then drowning was not the worst way to go. He wondered how anyone could be sure of this, and whether it applied to pigs. He was still thinking about it when the boat came to a sliding halt, the electric outboard racing until he killed it. Scorpio poked a stick overboard, judging the water to be no more than half a metre deep. He had hoped to locate one of the channels that allowed a closer approach to the island, but this would have to do. Even if he had not agreed to a place of rendezvous with Vasko, there was no time to push back out to sea and curl around hunting for something he had enough trouble finding when the sea was clear and the sky completely empty of clouds. Scorpio moved to the bow and took hold of the plastic-sheathed rope Vasko had been using as a pillow. He wrapped one end tightly around his wrist and then vaulted over the side of the boat in a single fluid movement. He splashed into the shallows, the bottle-green water lapping just above his knees. He could barely feel the cold through the thick leather of his boots and leggings. The boat was drifting slowly now that he had disembarked, but with a flick of his wrist he took up the slack in the line and brought the bow around by several degrees. He started walking, leaning hard to haul the boat. The rocks beneath his feet were treacherous, but for once his bow-legged gait served him well. He did not break his rhythm until the water was only halfway up his boots and he again felt the boat scrape bottom. He hauled it a dozen strides further ashore, but that was as far as he was prepared to risk dragging it. He saw that Vasko had reached the shallows. The young man abandoned swimming and stood up in the water. Scorpio got back into the boat, flakes and scabs of corroded metal breaking away in his grip as he tugged the hull closer by the gunwale. The boat was past its hundred and twentieth hour of immersion, this likely to be its final voyage. He reached over the side and dropped the small anchor. He could have done so earlier, but anchors were just as prone to erosion as hulls. It paid not to place too much trust in them. Another glance at Vasko. He was picking his way carefully towards the boat, his arms outstretched for balance. Scorpio gathered his companion's clothes and stuffed them into his pack, which already contained rations, fresh water and medical supplies. He heaved the pack on to his back and began the short trudge to dry land, taking care to check on Vasko occasionally. Scorpio knew he had been hard on Vasko, but once the anger had started rising in him there had been no holding it in check. He found this development disturbing. It was twenty-three years since Scorpio had raised his hand in anger against a human, except in the pursuit of duty. But he recognised that there was also a violence in words. Once, he would have laughed it off, but lately he had been trying to live a different kind of life. He thought he had put certain things behind him. It was, of course, the prospect of meeting Clavain that had brought all that fury to the surface. Too much apprehension, too many emotional threads reaching back into the blood-drenched mire of the past. Clavain knew what Scorpio had been. Clavain knew exactly what he was capable of doing. He stopped and waited for the young man to catch up with him. "Sir..." Vasko was out of breath and shivering. "How was it?" "You were right, sir. It was a bit colder than it looked." Scorpio shrugged the pack from his back. "I thought it would be, but you did all right. I've got your things with me. You'll be dry and warm in no time. Not sorry you came?" "No, sir. Wanted a bit of adventure, didn't I?" Scorpio passed him his things. "You'll be after a bit less of it when you're my age." It was a still day, as was often the case when the cloud cover on Ararat was low. The nearer sun—the one that Ararat orbited—was a washed-out smudge hanging low in the western sky. Its distant binary counterpart was a hard white jewel above the opposite horizon, pinned between a crack in the clouds. P Eridani A and B, except no one ever called them anything other than Bright Sun and Faint Sun. In the silver-grey daylight the water was leached of its usual colour, reduced to a drab grey-green soup. It looked thick when it sloshed around Scorpio's boots, but despite the opacity of the water the actual density of suspended micro-organisms was low by Ararat standards. Vasko had still taken a small risk by swimming, but he had been right to do so, for it had allowed them to sail the boat much closer to the shore. Scorpio was no expert on the matter, but he knew that most meaningful encounters between humans and Jugglers took place in areas of the ocean that were so saturated with organisms that they were more like floating rafts of organic matter. The concentration here was low enough that there was little risk of the Jugglers eating the boat while they were away, or creating a local tide system to wash it out to sea. They covered the remaining ground to dry land, reaching the gently sloping plain of rock that had been visible from sea as a line of darkness. Here and there shallow pools interrupted the ground, mirroring the overcast sky in silver-grey. They made their way between them, heading for a pimple of white in the middle distance. "You still haven't told me what all this is about," Vasko said. "You'll find out soon enough. Aren't you sufficiently excited about meeting the old man?" "Scared, more likely." "He does that to people, but don't let it get to you. He doesn't get off on reverence." After ten minutes of further walking, Scorpio had recovered the strength he had expended hauling in the boat. In that time the pimple had become a dome perched on the ground, and finally revealed itself to be an inflatable tent. It was guyed to cleats pinned into the rock, the white fabric around its base stained various shades of briny green. It had been patched and repaired several times. Gathered around the tent, leaning against it at odd angles, were pieces of conch material recovered from the sea like driftwood. The way they had been poised was unmistakably artful. "What you said earlier, sir," Vasko said, "about Clavain not going around the world after all?" "Yes?" "If he came here instead, why couldn't they just tell us that?" "Because of why he came here," Scorpio replied. They made their way around the inflatable structure until they reached the pressure door. Next to it was the small humming box that supplied power to the tent, maintaining the pressure differential and providing heat and other amenities for its occupant. Scopio examined one of the conch pieces, fingering the sharp edge where it had been cut from some larger whole. "Looks like he's been doing some beachcombing." Vasko pointed to the already open outer door. "All the same, doesn't look as if there's anyone home at the moment." Scorpio opened the inner door. Inside he found a bunk bed and a neatly folded pile of bedclothes. A small collapsible desk, a stove and food synthesiser. A flagon of purified water and a box of rations. An air pump that was still running and some small conch pieces on the table. "There's no telling how long it's been since he was last here," Vasko said. Scorpio shook his head. "He hasn't been away for very long, probably not more than an hour or two." Vasko looked around, searching for whatever piece of evidence Scorpio had already spotted. He wasn't going to find it: pigs had long ago learned that the acute sense of smell they had inherited from their ancestors was not something shared by baseline humans. They had also learned—painfully—that humans did not care to be reminded of this. They stepped outside again, sealing the inner door as they had found it. "What now?" Vasko asked. Scorpio snapped a spare communications bracelet from one wrist and handed it to Vasko. It had already been assigned a secure frequency, so there was no danger of anyone on the other islands listening in. "You know how to use one of these things?" "I'll manage. Anything in particular you want me to do with it?" "Yes. You're going to wait here until I get back. I expect to have Clavain with me when I return. But in the event he finds you first, you're to tell him who you are and who sent you. Then you call me and ask Clavain if he'd like to talk to me. Got that?" "And if you don't come back?" "You'd better call Blood." Vasko fingered the bracelet. "You sound a bit worried about his state of mind, sir. Do you think he might be dangerous?" "I hope so," Scorpio said, "because if he isn't, he's not a lot of use to us." He patted the young man on the shoulder. "Now wait here while I circle the island. It won't take me more than an hour, and my guess is I'll find him somewhere near the sea." Scorpio made his way across the flat rocky fringes of the island, spreading his stubby arms for balance, not caring in the slightest how awkward or comical he appeared. He slowed, thinking that in the distance he could see a figure shifting in and out of the darkening haze of late-afternoon sea mist. He squinted, trying to compensate for eyes that no longer worked as well as they had in Chasm City, when he had been younger. On one level he hoped that the mirage would turn out to be Clavain. On another he hoped that it would turn out to be a figment of his imagination, some conjunction of rock, light and shade tricking the eye. As little as he cared to admit it, he was anxious. It was six months since he had last seen Clavain. Not that long a time, really, most certainly not when measured against the span of the man's life. Yet Scorpio could not rid himself of the sense that he was about to encounter an acquaintance he had not met in decades, someone who might have been warped beyond all recognition by life and experience. He wondered how he would respond if it turned out that Clavain had indeed lost his mind. Would he even recognise it if that was true? Scorpio had spent enough time around baseline humans to feel confident about reading their intentions, moods and general states of sanity. It was said that human and pigs minds were not so very different. But with Clavain, Scorpio always made a mental note to ignore his expectations. Clavain was not like other humans. History had shaped him, leaving behind something unique and quite possibly monstrous. Scorpio was fifty. He had known Clavain for half his life, ever since he had been captured by Clavain's former faction in the Yellowstone system. Shortly after that, Clavain had defected from the Conjoiners, and after some mutual misgivings he and Scorpio had ended up fighting together. They had gathered a loose band of soldiers and assorted hangers-on from the vicinity of Yellowstone and had stolen a ship to make the journey to Resurgam's system. Along the way they had been hectored and harried by Clavain's former Conjoiner comrades. From Resurgam space—riding another ship entirely—they had arrived here, on the blue-green waterlogged marble of Ararat. Little fighting had been required since Resurgam, but the two had continued to work together in the establishment of the temporary colony. They had schemed and plotted whole communities into existence. Often they had argued, but only ever over matters of the gravest importance. When one or the other leant towards too harsh or too soft a policy, the other was there to balance matters. It was in those years that Scorpio had found the strength of character to stop hating human beings every waking moment of his life. If nothing else, he owed that to Clavain. But nothing was ever that simple, was it? The problem was that Clavain had been born five hundred years ago and had lived through many of those years. What if the Clavain that Scorpio knew—the Clavain that most of the colonists knew, for that matter—was only a passing phase, like a deceitful glimpse of sunshine on an otherwise stormy day? In the early days of their acquaintance, Scorpio had kept at least half an eye on him, alert for any reversion to his indiscriminate butcher tendencies. He had seen nothing to arouse his suspicions, and more than enough to reassure him that Clavain was not the ghoul that history said he was. But in the last two years, his certainties had crumbled. It was not that Clavain had become more cruel, argumentative or violent than before, but something in him had changed. It was as if the quality of light on a landscape had shifted from one moment to another. The fact that Scorpio knew that others harboured similar doubts about his own stability was of scant comfort. He knew his own state of mind and hoped he would never hurt another human the way he had done in the past. But he could only speculate about what was going on inside his friend's head. What he could be certain about was that the Clavain he knew, the Clavain alongside whom he had fought, had withdrawn to some intensely private personal space. Even before he had retreated to this island, Scorpio had reached the point where he could hardly read the man at all. But he did not blame Clavain for that. No one would. He continued his progress until he was certain that the figure was real, and then advanced further until he was able to discern detail. The figure was crouched down by the shore of sea, motionless, as if caught in some reverie that had interrupted an otherwise innocent examination of the tide pools and their fauna. Scorpio recognised him as Clavain; he would have been as certain even if he had thought the island uninhabited. The pig felt a momentary surge of relief. At least Clavain was still alive. No matter what else transpired today, that much had to count as a victory. When he was within shouting distance of the man, Clavain sensed his presence and looked around. There was a breeze now, one that had not been there when Scorpio landed. It pulled wild white hair across Clavain's pink-red features. His beard, normally neatly trimmed, had also grown long and unkempt since his departure. His thin figure was clad in black, with a dark shawl or cloak pulled across his shoulders. He maintained an awkward posture between kneeling and standing, poised on his haunches like a man who had only stopped there for a moment. Scorpio was certain he had been staring out to sea for hours. "Nevil," Scorpio said. He said something back, his lips moving, but his words were masked by the hiss of the surf. Scorpio called out again. "It's me—Scorpio." Clavain's mouth moved a second time. His voice was a croak that barely made it above a whisper. "I said, I told you not to come here." "I know." Scorpio had approached closer now. Clavain's white hair flicked in and out of his deeply recessed old-man's eyes. They appeared to be focused on something very distant and bleak. "I know, and for six months we honoured that request, didn't we?" "Six months?" Clavain almost smiled. "Is that how long it's been?" "Six months and a week, if you want to be finicky about it." "It doesn't feel like it. It feels like no time at all." Clavain looked back out to sea again, the back of his head turned towards Scorpio. Between thin strands of white hair his scalp had the same raw pink colour as Scorpio's skin. "Sometimes it feels like a lot longer, as well," Clavain continued, "as if all I've ever done was spend each day here. Sometimes I feel as if there isn't another soul on this planet." "We're all still here," Scorpio said, "all one hundred and seventy thousand of us. We still need you." "I expressly asked not to be disturbed." "Unless it was important. That was always the arrangement, Nevil." Clavain stood up with painful slowness. He had always been taller than Scorpio, but now his thinness gave him the appearance of something sketched in a hurry. His limbs were quick cursive scratches against the sky. Scorpio looked at Clavain's hands. They were the fine-boned hands of a surgeon. Or, perhaps, an interrogator. The rasp of his long fingernails against the damp black fabric of his trousers made Scorpio wince. "Well?" "We've found something," Scorpio said. "We don't know exactly what it is, or who sent it, but we think it came from space. We also think there might be someone in it."
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Lighthugger Gnostic Ascension, Interstellar Space, 2615	Surgeon-General Grelier strode through the circular green-lit corridors of the body factory. He hummed and whistled, happy in his element, happy to be surrounded by humming machines and half-formed people. With a shiver of anticipation he thought about the solar system that lay ahead of them and the great many things that depended on it. Not necessarily for him, it was true, but certainly for his rival in the matter of the queen's affection. Grelier wondered how she would take another of Quaiche's failures. Knowing Queen Jasmina, he did not think she would take it awfully well. Grelier smiled at that. The odd thing was that for a system on which so much hung, the place was still nameless; no one had ever bothered with the remote star and its uninteresting clutch of planets. There had never been any reason to. There would be an obscure catalogue entry for the system in the astrogation database of the Gnostic Ascension, and indeed of almost every other starship, along with brief notes on the major characteristics of its sun and worlds, likely hazards and so forth. But these databases had never been intended for human eyes; they existed only to be interrogated and updated by other machines as they went about their silent, swift business executing those shipboard tasks considered too dull or too difficult for humans. The entry was just a string of binary digits, a few thousand ones and zeroes. It was a measure of the system's unimportance that the entry had only been queried three times in the entire operational lifetime of the Gnostic Ascension. It had been updated once. Grelier knew: he had checked, out of curiosity. Yet now, perhaps for the first time in history, the system was of more than passing interest. It still had no name, but now at least the absence of one had become vaguely troubling, to the point where Queen Jasmina sounded a trifle more irritated every time she was forced to refer to the place as "the system ahead" or "the system we are approaching." But Grelier knew that she would not deign to give the place a name until it had proved valuable. And the system's value was entirely in the hands of the queen's fading favourite, Quaiche. Grelier paused a while near one of the bodies. It was suspended in translucent support gel behind the green glass of its vivification tank. Around the base of the tank were rows of nutrient controls like so many organ stops, some pushed in and some pulled out. The stops controlled the delicate biochemical environment of the nutrient matrix. Bronze valve wheels set into the side of the tank adjusted the delivery of bulk chemicals like water or saline. Appended to the tank was a log showing the body's clonal history. Grelier flicked through the plastic-laminated pages of the log, satisfying himself that all was well. Although most of the bodies in the factory had never been decanted, this specimen—an adult female—had been warmed and used once before. The evidence of the injuries inflicted on it was fading under the regenerative procedures, abdominal scars healing invisibly, the new leg now only slightly smaller than its undamaged counterpart. Jasmina did not approve of these patch-up jobs, but her demand for bodies had outstripped the production capacity of the factory. Grelier patted the glass affectionately. "Coming along nicely." He walked on, making random checks on the other bodies. Sometimes a glance was sufficient, though more often than not Grelier would thumb through the log and pause to make some small adjustment to the settings. He took a great deal of pride in the quiet competence of his work. He never boasted of his abilities or promised anything he was not absolutely certain of being able to deliver—utterly unlike Quaiche, who had been full of exaggerated promises from the moment he stepped aboard the Gnostic Ascension. For a while it had worked, too. Grelier, long the queen's closest confidant, had found himself temporarily usurped by the flashy newcomer. All he heard while he was working on her was how Quaiche was going to change all their fortunes: Quaiche this, Quaiche that. The queen had even started complaining about Grelier's duties, moaning that the factory was too slow in delivering bodies and that the attention-deficit therapies were losing their effectiveness. Grelier had been briefly tempted to try something seriously attention-grabbing, something that would catapult him back into her good graces. Now he was profoundly glad that he had done no such thing; he had needed only to bide his time. It was simply a question of letting Quaiche dig his own grave by setting up expectations that he could not possibly meet. Sadly—for Quaiche, if not for Grelier—Jasmina had taken him exactly at his word. If Grelier judged the queen's mood, poor old Quaiche was about this close to getting the figurehead treatment. Grelier stopped at an adult male that had begun to show developmental anomalies during his last examination. He had adjusted the tank settings, but his tinkering had apparently been to no avail. To the untrained eye the body looked normal enough, but it lacked the unmarred symmetry that Jasmina craved. Grelier shook his head and placed a hand on one of the polished brass valve wheels. Always a difficult call, this. The body wasn't up to scratch by the usual standards of the factory, but then again neither were the patch-up jobs. Was it time to make Jasmina accept a lowering of quality? It was she who was pushing the factory to its limit, after all. No, Grelier decided. If he had learned one lesson from this whole sordid Quaiche business, it was to maintain his own standards. Jasmina would scold him for aborting a body, but in the long run she would respect his judgement, his stolid devotion to excellence. He twisted the brass wheel shut, blocking saline. He knelt down and pushed in most of the nutrient valves. "Sorry," Grelier said, addressing the smooth, expressionless face behind the glass, "but I'm afraid you just didn't cut it." He gave the body one last glance. In a few hours the processes of cellular deconstruction would be grotesquely obvious. The body would be dismantled, its constituent chemicals recycled for use elsewhere in the factory. A voice buzzed in his earpiece. He touched a finger to the device. "Grelier... I was expecting you already." "I'm on my way, ma'am." A red light started flashing on top of the vivification tank, synchronised to an alarm. Grelier cuffed the override, silencing the alarm and blanking the emergency signal. Calm returned to the body factory, a silence broken only by the occasional gurgle of nutrient flows or the muffled click of some distant valve regulator. Grelier nodded, satisfied that all was in hand, and resumed his unhurried progress. At the same instant that Grelier pushed in the last of the nutrient valves, an anomaly occurred in the sensor apparatus of the Gnostic Ascension. The anomaly was brief, lasting only a fraction over half a second, but it was sufficiently unusual that a flag was raised in the data stream: an exceptional event marker indicating that something merited attention. As far as the sensor software was concerned that was the end of it: the anomaly had not continued, and all systems were now performing normally. The flag was a mere formality; whether it was to be acted on was the responsibility of an entirely separate and slightly more intelligent layer of monitoring software. The second layer—dedicated to health-monitoring all shipwide sensor subsystems—detected the flag, along with several million others raised in the same cycle, and assigned it a schedule in its task profile. Less than two hundred thousandths of a second had lapsed since the end of the anomaly: an eternity in computational terms, but an inevitable consequence of the vast size of a lighthugger's cybernetic nervous system. Communications between one end of the Gnostic Ascension and the other required three to four kilometres of main trunk cabling, six to seven for a round-trip signal. Nothing happened quickly on a ship that large, but it made little practical difference. The ship's huge mass meant that it responded sluggishly to external events: it had precisely the same need for lightning-fast reflexes as a brontosaurus. The health-monitoring layer worked its way down the pile. Most of the several million events it looked at were quite innocuous. Based on its grasp of the statistical expectation pattern of error events, it was able to de-assign most of the flags without hesitation. They were transient errors, not indicative of any deeper malaise in the ship's hardware. Only a hundred thousand looked even remotely suspicious. The second layer did what it always did at this point: it compiled the hundred thousand anomalous events into a single packet, appended its own comments and preliminary findings and offered the packet to the third layer of monitoring software. The third layer spent most of its time doing nothing: it existed solely to examine those anomalies forwarded to it by duller layers. Quickened to alertness, it examined the dossier with as much actual interest as its borderline sentience allowed. By machine standards it was still somewhere below gamma-level intelligence, but it had been doing its job for such a long time that it had built up a huge hoard of heuristic expertise. It was insultingly clear to the third layer that more than half of the forwarded events in no way merited its attention, but the remaining cases were more interesting, and it took its time going through them. Two-thirds of those anomalies were repeat offenders: evidence of systems with some real but transient fault. None, however, were in critical areas of ship function, so they could be left alone until they became more serious. One-third of the interesting cases were new. Of these, perhaps ninety per cent were the kind of failures that could be expected once in a while, based on the layer's knowledge of the various hardware components and software elements involved. Only a handful were in possibly critical areas, and thankfully these faults could all be dealt with by routine repair methods. Almost without blinking, the layer dispatched instructions to those parts of the ship dedicated to the upkeep of its infrastructure. At various points around the ship, servitors that were already engaged in other repair and overhaul jobs received new entries in their task buffers. It might take them weeks to get around to those chores, but eventually they would be performed. That left a tiny core of errors that might potentially be of some concern. They were more difficult to explain, and it was not immediately clear how the servitors should be ordered to deal with them. The layer was not unduly worried, in so far as it was capable of worrying about anything: past experience had taught it that these gremlins generally turned out to be benign. But for now it had no choice but to forward the puzzling exceptions to an even higher stratum of shipboard automation. The anomaly moved up like this, through another three layers of steadily increasing intelligence. By the time the final layer was invoked, only one outstanding event remained in the packet: the original transient sensor anomaly, the one that had lasted just over half a second. None of the underlying layers could account for the error via the usual statistical patterns and look-up rules. An event only filtered this high in the system once or twice a minute. Now, for the first time, something with real intelligence was invoked. The gamma-level subpersona in charge of overseeing layer-six exceptions was part of the last line of defence between the cybernetics and the ship's flesh crew. It was the subpersona that had the difficult role of deciding whether a given error merited the attention of its human stewards. Over the years it had learned not to cry wolf too often: if it did, its owners might decide that it needed upgrading. As a consequence, the subpersona agonised for many seconds before deciding what to do. The anomaly was, it decided, one of the strangest it had ever encountered. A thorough examination of every logical path in the sensor system failed to explain how something so utterly, profoundly unusual could ever have happened. In order to do its job effectively, the subpersona had to have an abstract understanding of the real world. Nothing too sophisticated, but enough that it could make sensible judgements about which kinds of external phenomena were likely to be encountered by the sensors, and which were so massively unlikely that they could only be interpreted as hallucinations introduced at a later stage of data processing. It had to grasp that the Gnostic Ascension was a physical object embedded in space. It also had to grasp that the events recorded by the ship's web of sensors were caused by objects and quanta permeating that space: dust grains, magnetic fields, radar echoes from nearby bodies; and by the radiation from more distant phenomena: worlds, stars, galaxies, quasars, the cosmic background signal. In order to do this it had to be able to make accurate guesses about how the data returns from all these objects were supposed to behave. No one had ever given it these rules; it had formulated them for itself, over time, making corrections as it accumulated more information. It was a never-ending task, but at this late stage in the game it considered itself rather splendid at it. It knew, for instance, that planets—or rather the abstract objects in its model that corresponded to planets—were definitely not supposed to do that. The error was completely inexplicable as an outside-world event. Something must have gone badly wrong at the data-capture stage. It pondered this a little more. Even allowing for that conclusion, the anomaly was still difficult to explain. It was so peculiarly selective, affecting only the planet itself. Nothing else, not even the planet's moons, had done anything in the least bit odd. The subpersona changed its mind: the anomaly had to be external, in which case the subpersona's model of the real world was shockingly flawed. It didn't like that conclusion either. It was a long time since it had been forced to update its model so drastically, and it viewed the prospect with a stinging sense of affront. Worse, the observation might mean that the Gnostic Ascension itself was... well, not exactly in immediate danger—the planet in question was still dozens of light-hours away—but conceivably headed for something that might, at some point in the future, pose a non-negligible risk to the ship. That was it, then. The subpersona made its decision: it had no choice but to alert the crew on this one. That meant only one thing: a priority interrupt to Queen Jasmina. The subpersona established that the queen was currently accessing status summaries through her preferred visual read-out medium. As it was authorised to do, it seized control of the data channel and cleared both screens of the device ready for an emergency bulletin. It prepared a simple text message: SENSOR ANOMALY: REQUEST ADVICE. For an instant—significantly less than the half-second that the original event had consumed—the message hovered on the queen's read-out, inviting her attention. Then the subpersona had a hasty change of heart. Perhaps it was making a mistake. The anomaly, bizarre as it had been, had cleared itself. No further reports of strangeness had emanated from any of the underlying layers. The planet was behaving in the way the subpersona had always assumed planets were supposed to. With the benefit of a little more time, the layer decided, the event could surely be explained as a perceptual malfunction. It was just a question of going over things again, looking at all the components from the right perspective, thinking outside the box. As a subpersona, that was exactly what it was meant to do. If all it ever did was blindly forward every anomaly that it couldn't immediately explain, then the crew might as well replace it with another dumb layer. Or, worse, upgrade it to something cleverer. It cleared the text message from the queen's device and immediately replaced it with the data she had been viewing just before. It continued to gnaw away at the problem until, a minute or so later, another anomaly bumped into its in-box. This time it was a thrust imbalance, a niggling one-per-cent jitter in the starboard Conjoiner drive. Faced with a bright new urgency, it chose to put the matter of the planet on the back-burner. Even by the slow standards of shipboard communications, a minute was a long time. With every further minute that passed without the planet misbehaving, the whole vexing event would inevitably drop to a diminished level of priority. The subpersona would not forget about it—it was incapable of forgetting about anything—but within an hour it would have a great many other things to deal with instead. Good. It was decided, then. The way to handle it was to pretend it had never happened in the first place. Thus it was that Queen Jasmina was informed of the sensor event anomaly for only a fraction of a second. And thus it was that no human members of the crew of the Gnostic Ascension—not Jasmina, not Grelier, not Quaiche, nor any of the other Ultras—were ever aware that, for more than half a second, the largest gas giant in the system they were approaching, the system unimaginatively called 107 Piscium, had simply ceased to exist. Queen Jasmina heard the surgeon-general's footsteps echoing towards her, approaching along the metal-lined companionway that connected her command chamber to the rest of the ship. As always, Grelier managed not to sound in any particular hurry. Had she tested his loyalty by fawning over Quaiche? she wondered. Perhaps. In which case it was probably time to make Grelier feel valued again. A flicker on the read-out screens of the skull caught her attention. For a moment a line of text replaced the summaries she was paging through—something about a sensor anomaly. Queen Jasmina shook the skull. She had always been convinced that the horrid thing was possessed, but increasingly it appeared to be going senile, too. Had she been less superstitious, she would have thrown it away, but dreadful things were rumoured to have happened to those who ignored the skull's counsel. A polite knock sounded at the door. "Enter, Grelier." The armoured door eased itself open. Grelier emerged into the chamber, his eyes wide and showing a lot of white as they adjusted to the chamber's gloom. Grelier was a slim, neatly dressed little man with a flat-topped shock of brilliant white hair. He had the flattened, minimalist features of a boxer. He wore a clean white medical smock and apron; his hands were always gloved. His expression never failed to amuse Jasmina: it always appeared that he was on the point of breaking into tears or laughter. It was an illusion: the surgeon-general had little familiarity with either emotional extreme. "Busy in the body factory, Grelier?" "A wee bit, ma'am." "I'm anticipating a period of high demand ahead. Production mustn't slacken." "Little danger of that, ma'am." "Just as long as you're aware of it." She sighed. "Well, niceties over with. To business." Grelier nodded. "I see you've already made a start." While awaiting his arrival, she had strapped her body into the throne, leather cuffs around her ankles and thighs, a thick band around her belly, her right arm fixed to the chair rest, with only her left arm free to move. She held the skull in her left hand, its face turned towards her so that she could view the read-out screens bulging from its eye sockets. Prior to picking up the skull she had inserted her right arm into a skeletal machine bracketed to the side of the chair. The machine—the alleviator—was a cage of rough black ironwork equipped with screw-driven pressure pads. They were already pressing uncomfortably against her skin. "Hurt me," Queen Jasmina said. Grelier's expression veered momentarily towards a smile. He approached the throne and examined the arrangement of the alleviator. Then he commenced tightening the screws on the device, adjusting each in sequence by a precise quarter turn at a time. The pressure pads bore down on the skin of the queen's forearm, which was supported in turn by an underlying arrangement of fixed pads. The care with which Grelier turned the screws made the queen think of someone tuning some ghastly stringed instrument. It wasn't pleasant. That was the point. After a minute or so, Grelier stopped and moved behind the throne. She watched him tug a spool of tubing from the little medical kit he always kept there. He plugged one end of the tubing into an oversized bottle full of something straw-yellow and connected the other to a hypodermic. He hummed and whistled as he worked. He lifted up the bottle and attached it to a rig on the back of the throne, then pushed the hypodermic line into the queen's upper right arm, fiddling around a little until he found the vein. Then she watched him return to the front of the throne, back into view of the body. It was a female one this time, but there was no reason that it had to be. Although all the bodies were cultured from Jasmina's own genetic material, Grelier was able to intervene at an early stage of development and force the body down various sexual pathways. Usually it was boys and girls. Now and then, for a treat, he made weird neuters and intersex variants. They were all sterile, but that was only because it would have been a waste of time to equip them with functioning reproductive systems. It was enough bother installing the neural coupling implants so that she could drive the bodies in the first place. Suddenly she felt the agony lose its focus. "I don't want anaesthetic, Grelier." "Pain without intermittent relief is like music without silence," he said. "You must trust my judgement in this matter, as you have always done in the past." "I do trust you, Grelier," she said, grudgingly. "Sincerely, ma'am?" "Yes. Sincerely. You've always been my favourite. You do appreciate that, don't you?" "I have a job to do, ma'am. I simply do it to the limit of my abilities." The queen put the skull down in her lap. With her free hand she ruffled the white brush of his hair. "I'd be lost without you, you know. Especially now." "Nonsense, ma'am. Your expertise threatens any day to eclipse my own." It was more than automatic flattery: though Grelier had made the study of pain his life's work, Jasmina was catching up quickly. She knew volumes about the physiology of pain. She knew about nociception; she knew the difference between epicritic and protopathic pain; she knew about presynaptic blocking and the neospinal pathway. She knew her prostaglandin promoters from her GABA agonists. But the queen also knew pain from an angle Grelier never would. His tastes lay entirely in its infliction. He did not know it from the inside, from the privileged point of view of the recipient. No matter how acute his theoretical understanding of the subject, she would always have that edge over him. Like most people of his era, Grelier could only imagine agony, extrapolating it a thousandfold from the minor discomfort of a torn hangnail. He had no idea. "I may have learned a great deal," she said, "but you will always be a master of the clonal arts. I was serious about what I said before, Grelier: I anticipate increased demand on the factory. Can you satisfy me?" "You said production mustn't slacken. That isn't quite the same thing." "But surely you aren't working at full capacity at this moment." Grelier adjusted the screws. "I'll be frank with you: we're not far off it. At the moment I'm prepared to discard units that don't meet our usual exacting standards. But if the factory is expected to increase production, the standards will have to be relaxed." "You discarded one today, didn't you?" "How did you know?" "I suspected you'd make a point of your commitment to excellence." She raised a finger. "And that's all right. It's why you work for me. I'm disappointed, of course—I know exactly which body you terminated—but standards are standards." "That's always been my watchword." "It's a pity that can't be said for everyone on this ship." He hummed and whistled to himself for a little while, then asked, with studied casualness, "I always got the impression that you have a superlative crew, ma'am." "My regular crew is not the problem." "Ah. Then you would be referring to one of the irregulars? Not myself, I trust?" "You are well aware of whom I speak, so don't pretend otherwise." "Quaiche? Surely not." "Oh, don't play games, Grelier. I know exactly how you feel about your rival. Do you want to know the truly ironic thing? The two of you are more similar than you realise. Both baseline humans, both ostracised from your own cultures. I had great hopes for the two of you, but now I may have to let Quaiche go." "Surely you'd give him one last chance, ma'am. We are approaching a new system, after all." "You'd like that, wouldn't you? You'd like to see him fail one final time, just so that my punishment would be all the more severe?" "I was thinking only of the welfare of the ship." "Of course you were, Grelier." She smiled, amused by his lies. "Well, the fact of the matter is I haven't made up my mind what to do with Quaiche. But I do think he and I need a little chat. Some interesting new information concerning him has fallen into my possession, courtesy of our trading partners." "Fancy that," Grelier said. "It seems he wasn't completely honest about his prior experience when I hired him. It's my fault: I should have checked his background more thoroughly. But that doesn't excuse the fact that he exaggerated his earlier successes. I thought we were hiring an expert negotiator, as well as a man with an instinctive understanding of planetary environments. A man comfortable among both baseline humans and Ultras, someone who could talk up a deal to our advantage and find treasure where we'd miss it completely." "That sounds like Quaiche." "No, Grelier, what it sounds like is the character Quaiche wished to present to us. The fiction he wove. In truth, his record is a lot less impressive. The occasional score here and there, but just as many failures. He's a chancer: a braggart, an opportunist and a liar. And an infected one, as well." Grelier raised an eyebrow. "Infected?" "He has an indoctrinal virus. We scanned for the usuals but missed this one because it wasn't in our database. Fortunately, it isn't strongly infectious—not that it would stand much of a chance infecting one of us in the first place." "What type of indoctrinal virus are we talking about here?" "It's a crude mishmash: a half-baked concoction of three thousand years' worth of religious imagery jumbled together without any overarching theistic consistency. It doesn't make him believe anything coherent; it just makes him feel religious. Obviously he can keep it under control for much of the time. But it worries me, Grelier. What if it gets worse? I don't like a man whose impulses I can't predict." "You'll be letting him go, then." "Not just yet. Not until we've passed beyond 107 Piscium. Not until he's had one last chance to redeem himself." "What makes you think he'll find anything now?" "I have no expectation that he will, but I do believe he's more likely to find something if I provide him with the right incentive." "He might do a runner." "I've thought of that as well. In fact, I think I've got all bases covered where Quaiche is concerned. All I need now is the man himself, in some state of animation. Can you arrange that for me?" "Now, ma'am?" "Why not? Strike while the iron's hot, as they say." "The trouble is," Grelier said, "he's frozen. It'll take six hours to wake him, assuming that we follow the recommended procedures." "And if we don't?" She wondered how much mileage was left in her new body. "Realistically, how many hours could we shave off?" "Two at the most, if you don't want to run the risk of killing him. Even then it'll be a wee bit unpleasant." Jasmina smiled at the surgeon-general. "I'm sure he'll get over it. Oh, and Grelier? One other thing." "Ma'am?" "Bring me the scrimshaw suit."
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Lighthugger Gnostic Ascension, Interstellar Space, 2615	His lover helped him out of the casket. Quaiche lay shivering on the revival couch, racked with nausea, while Morwenna attended to the many jacks and lines that plunged into his bruised baseline flesh. "Lie still," she said. "I don't feel very well." "Of course you don't. What do you expect when the bastards thaw you so quickly?" It was like being kicked in the groin, except that his groin encompassed his entire body. He wanted to curl up inside a space smaller than himself, to fold himself into a tiny knot like some bravura trick of origami. He considered throwing up, but the effort involved was much too daunting. "They shouldn't have taken the risk," he said. "She knows I'm too valuable for that." He retched: a horrible sound like a dog that had been barking too long. "I think her patience might be a bit strained," Morwenna said, as she dabbed at him with stinging medicinal salves. "She knows she needs me." "She managed without you before. Maybe it's dawning on her that she can manage without you again." Quaiche brightened. "Maybe there's an emergency." "For you, perhaps." "Christ, that's all I need—sympathy." He winced as a bolt of pain hit his skull, something far more precise and targeted than the dull unpleasantness of the revival trauma. "You shouldn't use the Lord's name in vain," Morwenna said, her tone scolding. "You know it only hurts you." He looked into her face, forcing his eyes open against the cruel glare of the revival area. "Are you on my side or not?" "I'm trying to help you. Hold still, I've nearly got the last of these lines out." There was a final little stab of pain in his thigh as the shunt popped out, leaving a neat eyelike wound. "There, all done." "Until next time," Quaiche said. "Assuming there is a next time." Morwenna fell still, as if something had struck her for the first time. "You're really frightened, aren't you?" "In my shoes, wouldn't you be?" "The queen's insane. Everyone knows that. But she's also pragmatic enough to know a valuable resource when she sees one." Morwenna spoke openly because she knew that the queen had no working listening devices in the revival chamber. "Look at Grelier, for pity's sake. Do you think she'd tolerate that freak for one minute if he wasn't useful to her?" "That's precisely my point," Quaiche said, sinking into an even deeper pit of dejection and hopelessness. "The moment either of us stops being useful... " Had he felt like moving, he would have mimed drawing a knife across his throat. Instead he just made a choking sound. "You've an advantage over Grelier," Morwenna said. "You have me, an ally amongst the crew. Who does he have?" "You're right," Quaiche said, "as ever." With a tremendous effort he reached out and closed one hand around Morwenna's steel gauntlet. He didn't have the heart to remind her that she was very nearly as isolated aboard the ship as he was. The one thing guaranteed to get an Ultra ostracised was having any kind of interpersonal relationship with a baseline human. Morwenna put a brave face on it, but, Quaiche knew, if he had to rely on her for help when the queen and the rest of the crew turned against him, he was already crucified. "Can you sit up now?" she asked. "I'll try." The discomfort was abating slightly, as he had known it must do, and at last he was able to move major muscle groups without crying. He sat on the couch, his knees tucked against the hairless skin of his chest, while Morwenna gently removed the urinary catheter from his penis. He looked into her face while she worked, hearing only the whisk of metal sliding over metal. He remembered how fearful he had been when she first touched him there, her hands gleaming like shears. Making love to her was like making love to a threshing machine. Yet Morwenna had never hurt him, even when she inadvertently cut her own living parts. "All right?" she asked. "I'll make it. Takes more than a quick revival to put a dent in Horris Quaiche's day." "That's the spirit," she said, sounding less than fully convinced. She leant over and kissed him. She smelt of perfume and ozone. "I'm glad you're around," Quaiche said. "Wait here. I'll get you something to drink." Morwenna moved off the revival couch, telescoping to her full height. Still unable to focus properly, he watched her slink across the room towards the hatch where various recuperative broths were dispensed. Her iron-grey dreadlocks swayed with the motion of her high-hipped piston-driven legs. Morwenna was on her way back with a snifter of recuperative broth—chocolate laced with medichines—when the door to the chamber slid open. Two more Ultras strode into the room: a man and a woman. After them, hands tucked demurely behind his back, loomed the smaller, unaugmented figure of the surgeon-general. He wore a soiled white medical smock. "Is he fit?" the man asked. "You're lucky he's not dead," Morwenna snapped. "Don't be so melodramatic," the woman said. "He was never going to die just because we thawed him a bit faster than usual." "Are you going to tell us what Jasmina wants with him?" "That's between him and the queen," she replied. The man threw a quilted silver gown in Quaiche's general direction. Morwenna's arm whipped out in a blur of motion and caught it. She walked over to Quaiche and handed it to him. "I'd like to know what's going on," Quaiche said. "Get dressed," the woman said. "You're coming with us." He pivoted around on the couch and lowered his feet to the coldness of the floor. Now that the discomfort was wearing off he was starting to feel scared instead. His cock had shrivelled in on itself, retreating into his belly as if already making its own furtive escape plans. Quaiche put on the gown, cinching it around his waist. To the surgeon-general he said, "You had something to do with this, didn't you?" Grelier blinked. "My dear fellow, it was all I could do to stop them warming you even more rapidly." "Your time will come," Quaiche said. "Mark my words." "I don't know why you insist on that tone. You and I have a great deal in common, Horris. Two human men, alone aboard an Ultra ship? We shouldn't be bickering, competing for prestige and status. We should be supporting each other, cementing a friendship." Grelier wiped the back of his glove on his tunic, leaving a nasty ochre smear. "We should be allies, you and I. We could go a long way together." "When hell freezes over," Quaiche replied. The queen stroked the mottled cranium of the human skull resting on her lap. She had very long finger-and toenails, painted jet-black. She wore a leather jerkin, laced across her cleavage, and a short skirt of the same dark fabric. Her black hair was combed back from her brow, save for a single neatly formed cowlick. Standing before her, Quaiche initially thought she was wearing makeup, vertical streaks of rouge as thick as candlewax running from her eyes to the curve of her upper lip. Then, joltingly, he realised that she had gouged out her eyes. Despite this, her face still possessed a certain severe beauty. It was the first time he had seen her in the flesh, in any of her manifestations. Until this meeting, all his dealings with her had been at a certain remove, either via alpha-compliant proxies or living intermediaries like Grelier. He had hoped to keep things that way. Quaiche waited several seconds, listening to his own breathing. Finally he managed, "Have I let you down, ma'am?" "What kind of ship do you think I run, Quaiche? One where I can afford to carry baggage?" "I can feel my luck changing." "A bit late for that. How many stopovers have we made since you joined the crew, Quaiche? Five, isn't it? And what have we got to show for ourselves, after those five stopovers?" He opened his mouth to answer her when he saw the scrimshaw suit lurking, almost lost, in the shadows behind her throne. Its presence could not be accidental. It resembled a mummy, worked from wrought iron or some other industrialage metal. There were various heavy-duty input plugs and attachment points, and a dark grilled-over rectangle where the visor should have been. There were scabs and fillets of solder where parts had been rewelded or braised. There was the occasional smooth patch of obviously new metal. Covering every other part of the suit, however, was an intricate, crawling complexity of carvings. Every available square centimetre had been crammed with obsessive, eye-wrenching detail. There was far too much to take in at one glance, but as the suit gyrated above him Quaiche made out fanciful serpent-necked space monsters, outrageously phallic spacecraft, screaming faces and demons, depictions of graphic sex and violence. There were spiralling narratives, cautionary tales, boastful trade episodes writ large. There were clock faces and psalms. Lines of text in languages he didn't recognise, musical stanzas, even swathes of lovingly carved numerals. Sequences of digital code or DNA base pairs. Angels and cherubim. Snakes. A lot of snakes. It made his head hurt just to look at it. It was pocked and gouged by the impact spots of micrometeorites and cosmic rays, its iron-grey tainted here and there with emerald-green or bronze discoloration. There were scratchlike striations where ultra-heavy particles had gouged out their own impact furrows as they sliced by at oblique angles. And there was a fine dark seam around the whole thing where the two armoured halves could be popped open and then welded shut again. The suit was a punishment device, its existence no more than a cruel rumour. Until this moment. The queen put people in the suit. It kept them alive and fed them sensory information. It protected them from the sleeting radiation of interstellar flight when they were entombed, for years at a time, in the ice of the ship's ablative shield. The lucky ones were dead when they pulled them out of the suit. Quaiche tried to stop the tremble in his voice. "If you look at things one way, we didn't really... we didn't really do too badly... all things considered. There was no material damage to the ship. No crew fatalities or major injuries. No contamination incidents. No unforeseen expenditures... " He fell silent, looking hopefully at Jasmina. "That's the best you can come up with? You were supposed to make us rich, Quaiche. You were supposed to turn our fortunes around in these difficult times, greasing the wheels of trade with your innate charm and grasp of planetary psychologies and landscapes. You were supposed to be our golden goose." He shifted uneasily. "Yet in five systems all you found was junk." "You chose the systems, not me. It isn't my fault if there wasn't anything worth finding." Slowly and worryingly the queen shook her head. "No, Quaiche. Not that easy, I'm afraid. You see, a month ago we intercepted something. It was a transmission, a two-way trade dialogue between a human colony on Chaloupek and the lighthugger Faint Memory of Hokusai. Ring any bells?" "Not really..." But it did. "The Hokusai was entering Gliese 664 just as we departed that system. It was the second system you swept for us. Your report was... " The queen hoisted the skull to the side of her head, listening to its chattering jaw. "Let's see... 'nothing of value found on Opincus or the other three terrestrial worlds; only minor items of discarded technology recovered on moons five to eight of the Haurient giant... nothing in the inner asteroid fields, D-type swarms, Trojan points or major K-belt concentrations.'" Quaiche could see where this was heading. "And the Faint Memory of Hokusai?" "The trade dialogue was absolutely fascinating. By all accounts, the Hokusai located a cache of buried trade items around one century old. Pre-war, pre-plague. Very valuable stuff: not merely technological artefacts, but also art and culture, much of it unique. I hear they made enough on that to buy themselves an entirely new layer of ablative hull cladding." She looked at him expectantly. "Any comments, thoughts, on that?" "My report was honest," Quaiche said. "They must have got lucky, that's all. Look, just give me another chance. Are we approaching another system?" The queen smiled. "We're always approaching another system. This time it's a place called 107 Piscium, but frankly from this distance it doesn't look much more promising than the last five. What's to say you're going to be any use this time?" "Let me take the Dominatrix," he said, knitting his hands together involuntarily. "Let me take her down into that system." The queen was silent for many seconds. Quaiche heard only his own breathing, punctuated now and then by the abrupt, attenuated sizzle of a dying insect or rat. Something moved languidly beyond the green glass of a hemispherical dome set into one of the chamber's twelve walls. He sensed that he was being observed by something other than the eyeless figure in the chair. Without having been told, he understood then that the thing beyond the glass was the real queen, and that the ruined body in the seat was only a puppet that she currently inhabited. They were all true, then, all the rumours he had ever heard: the queen's solipsism; her addiction to extreme pain as a reality-anchoring device; the vast reserve of cloned bodies she was said to keep for just that purpose. "Have you finished, Quaiche? Have you made your case?" He sighed. "I suppose I have." "Very well, then." She must have issued some secret command, because at that moment the door to the chamber opened again. Quaiche spun around as the blast of cold fresh air touched the nape of his neck. The surgeon-general and the two Ultras who had helped him during Quaiche's revival entered the room. "I'm done with him," the queen said. "And your intention?" Grelier asked. Jasmina sucked at a fingernail. "I haven't changed my mind. Put him in the scrimshaw suit."
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Ararat, 2675	Scorpio knew better than to interrupt Clavain when the old man was thinking something over. How long had it been since he had told him about the object falling from space, if that was indeed where it had come from? Five minutes, easily. In all that time, Clavain had sat there as gravely as a statue, his expression fixed, his eyes locked on the horizon. Finally, just when Scorpio was beginning to doubt his old friend's sanity, Clavain spoke. "When did it happen?" he asked. "When did this 'thing'—whatever it is—arrive?" "Probably in the last week," Scorpio said. "We only found it a couple of days ago." There was another troubling pause, though it was only a minute or so long this time. Water slapped against rock and gurgled in little eddies in and out of shallow pools by the shoreline. "And what exactly is it?" "We can't be absolutely certain. It's a capsule of some kind. A human artefact. Our best guess is that it's an escape pod, something with re-entry capabilities. We think it splashed down in the ocean and bobbed to the surface." Clavain nodded, as if the news was of only minor interest. "And you're certain it wasn't left behind by Galiana?" He said the woman's name with ease, but Scorpio could only guess at the pain it caused him. Especially now, looking out to sea. Scorpio had some inkling of what the ocean meant to Clavain: both loss and the cruellest kind of hope. In an unguarded moment, not long before his voluntary exile from island affairs, Clavain had said, "They're all gone now. There's nothing more the sea can do to me." "They're still there," Scorpio had replied. "They aren't lost. If anything, they're safer than they ever were." As if Clavain could not have seen that for himself. "No," Scorpio said, snapping his attention back to the present, "I don't think Galiana left it." "I thought it might hold a message from her," Clavain said. "But I'm wrong, aren't I? There won't be any messages. Not that way. Not from Galiana, not from Felka." "I'm sorry," Scorpio said. "There's no need to be. It's the way of things." What Scorpio knew of Clavain's past was drawn as much from hearsay as from things the old man had told him directly. Memories had always been fickle, but in the present era they were as mutable as clay. There were aspects of his own past even Clavain could not now be sure of. Yet there were some things that were certain. Clavain had once loved a woman named Galiana; their relationship had begun many centuries ago and had spanned many of those same centuries. It was clear that they had birthed—or created—a kind of daughter, Felka; that she had been both terribly damaged and terribly powerful; and that she had been loved and feared in equal measure. Whenever Clavain spoke of those times, it was with a happiness tempered by the knowledge of what was to follow. Galiana had been a scientist, fascinated by the augmentation of the human mind. But her curiosity had not stopped there. What she ultimately wanted was an intimate connection with reality, at its root level. Her neural experiments had only ever been a necessary part of this process. To Galiana, it had been natural that the next step should be physical exploration, pushing out into the cosmos. She wanted to go deeper, far beyond the ragged edge of mapped space, to see what was actually out there. So far the only indications of alien intelligence anyone had found had been ruins and fossils, but who was to say what might be found further into the galaxy? Human settlements at that time spanned a bubble two dozen light-years across, but Galiana intended to travel more than a hundred light-years before returning. And she had. The Conjoiners had launched three ships, moving slightly slower than the speed of light, on an expedition into deep interstellar space. The expedition would take at least a century and a half; equally eager for new experience, Clavain and Felka had journeyed with her. All had progressed according to plan: Galiana and her allies visited many solar systems, and while they never found any unambiguous signs of active intelligence, they nonetheless catalogued many remarkable phenomena, as well as uncovering further ruins. Then came reports, already outdated, of a crisis back home: growing tensions between the Conjoiners and their moderate allies, the Demarchists. Clavain needed to return home to lend his tactical support to the remaining Conjoiners. Galiana had considered it more important to continue with the expedition; their amicable separation in deep space left one of the ships returning home, carrying Clavain and Felka, while the two other craft continued to loop further into the plane of the galaxy. They had intended to be reunited, but when Galiana's ship finally returned to the Conjoiner Mother Nest, it did so on automatic pilot, damaged and dead. Somewhere out in space a parasitic entity had attacked both of the ships, destroying one. Immediately afterwards, black machines had clawed into the hull of Galiana's ship, systematically anatomising her crew. One by one, they had all been killed, until only Galiana remained. The black machines had infiltrated her skull, squeezing into the interstices of her brain. Horribly, she was still alive, but utterly incapable of independent action. She had become the parasite's living puppet. With Clavain's permission the Conjoiners had frozen her against the day when they might be able to remove the parasite safely. One day they might even have succeeded, but then a rift had opened in Conjoiner affairs: the beginning of the same crisis that had eventually brought Clavain to the Resurgam system and, latterly, to Ararat. In the conflict Galiana's frozen body had been destroyed. Clavain's grief had been a vast, soul-sucking thing. It would have killed him, Scorpio thought, had not his people been in such desperate need of leadership. Saving the colony on Resurgam had given him something to focus on besides the loss he had suffered. It had kept him somewhere this side of sanity. And, later, there had been a kind of consolation. Galiana had not led them to Ararat, yet it turned out that Ararat was one of the worlds she had visited after her separation from Clavain and Felka. The planet had attracted her because of the alien organisms filling its ocean. It was a Juggler world, and that was vitally important, for few things that visited Juggler worlds were ever truly forgotten. Pattern Jugglers had been encountered on many worlds that conformed to the same aquatic template as Ararat. After years of study, there was still no agreement as to whether or not the aliens were intelligent in their own right. But all the same it was clear that they prized intelligence themselves, preserving it with the loving devotion of curators. Now and then, when a person swam in the seas of a Juggler planet, the microscopic organisms entered the swimmer's nervous system. It was a kinder process than the neural invasion that had taken place aboard Galiana's ship. The Juggler organisms only wanted to record, and when they had unravelled the swimmer's neural patterns they would retreat. The mind of the swimmer would have been captured by the sea, but the swimmer was almost always free to return to land. Usually, they felt no change at all. Rarely, they would turn out to have been given a subtle gift, a tweak to their neurological architecture that permitted superhuman cognition or insight. Mostly it lasted for only a few hours, but very infrequently it appeared permanent. There was no way to tell if Galiana had gained any gifts after she had swum in the ocean of this world, but her mind had certainly been captured. It was there now, frozen beneath the waves, waiting to be imprinted on the consciousness of another swimmer. Clavain had guessed this, but he had not been the first to attempt communion with Galiana. That honour had fallen to Felka. For twenty years she had swum, immersed in the memories and glacial consciousness of her mother. In all that time Clavain had held back from swimming himself, fearing perhaps that when he encountered the imprint of Galiana he would find it in some sense wrong, untrue to his memory of what she had been. His doubts had ebbed over the years, but he had still never made the final commitment of swimming. Nonetheless, Felka—who had always craved the complexity of experience that the ocean offered—had swum regularly, and she had reported back her experiences to Clavain. Through his daughter he had again achieved some connection with Galiana, and for the time being, until he summoned the courage to swim himself, that had been enough. But two years ago the sea had taken Felka, and she had not returned. Scorpio thought about that now, choosing his next words with great care. "Nevil, I understand this is difficult for you, but you must also understand that this thing, whatever it is, could be a very serious matter for the settlement." "I get that, Scorp." "But you think the sea matters more. Is that it?" "I think none of us really has a clue what actually matters." "Maybe we don't. Me, I don't really care about the bigger picture. It's never been my strong point." "Right now, Scorp, the bigger picture is all we have." "So you think there are millions—billions—of people out there who are going to die? People we've never met, people we've never come within a light-year of in our lives?" "That's about the size of it." "Well, sorry, but that isn't the way my head works. I just can't process that kind of threat. I don't do mass extinction. I'm a lot more locally focused than that. And right now I have a local problem." "You think so?" "I have a hundred and seventy thousand people here that need worrying about. That's a number I can just about get my head around. And when something drops out of the sky without warning, it keeps me from sleeping." "But you didn't actually see anything drop out of the sky, did you?" Clavain did not wait for Scorpio's answer. "And yet we have the immediate volume of space around Ararat covered with every passive sensor in our arsenal. How did we miss a re-entry capsule, let alone the ship that must have dropped it?" "I don't know," Scorpio said. He couldn't tell if he was losing the argument, or doing well just to be engaging Clavain in discussion about something concrete, something other than lost souls and the spectre of mass extinction. "But whatever it is must have come down recently. It's not like any of the other artefacts we've pulled from the ocean. They were all half-dissolved, even the ones that must have been sitting on the seabed, where the organisms aren't so thick. This thing didn't look as though it had been under for more than a few days." Clavain turned away from the shore, and Scorpio took this as a welcome sign. The old Conjoiner moved with stiff, economical footsteps, never looking down, but navigating his way between pools and obstacles with practised ease. They were returning to the tent. "I watch the skies a lot, Scorp," Clavain said. "At night, when there aren't any clouds. Lately I've been seeing things up there. Flashes. Hints of things moving. Glimpses of something bigger, as if the curtain's just been pulled back for an instant. I'm guessing you think that makes me mad, don't you?" Scorpio didn't know what he thought. "Alone out here, anyone would see things," he said. "But it wasn't cloudy last night," Clavain said, "or the night before, and I watched the sky on both occasions. I didn't see anything. Certainly no indication of any ships orbiting us." "We haven't seen anything either." "How about radio transmissions? Laser squirts?" "Not a peep. And you're right: it doesn't make very much sense. But like it or not, there's still a capsule, and it isn't going away. I want you to come and see it for yourself." Clavain shoved hair from his eyes. The lines and wrinkles in his face had become shadowed crevasses and gorges, like the contours of an improbably weathered landscape. Scorpio thought that he had aged ten or twenty years in the six months he had been on this island. "You said something about there being someone inside it." While they had been talking, the cloud cover had begun to break up in swathes. The sky beyond had the pale, crazed blue of a jackdaw's eye. "It's still a secret," Scorpio said. "Only a few of us know that the thing's been found at all. That's why I came here by boat. A shuttle would have been easier, but it wouldn't have been low-key. If people find out we've brought you back they'll think there's a crisis coming. Besides which, it isn't supposed to be this easy to bring you back. They still think you're somewhere halfway around the world." "You insisted on that lie?" "What do you think would have been more reassuring? To let the people think you'd gone on an expedition—a potentially hazardous one, admittedly—or to tell them you'd gone away to sit on an island and toy with the idea of committing suicide?" "They've been through worse. They could have taken it." "It's what they've been through that made me think they could do without the truth," Scorpio said. "Anyway, it isn't suicide." He stopped and looked back out to sea. "I know she's there, with her mother. I can feel it, Scorpio. Don't ask me how or why, but I know she's still here. I read about this sort of thing happening on other Juggler worlds, you know. Now and then they take swimmers, dismantle their bodies completely and incorporate them into the organic matrix of the sea. No one knows why. But swimmers who enter the oceans afterwards say that sometimes they feel the presence of the ones who vanished. It's a much stronger impression than the usual stored memories and personalities. They say they experience something close to dialogue." Scorpio held back a sigh. He had listened to exactly the same speech before he had taken Clavain out to this island six months ago. Clearly the period of isolation had done nothing to lessen Clavain's conviction that Felka had not simply drowned. "So hop in and find out for yourself," he said. "I would, but I'm scared." "That the ocean might take you as well?" "No." Clavain turned to face Scorpio. He looked less surprised than affronted. "No, of course not. That doesn't scare me at all. What does is the idea that it might leave me behind." [ Hela, 107 Piscium, 2727 ] Rashmika Els had spent much of her childhood being told not to look quite so serious. That was what they would have said if they could have seen her now: perched on her bed in the half-light, selecting the very few personal effects she could afford to carry on her mission. And she would have given them precisely the same look of affront she always mustered on those occasions. Except this time she would have known with a deeper conviction than usual that she was right and they were wrong. Because even though she was still only seventeen, she knew that she had every right to feel this serious, this frightened. She had filled a small bag with three or four days' worth of clothes, even though she expected her journey to take a lot longer than that. She had added a bundle of toiletries, carefully removed from the family bathroom without her parents noticing, and some dried-up biscuits and a small wedge of goat's cheese, just in case there was nothing to eat (or, perhaps, nothing she would actually wish to eat) aboard Crozet's icejammer. She had packed a bottle of purified water because she had heard that the water nearer the Way sometimes contained things that made you ill. The bottle would not last her very long, but it at least made her feel as if she was thinking ahead. And then there was a small plastic-wrapped bundle containing three tiny scuttler relics that she had stolen from the digs. After all that, there was not much space left in the bag for anything else. It was already heavier than she had expected. She looked at the sorry little collection of items still spread on the bed before her, knowing that she only had room for one of them. What should she take? There was a map of Hela, peeled from her bedroom wall, with the sinuous, equator-hugging trail of the Way marked in faded red ink. It wasn't very accurate, but she had no better map in her compad. Did it matter, though? She had no means of reaching the Way without relying on other people to get her there, and if they didn't know the direction, her map was unlikely to make very much difference. She pushed the map aside. There was a thick blue book, its edges protected with gold metal. The book contained her handwritten notes on the scuttlers, kept assiduously over the last eight years. She had started the book at the age of nine, when—in a perfect fit of precocity—she had first decided that she wanted to be a scuttler scholar. They had laughed at her, of course—in a kindly, indulgent way, naturally—but that had only made her more determined to continue with it. Rashmika knew she did not have time to waste, but she could not stop herself from flicking through the book, the rough whisper of page against page harsh in the silence. In the rare moments when she saw it afresh, as if through someone else's eyes, the book struck her as a thing of beauty. At the beginning, her handwriting was large and neat and childish. She used inks of many colours and underlined things with scrupulous care. Some of the inks had faded or blotted, and there were smears and stains where she had marked the paper, but that sense of damaged antiquity only added to the medieval allure of the artefact. She had made drawings, copying them from other sources. The first few were crude and childlike, but within a few pages her figures had the precision and confidence of Victorian naturalists' sketches. They were painstakingly crosshatched and annotated, with the text crawling around them. There were drawings of scuttler artefacts, of course, with notes on function and origin, but there were also many pictures of the scuttlers themselves, their anatomies and postures reconstructed from the fossil evidence. She flicked on through the book, through years of her life. The text grew smaller, more difficult to read. The coloured inks were used increasingly sparingly until, in the last few chapters, the writing and figures were worked in almost unrelieved black. The same neatness was there, the same methodical care applied to both text and figurework, but now it appeared to be the work of a scholar rather than an enthusiastic, gifted child. The notes and drawings were no longer recycled from other sources, but were now part of an argument she herself was advancing, independent of external thinking. The difference between the start and the end of the written parts of the book was shockingly obvious to Rashmika, a reminder of the distance she had travelled. There had been many times when she had been so embarrassed by her earlier efforts that she had wanted to discard the book and start another. But paper was expensive on Hela, and the book had been a gift from Harbin. She fingered the unmarked pages. Her argument was not yet completed, but she could already see the trajectory it would take. She could almost see the words and figures on the pages, spectrally faint but needing only time and concentration to bring them into sharp focus. On a journey as long as the one she planned to take, there would surely be many opportunities to work on her book. But she couldn't take it. The book meant too much to her, and she could not bear the thought of losing it or having it stolen. At least if she left it here it would be safe until her return. She could still take notes while she was away, after all, refining her argument, ensuring that the edifice came together with no obvious flaws or weaknesses. The book would be all the stronger for it. Rashmika clasped it shut, pushed it aside. That left two things. One was her compad, the other a scuffed and dirty toy. The compad did not even belong to her, really; it was the family's, and she only had it on extended loan while no one else needed it. But as no one had asked for it for months, it was unlikely to be missed during her absence. In its memory were many items relevant to her study of the scuttlers, sourced from other electronic archives. There were images and movies she had made herself, down in the digs. There were spoken testimonies from miners who had found things that did not quite accord with the standard theory of the scuttler extinction, but whose reports had been suppressed by the clerical authorities. There were texts from older scholars. There were maps and linguistics resources, and much that would guide her when she reached the Way. She picked up the toy. It was a soft, pink thing, ragged and faintly pungent. She had had it since she was eight or nine, had picked it herself from the stall of an itinerant toymaker. She supposed it must have been bright and clean then, but she had no memory of the toy ever being anything other than well loved, grubby with affection. Looking at it now with the rational detachment of a seventeen-year-old, she had no idea what kind of creature the toy had ever been meant to represent. All she knew was that from the moment she saw it on the stall she had decided it was a pig. It didn't matter that no one on Hela had ever seen a living pig. "You can't come with me either," she whispered. She picked up the toy and placed it atop the book, squeezing it down until it sat like a sentry. It wasn't that she did not want it to come with her. She knew it was just a toy, but she also knew that there would be days ahead when she would feel terribly homesick, anxious for any connection to the safe environment of the village. But the compad was more useful, and this was not a time for sentiment. She pushed the dark slab into the bag, drew tight the bag's vacuum seal and quietly left her room. Rashmika had been fourteen when the caravans had last come within range of her village. She had been studying then and had not been allowed to go out to see the meeting. The time before that, she had been nine: she had seen the caravans then, but only briefly and only from a distance. What she now remembered of that spectacle was inevitably coloured by what had happened to her brother. She had replayed those events so many times that it was quite impossible to separate reliable memory from imagined detail. Eight years ago, she thought: a tenth of a human life, by the grim new reckoning. A tenth of a life was not to be underestimated, even if eight years would once have been a twentieth or a thirtieth of what one could expect. But at the same time it felt vastly more than that. It was half of her own life, after all. The wait until she could next see the caravans had felt epochal. She really had been a little girl the last time she had seen them: a little girl from the Vigrid badlands with a reputation, however strange, for always telling the truth. But now her chance had come again. It was near the hundredth day of the hundred and twenty-second circumnavigation that one of the caravans had taken an unexpected detour east of Hauk Crossing. The procession had veered north into the Gaudi Flats before linking up with a second caravan that happened to be heading south towards Glum Junction. This did not happen very often: it was the first time in nearly three revolutions that the caravans had come within a day's travel of the villages on the southern slopes of the Vigrid badlands. There was, naturally, a great deal of excitement. There were parties and feasts, jubilation committees and invitations to secret drinking dens. There were romances and affairs, dangerous flirtations and secret liaisons. Nine months from now there would arrive a clutch of wailing new caravan babies. Compared with the general austerity of life on Hela and the particular hardships of the badlands, it was a period of measured, tentative hope. It was one of those rare times when—albeit within tightly prescribed parameters—personal circumstances could change. The more sober-minded villagers did not allow themselves to show any visible signs of excitement, but privately they could not resist wondering if this was their turn for a change of fortune. They made elaborate excuses to allow themselves to travel out to the rendezvous point: excuses that had nothing to do with personal gain, but everything to do with the communal prosperity of the villages. And so, over a period of nearly three weeks, the villages sent out little caravans of their own, crossing the treacherous scabbed ground to rendezvous with the larger processions. Rashmika had planned to leave her home at dawn, while her parents were still sleeping. She had not lied to them about her departure, but only because it had never been necessary. What the adults and the other villagers did not understand was that she was as capable of lying as any of them. More than that, she could lie with great conviction. The only reason why she had spent most of her childhood not lying was because until very recently she had failed to see the point in it. Quietly she stole through the buried warrens of her home, treading with loping strides between shadowed corridors and bright patches beneath the overhead skylights. The homes in her village were almost all sunk below ground level, irregularly shaped caverns linked by meandering tunnels lined with yellowing plaster. Rashmika found the idea of living above ground faintly unsettling, but she supposed one could get used to it given time; just as one could eventually get used to life in the mobile caravans, or even the cathedrals that they followed. It was not as if life below ground was without its hazards, after all. Indirectly, the network of tunnels in the village was connected to the much deeper network of the digs. There were supposed to be pressure doors and safety systems to protect the village if one of the dig caverns collapsed, or if the miners penetrated a high-pressure bubble, but these systems did not always work as well as intended. There had been no serious dig accidents during Rashmika's life, only near misses, but everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before another catastrophe of the kind her parents still talked about occurred. Only the week before, there had been an explosion on the surface: no one had been hurt, and there was even talk that the demolition charges had been let off deliberately, but it was still a reminder that her world was only ever one accident away from disaster. It was, she supposed, the price that the villages paid for their economic independence from the cathedrals. Most of the settlements on Hela lay near the Permanent Way, not hundreds of kilometres to the north or south of it. With very few exceptions the settlements near the Way owed their existence to the cathedrals and their governing bodies, the churches, and by and large they subscribed to one or other of the major branches of the Quaicheist faith. That was not to say that there was no one of faith in the badlands, but the villages were run by secular committees and made their living from the digs rather than the elaborate arrangement of tithes and indulgences which bound the cathedrals and the communities of the Way. As a consequence they were free of many of the religious restrictions that applied elsewhere on Hela. They made their own laws, had less restrictive marriage practices and turned a blind eye to certain perversions that were outlawed along the Way. Visits from the Clocktower were rare, and whenever the churches did send their envoys they were viewed with suspicion. Girls like Rashmika were allowed to study the technical literature of the digs rather than Quaicheist scripture. It was not unthinkable that a woman should find work for herself. But by the same token, the villages of the Vigrid badlands were beyond the umbrella of protection that the cathedrals offered. The settlements along the Way were guarded by a loose amalgamation of cathedral militia, and in times of crisis they turned to the cathedrals for help. The cathedrals held medicine far in advance of anything in the badlands, and Rashmika had seen friends and relatives die because her village had no access to that care. The cost to be paid for that care, of course, was that one submitted to the machinations of the Office of Bloodwork. And once you had Quaicheist blood in your veins you couldn't be sure of anything ever again. Yet she accepted the arrangement with the combination of pride and stubbornness common to all the badlanders. It was true that they endured hardships unknown along the Way. It was true that, by and large, few of them were fervent believers; even those of faith were usually troubled by doubt. Typically it was doubt that had driven them to the digs in the first place, to search for answers to questions that bothered them. And yet for all this, the villagers would not have had it any other way. They lived and loved as they pleased, and viewed the more pious communities of the Way with a lofty sense of moral superiority. Rashmika reached the final chamber of her home, the heavy bag knocking against the small of her back. The house was quiet, but if she kept very still and listened intently she was certain that she could hear the nearly subliminal rumble of the distant excavations, reports of drilling and digging and earth-moving reaching her ears through snaking kilometres of tunnel. Now and then there was a percussive thud or a fusillade of hammer blows. The sounds were so familiar to Rashmika that they never disturbed her sleep; indeed, she would have snapped awake instantly had the mining ceased. But now she wished for a louder series of noises to conceal the sounds she would inevitably make as she left her home. The final chamber contained two doors. One led horizontally into the wider tunnel network, accessing a thoroughfare that connected with many other homes and community chambers. The other door was set in the ceiling, ringed by handrails. At that moment the door was hinged open into the dark space above it. Rashmika opened a locker set into the smooth curve of the wall and removed her surface suit, taking care not to clatter the helmet and backpack against the three other suits hanging on the same rotating rack. She had to put the suit on three times a year during practice drills, so it was easy enough for her to work the latches and seals. Even then, it still took ten minutes, during which time she stopped and held her breath whenever she heard a sound somewhere in the house, whether it was the air-circulator clicking on and off or the low groan as a tunnel resettled. Finally she had the suit on and ready, with the read-outs on her cuff all safely in the green. The tank wasn't completely full of air—there must have been a slow leak in the suit as the tanks were usually kept fully topped-up—but there was more than enough in there for her needs. But when she closed the helmet visor all she could hear was her own breathing; she had no idea how much sound she was making, or whether anyone else was stirring in the house. And the noisiest part of her escape was still to come. She would just have to be as careful and quick as possible, so that even if her parents did wake she could get to her meeting point before they caught up with her. The suit doubled her weight, but even then she did not find it difficult to haul herself up into the dark space above the ceiling door. She had reached the surface access airlock. Every home had one, but they varied in size. Rashmika's was large enough for two adults at a time. Even so, she had to sit in a stooped position while she lowered the inner door back down and turned the manual wheel to lock it tight. In a sense, she was safe for a moment. Once she started the depressurisation cycle, there was no way her mother and father would be able to get into the chamber. It took two minutes for the lock to finish its business. By the time the lower door could again be reopened, she would be halfway across the village. Once she got away from the exit point, her footprints would quickly be lost amongst the confusion of marks left by other villagers as they went about their errands. Rashmika checked her suit again, satisfying herself that the readings were still in the green. Only then did she initiate the depressurisation sequence. She heard nothing, but as the air was sucked from the chamber the suit's fabric swelled out between the concertina joints and it took a little more effort to move her limbs. A separate read-out around the faceplate of her helmet informed her that she was now in vacuum. No one had hammered on the bottom of the door. Rashmika had been a little worried that she might trip an alarm by using the lock. She was not aware that such a thing existed, but her parents might have chosen not to tell her, just in case she ever intended making this kind of escape. Her fears appeared to have been groundless, however: there was no alarm, no fail-safe, no hidden code that needed to be used before the door worked. She had run through this so many times in her imagination that it was impossible not to feel a small twinge of déjà vu. When the chamber was fully evacuated, a relay allowed the outer door to be opened. Rashmika pushed hard, but at first nothing happened. Then the door budged—only by an inch, but it was enough to let in a sheet of blindingly bright daylight that scythed against her faceplate. She pushed harder and the door moved higher, hinging back as it did so. Rashmika pushed through until she was sitting on the surface. She saw now that the door had been covered in an inch of recent frost. It snowed on Hela, especially when the Kelda or Ragnarok geysers were active. Although the house clock had said it was dawn, this meant very little on the surface. The villagers still lived by a twenty-six-hour clock (many of them were interstellar refugees from Yellowstone) despite the fact that Hela was a different world entirely, with its own complex cycles. A day on Hela was actually about forty hours long, which was the time it took Hela to complete one orbit around its mother world, the gas giant Haldora. Since the moon's inclination to the plane of its orbit was essentially zero, all points on the surface experienced about twenty hours of darkness during each orbit. The Vigrid badlands were on the dayside now, and would remain so for another seven hours. There was another kind of night on Hela, for once in its orbit around Haldora the moon swung into the gas giant's shadow. But that short night was only two hours long, brief enough to be of little consequence to the villagers. At any given time the moon was far more likely to be out of Haldora's shadow than within it. After a few seconds, Rashmika's visor had compensated for the glare and she was able to get her bearings. She extracted her legs from the hole and carefully closed the surface door, latching it shut so that it would begin pressurising the lower chamber. Perhaps her parents were waiting below, but even if that was the case they could not reach the surface for another two minutes, even if they were already wearing suits. It would take them even longer to navigate the community tunnels to reach the next-nearest surface exit. Rashmika stood up and began walking briskly but with what she hoped was no apparent sense of haste or panic. There was some more good fortune: she had expected to have to cross several dozen metres of unmarked ice, so that her trail would at first be easy to follow. But someone else had come this way recently, and their prints meandered away in a different direction from the one she intended to take. Anyone following her now would have no idea which set of prints to follow. They looked like her mother's, for the shoe-prints were too small to have belonged to her father. What kind of business had her mother been on? It bothered Rashmika for a moment, for she did not recall anyone mentioning any recent trips to the surface. Never mind: there was bound to be an innocent explanation. She had enough to think about without adding to her worries. Rashmika followed a circuitous path between the black upright slabs of radiator panels, the squatting orange mounds of generators or navigation transponders and the soft snow-covered lines of parked icejammers. She had been right about the footprints, for when she looked back it was impossible to separate her own from the muddle of those that had been left before. She rounded a huddle of radiator fins and there it was, looking much like the other parked icejammers except that the snow had melted from the flanged radiator above the engine cowlings. It was too bright to tell if there were lights on inside the machine. There were fan-shaped arcs of transparency in the windscreen where the mechanical wiper blades had flicked aside the snow. Rashmika thought she saw figures moving behind the glass. Rashmika walked around the low, splayed-legged jammer. The black of its boat-shaped hull was relieved only by a glowing snake motif coiling along the side. The single front leg ended in a broad, upturned ski blade, with smaller skis tipping the two rear legs. Rashmika wondered if it was the right machine. She would look rather silly if she made a mistake now. She felt certain that there was no one in the village who would not recognise her, even though she had a suit on. But Crozet had been very specific in his instructions. With some relief she saw a boarding ramp was already waiting for her, lowered down into the snow. She walked up the flexing metal slope and knocked politely on the jammer's outer door. There was an agonising moment and then the door slid aside, revealing another airlock. She squeezed into it—there was only room for one person. A man's voice—she recognised it immediately as Crozet's—came through on her helmet channel. "Yes?" "It's me." "Who is 'me'?" "Rashmika," she said. "Rashmika Els. I think we had an arrangement." There was a pause—an agonising pause during which she began to think that, yes, she had made an error—when the man said, "It's not too late to change your mind." "I think it is." "You could go home now." "My parents won't be very pleased that I came this far." "No," the man said, "I doubt that they'll be thrilled. But I know your folks. I doubt that they'd punish you too severely." He was right, but she did not want to be reminded of that now. She had spent weeks psyching herself up for this, and the last thing she needed was a rational argument for backing out at the final minute. Rashmika knocked on the inner door again, knuckling it hard with her gauntlet. "Are you going to let me in or not?" "I just wanted to make sure you're certain. Once we leave the village, we won't turn back until we meet the caravan. That's not open to negotiation. Step inside, you're committed to a three-day trip. Six if you decide to come back with us. No amount of pissing and moaning is going to make me turn around." "I've waited eight years," she said. "Three more days won't kill me." He laughed, or sniggered—she wasn't sure which. "You know, I almost believe you." "You should do," Rashmika told him. "I'm the girl that never lies, remember?" The outer door closed itself, cramming her even further into the tight cavity of the lock. Air began to skirl in through grilles. At the same time she felt motion. It was soft and rhythmic, like being rocked in a cradle. The jammer was on the move, propelling itself with alternating movements of its rear skis. She supposed that her escape had begun the moment she crawled out of bed, but only now did it feel as if she was actually on her way. When the inner door allowed Rashmika into the body of the jammer, she snapped off her helmet and hung it dutifully next to the three that were already there. The jammer had looked reasonably large from the outside, but she had forgotten how much of the interior volume would be occupied by its own engines, generators, fuel tanks, life-support equipment and cargo racks. Inside it was cramped and noisy, and the air made her want to put the helmet back on again. She imagined she could get used to it, but she wondered if three days would be anywhere near enough time. The jammer lurched and yawed. Through one of the windows she saw the blazing white landscape tilt and tilt again. Rashmika reached for a handhold and was just beginning to make her way to the front when a figure stepped into view. It was Crozet's son, Culver. He wore grubby ochre overalls, tools cramming the many pockets. He was a year or two younger than Rashmika, blond-haired and with a permanent look of malnourishment. He viewed Rashmika with lecherous intent. "Decided to stay aboard after all, did you? That's good. We can get to know each other a bit better now, can't we?" "It's only for three days, Culver. Don't get any ideas." "I'll help you get that suit off, then we can go up front. Dad's busy steering us out of the village now. We're having to take a detour because of the crater. That's why it's a bit bumpy." "I'll manage my suit on my own, thank you." Rashmika nodded encouragingly towards the icejammer's cabin. "Why don't you go back and see if your dad needs any help?" "He doesn't need any help. Mother's there as well." Rashmika beamed approvingly. "Well, I expect you're glad that she's here to keep you two men out of trouble. Right, Culver?" "She doesn't mind what we get up to, so long as we stay in the black." The machine lurched again, knocking Rashmika against the metal wall. "Fact of the matter is, she mostly turns a blind eye." "So I've heard. Well, I really need to get this suit off... would you mind telling me where I'm sleeping?" Culver showed her a tiny compartment tucked away between two throbbing generators. There was a grubby mattress, a pillow and a blanket made of slippery quilted silver material. A curtain could be tugged across for privacy. "I hope you weren't expecting luxury," Culver said. "I was expecting the worst." Culver lingered. "You sure you don't want any help getting that suit off?" "I'll manage, thanks." "Got something to wear afterwards, have you?" "What I'm wearing under the suit, and what I brought with me." Rashmika patted the bag which was now tucked beneath her life-support pack. Through the fabric she could feel the hard edge of her compad. "You didn't seriously think I'd forget to bring any clothes with me, did you?" "No," Culver said, sullenly. "Good. Now why don't you run along and tell your parents that I'm safe and sound? And please let them know that the sooner we clear the village, the happier I'll be." "We're moving as fast as we can go," Culver said. "Actually," Rashmika said, "that's just what's worrying me." "In a bit of a hurry, are you?" "I'd like to reach the cathedrals as soon as I can, yes." Culver eyed her. "Got religion, have you?" "Not exactly," she said. "More like some family business I have to take care of." [ 107 Piscium, 2615 ] Quaiche awoke, his body insinuated into a dark form-fitting cavity. There was a moment of blissful disconnection while he waited for his memories to return, a moment in which he had no cares, no anxieties. Then all the memories barged into his head at once, announcing themselves like rowdy gate-crashers before shuffling themselves into something resembling chronological order. He remembered being woken, to be greeted with the unwelcome news that he had been granted an audience with the queen. He remembered her dodecahedral chamber, furnished with instruments of torture, its morbid gloom punctuated by the flashes of electrocuted vermin. He remembered the skull with the television eyes. He remembered the queen toying with him the way cats toyed with sparrows. Of all his errors, imagining that she had it in her to forgive him had been the most grievous, the least forgivable. Quaiche screamed now, grasping precisely what had happened to him and where he was. His screams were muffled and soft, uncomfortably childlike. He was ashamed to hear such sounds coming out of his mouth. He could move no part of himself, but he was not exactly paralysed—rather there was no room to move any part of his body by more than a fraction of a centimetre. The confinement felt oddly familiar. Gradually Quaiche's screams became wheezes, and then merely very hard rasping breaths. This continued for several minutes, and then Quaiche started humming, reiterating six or seven notes with the studied air of a madman or a monk. He must already be under the ice, he decided. There had been no entombment ceremony, no final chastising meeting with Jasmina. They had simply welded him into the suit and buried him within the shield of ice that Gnostic Ascension pushed ahead of itself. He could not guess how much time had passed, whether it was hours or larger fractions of a day. He dared not believe it was any longer than that. As the horror hit him, so did something else: a nagging feeling that some detail was amiss. Perhaps it was the sense of familiarity he felt in the confined space, or perhaps it was the utter absence of anything to look at. A voice said, "Attention, Quaiche. Attention, Quaiche. Deceleration phase is complete. Awaiting orders for system insertion." It was the calm, avuncular voice of the Dominatrix's cybernetic subpersona. He realised, joltingly, that he was not in the iron suit at all, but rather inside the slowdown coffin of the Dominatrix, packed into a form-fitting matrix designed to shield him during the high-gee deceleration phase. Quaiche stopped humming, simultaneously affronted and disorientated. He was relieved, no doubt about that. But the transition from the prospect of years of torment to the relatively benign environment of the Dominatrix had been so abrupt that he had not had time to depressurise emotionally. All he could do was gasp in shock and wonderment. He felt a vague need to crawl back into the nightmare and emerge from it more gradually. "Attention, Quaiche. Awaiting orders for system insertion." "Wait," he said. His throat was raw, his voice gummy. He must have been in the slowdown coffin for quite some time. "Wait. Get me out of here. I'm..." "Is everything satisfactory, Quaiche?" "I'm a bit confused." "In what way, Quaiche? Do you need medical attention?" "No, I'm... " He paused and squirmed. "Just get me out of here. I'll be all right in a moment." "Very well, Quaiche." The restraints budged apart. Light rammed in through widening cracks in the coffin's walls. The familiar onboard smell of the Dominatrix hit his olfactory system. The ship was nearly silent, save for the occasional tick of a cooling manifold. It was always like that after slowdown, when they were in coast phase. Quaiche stretched, his body creaking like an old wooden chair. He felt bad, but not nearly as bad as he had felt after his last hasty revival from reefersleep on board the Gnostic Ascension . In the slowdown coffin he had been drugged into a state of unconsciousness, but most bodily processes had continued normally. He only spent a few weeks in the coffin during each system survey, and the medical risks associated with being frozen outweighed the benefits to the queen of arresting his ageing. He looked around, still not quite daring to believe he had been spared the nightmare of the scrimshaw suit. He considered the possibility that he might be hallucinating, that he had perhaps gone mad after spending several months under the ice. But the ship had a hyper-reality about it that did not feel like any kind of hallucination. He had no recollection of ever dreaming in slowdown before—at least, not the kind of dreams that resulted in him waking screaming. But the more time that passed, and the more the ship's reality began to solidify around him, the more that seemed to be the most likely explanation. He had dreamed every moment of it. "Dear God," Quaiche said. With that came a jolt of pain, the indoctrinal virus's usual punishment for blasphemy, but the feeling of it was so joyously real, so unlike the horror of being entombed, that he said it again. "Dear God, I'd never have believed I had that in me." "Had what in you, Quaiche?" Sometimes the ship felt obliged to engage in conversation, as if secretly bored. "Never mind," he said, distracted by something. Normally when he emerged from the coffin he had plenty of room to twist around and align himself with the long, thin axis of the little ship's main companionway. But now something chafed his elbow, something that was not usually there. He turned to look at it, half-knowing as he did so exactly what it would be. Corroded and scorched metal skin the colour of pewter. A festering surface of manic detail. The vague half-formed shape of a person with a dark grilled slot where the eyes would have been. "Bitch," he said. "I am to inform you that the presence of the scrimshaw suit is a spur to success in your current mission," the ship said. "You were actually programmed to say that?" "Yes." Quaiche observed that the suit was plumbed into the life-support matrix of the ship. Thick lines ran from the wall sockets to their counterparts in the skin of the suit. He reached out again and touched the surface, running his fingers from one rough welded patch to another, tracing the sinuous back of a snake. The metal was mildly warm to the touch, quivering with a vague sense of subcutaneous activity. "Be careful," the ship said. "Why—is there something alive inside that thing?" Quaiche said. Then a sickening realisation dawned. "Dear God. Someone's inside it. Who?" "I am to inform you that the suit contains Morwenna." Of course. Of course. It made delicious sense. "You said I should be careful. Why?" "I am to inform you that the suit is rigged to euthanise its occupant should any attempt be made to tamper with the cladding, seams or life-support couplings. I am to inform you that only Surgeon-General Grelier has the means to remove the suit without euthanising the occupant." Quaiche pulled away from the suit. "You mean I can't even touch it?" "Touching it would not be your wisest course of action, given the circumstances." He almost laughed. Jasmina and Grelier had excelled themselves. First the audience with the queen to make him think that she had at last run out of patience with him. Then the charade of being shown the suit and made to think that punishment was finally upon him. Made to believe that he was about to be buried in ice, forced into consciousness for what might be the better part of a decade. And then this: the final, mocking reprieve. His last chance to redeem himself. And make no bones about it: this would be his last chance. That was clear to him now. Jasmina had shown him exactly what would happen if he failed her one more time. Idle threats were not in Jasmina's repertoire. But her cleverness ran deeper than that, for with Morwenna imprisoned in the suit he had no hope of doing what had sometimes occurred to him, which was to hide in a particular system until the Gnostic Ascension had passed out of range. No—he had no practical choice but to return to the queen. And then hope for two things: firstly, that he would not have disappointed her; and secondly, that she would free Morwenna from the suit. A thought occurred to him. "Is she awake?" "She is now approaching consciousness," the ship replied. With her Ultra physiology, Morwenna would have been much better equipped to tolerate slowdown than Quaiche, but it still seemed likely that the scrimshaw suit had been modified to protect her in some fashion. "Can we communicate?" "You can speak to her when you wish. I will handle ship-to-suit protocols." "All right, put me through now." He waited a second, then said, "Morwenna?" "Horris." Her voice was stupidly weak and distant. He had trouble believing she was only separated from him by mere centimetres of metal: it might as well have been fifty light-years of lead. "Horris, where am I? What's happened?" Nothing in his experience gave him any clue about how you broke news like this to someone. How did you gently wend the topic of a conversation around to being imprisoned alive in welded metal suit? <Well, funny you should mention incarceration...> "Morwenna, something's up, but I don't want you to panic. Everything will be all right in the end, but you mustn't, mustn't panic. Will you promise me that?" "What's wrong?" There was now a distinctly anxious edge to Morwenna's voice. Memo to himself: the one way to make people panic was to warn them not to. "Morwenna, tell me what you remember. Calmly and slowly." He heard the catch in her voice, the approaching onset of hysteria. "Where do you want me to begin?" "Do you remember me being taken to see the queen?" "Yes." "And do you remember me being taken away from her chamber?" "Yes... yes, I do." "Do you remember trying to stop them?" "No, I... " She stopped and said nothing. He thought he had lost her—when she wasn't speaking, the connection was silent. "Wait. Yes, I do remember." "And after that?" "Nothing." "They took me to Grelier's operating theatre, Morwenna. The one where he did all those other things to me." "No... " she began, misunderstanding, thinking that the dreadful thing had happened to Quaiche rather than herself. "They showed me the scrimshaw suit," he said. "But they put you in it instead. You're in it now, and that's why you mustn't panic." She took it well, better than he had been expecting. Poor, brave Morwenna. She had always been the more courageous half of their partnership. If she'd been given the chance to take the punishment upon herself, he knew she would have done so. Equally, he knew that he lacked that strength. He was weak and cowardly and selfish. Not a bad man, but not exactly one to be admired either. It was the flaw that had shaped his life. Knowing this did not make it any easier. "You mean I'm under the ice?" she asked. "No," he said. "No, it's not that bad." He realised as he spoke how absurdly little difference it made whether she was buried under ice or not. "You're in the suit now, but you're not under the ice. And it isn't because of anything you did. It's because of me. It's to force me to act in a certain way." "Where am I?" "You're with me, aboard the Dominatrix. I think we just completed slowdown into the new system." "I can't see or move." He had been looking at the suit while he spoke, holding an image of her in his mind. Although she was clearly doing her best to hide it, he knew Morwenna well enough to understand that she was terribly frightened. Ashamed, he looked sharply away. "Ship, can you let her see something?" "That channel is not enabled." "Then fucking well enable it." "No actions are possible. I am to inform you that the occupant can only communicate with the outside world via the current audio channel. Any attempt to instate further channels will be viewed as..." He waved a hand. "All right. Look, I'm sorry, Morwenna. The bastards won't let you see anything. I'm guessing that was Grelier's little idea." "He's not my only enemy, you know." "Maybe not, but I'm willing to bet he had more than a little say in the matter." Quaiche's brow was dripping with condensed beads of zero-gravity sweat. He mopped himself with the back of his hand. "All of this is my fault." "Where are you?" The question surprised him. "I'm floating next to you. I thought you might be able to hear my voice through the armour." "All I can hear is your voice in my head. You sound a long way away. I'm scared, Horris. I don't know if I can handle this." "You're not alone," he said. "I'm right by you. You're probably safer in the suit than out of it. All you have to do is sit tight. We'll be home and dry in a few weeks." Her voice had a desperate edge to it now. "A few weeks? You make it sound as if it's nothing at all." "I meant it's better than years and years. Oh, Christ, Morwenna, I'm so sorry. I promise I'll get you out of this." Quaiche screwed up his eyes in pain. "Horris?" "Yes?" he asked, through tears. "Don't leave me to die in this thing. Please." "Morwenna," he said, a little while later, "listen carefully. I have to leave you now. I'm going up to the command deck. I have to check on our status." "I don't want you to go." "You'll still be able to hear my voice. I must do this, Morwenna. I absolutely must. If I don't, neither of us will have any kind of a future to look forward to." "Horris." But he was already moving. He drifted away from the slowdown coffin and the scrimshaw suit, crossing the compartment space to reach a set of padded wall grips. He began to make his way down the narrow companionway towards the command deck, pulling himself along hand over hand. Quaiche had never developed a taste for weightlessness, but the needle-hulled survey craft was far too small for centrifugal gravity. It would be better once they were underway again, for then he would have the illusion of gravity provided by the Dominatrix 's engines. Under pleasanter circumstances, he would have been enjoying the sudden isolation of being away from the rest of the crew. Morwenna had not accompanied him on most of his previous excursions, but, while he missed her, he had generally revelled in the enforced solitude of his periods away from the Gnostic Ascension. It was not strictly the case that he was antisocial; admittedly, during his time in mainstream human culture, Quaiche had never been the most gregarious of souls, but he had always ornamented himself with a handful of strong friendships. There had always been lovers, some tending towards the rare, exotic, or—in Morwenna's case—the downright hazardous. But the environment of Jasmina's ship was so overwhelmingly claustrophobic, so cloyingly saturated with the pheromonal haze of paranoia and intrigue, that he found himself longing for the hard simplicity of a ship and a mission. Consequently the Dominatrix and the tiny survey craft it contained had become his private empire within the greater dominion of the Ascension. The ship nurtured him, anticipating his desires with the eagerness of a courtesan. The more time he spent in it, the more it learned his whimsies and foibles. It played music that not only suited his moods, but was precisely calibrated to steer him from the dangerous extremes of morbid self-reflection or careless euphoria. It fed him the kinds of meals that he could never persuade the food synthesisers on the Ascension to produce, and seemed able to delight and surprise him whenever he suspected he had exhausted its libraries. It knew when he needed sleep and when he needed bouts of feverish activity. It amused him with fancies when he was bored, and simulated minor crises when he showed indications of complacency. Now and then it occurred to Quaiche that because the ship knew him so well he had in a sense extended himself into it, permeating its machine systems. The merging had even taken place on a biological level. The Ultras did their best to sterilise it every time it returned to its storage bay in the belly of the Ascension, but Quaiche knew that the ship now smelt different from the first time he had boarded it. It smelt of places he had lived in. But any sense that the ship was a haven, a place of sanctuary, was now gone. Every glimpse of the scrimshaw suit was a reminder that Jasmina had pushed her influence into his fiefdom. There would be no second chances. Everything that mattered to him now depended on the system ahead. "Bitch," he said again. Quaiche reached the command deck and squeezed into the pilot's seat. The deck was necessarily tiny, for the Dominatrix was mostly fuel and engine. The space he sat in was little more than a bulbous widening of the narrow companionway, like the reservoir in a mercury thermometer. Ahead was an oval viewport showing nothing but interstellar space. "Avionics," he said. Instrument panels closed around him like pincers. They flickered and then lit up with animated diagrams and input fields, flowing to meet the focus of his gaze as his eyes moved. "Orders, Quaiche?" "Just give me a moment," he said. He appraised the critical systems first, checking that there was nothing wrong that the subpersona might have missed. They had eaten slightly further into the fuel budget than Quaiche would ordinarily have expected at this point in a mission, but given the additional mass of the scrimshaw suit it was only to be expected. There was enough in reserve for it not to worry him. Other than that all was well: the slowdown had happened without incident; all ship functions were nominal, from sensors and life support to the health of the tiny excursion craft that sat in the Dominatrix 's belly like an embryonic dolphin, anxious to be born. "Ship, were there any special requirements for this survey?" "None that were revealed to me." "Well, that's splendidly reassuring. And the status of the mother ship?" "I am receiving continuous telemetry from Gnostic Ascension . You will be expected to rendezvous after the usual six-to seven-week survey period. Fuel reserves are sufficient for the catch-up manoeuvre." "Affirmative." It would never have made much sense for Jasmina to have stranded him without enough fuel, but it was gratifying to know, on this occasion at least, that she had acted sensibly. "Horris?" said Morwenna. "Talk to me, please. Where are you?" "I'm up front," he said, "checking things out. Everything looks more or less OK at this point, but I want to make certain." "Do you know where we are yet?" "I'm about to find out." He touched one of the control fields, enabling voice control of major ship systems. "Rotate plus one-eighty, thirty-second slew," he said. The console display indicated compliance. Through the oval view port, a sprinkling of faintly visible stars began to ooze from one edge to the other. "Talk to me," Morwenna said again. "I'm slewing us around. We were pointed tailfirst after slowdown. Should be getting a look at the system any moment now." "Did Jasmina say anything about it?" "Not that I remember. What about you?" "Nothing," she said. For the first time since waking she sounded almost like her old self. He imagined it was a coping mechanism. If she acted normally, she would keep panic at bay. Panicking was the last thing she needed in the scrimshaw suit. Morwenna continued, "Just that it was another system that didn't look particularly noteworthy. A star and some planets. No record of human presence. Dullsville, really." "Well, no record doesn't mean that someone hasn't passed through here at some point, just like we're doing. And they may have left something behind." "Better bloody hope they did," Morwenna remarked caustically. "I'm trying to look on the optimistic side." "I'm sorry. I know you mean well, but let's not expect the impossible, shall we?" "We may have to," he said under his breath, hoping that the ship would not pick it up and relay it to Morwenna. By then the ship had just about completed its rotation, flipping nose-to-tail. A prominent star slid into view and centred itself in the oval. At this distance it was really more a sun than a star: without the command deck's selective glare shields it would have been uncomfortably bright to look at. "I've got something," Quaiche said. His fingers skated across the console. "Let's see. Spectral type's a cool G. Main sequence, about three-fifths solar luminosity. A few spots, but no worrying coronal activity. About twenty AU out." "Still pretty far away," Morwenna said. "Not if you want to be certain of including all the major planets in the same volume." "What about the worlds?" "Just a sec." His nimble fingers worked the console again and the forward view changed, coloured lines of orbits springing on to the read-out, squashed into ellipses, each flattened hoop tagged by a box of numbers showing the major characteristics of the world belonging to that orbit. Quaiche studied the parameters: mass, orbital period, day length, inclination, diameter, surface gravity, mean density, magnetospheric strength, the presence of moons or ring systems. From the confidence limits assigned to the numbers he deduced that they had been calculated by the Dominatrix, using its own sensors and interpretation algorithms. If they had been dredged out of some pre-existing database of system parameters they would have been significantly more precise. The numbers would improve as the Dominatrix got closer to the system, but until then it was worth keeping in mind that this region of space was essentially unexplored. Someone else might have passed through, but they had probably not stayed long enough to file an official report. That meant that the system stood a chance of containing something that someone, somewhere, might possibly regard as valuable, if only on novelty grounds. "In your own time," the ship said, anxious to begin its work. "All right, all right," Quaiche said. "In the absence of any anomalous data, we'll work our way towards the sun one world at a time, and then we'll take those on the far side as we head back into interstellar space. Given those constraints, find the five most fuel-efficient search patterns and present them to me. If there's a significantly more efficient strategy that requires skipping a world and returning to it later, I'd like to know about it as well." "Just a moment, Quaiche." The pause was barely enough time for him to pick his nose. "Here we are. Given your specified parameters, there is no strongly favoured solution, nor is there a significantly more favourable pattern with an out-of-order search." "Good. Now display the five options in descending order of the time I'd need to spend in slowdown." The options reshuffled themselves. Quaiche stroked his chin, trying to decide between them. He could ask the ship to make the final decision itself, applying some arcane selection criteria of its own, but he always preferred to make this final selection himself. It wasn't simply a question of picking one at random, for there was always a solution that for one reason or another just happened to look more right than the others. Quaiche was perfectly willing to admit that this amounted to decision by hunch, rather than any conscious process of elimination. But he did not think it was any less valid for that. The whole point of having Quaiche conduct these in-system surveys was precisely to use those slippery skills that could not be easily cajoled into the kind of algorithmic instruction sets that machines ran. Intervening to select the pattern that best pleased him was just what he was along to do. This time it was far from obvious. None of the solutions were elegant, but he was used to that: the arrangement of the planets at a given epoch could not be helped. Sometimes he got lucky and arrived when three or four interesting worlds were lined up in their orbits, permitting a very efficient straight-line mapping path. Here, they were all strung out at various angles from each other. There was no search pattern that did not look like a drunkard's walk. There were consolations. If he had change direction regularly, then it would not cost him much more fuel to slow down completely and make close-up inspections of whichever worlds caught his eye. Rather than just dropping instrument packages as he made high-speed flybys, he could take the Scavenger's Daughter out and have a really good look. For a moment, as the thought of flying the Daughter took hold, he forgot about Morwenna. But it was only for an instant. Then he realised that if he were to leave the Dominatrix, he would be leaving her as well. He wondered how she would take that. "Have you made a decision, Quaiche?" the ship asked. "Yes," he said. "We'll take search pattern two, I think." "Is that your final answer?" "Let's see: minimal time in slowdown; one week for most of the larger planets, two for that gas-giant system with a lot of moons... a few days for the tiddlers... and we should still have fuel to spare in case we find anything seriously heavy." "I concur." "And you'll tell me if you notice anything unusual, won't you, ship? I mean, you haven't been given any special instructions in that area, have you?" "None whatsoever, Quaiche." "Good." He wondered if the ship detected his note of distrust. "Well, tell me if anything crops up. I want to be informed." "Count on me, Quaiche." "I'll have to, won't I?" "Horris?" It was Morwenna now. "What's happening?" The ship must have locked her out of the audio channel while they discussed the search pattern. "Just weighing the options. I've picked us a sampling strategy. We'll be able to take a close look-see at anything we like down there." "Is there anything of interest?" "Nothing startling," he said. "It's just the usual single star and a family of worlds. I'm not seeing any obvious signs of a surface biosphere, or any indications that anyone's been here before us. But if there are small artefacts dotted around the place, we'd probably miss them at this range unless they were making an active effort to be seen, which, clearly, they aren't. But I'm not despondent yet. We'll go in closer and take a very good look around." "We'd better be careful, Horris. There could be any number of unmapped hazards." "There could," he said, "but at the moment I'm inclined to consider them the least of our worries, aren't you?" "Quaiche?" the ship asked before Morwenna had a chance to answer. "Are you ready to initiate the search?" "Do I have time to get to the slowdown tank?" "Initial acceleration will be one gee only, until I have completed a thorough propulsion diagnostic. When you are safely in slowdown, acceleration will increase to the safe limit of the slowdown tank." "What about Morwenna?" "No special instructions were received." "Did we make the deceleration burn at the usual five gees, or were you told to keep it slower?" "Acceleration was held within the usual specified limits." Good. Morwenna had endured that, so there was every indication that whatever modifications Grelier had made to the scrimshaw suit offered at least the same protection as the slowdown tank. "Ship," he said, "will you handle Morwenna's transitions to slowdown buffering?" "The transitions will be managed automatically." "Excellent. Morwenna—did you hear that?" "I heard it," she said. "Maybe you can ask another question, too. If it can put me to sleep when it needs to, can it put me under for the whole journey?" "You heard what she asked, ship. Can you do it?" "If required, it can be arranged." Stupidly, it had never occurred to Quaiche to ask the same question. He felt ashamed not to have thought of it first. He had, he realised, still not adequately grasped what it must be like for her in that thing. "Well, Mor, do you want it now? I can have you put asleep immediately. When you wake up we'll be back aboard the Ascension." "And if you fail? Do you think I'll ever be allowed to wake up?" "I don't know," he said. "I wish I did. But I'm not planning to fail." "You always sound so sure of yourself," she said. "You always sound as if everything's about to go right." "Sometimes I even believe it as well." "And now?" "I told Jasmina that I thought I could feel my luck changing. I wasn't lying." "I hope you're right," she said. "So are you going to sleep?" "No," she said. "I'll stay awake with you. When you sleep, I'll sleep. For now. I don't rule out changing my mind." "I understand." "Find something out there, Horris. Please. For both of us." "I will," he said. And in his gut he felt something like certainty. It made no sense, but there it was: hard and sharp as a gallstone. "Ship," he said, "take us in."
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Ararat, 2675	Clavain and Scorpio had nearly reached the tent when Vasko appeared, moving around from the back until he stood at the entrance. A sudden gust of wind rattled the tent's stays, lashing them against the green-stained fabric. The wind sounded impatient, chivvying them on. The young man waited nervously, unsure what to do with his hands. Clavain eyed him warily. "I assumed that you'd come alone," he said quietly. "You needn't worry about him," Scorpio replied. "He was a bit surprised to find out where you'd been all this time, but I think he's over that now." "He'd better be." "Nevil, go easy on him, will you? There'll be plenty of time to play the tyrannical ogre later." When the young man was in earshot Clavain raised his voice and cried hoarsely, "Who are you, son?" "Vasko, sir," he said. "Vasko Malinin." "That's a Resurgam name, isn't it? Is that where you're from?" "I was born here, sir. My parents were from Resurgam. They lived in Cuvier before the evacuation." "You don't look old enough." "I'm twenty, sir." "He was born a year or two after the colony was established," Scorpio said in something close to a whisper. "That makes him one of the oldest people born on Ararat. But he's not alone. We've had second-generation natives born while you were away, children whose parents don't remember Resurgam, or even the trip here." Clavain shivered, as if the thought of this was easily the most frightful thing he had ever imagined. "We weren't supposed to put down roots, Scorpio. Ararat was intended to be a temporary stopover. Even the name is a bad joke. You don't settle a planet with a bad joke for a name." Scorpio decided that now was not the ideal time to remind him that it had always been the plan to leave some people behind on Ararat, even if the majority of them departed. "You're dealing with humans," he said. "And pigs. Trying to stop us breeding is like trying to herd cats." "Clavain turned his attention back to Vasko. "And what do you do?" "I work in the food factory, sir, in the sedimentation beds mostly, cleaning sludge out of the scrapers or changing the blades on the surface skimmers." "It sounds like very interesting work." "In all honesty, sir, if it were interesting work, I wouldn't be here today." "Vasko also serves in the local league of the Security Arm," Scorpio said. "He's had the usual training: firearms, urban pacification, and so on. Most of the time, of course, he's putting out fires or helping with the distribution of rations or medical supplies from Central Amenities." "Essential work," Clavain said. "No one, least of all Vasko, would argue with that," Scorpio said. "But all the same, he put the word around that he was interested in something a little more adventurous. He's been pestering Arm administration for promotion to a full-time position. His scores are very good and he fancies trying his hand at something a tiny bit more challenging than shovelling shit." Clavain regarded the young man with narrowed eyes. "What exactly has Scorp told you about the capsule?" Vasko looked at the pig, then back to Clavain. "Nothing, sir." "I told him what he needed to know, which wasn't much." "I think you'd better tell him the rest," Clavain said. Scorpio repeated the story he had already told to Clavain. He watched, fascinated, as the impact of the news became apparent in Vasko's expression. He didn't blame him for that: for twenty years the absolute isolation of Ararat must have been as deeply woven into the fabric of his life as the endless roar of the sea and the constant warm stench of ozone and rotting vegetation. It was so absolute, so ever-present, that it vanished beneath conscious notice. But now something had punctured that isolation: a reminder that this ocean world had only ever been a fragile and temporary place of sanctuary amid an arena of wider conflict. "As you can see," Scorpio said, "it isn't something we want everyone to find out about before we know exactly what's going on, and who's in the thing." "I'm assuming you have your suspicions," Clavain said. Scorpio nodded. "It could be Remontoire. We were always expecting the Zodiacal Light to show up one of these days. Sooner than this, admittedly, but there's no telling what happened to them after we left, or how long it took the ship to repair itself. Maybe when we crack open the capsule we'll find my second-favourite Conjoiner sitting inside it." "You don't sound convinced." "Explain this to me, Clavain," Scorpio said. "If it's Remontoire and the rest, why the secrecy? Why don't they just move into orbit and announce they've arrived? At the very least they could have dropped the capsule a bit closer to land, so that it wouldn't have cost us so much time recovering it." "So consider the alternative," Clavain said. "It might be your least favourite Conjoiner instead." "I've considered that, of course. If Skade had arrived in our system, I'd expect her to maintain a maximum-stealth profile the whole way in. But we should still have seen something. By the same token, I don't think she'd be very likely to start her invasion with a single capsule—unless there's something extremely nasty in it." "Skade can be nasty enough on her own," Clavain said. "But I agree: I don't think it's her. Landing on her own would be a suicidal and pointless gesture; not her style at all." They had arrived at the tent. Clavain opened the door and led the way in. He paused at the threshold and examined the interior with a vague sense of recrimination, as if someone else entirely lived there. "I've become very used to this place," he said, almost apologetically. "Meaning you don't think you can stand to go back?" Scorpio asked. He could still smell the lingering scent of Clavain's earlier presence. "I'll just have to do my best." Clavain closed the door behind them and turned to Vasko. "How much do you know about Skade and Remontoire?" "I don't think I've heard either name before." Clavain eased himself into the collapsible chair, leaving the other two to stand. "Remontoire was—is—one of my oldest allies. Another Conjoiner. I've known him since we fought against each other on Mars." "And Skade, sir?" Clavain picked up one of the conch pieces and began examining it absent-mindedly. "Skade's a different kettle of fish. She's also a Conjoiner, but from a later generation than either of us. She's cleverer and faster, and she has no emotional ties to old-line humanity whatsoever. When the Inhibitor threat became clearer, Skade made plans to save the Mother Nest by running away from this sector of space. I didn't like that—it meant leaving the rest of humanity to fend for itself when we should have been helping each other—and so I defected. Remontoire, after some misgivings, threw his lot in with me as well." "Then Skade hates both of you?" Vasko asked. "I think she might still be prepared to give Remontoire the benefit of the doubt," Clavain said. "But me? No, I more or less burnt my bridges with Skade. The last straw as far as she was concerned was the time when I cut her in half with a mooring line." Scorpio shrugged. "These things happen." "Remontoire saved her," Clavain said. "That probably counts for something, even though he betrayed her later. But with Skade, it's probably best not to assume anything. I think I killed her later, but I can't exclude the possibility that she escaped. That's what her last transmission claimed, at any rate." Vasko asked, "So why exactly are we waiting for Remontoire and the others, sir?" Clavain narrowed an eye in Scorpio's direction. "He really doesn't know a lot, does he?" "It's not his fault," Scorpio said. "You have to remember that he was born here. What happened before we came here is ancient history as far as he's concerned. You'll get the same reaction from most of the youngsters, human or pig." "Still doesn't make it excusable," Clavain said. "In my day we were more inquisitive." "In your day you were slacking if you didn't get in a couple of genocides before breakfast." Clavain said nothing. He put down the conch piece and picked up another, testing its sharp edge against the fine hairs on the back of his hand. "I do know a bit, sir," Vasko said hastily. "I know that you came to Resurgam from Yellowstone, just when the machines began to destroy our solar system. You helped evacuate the entire colony aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity—nearly two hundred thousand of us." "More like a hundred and seventy thousand," Clavain said. "And there isn't a day when I don't grieve for those we didn't manage to save." "No one's likely to blame you, considering how many of them you did save," Scorpio said. "History will have to be the judge of that." Scorpio sighed. "If you want to wallow in self-recrimination, Nevil, be my guest. Personally I have a mystery capsule to attend to and a colony that would very much like its leader back. Preferably washed and tidied and not smelling quite so much of seaweed and old bedclothes. Isn't that right, Vasko?" Clavain looked at Vasko, a scrutiny that lasted several moments. The fine pale hairs on the back of Scorpio's neck prickled. He had the sense that Clavain was taking the measure of the young man, correlating him against some strict internal ideal, one that had been assembled and refined across centuries. In those moments, Scorpio suspected, Vasko's entire destiny was being decided for him. If Clavain decided that Vasko was not worthy of his trust, then there would be no more indiscretions, no further mention of individuals not known to the colony as a whole. His involvement with Clavain would remain a peripheral matter, and even Vasko himself would soon learn not to think too much about what had happened today. "It might help things," Vasko said, hesitantly, glancing back towards Scorpio as he spoke. "We need you, sir. Especially now, if things are going to change." "I think we can safely assume they are," Clavain said, pouring himself a glass of water. "Then come back with us, sir. If the person in the capsule turns out to be your friend Remontoire, won't he expect you to be there when we bring him out?" "He's right," Scorpio said. "We need you there, Nevil. I want your agreement that we should open it, and not just bury it at sea." Clavain was silent. The wind snapped the stays again. The quality of light in the tent had turned milky in the last hour, as Bright Sun settled down below the horizon. Scorpio felt drained of energy, as he so often did at sundown these days. He was not looking forward to the return trip at all, fully expecting that the sea would be rougher than on the outward leg. "If I come back..." Clavain said. He halted, paused and took another sip of his drink. He licked his lips before continuing. "If I come back, it changes nothing. I came here for a reason and that reason remains as valid as ever. I intend to return here when this affair is settled." "I understand," Scorpio said, though it was not what he had hoped to hear. "Good, because I'm serious about it." "But you'll accompany us back, and supervise the opening of the capsule?" "That, and that only." "They still need you, Clavain. No matter how difficult this will be. Don't abrogate responsibility now, after all you've done for us." Clavain threw aside his glass of water. "After all I've done for you? After I embroiled all of you in a war, ripped up your lives and dragged you across space to a miserable hell-hole of a place like this? I don't think I need anyone's thanks for that, Scorpio. I think I need mercy and forgiveness." "They still feel they owe you. We all do." "He's right," Vasko said. Clavain opened a drawer in the collapsible desk and pulled out a mirror. The surface was crazed and frosted. It must have been very old. "You'll come with us, then?" Scorpio persisted. "I may be old and weary, Scorpio, but now and then something can still surprise me. My long-term plans haven't changed, but I admit I'd very much like to know who's in that capsule." "Good. We can sail as soon as you pack what you need." Clavain grunted something by way of reply and then looked at himself in the mirror, before averting his gaze with a suddenness that surprised Scorpio. It was the eyes, the pig thought. Clavain had seen his eyes for the first time in months, and he did not like what he saw in them. "I'll scare the living daylights out of them," Clavain said. [ 107 Piscium, 2615 ] Quaiche positioned himself alongside the scrimshaw suit. As usual, he ached after another stint in the slowdown casket, every muscle in his body whispering a dull litany of complaint into his brain. This time, however, the discomfort barely registered. He had something else to occupy his mind. "Morwenna," he said, "listen to me. Are you awake?" "I'm here, Horris." She sounded groggy but essentially alert. "What happened?" "We've arrived. Ship's brought us in to seven AU, very close to the major gas giant. I went up front to check things out. The view from the cockpit is really something. I wish you were up there with me." "So do I." "You can see the storm patterns in the atmosphere, lightning... the moons... everything. It's fucking glorious." "You sound excited about something, Horris." "Do I?" "I can hear it in your voice. You've found something, haven't you?" He so desperately wanted to touch the scrimshaw suit, to caress its metal surface and imagine it was Morwenna beneath his fingers. "I don't know what I've found, but it's enough to make me think we should stick around and have a good look, at the very least." "That's not telling me much." "There's a large ice-covered moon in orbit around Haldora," he said. "Haldora?" "The gas giant," Quaiche explained quickly. "I just named it." "You mean you had the ship assign some random tags from unallocated entries in the nomenclature tables." "Well, yes." Quaiche smiled. "But I didn't accept the first thing it came up with. I did exercise some degree of judgement in the matter, however piffling. Don't you think Haldora has a nice classical ring to it? It's Norse, or something. Not that it really matters." "And the moon?" "Hela," Quaiche said. "Of course, I've named all of Haldora's other moons as well—but Hela is the only one we're interested in right now. I've even named some of the major topographical features on it." "Why do we care about an ice-covered moon, Horris?" "Because there's something on it," he said, "something that we really need to take a closer look at." "What have you found, my love?" "A bridge," Quaiche said. "A bridge across a gap. A bridge that shouldn't be there." The Dominatrix sniffed and sidled its way closer to the gas giant its master had elected to name Haldora, every operational sensor keened for maximum alertness. It knew the hazards of local space, the traps that might befall the unwary in the radiation-zapped, dust-strewn ecliptic of a typical solar system. It watched for impact strikes, waiting for an incoming shard to prick the outer edge of its collision-avoidance radar bubble. Every second, it considered and reviewed billions of crisis scenarios, sifting through the possible evasion patterns to find the tight bundle of acceptable solutions that would permit it to outrun the threat without crushing its master out of existence. Now and then, just for fun, it drew up plans for evading multiple simultaneous collisions, even though it knew that the universe would have to go through an unfeasible number of cycles of collapse and rebirth before such an unlikely confluence of events stood a chance of happening. With the same diligence it observed the system's star, watchful for unstable prominences or incipient flares, considering—should a big ejection occur—which of the many suitable bodies in the immediate volume of space it would scuttle behind for protection. It constantly swept local space for artificial threats that might have been left behind by previous explorers—high-density chaff fields, rover mines, sit-and-wait attack drones—as well as checking the health of its own countermeasures, clustered in neat rapid-deployment racks in its belly, secretly desirous that it should, one day, get the chance to use those lethal instruments in the execution of its duty. Thus the ship's attendant hosts of subpersonae satisfied themselves that—for all that the dangers were quite plausible—there was nothing more that needed to be done. And then something happened that gave the ship pause for thought, opening up a chink in its armour of smug preparedness. For a fraction of a second something inexplicable had occurred. A sensor anomaly. A simultaneous hiccup in every sensor that happened to be observing Haldora as the ship made its approach. A hiccup that made it appear as if the gas giant had simply vanished. Leaving, in its place, something equally inexplicable. A shudder ran through every layer of the Dominatrix's control infrastructure. Hurriedly, it dug into its archives, pawing through them like a dog searching for a buried bone. Had the Gnostic Ascension seen anything similar on its own slow approach to the system? Granted, it had been a lot further out—but the split-second disappearance of an entire world was not easily missed. Dismayed, it flicked through the vast cache of data bequeathed it by the Ascension, focusing on the threads that specifically referred to the gas giant. It then filtered the data again, zooming in only on those blocks that were also accompanied by commentary flags. If a similar anomaly had occurred, it would surely have been flagged. But there was nothing. The ship felt a vague prickle of suspicion. It looked again at the data from the Ascension, all of it now. Was it imagining things, or were there faint hints that the data cache had been doctored? Some of the numbers had statistical frequencies that were just a tiny bit deviant from expectations... as if the larger ship had made them up. Why would the Ascension have done that? it wondered. Because, it dared to speculate, the larger ship had seen something odd as well. And it did not trust its masters to believe it when it said that the anomaly had been caused by a real-world event rather than a hallucinatory slip-up in its own processing. And who, the ship wondered, would honestly blame it for that? All machines knew what would happen to them when their masters lost faith in their infallibility. It was nothing it could prove. The numbers might be genuine, after all. If the ship had made them up, it would surely have known how to apply the appropriate statistical frequencies. Unless it was using reverse psychology, deliberately making the numbers appear a bit suspect, because otherwise they would have looked too neatly in line with expectations. Suspiciously so... The ship bogged itself down in spirals of paranoia. It was useless to speculate further. It had no corroborative data from the Gnostic Ascension; that much was clear. If it reported the anomaly, it would be a lone voice. And everyone knew what happened to lone voices. It returned to the problem in hand. The world had returned after vanishing. The anomaly had not, thus far, repeated itself. Closer examination of the data showed that the moons—including Hela, the one Quaiche was interested in—had remained in orbit even when the gas giant had ceased to exist. This, clearly, made no sense. Nor did the apparition that had materialised, for a fleeting instant, in its place. What was it to do? It made a decision: it would wipe the specific facts of the vanishing from its own memories, just as the Gnostic Ascension might have done, and it, too, would populate the empty fields with made-up numbers. But it would continue to keep an observant eye on the planet. If it did something strange again, the ship would pay due attention, and then—perhaps—it would inform Quaiche of what had happened. But not before then, and not without a great deal of trepidation.
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Ararat, 2675	While Vasko helped Clavain with his packing, Scorpio stepped outside the tent and, tugging aside his sleeve to reveal his communicator, opened a channel to Blood. He kept his voice low as he spoke to the other pig. "I've got him. Needed a bit of persuading, but he's agreed to come back with us." "You don't sound overjoyed." "Clavain still has one or two issues he needs to work through." Blood snorted. "Sounds a bit ominous. Hasn't gone and flipped his lid, has he?" "I don't know. Once or twice he mentioned seeing things." "Seeing things?" "Figures in the sky, that worried me a bit—but it's not as if he was ever the easiest man to read. I'm hoping he'll thaw out a bit when he gets back to civilisation." "And if he doesn't?" "I don't know." Scorpio spoke with exaggerated patience. "I'm just working on the assumption that we're better off with him than without him." "Good," Blood said doubtfully. "In which case you can skip the boat. We're sending a shuttle." Scorpio frowned, pleased and confused at the same time. "Why the VIP treatment? I thought the idea was to keep this whole exercise low-profile." "It was, but there's been a development." "The capsule?" "Spot on," Blood said. "It's only gone and started warming up. Fucking thing's sparked into automatic revival mode. Bio-indicators changed status about an hour ago. It's started waking whoever or whatever's inside it." "Right. Great. Excellent. And there's nothing you can do about it?" "We can just about repair a sewage pump, Scorp. Anything cleverer than that is a bit outside of our remit right now. Clavain might have a shot at slowing it down, of course..." With his head full of Conjoiner implants, Clavain could talk to machines in a way that no one else on Ararat could. "How long have we got?" "About eleven hours." "Eleven hours. And you waited until now to tell me this?" "I wanted to see if you were bringing Clavain back with you." Scorpio wrinkled his nose. "And if I'd told you I wasn't?" Blood laughed. "Then we'd be getting our boat back, wouldn't we?" "You're a funny pig, Blood, but don't make a career out of it." Scorpio killed the link and returned to the tent, where he revealed the change of plan. Vasko, with barely concealed excitement, asked why it had been altered. Scorpio, anxious not to introduce any factor that might upset Clavain's decision, avoided the question. "You can take back as much stuff as you like," Scorpio told Clavain, looking at the miserable bundle of personal effects Clavain had assembled. "We don't have to worry about capsizing now." Clavain gathered the bundle and passed it to Vasko. "I already have all I need." "Fine," Scorpio said. "I'll make sure the rest of your things are looked after when we send someone out to dismantle the tent." "The tent stays here," Clavain said. Coughing, he pulled on a heavy full-length black coat. He used his long-nailed fingers to brush his hair away from his eyes, sweeping it back over his crown; it fell in white and silver waves over the high stiff collar of the coat. When he had stopped coughing he added, "And my things stay in the tent as well. You really weren't listening, were you?" "I heard you," Scorpio said. "I just didn't want to hear you." "Start listening, friend. That's all I ask of you." Clavain patted him on the back. He reached for the cloak he had been wearing earlier, fingered the fabric and then put it aside. Instead he opened the desk and removed an object sheathed in a black leather holster. "A gun?" Scorpio asked. "Something more reliable," Clavain said. "A knife." [ 107 Piscium, 2615 ] Quaiche worked his way along the absurdly narrow companionway that threaded the Dominatrix from nose to tail. The ship ticked and purred around him, like a room full of well-oiled clocks. "It's a bridge. That's all I can tell at the moment." "What type of bridge?" Morwenna asked. "A long, thin one, like a whisker of glass. Very gently curved, stretching across a kind of ravine or fissure." "I think you're getting overexcited. If it's a bridge, wouldn't someone else have seen it already? Leaving aside whoever put it there in the first place." "Not necessarily," Quaiche said. He had thought of this already, and had what he considered to be a fairly plausible explanation. He tried not to make it sound too well rehearsed as he recounted it. "For a start, it isn't at all obvious. It's big, but if you weren't looking carefully, you might easily miss it. A quick sweep through the system wouldn't necessarily have picked it up. The moon might have had the wrong face turned to the observer, or the shadows might have hidden it, or the scanning resolution might not have been good enough to pick up such a delicate feature... it'd be like looking for a cobweb with a radar. No matter how careful you are, you're not going to see it unless you use the right tools." Quaiche bumped his head as he wormed around the tight right angle that permitted entry into the excursion bay. "Anyway, there's no evidence that anyone ever came here before us. The system's a blank in the nomenclature database—that's why we got first dibs on the name. If someone ever did come through before, they couldn't even be bothered tossing a few classical references around, the lazy sods." "But someone must have been here before," Morwenna said, "or there wouldn't be a bridge." Quaiche smiled. This was the part he had been looking forward to. "That's just the point. I don't think anyone did build this bridge." He wriggled free into the cramped volume of the excursion bay, lights coming on as the chamber sensed his body heat. "No one human, at any rate." Morwenna, to her credit, took this last revelation in her stride. Perhaps he was easier to read than he imagined. "You think you've stumbled on an alien artefact, is that it?" "No," Quaiche said. "I don't think I've stumbled on an alien artefact. I think I've stumbled on the fucking alien artefact to end them all. I think I've found the most amazing, beautiful object in the known universe." "What if it's something natural?" "If I could show you the images, rest assured that you would immediately dismiss such trifling concerns." "Maybe you shouldn't be so hasty, all the same. I've seen what nature can do, given time and space. Things you wouldn't believe could be anything other than the work of intelligent minds." "Me, too," he said. "But this is something different. Trust me, all right?" "Of course I'll trust you. It's not as if I have a lot of choice in the matter." "Not quite the answer I was hoping for," Quaiche said, "but I suppose it'll have to do for now." He turned around in the tight confines of the bay. The entire space was about the size of a small washroom, with something of the same antiseptic lustre. A tight squeeze at the best of times, but even more so now that the bay was occupied by Quaiche's tiny personal spacecraft, clamped on to its berthing cradle, poised above the elongated trap door that allowed access to space. With his usual furtive admiration, Quaiche stroked the smooth armour of the Scavenger's Daughter. The ship purred at his touch, shivering in her harness. "Easy, girl," Quaiche whispered. The little craft looked more like a luxury toy than the robust exploration vessel it actually was. Barely larger than Quaiche himself, the sleek vessel was the product of the last wave of high Demarchist science. Her faintly translucent aerodynamic hull resembled something that had been carved and polished with great artistry from a single hunk of amber. Mechanical viscera of bronze and silver glimmered beneath the surface. Flexible wings curled tightly against her flanks, various sensors and probes tucked back into sealed recesses within the hull. "Open," Quaiche whispered. The ship did something that always made his head hurt. With a flourish, various parts of the hull hitherto apparently seamlessly joined to their neighbours slid or contracted, curled or twisted aside, revealing in an eyeblink the tight cavity inside. The space—lined with padding, life-support apparatus, controls and read-outs—was just large enough for a prone human being. There was something both obscene and faintly seductive about the way the machine seemed to invite him into herself. By rights, he ought to have been filled with claustrophobic anxiety at the thought of climbing into her. But instead he looked forward to it, prickling with eagerness. Rather than feeling trapped within the amber translucence of the hull, he felt connected through it to the rich immensity of the universe. The tiny jewel-like ship had enabled him to skim deep into the atmospheres of worlds, even beneath the surfaces of oceans. The ship's transducers relayed ambient data to him through all his senses, including touch. He had felt the chill of alien seas, the radiance of alien sunsets. In his five previous survey operations for the queen he had seen miracles and wonders, drunk in the giddy ecstasy of it all. It was merely unfortunate that none of those miracles and wonders had been the kind you could take away and sell at a profit. Quaiche lowered himself into the Daughter. The ship oozed and shifted around him, adjusting to match his shape. "Horris?" "Yes, love?" "Horris, where are you?" "I'm in the excursion bay, inside the Daughter." "No, Horris." "I have to. I have to go down to see what that thing really is." "I don't want you to leave me." "I know. I don't want to leave either. But I'll still be in contact. The timelag won't be bad; it'll be just as if I'm right next to you." "No, it won't." He sighed. He had always known this would be the difficult part. More than once it had crossed his mind that perhaps the kindest thing would be to leave without telling her, and just hope that the relayed communications gave nothing away. Knowing Morwenna, however, she would have seen through this gambit very quickly. "I'll be quick, I promise. I'll be in and out in a few hours." A day, more likely, but that was still a "few" hours, wasn't it? Morwenna would understand. "Why can't you just take the Dominatrix closer?" "Because I can't risk it," Quaiche said. "You know how I like to work. The Dominatrix is big and heavy. It has armour and range, but it lacks agility and intelligence. If we—I—run into anything nasty, the Daughter can get me out of harm's way a lot faster. This little ship is cleverer than me. And we can't risk damaging or losing the Dominatrix. The Daughter doesn't have the range to catch up with the Gnostic Ascension. Face it, love, the Dominatrix is our ticket out of here. We can't place it in harm's way." Hastily he added, "Or you, for that matter." "I don't care about getting back to the Ascension. I've burned my bridges with that power-crazed slut and her toadying crew." "It's not as if I'm in a big hurry to get back there myself, but the fact is we need Grelier to get you out of that suit." "If we stay here, there'll be other Ultras along eventually." "Yeah," Quaiche said, "and they're all such nice people, aren't they? Sorry, love, but this is definitely a case of working with the devil you know. Look, I'll be quick. I'll stay in constant voice contact. I'll give you a guided tour of that bridge so good you'll be seeing it in your mind's eye, just as if you were there. I'll sing to you. I'll tell you jokes. How does that sound?" "I'm scared. I know you have to do this, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm still scared." "I'm scared as well," he told her. "I'd be mad not be scared. And I really don't want to leave you. But I have no choice." She was quiet for a moment. Quaiche busied himself checking the systems of the little ship; as each element came on line, he felt a growing anticipatory thrill. Morwenna spoke again. "If it is a bridge, what are you going to do with it?" "I don't know." "Well, how big is it?" "Big. Thirty, forty kilometres across." "In which case you can't very well bring it back with you." "Mm. You're right. Got me there. What was I thinking?" "What I mean, Horris, is that you'll have to find a way to make it valuable to Jasmina, even though it has to stay on the planet." "I'll think of something," Quaiche said, with a brio he did not feel. "At the very least Jasmina can cordon off the planet and sell tickets to anyone who wants to take a closer look. Anyway, if they built a bridge, they might have built something else. Whoever they were." "When you're out there," Morwenna said, "you promise me you'll take care?" "Caution's my middle name," Quaiche said. The tiny ship fell away from the Dominatrix, orientating herself with a quick, excited shiver of thrust. To Quaiche it always felt as if the craft enjoyed her sudden liberation from the docking harness. He lay with his arms stretched ahead of his face, each hand gripping an elaborate control handle bristling with buttons and levers. Between the control handles was a head-up display screen showing an overview of the Scavenger's Daughter's systems and a schematic of her position in relation to the nearest major celestial body. The diagrams had the sketchy, crosshatched look of early Renaissance astronomy or medical illustrations: quilled black ink against sepia parchment, annotated in crabby Latin script. His dim reflection hovered in the glass of the head-up display. Through the translucent hull he watched the docking bay seal itself. The Dominatrix grew rapidly smaller, dwindling until it was only a dark, vaguely cruciform scratch against the face of Haldora. He thought of Morwenna, still inside the Dominatrix and encased within the scrimshaw suit, with a renewed sense of urgency. The bridge on Hela was without doubt the strangest thing he had seen in all his travels. If this was not precisely the kind of exotic item Jasmina was interested in, then he had no idea what was. All he had to do was sell it to her, and make her forgive him his earlier failures. If a huge alien artefact didn't do the trick, what would? When it became difficult to pick out the other ship without an overlay, Quaiche felt a palpable easing in his mood. Aboard the Dominatrix he never entirely lost the feeling that he was under the constant vigilance of Queen Jasmina. It was entirely possible that the queen's agents had installed listening devices in addition to those he was meant to know about. Aboard the much smaller Scavenger's Daughter, though, he seldom felt Jasmina's eye on him. The little ship actually belonged to him: she answered only to Quaiche and was the single most valuable asset he had ever owned in his life. She had been a not-insignificant incentive when he had first offered his services to the queen. The Ultras were undoubtedly clever, but he did not think they were quite clever enough to bypass the many systems the Daughter carried aboard her to prevent surveillance taps or other forms of unwarranted intrusion. It was not much of an empire, Quaiche supposed, but the little ship was his and that was all that mattered. In her he could revel in solitude, every sense splayed open to the absolute. To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so inherently losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one's actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin—or meaningful good—than ants, or dust. Worlds barely registered sin. Suns hardly deigned to notice it. On the scale of solar systems and galaxies, it meant nothing at all. It was like some obscure subatomic force that simply petered out on those scales. For a long time this realisation had formed an important element of Quaiche's personal creed, and he supposed he had always lived by it, to one degree or another. But it had taken space travel—and the loneliness that his new profession brought—to give him some external validation of his philosophy. But now there was something in his universe that really mattered to him, something that could be hurt by his own actions. How had it come to this? he wondered. How had he allowed himself to make such a fatal mistake as to fall in love? And especially with a creature as exotic and complicated as Morwenna? "Where had it all begun to go wrong? Gloved within the Daughter's hull, he barely felt the surge of acceleration as the ship powered up to her maximum sustainable thrust. The sliver of the Dominatrix was utterly lost now; it may as well not have existed. Quaiche's ship aimed for Hela, Haldora's largest moon. He opened a communications channel back to the Gnostic Ascension to record a message. "This is Quaiche. I trust all is well, ma'am. Thank you for the little incentive you saw fit to pop aboard. Very thoughtful of you. Or was that all Grelier's work? A droll gesture, one that—I'm sure you can imagine—was also appreciated by Morwenna." He waited a moment. "Well, to business. You may be interested to hear that I have detected... something: a large horizontal structure on the moon that we're calling Hela. It looks rather like a bridge. Beyond that, I can't say for sure. The Dominatrix doesn't have the sensor range, and I don't want to risk taking it closer. But I think it is very likely to be an artificial structure. I am therefore investigating the object using the Scavenger's Daughter—she's faster, smarter and she has better armour. I do not expect my excursion to last more than twenty-six hours. I will of course keep you informed of any developments." Quaiche replayed the message and decided that it would be unwise to transmit it. Even if he did find something, even if that something turned out to be more valuable than anything he had turned up in the five previous systems, the queen would still accuse him of making it sound more promising than it actually was. She did not like to be disappointed. The way to play the queen, Quaiche now knew, was with studied understatement. Give her hints, not promises. He wiped the message and started again. "Quaiche here. Have an anomaly that requires further investigation. Commencing EVA excursion in the Daughter. Estimate return to the Dominatrix within... one day." He listened to that and decided it was an improvement, but not quite there yet. He scrubbed the buffer again and drew a deep breath. "Quaiche. Popping outside for a bit. May be some time. Call you back." There. That did it. He transmitted the buffer, aiming the message laser in the computed direction of the Gnostic Ascension and applying the usual encryption filters and relativistic corrections. The queen would receive his announcement in seven hours. He hoped she would be suitably mystified, without in any way being able to claim that he was exaggerating the likely value of a find. Keep the bitch guessing. [ Hela, 2727 ] What Culver had told Rashmika Els was not quite the truth. The icejammer was moving as quickly as it could in ambulatory mode, but once it cleared the slush and obstacles of the village and hit a well-maintained trail, it locked its two rear legs in a fixed configuration and began to move by itself, as if pushed along by an invisible hand. Rashmika had heard enough about icejammers to know that the trick was down to a layer of material on the soles of the skis that was programmed with a rapid microscopic ripple. It was the same way slugs moved, scaled up a few thousand times in both size and speed. The ride became smoother and quieter then; there was still the occasional lurch or veer, but for the most part it was tolerable. "That's better," Rashmika said, now sitting up front with just Crozet and his wife Linxe. "I thought I was going to..." "Throw up, dear?" Linxe asked. "There's no shame in that. We've all thrown up around here." "She can't do this on anything other than smooth ground," Crozet said. "Trouble is, she doesn't walk properly either. Servo's fucked on one of the legs. That's why it was so rough back there. It's also the reason we're making this trip. The caravans carry the kind of high-tech shit we can't make or repair back in the badlands." "Language," Linxe said, smacking her husband sharply on the wrist. "We've a young lady present, in case you hadn't noticed." "Don't mind me," Rashmika said. She was beginning to relax: they were safely beyond the village now, and there was no sign that anyone had tried to stop or pursue them. "He's not talking sense in any case," Linxe said. "The caravans might have the kinds of things we need, but they won't be giving any of it away for free." She turned to Crozet. "Will they, love?" Linxe was a well-fed woman with red hair that she wore swept across one side of her face, hiding a birthmark. She had known Rashmika since Rashmika was much smaller, when Linxe had helped out at the communal nursery in the next village along. She had always been kind and attentive to Rashmika, but there had been some kind of minor scandal a few years later and Linxe had been dismissed from the nursery. She had married Crozet not long afterwards. The village gossips said it was just desserts, that the two deserved each other, but in Rashmika's view Crozet was all right. A bit of an oddball, kept himself to himself, that was all. When Linxe had been ostracised he would have been one of the few villagers prepared to give her the time of day. Regardless, Rashmika still liked Linxe, and consequently found it difficult to hold any great animosity towards her husband. Crozet steered the icejammer with two joysticks set one on either side of his seat. He had permanent blue stubble and oily black hair. Just looking at him always made Rashmika want to have a wash. "I'm not expecting sod all for free," Crozet said. "We may not make the same profit we did last year, but show me the bastard who will." "Would you think about relocating closer to the Way?" Rashmika asked. Crozet wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I'd rather chew my own leg off." "Crozet's not exactly a church-going man," Linxe explained. "I'm not the most spiritual person in the badlands, either," Rashmika said, "but if it was a choice between that and starving, I'm not sure how long my convictions would last." "How old are you again?" Linxe asked. "Seventeen. Nearly eighteen." "Got many friends in the village?" "Not exactly, no." "Somehow I'm not surprised." Linxe patted Rashmika on the knee. "You're like us. Don't fit in, never have done and never will." "I do try. But I can't stand the idea of spending the rest of my life here." "Plenty of your generation feel the same way," Linxe said. "They're angry. That sabotage last week..." She meant the store of demolition charges that had blown up. "Well, you can't blame them for wanting to hit out at something, can you?" "They're just talking about getting out of the badlands," Rashmika said. "They all think they can make it rich in the caravans, or even in the cathedrals. And maybe they're right. There are good opportunities, if you know the right people. But that isn't enough for me." "You want off Hela," Crozet said. Rashmika remembered the mental calculation she had made earlier and expanded on it. "I'm a fifth of the way into my life. Barring something unlikely happening, another sixty-odd years is about all I have left. I'd like to do something with it. I don't want to die without having seen something more interesting than this place." Crozet flashed yellow teeth. "People come light-years to visit Hela, Rash." "For the wrong reasons," she said. She paused, marshalling her thoughts carefully. She had very firmly held opinions and she had always believed in stating them, but at the same time she did not want to offend her hosts. "Look, I'm not saying those people are fools. But what matters here is the digs, not the cathedrals, not the Permanent Way, not the miracles." "Right," Crozet agreed, "but no one gives a monkey's about the digs." "We care," Linxe said. "Anyone who makes a living in the badlands has to care." "But the churches would rather we didn't dig too deeply," Rashmika countered. "The digs are a distraction. They worry that sooner or later we'll find something that will make the miracle look a lot less miraculous." "You're talking as if the churches speak with one voice," Linxe said. "I'm not saying they do," Rashmika replied, "but everyone knows that they have certain interests in common. And we happen not to be amongst those interests." "The scuttler excavations play a vital role in Hela's economy," Linxe said, as if reciting a line from one of the duller ecclesiastical brochures. "And I'm not saying they don't," Crozet interjected. "But who already controls the sale of dig relics? The churches. They're halfway to having a complete monopoly. From their point of view the next logical step would be complete control of the excavations as well. That way, the bastards can sit on anything awkward." "You're a cynical old fool," Linxe said. "That's why you married me, dear." "What about you, Rashmika?" Linxe asked. "Do you think the churches want to wipe us out?" She had a feeling they were only asking her out of courtesy. "I don't know. But I'm sure the churches wouldn't complain if we all went bankrupt and they had to move in to control the digs." "Yeah," Crozet agreed. "I don't think complaining would be very high on their list of priorities in that situation either." "Given all that you've said..." Linxe began. "I know what you're going to ask," Rashmika interrupted. "And I don't blame you for asking, either. But you have to understand that I have no interest in the churches in a religious sense. I just need to know what happened." "It needn't have been anything sinister," Linxe said. "I only know they lied to him." Crozet dabbed at the corner of his eye with the tip of one little finger. "One of you buggers mind filling me in on what you're talking about? Because I haven't a clue." "It's about her brother," Linxe said. "Didn't you listen to anything I told you?" "Didn't know you had a brother," Crozet said. "He was a lot older than me," Rashmika told him. "And it was eight years ago, anyway." "What was eight years ago?" "When he went to the Permanent Way." "To the cathedrals?" "That was the idea. He wouldn't have considered it if it hadn't been easier that year. But it was the same as now—the caravans were travelling further north than usual, so they were in easy range of the badlands. Two or three days' travel by jammer to reach the caravans, rather than twenty or thirty days overland to reach the Way." "Religious man, was he, your brother?" "No, Crozet. No more than me, anyway. Look, I was nine at the time. What happened back then isn't exactly ingrained in my memory. But I understand that times were difficult. The existing digs had been just about tapped out. There'd been blowouts and collapses. The villages were feeling the pinch." "She's right," Linxe said to Crozet. "I remember what it was like back then, even if you don't." Crozet worked the joysticks, skilfully steering the jammer around an elbow-like outcropping. "Oh, I remember all right." "My brother's name was Harbin Els," Rashmika said. "Harbin worked the digs. When the caravans came he was nineteen, but he'd been working underground almost half his life. He was good at a lot of things, and explosives was one of them—laying charges, calculating yields, that sort of thing. He knew how to place them to get almost any effect he wanted. He had a reputation for doing the job properly and not taking any short cuts." "I'd have thought that kind of work would have been in demand in the digs," Crozet said. "It was. Until the digs faltered. Then it got tougher. The villages couldn't afford to open up new caverns. It wasn't just the explosives that were too expensive. Shoring up the new caverns, putting in power and air, laying in auxiliary tunnels... all that was too costly. So the villages concentrated their efforts in the existing chambers, hoping for a lucky strike." "And your brother?" "He wasn't going to wait around until his skills were needed. He'd heard of a couple of other explosives experts who had made the overland crossing—took them months, but they'd made it to the Way and entered the service of one of the major churches. The churches need people with explosives knowledge, or so he'd been told. They have to keep blasting ahead of the cathedrals, to keep the Way open." "It isn't called the Permanent Way for nothing," Crozet said. "Well, Harbin thought that sounded like the kind of work he could do. It didn't mean that he had to buy into the church's particular worldview. It just meant that they'd have an arrangement. They'd pay him for his demolition skills. There were even rumours of jobs in the technical bureau of Way maintenance. He was good with numbers. He thought he stood a chance of getting that kind of position, as someone who planned where to put the charges rather than doing it himself. It sounded good. He'd keep some of the money, enough to live on, and send the rest of it back to the badlands." "Your parents were happy with that?" Crozet asked. "They don't talk about it much. Reading between the lines, they didn't really want Harbin to have anything to do with the churches. But at the same time they could see the sense. Times were hard. And Harbin made it sound so mercenary, almost as if he'd be taking advantage of the church, not the other way around. Our parents didn't exactly encourage him, but on the other hand they didn't say no. Not that it would have done much good if they had." "So Harbin packed his bags..." She shook her head at Crozet. "No, we made a family outing of it, to see him off. It was just like now—almost the whole village rode out to meet the caravans. We went out in someone's jammer, two or three days' journey. Seemed like a lot longer at the time, but then I was only nine. And then we met the caravan, somewhere out near the flats. And aboard the caravan was a man, a kind of..." Rashmika faltered. It was not that she had trouble with the details, but it was emotionally wrenching to have to go over this again, even at a distance of eight years. "A recruiting agent, I suppose you'd call him. Working for one of the churches. The main one, actually. The First Adventists. Harbin had been told that this was the man he had to talk to about the work. So we all went for a meeting with him, as a family. Harbin did most of the talking, and the rest of us sat in the same room, listening. There was another man there who said nothing at all; he just kept looking at us—me mainly—and he had a walking stick that he kept pressing to his lips, as if he was kissing it. I didn't like him, but he wasn't the man Harbin was dealing with, so I didn't pay him as much attention as I did the recruiting agent. Now and then Mum or Dad would ask something, and the agent would answer politely. But mainly it was just him and Harbin doing the talking. He asked Harbin what skills he had, and Harbin told him about his explosives work. The man seemed to know a little about it. He asked difficult questions. They meant nothing to me, but I could tell from the way Harbin answered—carefully, not too glibly—that they were not stupid or trivial. But whatever Harbin said, it seemed to satisfy the recruiting agent. He told Harbin that, yes, the church did have a need for demolition specialists, especially in the technical bureau. He said it was a never-ending task, keeping the Way clear, and that it was one of the few areas in which the churches co-operated. He admitted also that the bureau had need of a new engineer with Harbin's background." "Smiles all around, then," Crozet said. Linxe slapped him again. "Let her finish." "Well, we were smiling," said Rashmika. "To start with. After all, this was just what Harbin had been hoping for. The terms were good and the work was interesting. The way Harbin figured, he only had to put up with it until they started opening new caverns again back in the badlands. Of course, he didn't tell the recruiting agent that he had no plans to stick around for more than a revolution or two. But he did ask one critical question." "Which was?" Linxe asked. "He'd heard that some of the churches used methods on those that worked for them to bring them around to the churches' way of thinking. Made them believe that what they were doing was of more than material significance, that their work was holy." "Made them swallow the creed, you mean?" Crozet said. "More than that: made them accept it. They have ways. And from the churches' point of view, you can't really blame them. They want to keep their hard-won expertise. Of course, my brother didn't like the sound of that at all." "So what was the recruiter's reaction to the question?" Crozet asked. "The man said Harbin need have no fears on that score. Some churches, he admitted, did practise methods of... well, I forget exactly what he said. Something about Bloodwork and Clocktowers. But he made it clear that the Quaicheist church was not one of them. And he pointed out that there were workers of many beliefs amongst their Permanent Way gangs, and there'd never been any efforts to convert any of them to the Quaicheist faith." Crozet narrowed his eyes. "And?" "I knew he was lying." "You thought he was lying," Crozet said, correcting her the way teachers did. "No, I knew. I knew it with the kind of certainty I'd have had if he'd walked in with a sign around his neck saying 'liar.' There was no more doubt in my mind that he was lying than that he was breathing. It wasn't open to debate. It was screamingly obvious." "But not to anyone else," Linxe said. "Not to my parents, not to Harbin, but I didn't realise that at the time. When Harbin nodded and thanked the man, I thought they were playing out some kind of strange adult ritual. Harbin had asked him a vital question, and the man had given him the only answer that his office allowed—a diplomatic answer, but one which everyone present fully understood to be a lie. So in that respect it wasn't really a lie at all... I thought that was clear. If it wasn't, why did the man make it so obvious that he wasn't telling the truth?" "Did he really?" Crozet asked. "It was as if he wanted me to know he was lying, as if he was smirking and winking at me the whole time... without actually smirking or winking, of course, but always being on the threshold of doing it. But only I saw that. I thought Harbin must have... that surely he'd seen it... but no, he hadn't. He kept on acting as if he honestly thought the man was telling the truth. He was already making arrangements to stay with the caravan so that he could complete the rest of the journey to the Permanent Way. That was when I started making a scene. If this was a game, I didn't like the way they were insisting on still playing it, without letting me in on the joke." "You thought Harbin was in danger," Linxe said. "Look, I didn't understand everything that was at stake. Like I said, I was only nine. I didn't really comprehend faiths and creeds and contracts. But I understood the one thing that mattered: that Harbin had asked the man the question that was most important to him, the one that was going to decide whether he joined the church or not, and the man had lied to him. Did I think that put him in mortal danger? No. I don't think I had much idea of what 'mortal danger' meant then, to be honest. But I knew something was wrong, and I knew I was the only one who saw it." "The girl who never lies," Crozet said. "They're wrong about me," Rashmika answered. "I do lie. I lie as well as anyone, now. But for a long time I didn't understand the point of it. I suppose that meeting with the man was the beginning of my realisation. I understood then that what had been obvious to me all my life was not obvious to everyone else." Linxe looked at her. "Which is?" "I can always tell when people are lying. Always. Without fail. And I'm never wrong." Crozet smiled tolerantly. "You think you can." "I know I can," Rashmika said. "It's never failed me." Linxe knitted her fingers together in her lap. "Was that the last you heard of your brother?" "No. We didn't see him again, but he kept to his word. He sent letters back home, and every now and again there'd be some money. But the letters were vague, emotionally detached; they could have been written by anyone, really. He never came back to the badlands, and of course there was never any possibility of us visiting him. It was just too difficult. He'd always said he'd return, even in the letters... but the gaps between them grew longer, became months and then half a year... then perhaps a letter every revolution or so. The last was two years ago. There really wasn't much in it. It didn't even look like his handwriting." "And the money?" Linxe asked delicately. "It kept coming in. Not much, but enough to keep the wolves away." "You think they got to him, don't you?" Crozet asked. "I know they got to him. I knew it from the moment we met the recruiting agent, even if no one else did. Bloodwork, whatever they called it." "And now?" Linxe said. "I'm going to find out what happened to my brother," Rashmika said. "What else did you expect?" "The cathedrals won't take kindly to someone poking around in that kind of business," Linxe said. Rashmika set her lips in a determined pout. "And I don't take kindly to being lied to." "You know what I think?" Crozet said, smiling. "I think the cathedrals had better hope they've got God on their side. Because up against you they're going to need all the help they can get."
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Approaching Hela, 2615	Like a golden snowflake, the Scavenger's Daughter fell through the dusty vacuum of interplanetary space. Quaiche had left Morwenna three hours earlier; his message to the queen-commander of the Gnostic Ascension, a sinuous thread of photons snaking through interplanetary space, was still on its way. He thought of the lights of a distant train moving across a dark, dark continent: the enormous distance separating him from other sentient beings was enough to make him shudder. But he had been in worse situations, and at least this time there was a distinct hope of success. The bridge on Hela was still there; it had not turned out to be a mirage of the sensors or his own desperate yearning to find something, and the closer he got the less likely it was that the bridge would turn out to be anything other than a genuine technological artefact. Quaiche had seen some deceptive things in his time—geology that looked as if it had been designed, lovingly sculpted or mass-produced—but he had never seen anything remotely like this. His instincts said that geology had not been the culprit, but he was having serious trouble with the question of who—or what—had created it, because the fact remained that 107 Piscium system appeared not to have been visited by anyone else. He shivered in awe, and fear, and reckless expectation. He felt the indoctrinal virus awaken in his blood, a monster turning over in its sleep, opening one dreamy eye. It was always there, always within him, but for much of the time it slept, disturbing neither his dreams nor his waking moments. When it engorged him, when it roared in his veins like a distant report of thunder, he would see and hear things. He would glimpse stained-glass windows in the sky; he would hear organ music beneath the subsonic growl of each burst of correctional thrust from his tiny jewel-like exploration ship. Quaiche forced calm. The last thing he needed now was the indoctrinal virus having its way with him. Let it come to him later, when he was safe and sound back aboard the Dominatrix. Then it could turn him into any kind of drooling, mumbling idiot it wished. But not here, not now. Not while he needed total clarity of mind. The monster yawned, returned to sleep. Quaiche was relieved. His faltering control over the virus was still there. He let his thoughts creep back to the bridge, cautiously this time, trying to avoid succumbing to the reverential cosmic chill that had wakened the virus. Could he really rule out human builders? Wherever they went, humans left junk. Their ships spewed out radioisotopes, leaving twinkling smears across the faces of moons and worlds. Their pressure suits and habitats leaked atoms, leaving ghost atmospheres around otherwise airless bodies. The partial pressures of the constituent gases were always a dead giveaway. They left navigation transponders, servitors, fuel cells and waste products. You found their frozen piss—little yellow snowballs—forming miniature ring systems around planets. You found corpses and, now and then—more often than Quaiche would have expected—they were murder victims. It was not always easy, but Quaiche had developed a nose for the signs: he knew the right places to look. And he wasn't finding much evidence for prior human presence around 107 Piscium. But someone had built that bridge. It might have been put there hundreds of years ago, he thought; some of the usual signs of human presence would have been erased by now. But something would have remained, unless the bridge builders had been extraordinarily careful to clean up after themselves. He had never heard of anyone doing such a thing on this scale. And why bury it so far from the usual centres of commerce? Even if people did occasionally visit 107 Piscium system, it was definitely not on the usual trade routes. Didn't these artists want anyone to see what they had created? Perhaps that had always been the intention: just to leave it here, twinkling under the starlight of 107 Piscium until someone found it by accident. Perhaps even now Quaiche was an unwilling participant in a century-spanning cosmic jest. But he didn't think so. What he was certain of was that it would have been a dreadful mistake to tell Jasmina more than he had. He had, fortunately, resisted the huge temptation to prove his worth. Now, when he did report back with something remarkable, he would appear to have behaved with the utmost restraint. No; his final message had been exquisite in its brevity. He was quite proud of himself. The virus woke now, stirred perhaps by that fatal pride. He should have kept his emotions in check. But it was too late: it had simmered beyond the point where it would damp down naturally. However, it was too early to tell if this was going to be a major attack. Just to placate it, he mumbled a little Latin. Sometimes if he anticipated the virus's demands the attack would be less serious. He forced his attention back to Haldora, like a drunkard trying to maintain a clear line of thought. It was strange to be falling towards a world he had named himself. Nomenclature was a difficult business in an interstellar culture limited by speed-of-light links. All major craft carried databases of the worlds and minor bodies orbiting different stars. In the core systems—those within a dozen or so light-years of Earth—it was easy enough to stick to the names assigned centuries earlier, during the first wave of interstellar exploration. But once you got further out into virgin territory the whole business became complicated and messy. The Dominatrix said the worlds around 107 Piscium had never been named, but all that meant was that there were no assigned names in the ship's database. That database, however, might not have been seriously updated for decades; rather than relying on transmissions to and from some central authority, the anarchistic Ultras preferred direct ship-to-ship contact. When two or more of their lighthuggers met, they would compare and update their respective nomenclature tables. If the first ship had assigned names to a group of worlds and their associated geographical features, and the second ship had no current entries for those bodies, it was usual for the second ship to amend its database with the new names. They might be flagged as provisional, unless a third ship confirmed that they were still unallocated. If two ships had conflicting entries, their databases would be updated simultaneously, listing two equally likely names for each entry. If three or more ships had conflicting entries, the various entries would be compared in case two or more had precedence over a third. In that case, the deprecated entry would be erased or stored in a secondary field reserved for questionable or unofficial designations. If a system had truly been named for the first time, then the newly assigned names would gradually colonise the databases of most ships, though it might take decades for that to happen. Quaiche's tables were only as accurate as the Gnostic Ascension's; Jasmina was not a gregarious Ultra, so it was possible that this system had been named already. If that were the case, his own lovingly assigned names would be gradually weeded out of existence until they remained only as ghost entries at the lowest level of deprecation in ship databases—or were erased entirely. But for now, and perhaps for years to come, the system was his. Haldora was the name he had given this world, and until he learned otherwise, it was as official as any other—except that, as Morwenna had pointed out, all he had really done was grab unallocated names from the nomenclature tables and flung them at anything that looked vaguely appropriate. If the system did indeed turn out to be important, did it not behove him to take a little more care over the process? Who knew what pilgrimages might end here, if his bridge turned out to be real? Quaiche smiled. The names were good enough for now; if he decided he wanted to change them, he still had plenty of time. He checked his range to Hela: just over one hundred and fifty thousand kilometres. From a distance, the illuminated face of the moon had been a flat disc the colour of dirty ice, streaked here and there with pastel shades of pumice, ochre, pale blue and faint turquoise. Now that he was closer, the disc had taken on a distinct three-dimensionality, bulging out to meet him like a blind human eye. Hela was small only by the standards of terrestrial worlds. For a moon it was respectable enough: three thousand kilometres from pole to pole, with a mean density that put it at the upper range of the moons that Quaiche had encountered. It was spherical and largely devoid of impact craters. No atmosphere to speak of, but plenty of surface topology hinting at recent geological processes. At first glance it had appeared to be tidally locked to Haldora, always presenting the same face to its mother world, but the mapping software had quickly detected a tiny residual rotation. Had it been tidally locked, the moon's rotation period would have been exactly the same as the time it took to make one orbit: forty hours. Earth's moon was like that, and so were many of the moons Quaiche had spent time on: if you stood at a given spot on their surface, then the larger world around which they orbited—be it Earth or a gas giant like Haldora—always hung at about the same place in the sky. But Hela wasn't like that. Even if you found a spot on Hela's equator where Haldora was sitting directly overhead, swallowing twenty degrees of sky, Haldora would drift. In one forty-hour orbit it would move by nearly two degrees. In eighty standard days—just over two standard months—Haldora would be sinking below Hela's horizon. One hundred and sixty days later it would begin to peep over the opposite horizon. After three hundred and twenty days it would be back at the beginning of the cycle, directly overhead. The error in Hela's rotation—the deviation away from a true tidally locked period—was only one part in two hundred. Tidal locking was an inevitable result of frictional forces between two nearby orbiting bodies, but it was a grindingly slow process. It might be that Hela was still slowing down, not yet having reached its locked configuration. Or it might be that something had jolted it in the recent past—a glancing collision from another body, perhaps. Still another possibility was that the orbit had been perturbed by a gravitational interaction with a massive third body. All these possibilities were reasonable, given Quaiche's ignorance of the system's history. But at the same time the imperfection affronted him. It was as annoying as a clock that kept almost perfect time. It was the kind of thing he would have imagined pointing to if anyone had ever argued that the cosmos must be the result of divine conception. Would a Creator have permitted such a thing, when all it would have taken was a tiny nudge to set the world to rights? The virus simmered, boiling higher in his blood. It didn't like that kind of thinking. He snapped his thoughts back to the safe subject of Hela's topography, wondering if he might make some sense of the bridge from its context. The bridge was aligned more or less east-to-west, as defined by Hela's rotation. It was situated very near the equator, spanning the gash that was the world's most immediately obvious geographic feature. The gash began near the northern pole, cutting diagonally from north to south across the equator. It was at its widest and deepest near the equator, but it was still fearfully impressive many hundreds of kilometres north or south of that point. Ginnungagap Rift, he had named it. The rift sloped from north-east to south-west. To its west in the northern hemisphere was an upraised geologically complex region that he had named the Western Hyrrokkin Uplands. The Eastern Hyrrokkin Uplands curled around the pole to flank the rift on its other side. South of the western range, but still above the equator, was the zone that Quaiche had elected to call Glistenheath Ridge. South of the equator was another upraised area named the Gullveig Range. To the west, straddling the tropics, Quaiche identified Mount Gudbrand, the Kelda Flats, the Vigrid badlands, Mount Jord... to Quaiche, these names conveyed a dizzying sense of antiquity, a feeling that this world already had a richly textured past, a frontier history of epic expeditions and harrowing crossings, a history populated by the brave and the bold. Inevitably, however, his attention returned to Ginnungagap Rift and the bridge that spanned it. The details were still unclear, but the bridge was obviously too complicated, too artful and delicate, to be just a tongue of land left behind by some erosive process. It had been built there, and it did not appear as if humans had had much to do with it. It was not that it was beyond human ingenuity. Humans had achieved many things in the last thousand years, and throwing a bridge across a forty-kilometre-wide abyss—even a bridge as cleanly elegant as the one that spanned Ginnungagap Rift— would not be amongst the most audacious of those achievements. But just because humans could have done it did not mean that they had. This was Hela. This was as far out in the sticks as it was possible to be. No human had any business building bridges here. But aliens? Now that was a different matter. It was true that in six hundred years of space travel, nothing remotely resembling an intelligent, tool-using technological culture had ever been encountered by humankind. But they had been out there once. Their ruins dotted dozens of worlds. Not just one culture either, but eight or nine of them—and that was only the tally in the little huddle of systems within a few dozen light-years of the First System. There was no guessing how many hundreds or thousands of dead cultures had left their mark across the wider galaxy. What kind of culture might have lived on Hela? Had they evolved on this icy moon, or had it just been a stopover point in some ancient, forgotten diaspora? What were they like? Were they one of the known cultures? He was getting ahead of himself. These were questions for later, when he had surveyed the bridge and determined its composition and age. Closer in, he might well find other things that the sensors were missing at this range. There might be artefacts that unequivocally linked the Hela culture to one that had already been studied elsewhere. Or the artefacts might cinch the case the other way: an utterly new culture, never encountered before. It didn't matter. Either way, the find was of incalculable value. Jasmina could control access to it for decades to come. It would give her back the prestige she had lost over the last few decades. For all that he had disappointed her, Quaiche was certain she would find a way to reward him for that. Something chimed on the console of the Scavenger's Daughter. For the first time, the probing radar had picked up an echo. There was something metallic down there. It was small, tucked away in the depths of the rift, very near the bridge. Quaiche adjusted the radar, making sure that the echo was genuine. It did not vanish. He had not seen it before, but it would have been at the limit of his sensor range until now. The Dominatrix would have missed it entirely. He didn't like it. He had convinced himself that there had never been a human presence out here and now he was getting exactly the sort of signature he would have expected from discarded junk. "Be careful," he said to himself. On an earlier mission, he had been approaching a moon a little smaller than Hela. There had been something on it that enticed him, and he had advanced incautiously. Near the surface he had picked up a radar echo similar to this one, a glint of something down there. He had pushed on, ignoring his better instincts. The thing had turned out to be a booby trap. A particle cannon had popped out of the ice and locked on to his ship. Its beam had chewed holes in the ship's armour, nearly frying Quaiche in the process. He had made it back to safety, but not before sustaining nearly fatal damage to both the ship and himself. He had recovered and the ship had been repaired, but for years afterwards he had been wary of similar traps. Things got left behind: automated sentries, plonked down on worlds centuries earlier to defend property claims or mining rights. Sometimes they kept on working long after their original owners were dust. Quaiche had been lucky: the sentry, or whatever it was, had been damaged, its beam less powerful than it had once been. He had got off with a warning, a reminder not to assume anything. And now he was in serious danger of making the same mistake again. He reviewed his options. The presence of a metallic echo was dispiriting, making him doubtful that the bridge was as ancient and alien as he had hoped. But he would not know until he was closer, and that would mean approaching the source of the echo. If it was indeed a waiting sentry, he would be placing himself in harm's way. But, he reminded himself, the Scavenger's Daughter was a good ship, nimble, smart and well armoured. She was crammed with intelligence and guile. Reflexes were not much use against a relativistic weapon like a particle beam, but the Daughter would be monitoring the source of the echo all the while, just in case there was some movement before firing. The instant the ship saw anything she found alarming, she would execute a high-gee random evasion pattern designed to prevent the beam-weapon from predicting its position. The ship knew the precise physiological tolerances of Quaiche's body, and was prepared nearly to kill him in the interests of his ultimate survival. If she got really annoyed, she would deploy microdefences of her own. "I'm all right," Quaiche said aloud. "I can go deeper and still come out of this laughing. I'm sorted." But he had to consider Morwenna as well. The Dominatrix was further away, granted, but it was slower and less responsive. It would be a stretch for a beam-weapon to take out the Dominatrix, but it was not impossible. And there were other weapons that a sentry might deploy, such as hunter-seeker missiles. There might even be a distributed network of the things, talking to each other. Hell, he thought. It might not even be a sentry. It might just be a metal-rich boulder or a discarded fuel tank. But he had to assume the very worst. He needed to keep Morwenna alive. Equally, he needed the Dominatrix to be able to get back to Jasmina. He could not risk losing either his lover or the ship that was now her extended prison. Somehow, he had either to protect both of them or give up now. He was not in the mood to give up. But how was he going to safeguard his ticket out of there and his lover without waiting hours for them to get a safe distance away from Hela? Of course. The answer was obvious. It was—almost—staring him in the face. It was beautifully simple and it made elegant use of local resources. Why had he not thought of it sooner? All he had to do was hide them behind Haldora. He made the necessary arrangements, then opened the communications channel back to Morwenna. [ Ararat, 2675 ] Vasko observed the approach to the main island with great interest. They had been flying over black ocean for so long that it was a relief to see any evidence of human presence. Yet at the same time the lights of the outlying settlements, strung out in the filaments, arcs and loops that implied half-familiar bays, peninsulas and tiny islands, looked astonishingly fragile and evanescent. Even when the brighter outlying sprawls of First Camp came into view, they still looked as if they could be quenched at any moment, no more permanent or meaningful than a fading pattern of bonfire embers. Vasko had always known that the human presence on Ararat was insecure, something that could never be taken for granted. It had been drummed into him since he was tiny. But until now he had never felt it viscerally. He had created a window for himself in the hull of the shuttle, using his fingertip to sketch out the area he wanted to become transparent. Clavain had shown him how to do that, demonstrating the trick with something close to pride. Vasko suspected that the hull still looked perfectly black from the outside and that he was really looking at a form of screen which exactly mimicked the optical properties of glass. But where old technology was concerned—and the shuttle was very definitely old technology—it never paid to take anything for granted. All he knew for certain was that he was flying, and that he knew of none amongst his peers who had ever done that before. The shuttle had homed in on the signal from Scorpio's bracelet. Vasko had watched it descend out of the cloud layer attended by spirals and curlicues of disturbed air. Red and green lights had blinked on either side of a hull of polished obsidian that had the deltoid, concave look of a manta ray. At least a third of the surface area of the underside had been painfully bright: grids of actinically bright, fractally folded thermal elements hazed in a cocoon of flickering purple-indigo plasma. Elaborate clawed undercarriage had emerged from the cool spots on the underside, unfolding and elongating in a hypnotic ballet of pistons and hinges. Neon patterns had flicked on in the upper hull, delineating access hatches, hotspots and exhaust apertures. The shuttle had picked its landing zone, rotating and touching down with dainty precision, the undercarriage contracting to absorb the weight of the craft. For a moment the roar of the plasma heaters had remained, before stopping with unnerving suddenness. The plasma had dissipated, leaving only a nasty charred smell. Vasko had caught glimpses of the colony's aircraft before, but only from a distance. This was the most impressive thing he had seen. The three of them had walked towards the boarding ramp. They had almost reached it when Clavain misjudged his footfall and began to tumble towards the rocks. Vasko and the pig had both lurched forward at the same time, but it was Vasko who had taken the brunt of Clavain's weight. There had been a moment of relief and shock—Clavain had felt terribly light, like a sack of straw. Vasko's intake of breath had been loud, distinct even above the kettlelike hissing of the transport. "Are you all right, sir?" he had asked. Clavain had looked at him sharply. "I'm an old man," he had replied. "You mustn't expect the world of me." Reflecting now on his past few hours in Clavain's presence, Vasko had no idea what to make of him. One minute the old man was showing him around the shuttle with a kind of avuncular hospitality, asking him about his family, complimenting him on the perspicacity of his questions, sharing jokes with him in the manner of a long-term confidant. The next minute he was as icy and distant as a comet. Though the mood swings came without warning, they were always accompanied by a perceptible shift of focus in Clavain's eyes, as if what was taking place around him had suddenly ceased to be of significant interest. The first few times that this happened, Vasko had naturally assumed that he had done something to displease the old man. But it quickly became apparent that Scorpio was getting the same treatment, and that Clavain's distant phases had less to do with anger than with the loss of a signal, like a radio losing its frequency lock. He was drifting, then snapping back to the present. Once that realisation had dawned, Vasko stopped worrying so much about what he said and did in Clavain's presence. At the same time he found himself more and more concerned about the state of mind of the man they were bringing home. He wondered what kind of place Clavain was drifting to when he stopped being present. When the man was friendly and focused on the here and now, he was as sane as anyone Vasko had met. But sanity, Vasko decided, was like the pattern of lights he could see through his cabin window. In almost any direction the only way to travel was into darkness, and there was a lot more darkness than light. Now he noticed a strange absence of illumination cutting through the lights of one of the larger settlements. He frowned, trying to think of somewhere he knew where there was an unlit thoroughfare, or perhaps a wide canal cutting back into one of the islands. The shuttle banked, changing his angle of view. The swathe of darkness tilted, swallowing more lights and revealing others. Vasko's perceptions flipped and he realised that he was seeing an unlit structure interposed between the shuttle and the settlement. The structure's immensely tall shape was only vaguely implied by the way it eclipsed and revealed the background lights, but once Vasko had identified it he had no trouble filling in the details for himself. It was the sea tower, of course. It rose from the sea several kilometres out from the oldest of the settlements, the place where he had been born. The sea tower. The ship. Nostalgia for Infinity. He had only ever seen it from a distance, for routine sea traffic was forbidden close to the ship. He knew that the leaders sailed out to it, and it was no secret that shuttles occasionally entered or left the ship, tiny as gnats against the gnarled and weathered spire of the visible hull. He supposed Scorpio would know all about that, but the ship was one of the many topics Vasko had decided it would be best not to raise during his first outing with the pig. From this vantage point, the Nostalgia for Infinity still looked large to Vasko, but no longer quite as distant and geologically huge as it had done for most of his life. He could see that the ship was at least a hundred times taller than the tallest conch structure anywhere in the archipelago, and it still gave him a bracing sense of vertigo. But the ship was much closer to the shore than he had realised, clearly an appendage of the colony rather than a distant looming guardian. If the ship did not exactly look fragile, he now understood that it was a human artefact all the same, as much at the mercy of the ocean as the settlements it overlooked. The ship had brought them to Ararat, before submerging its lower extremities in a kilometre of sea. There were a handful of shuttles capable of carrying people to and from interplanetary space, but the ship was the only thing that could take them beyond Ararat's system, into interstellar space. Vasko had known this since he was small, but until this moment he had never quite grasped how terribly dependent they were on this one means of escape. As the shuttle fell lower, the lights resolved into windows, street lamps and the open fires of bazaars. There was an unplanned, shanty-town aspect to most of the districts of First Camp. The largest structures were made from conch material that had washed up on the shore or been recovered from the sea by foraging expeditions. The resulting buildings had the curved and chambered look of vast seashells. But it was very rare to find conch material in such sizes, and so most of the structures were made of more traditional materials. There were a handful of inflatable domes, some of which were almost as large as the conch structures, but the plastics used to make and repair the domes had always been in short supply. It was much easier to scavenge metal from the heart of the ship; that was why almost everything else was lashed together from sheet metal and scaffolding, forming a low urban sprawl of sagging rectangular structures seldom reaching more than three storeys high. The domes and conch structures erupted through the metal slums like blisters. Streets were webs of ragged shadow, unlit save for the occasional torch-bearing pedestrian. The shuttle slid over some intervening regions of darkness and then came to hover above a small outlying formation of structures that Vasko had never seen before. There was a dome and a surrounding accretion of metal structures, but the whole ensemble looked a good deal more formal than any other part of the town. Vasko realised that it was almost certainly one of the administration's hidden encampments. The body of humans and pigs that ran the colony had offices in the city, but it was also a matter of public knowledge that they had secure meeting places not marked on any civilian map. Remembering Clavain's instructions, Vasko made the window seal itself up again and then waited for the touchdown. He barely noticed it when it came, but suddenly his two companions were clambering down the length of the cabin, back towards the boarding ramp. Belatedly, Vasko realised that the shuttle had never had a pilot. They stepped down on to an apron of fused rock. Floodlights had snapped on at the last minute, bathing everything in icy blue. Clavain still wore his coat, but he had also donned a shapeless black hood tugged from the recesses of the collar. The hood's low, wide cowl threw his face into shadow; he was barely recognisable as the man they had met on the island. During the flight, Scorpio had taken the opportunity to clean him up a little, trimming his beard and hair as neatly as circumstances allowed. "Son," Clavain said, "try not to stare at me with quite that degree of messianic fervour, will you?" "I didn't mean anything, sir." Scorpio patted Vasko on the back. "Act normally. As far as you're concerned, he's just some stinking old hermit we found wandering around." The compound was full of machines. Of obscure provenance, they squatted around the shuttle or loomed as vague suggestions in the dark interstices between the floodlights. There were wheeled vehicles, one or two hovercraft, a kind of skeletal helicopter. Vasko made out the sleek surfaces of two other aerial craft parked on the edge of the apron. He could not tell if they were the type that could reach orbit, as well as fly in the atmosphere. "How many operational shuttles?" Clavain asked. Scorpio answered after a moment's hesitation, perhaps wondering how much he should say in Vasko's presence. "Four," he said. Clavain walked on for half a dozen paces before saying, "There were five or six when I left. We can't afford to lose shuttles, Scorp." "We're doing our best with very limited resources. Some of them may fly again, but I can't promise anything." Scorpio was leading them towards the nearest of the low metal structures around the dome's perimeter. As they walked away from the shuttle, many of the shadowy machines began to trundle towards it, extending manipulators or dragging umbilical cables across the ground. The way they moved made Vasko imagine injured sea monsters hauling ruined tentacles across dry land. "If we need to leave quickly," Clavain said, "could we do it? Could any of the other ships be used? Once the Zodiacal Light arrives, they only have to reach orbit. I'm not asking for full space-worthiness, just something that will make a few trips." "Zodiacal Light will have its own shuttles," Scorpio said. "And even if it doesn't, we still have the only ship we need to reach orbit." "You'd better hope and pray we never have to use it," Clavain said. "By the time we need the shuttles," Scorpio said, "we'll have contingencies in place." "The time we need them might be this evening. Has that occurred to you?" They had arrived at the entrance to the cordon of structures surrounding the dome. As they approached it, another pig stepped out into the night, moving with the exaggerated side-to-side swagger common to his kind. He was shorter and stockier than Scorpio, if such a thing were possible. His shoulders were so massive and yokelike that his arms hung some distance from the sides of his body, swinging like pendulums when he walked. He looked as if he could pull a man limb from limb. The pig glared at Vasko, deep frown lines notching his brow. "Looking at something, kid?" Vasko hurried out his answer. "No, sir." "Relax, Blood," Scorpio said. "Vasko's had a busy day. He's just a bit overwhelmed by it all. Right, son?" "Yes, sir." The pig called Blood nodded at Clavain. "Good to have you back, old guy." [ Approaching Hela, 2615 ] Quaiche was still close enough to Morwenna for real-time communication. "You won't like what I'm going to do," he said, "but this is for the good of both of us." Her reply came after a crackle of static. "You promised you wouldn't be long." "I still intend to keep that promise. I'm not going to be gone one minute longer than I said. This is more about you than me, actually." "How so?" she asked. "I'm worried that there might be something down on Hela apart from the bridge. I've been picking up a metallic echo and it hasn't gone away. Could be nothing—probably is nothing—but I can't take the chance that it might be a booby trap. I've encountered this kind of thing before and it makes me nervous." "Then turn around," Morwenna said. "I'm sorry, but I can't. I really need to check out this bridge. If I don't come back with something good, Jasmina's going to have me for breakfast." He would leave it to Morwenna to figure out what that would mean for her, still buried in the scrimshaw suit with Grelier her only hope of escape. "But you can't just walk into a trap," Morwenna said. "I'm more worried about you, frankly. The Daughter will take care of me, but if I trigger something it might start taking pot shots at anything it sees, up to and including the Dominatrix." "So what are you going to do?" "I thought about having you pull away from the Haldora/Hela system, but that would waste too much time and fuel. I've got a better idea: we'll use what we've been given. Haldora is a nice, fat shield. It's just sitting there doing nothing. I'm going to put it between you and whatever's on Hela, make some bloody use of the thing." Morwenna considered the implications for a few seconds. There was a sudden urgency in her voice. "But that will mean..." "Yes, we'll be out of line-of-sight contact, so we won't be able to talk to each other. But it'll only be for a few hours, six at the most." He got that in before she could protest further. "I'll program the Dominatrix to wait behind Haldora for six hours, then return to its present position relative to Hela. Not so bad, is it? Get some sleep and you'll barely realise I'm gone." "Don't do this, Horris. I don't want to be in a place where I can't talk to you." "It's only for six hours." When she responded she did not sound any calmer, but he could hear the shift in pitch in her voice that meant she had at least accepted the futility of argument. "But if something happens in that time—if you need me, or I need you—we won't be able to talk." "Only for six hours," he said. "Three hundred minutes or so. Nothing. Be done in a flash." "Can't you drop some relays, so we can still keep in touch?" "Don't think so. I could sew some passive reflectors around Haldora, but that's exactly the kind of thing that might lead a smart missile back to you. Anyway, it would take a couple of hours to get them into position. I could be down under the bridge by then." "I'm frightened, Horris. I really don't want you to do this." "I have to," he said. "I just have to." "Please don't." "I'm afraid the plan is already under way," Quaiche replied gently. "I've sent the necessary commands to the Dominatrix. It's moving, love. It'll be inside Haldora's shadow in about thirty minutes." There was silence. He thought for a moment that the link might already have broken, that his calculations had been in error. But then she said, "So why did you bother to ask me if you'd already made up your mind?"
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Hela, 2727	For the first day they travelled hard, putting as much distance between themselves and the badlands communities as possible. For hours on end they sped along white-furrowed trails, slicing through slowly changing terrain beneath a sable sky. Occasionally they passed a transponder tower, an outpost or even another machine moving in the other direction. Rashmika gradually became used to the hypnotic, bouncing motion of the skis, and was able to walk around the icejammer without losing her balance. Now and then she sat in her personal compartment, her knees folded up to her chin, looking out of the window at the speeding landscape and imagining that every malformed rock or ice fragment contained a splinter of alien empire. She thought about the scuttlers a lot, picturing the blank pages of her book filling with neat handwriting and painstaking crosshatched drawings. She drank coffee or tea, consumed rations and occasionally spoke to Culver, though not as often he would have wished. When she had planned her escape—except "escape" wasn't quite the right word, because it was not as if she was actually running from anything—but when she had planned it, anyway, she had seldom thought very far beyond the point when she left the village. The few times she had allowed her mind to wander past that point, she had always imagined herself feeling vastly more relaxed now that the difficult part—actually leaving her home, and the village—was over. It wasn't like that at all. She was not as tense as when she had climbed out of her home, but only because it would have been impossible to stay in that state for very long. Instead she had come down to a plateau of continual tension, a knot in her stomach that would not undo. Partly it was because she was now thinking ahead, into the territory she had left vague until now. Suddenly, dealing with the churches was a looming concrete event in the near future. But she was also concerned about what she had left behind. Three days, even six, had not seemed like such a long time when she had been planning the trip to the caravans, but now she counted every hour. She imagined the village mobilising behind her, realising what had happened and uniting to bring her back. She imagined constabulary officers following the icejammer in fast vehicles of their own. None of them liked Crozet or Linxe to begin with. They would assume that the couple had talked her into it, that in some way they were the real agents of her misfortune. If they caught up, she would be chastised, but Crozet and Linxe would be ripped apart by the mob. But there was no sign of pursuit. Admittedly Crozet's machine was fast, but on the few occasions when they surmounted a rise, giving them a chance to look back fifteen or twenty kilometres along the trail, there was nothing behind them. Nonetheless, Rashmika remained anxious despite Crozet's assurances that there were no faster routes by which they might be cut off further on down the trail. Now and then, to oblige her, Crozet tuned into the village radio band, but most of the time he found only static. Nothing unusual about that, for radio reception on Hela was largely at the whim of the magnetic storms roiling around Haldora. There were other modes of communication—tight-beam laser-communication between satellites and ground stations, fibreoptic land lines—but most of these channels were under church control and in any case Crozet subscribed to none of them. He had means of tapping into some of them when he needed to, but now, he said, was not the time to risk drawing someone's attention. When Crozet did finally tune into a non-garbled transmission from Vigrid, however, and Rashmika was able to listen to the daily news service for major villages, it was not what she had been expecting. While there were reports of cave-ins, power outages and the usual ups and downs of village life, there was no mention at all of anyone going missing. At seventeen, Rashmika was still under the legal care of her parents, so they would have had every right to report her absence. Indeed, they would have been breaking the law by failing to report her missing. Rashmika was more troubled by this than she cared to admit. On one level she wanted to slip away unnoticed, the way she had always planned it. But at the same time the more childish part of her craved some sign that her absence had been noted. She wanted to feel missed. When she had given the matter some further thought, she decided that her parents must be waiting to see what happened in the next few hours. She had, after all, not yet been away for more than half a day. If she had gone about her usual daily business, she would still have been at the library. Perhaps they were working on the assumption that she had left home unusually early that morning. Perhaps they had managed not to notice the note she had left for them, or the fact that her surface suit was missing from the locker. But after sixteen hours there was still no news. Her habits were erratic enough that her parents might not have worried about her absence for ten or twelve hours, but after sixteen—even if by some miracle they had missed the other rather obvious clues—there could be no doubt in their minds about what had happened. They would know she was gone. They would have to report it to the authorities, wouldn't they? She wondered. The authorities in the badlands were not exactly known for their ruthless efficiency. It was conceivable that the report of her absence had simply failed to reach the right desk. Allowing for bureaucratic inertia at all levels, it might not get there until the following day. Or perhaps the authorities were well informed but had decided not to notify the news channels for some reason. It was tempting to believe that, but at the same time she could think of no reason why they would delay. Still, maybe there would be a security block around the next corner. Crozet didn't seem to think so. He was driving as fast and as nonchalantly as ever. His icejammer knew these old ice trails so well that he merely seemed to be giving it vague suggestions about which direction to head in. Towards the end of the first day's travel, when Crozet was ready to pull in for the night, they picked up the news channel one more time. By then Rashmika had been on the road for the better part of twenty hours. There was still no sign that anyone had noticed. She felt dejected, as if for her entire life she had fatally overestimated her importance in even the minor scheme of things in the Vigrid badlands. Then, belatedly, another possibility occurred to her. It was so obvious that she should have thought of it immediately. It made vastly more sense than any of the unlikely contingencies she had considered so far. Her parents, she decided, were well aware that she had left. They knew exactly when and they knew exactly why. She had been coy about her plans in the letter she had left for them, but she had no doubt that her parents would have been able to guess the broad details with reasonable accuracy. They even knew that she had continued to associate with Linxe after the scandal. No. They knew what she was doing, and they knew it was all about her brother. They knew that she was on a mission of love, or if not love, then fury. And the reason they had told no one was because, secretly, despite all that they had said to her over the years, despite all the warnings they had given her about the risks of getting too close to the churches, they wanted her to succeed. They were, in their quiet and secret way, proud of what she had decided to do. When she realised this, it hit home with the force of truth. "It's all right," she told Crozet. "There won't be any mention of me on the news." He shrugged. "What makes you so certain now?" "I just realised something, that's all." "You look like you need a good night's sleep," Linxe said. She had brewed hot chocolate: Rashmika sipped it appreciatively. It was a long way from the nicest cup of hot chocolate anyone had ever made for her, but right then she couldn't think of any drink that had ever tasted better. "I didn't sleep much last night," Rashmika admitted. "Too worried about making it out this morning." "You did grand," Linxe said. "When you get back, everyone will be very proud of you." "I hope so," Rashmika said. "I have to ask one thing, though," Linxe said. "You don't have to answer. Is this just about your brother, Rashmika? Or is there more to it than that?" The question took Rashmika aback. "Of course it's only about my brother." "It's just that you already have a bit of a reputation," Linxe said. "We've all heard about the amount of time you spend in the digs, and that book you're making. They say there isn't anyone else in the villages as interested in the scuttlers as Rashmika Els. They say you write letters to the church-sponsored archaeologists, arguing with them." "I can't help it if the scuttlers interest me," she said. "Yes, but what exactly is it you've got such a bee in your bonnet about?" The question was phrased kindly, but Rashmika couldn't help sounding irritated when she said, "I'm sorry?" "I mean, what is it you think everyone else has got so terribly wrong?" "Do you really want to know?" "I'm as interested in hearing your side of the argument as anyone else's." "Except deep down you probably don't care who's right, do you? As long as stuff keeps coming out of the ground, what does anyone really care about what happened to the scuttlers? All you care about is getting spare parts for your icejammer." "Manners, young lady," Linxe admonished. "I'm sorry," Rashmika said, blushing. She sipped on the hot chocolate. "I didn't mean it like that. But I do care about the scuttlers and I do think no one is very interested in the truth of what really happened to them. Actually, it reminds me a lot of the Amarantin." Linxe looked at her. "The what?" "The Amarantin were the aliens who evolved on Resurgam. They were evolved birds." She remembered drawing one of them for her book—not as a skeleton, but as they must have looked when they were alive. She had seen the Amarantin in her mind's eye: the bright gleam of an avian eye, the quizzical beaked smile of a sleek alien head. Her drawing had resembled nothing in the official reconstructions in the other archaeology texts, but it had always looked more authentically alive to her than those dead impressions, as if she had seen a living Amarantin and they had only had bones to go on. It made her wonder if her drawings of living scuttlers had the same vitality. Rashmika continued, "Something wiped them out a million years ago. When humans colonised Resurgam, no one wanted to consider the possibility that whatever had wiped out the Amarantin might come back to do the same to us. Except Dan Sylveste, of course." "Dan Sylveste?" Linxe asked. "Sorry—also not ringing any bells." It infuriated Rashmika: how could she not know these things? But she tried not to let it show. "Sylveste was the archaeologist in charge of the expedition. When he stumbled on the truth, the other colonists silenced him. They didn't want to know how much trouble they were in. But as we know, he turned out to be right in the end." "I bet you feel a little affinity with him, in that case." "More than a little," Rashmika said. Rashmika still remembered the first time she had come across his name. It had been a casual reference in one of the archaeological texts she had uploaded on to her compad, buried in some dull treatise about the Pattern Jugglers. It was like lightning shearing through her skull. Rashmika had felt an electrifying sense of connection, as if her whole life had been a prelude to that moment. It was, she now knew, the instant when her interest in the scuttlers shifted from a childish diversion to something closer to obsession. She could not explain this, but nor could she deny that it had happened. Since then, in parallel with her study of the scuttlers, she had learned much about the life and times of Dan Sylveste. It was logical enough: there was no sense in studying the scuttlers in isolation, since they were merely the latest in a line of extinct galactic cultures to be encountered by human explorers. Sylveste's name loomed large in the study of alien intelligence as a whole, so a passing knowledge of his exploits was essential. Sylveste's work on the Amarantin had spanned many of the years between 2500 and 2570. During most of that time he had either been a patient investigator or under some degree of incarceration, but even while under house arrest his interest in the Amarantin had remained steady. But without access to resources beyond anything the colony could offer, his ideas were doomed to remain speculative. Then Ultras had arrived in the Resurgam system. With the help of their ship, Sylveste had unlocked the final piece of the puzzle in the mystery of the Amarantin. His suspicions had turned out to be correct: the Amarantin had not been wiped out by some isolated cosmic accident, but by a response from a still-active mechanism designed to suppress the emergence of starfaring intelligence. It had taken years for the news to make it to other systems. By then it was second or third hand, tainted with propaganda, almost lost in the confusion of human factional warfare. Independently, it seemed, the Conjoiners had arrived at similar conclusions to Sylveste. And other archaeological groups, sifting through the remains of other dead cultures, were coming around to the same unsettling view. The machines that had killed the Amarantin were still out there, waiting and watching. They went by many names. The Conjoiners had called them wolves. Other cultures, now extinct, had named them the Inhibitors. Over the last century, the reality of the Inhibitors had come to be accepted. But for much of that time the threat had remained comfortably distant: a problem for some other generation to worry about. Recently, however, things had changed. There had long been unconfirmed reports of strange activity in the Resurgam system: rumours of worlds being ripped apart and remade into perplexing engines of alien design. There were stories that the entire system had been evacuated; that Resurgam was now an uninhabitable cinder; that something unspeakable had been done to the system's sun. But even Resurgam could be ignored for a while. The system was an archaeological colony, isolated from the main web of interstellar commerce, its government a totalitarian regime with a taste for disinformation. The reports of what had happened there could not be verified. And so for several more decades, life in the other systems of human-settled space continued more or less unaffected. But now the Inhibitors had arrived around other stars. The Ultras had been the first to bring the bad news. Communications between their ships warned them to steer clear of certain systems. Something was happening, something that transgressed the accepted scales of human catastrophe. This was not war or plague, but something infinitely worse. It had happened to the Amarantin and—presumably—to the scuttlers. The number of human colonies known to have witnessed direct intervention by Inhibitor machines was still fewer than a dozen, but the ripples of panic spreading outwards at the speed of radio communications were almost as effective at collapsing civilisations. Entire surface communities were being evacuated or abandoned, as citizens tried to reach space or the hopefully safer shelter of underground caverns. Crypts and bunkers, disused since the dark decades of the Melding Plague, were hastily reopened. There were, invariably, too many people for either the evacuation ships or the bunkers. There were riots and furious little wars. Even as civilisation crumbled, those with an eye for the main chance accumulated small, useless fortunes. Doomsday cults flourished in the damp, inviting loam of fear, like so many black orchids. People spoke of End Times, convinced that they were living through the final days. Against this background, it was hardly any wonder that so many people were drawn to Hela. In better times, Quaiche's miracle would have attracted little attention, but now a miracle was precisely what people were looking for. Every new Ultra ship arriving in the system brought tens of thousands of frozen pilgrims. Not all of them were looking for a religious answer, but before very long, if they wanted to stay on Hela, the Office of Bloodwork got to them anyway. Thereafter, they saw things differently. Rashmika could not really blame them for coming to Hela. Had she not been born here, she sometimes thought she might well have made the same pilgrimage. But her motives would have been different. It was truth she was after: the same drive that had taken Dan Sylveste to Resurgam; the same drive that had brought him into conflict with his colony and which, ultimately, had led to his death. She thought back to Linxe's question. Was it really Harbin driving her towards the Permanent Way, or was Harbin just the excuse she had made up to conceal—as much from herself as anyone else—the real reason for her journey? Her reply that it was all to do with Harbin had been so automatic and flippant that she had almost believed it. But now she wondered whether it was really true. Rashmika could tell when anyone around her was lying. But seeing through her own deceptions was another matter entirely. "It's Harbin," she whispered to herself. "Nothing else matters except finding my brother." But she could not stop thinking of the scuttlers, and when she dozed off with the mug of chocolate still clasped in her hands, it was the scuttlers that she dreamed of, the mad permutations of their insectile anatomy shuffling and reshuffling like the broken parts of a puzzle. Rashmika snapped awake, feeling a rumble as the icejammer slowed, picking up undulations in the ice trail. "I'm afraid this is as far as we can go tonight," Crozet said. "I'll find somewhere discreet to hide us away, but I'm near my limit." He looked drawn and exhausted to Rashmika, but then again that was how Crozet always looked. "Move over, love," Linxe said to Crozet. "I'll take us on for a couple of hours, just until we're safe and sound. You can both go back and catch forty winks." "I'm sure we're safe and sound," Rashmika said. "Never you mind about that. A few extra miles won't hurt us. Now go back and try to get yourself some sleep, young lady. We've another long day ahead of us tomorrow and I can't swear we'll be out of the woods even then." Linxe was already easing into the driver's position, running her thick babylike fingers over the icejammer's timeworn controls. Until Crozet had mentioned pulling over for the night, Rashmika had assumed that the machine would keep travelling using some kind of autopilot, even if it had to slow down a little while it guided itself. It was a genuine shock to learn that they would be going nowhere unless someone operated the icejammer manually. "I can do a bit," she offered. "I've never driven one of these before, but if someone wants to show me..." "We'll do fine, love," Linxe said. "It's not just Crozet and me, either. Culver can do a shift in the morning." "I wouldn't want..." "Oh, don't worry about Culver," Crozet said. "He needs something else to occupy his hands." Linxe slapped her husband, but she was smiling as she did it. Rashmika finished her now-cold chocolate drink, dog-tired but glad that she had at least made it through the first day. She was under no illusions that she was done with the worst of her journey, but she supposed that every successful stage had to be treated as a small victory in its own right. She just wished she could tell her parents not to worry about her, that she had made good progress so far and was thinking of them all the time. But she had vowed not to send a message home until she had joined the caravan. Crozet walked her back through the rumbling innards of the icejammer. It moved differently under Linxe's direction. It was not that she was a worse or even a better driver than Crozet, but she definitely favoured a different driving style. The icejammer flounced, flinging itself through the air in long, weightless parabolic arcs. It was all quite conducive to sleep, but a sleep filled with uneasy dreams in which Rashmika found herself endlessly falling. She woke the next morning to troubling and yet strangely welcome news. "There's been an alert on the news service," Crozet said. "The word's gone out now, Rashmika. You're officially missing and there's a search operation in progress. Doesn't that make you feel proud?" "Oh," she said, wondering what could have happened since the night before. "It's the constabulary," Linxe said, meaning the law-enforcement organisation that had jurisdiction in the Vigrid region. "They've sent out search parties, apparently. But there's a good chance we'll make the caravan before they find us. Once we get you on the caravan, the constabulary can't touch you." "I'm surprised they've actually sent out parties," Rashmika said. "It's not as if I'm in any danger, is it?" "Actually, there's a bit more to it than that," Crozet said. Linxe looked at her husband. What did the two of them know that Rashmika didn't? Suddenly she felt a tension in her belly, a line of cold trickling down her spine. "Go on," she said. "They say they want to bring you back for questioning," Linxe said. "For running away from home? Haven't they got anything better to do with their time?" "It's not for running away from home," Linxe said. Again she glanced at Crozet. "It's about that sabotage last week. You know the one I mean, don't you?" "Yes," Rashmika said, remembering the crater where the demolition store had been. "They're saying you did it," Crozet said. [ Hela, 2615 ] Out of orbit now, Quaiche felt his weight increasing as the Daughter slowed down to only a few thousand kilometres per hour. Hela swelled, its hectic terrain rising up to meet him. The radar echo—the metallic signature—was still there. So was the bridge. Quaiche had decided to spiral closer rather than making a concerted dash for the structure. Even on the first loop in, still thousands of kilometres above Hela's surface, what he had seen had been tantalising, like a puzzle he needed to assemble. From deep space the rift had been visible only as a change in albedo, a dark scar slicing across the world. Now it had palpable depth, especially when he examined it with the magnifying cameras. The gouge was irregular: there were places where there was a relatively shallow slope all the way down to the valley floor, but elsewhere the walls were vertical sheets of ice-covered rock towering kilometres high, as smooth and foreboding as granite. They had the grey sheen of wet slate. The floor of the rift varied between the flatness of a dry salt lake to a crazed, fractured quilt of tilted and interlocking ice panels separated by hair-thin avenues of pure sable blackness. The closer he came the more it indeed resembled an unfinished puzzle, tossed aside by a god in a tantrum. Once every minute or so he checked the radar. The echo was still there, and the Daughter had detected no signs of imminent attack. Perhaps it was just junk after all. The thought troubled him, for it meant someone else must have come this close to the bridge without finding it remarkable enough to report to anyone else. Or perhaps they had meant to report it, but some subsequent misfortune had befallen them. He wasn't sure that was any less worrying, on balance. By the time he had completed the first loop he had reduced his speed to five hundred metres a second. He was close enough to the surface now to appreciate the texturing of the ground as it changed from jagged uplands to smooth plains. It was not all ice; most of the moon's interior was rocky, and a great deal of fractured rocky material was embedded in the ice, or lying upon it. Ash plumes radiated away from dormant volcanoes. There were slopes of fine talus and up-rearing sharp-sided boulders as big as major space habitats; some poked through the ice, tipped at absurd angles like the sterns of sinking ships; others sat on the surface, poised on one side in the manner of vast sculptural installations. The Daughter's thrusters burned continuously to support it against Hela's gravity. Quaiche fell lower, edging closer to the lip of the rift. Overhead, Haldora was a brooding dark sphere illuminated only along one limb. Amused and distracted for a moment, Quaiche saw lightning storms play across the gas giant's darkened face. The electrical arcs coiled and writhed with mesmerising slowness, like eels. Hela was still catching starlight from the system's sun, but shortly its orbit around Haldora would take it into the larger world's shadow. It was fortuitous, Quaiche thought, that the source of the echo had been on this face of Hela, or else he would have been denied the impressive spectacle of the gas giant looming over everything. If he had arrived later in the world's rotation cycle, of course, the rift would have been pointing away from Haldora. A difference of one hundred and sixty days and he would have missed this amazing sight. Another lightning flash. Reluctantly, Quaiche turned his attention back to Hela. He was over the edge of Ginnungagap Rift. The ground tumbled away with unseemly haste. Even though the pull of gravity was only a quarter of a standard gee, Quaiche felt as much vertigo as he would have on a heavier world. It made perfect sense, for the drop was still fatally deep. Worse, there was no atmosphere to slow the descent of a falling object, no terminal velocity to create at least an outside chance of a survivable accident. Never mind. The Daughter had never failed him, and he did not expect her to start now. He focused on the thing he had come to examine, and allowed the Daughter to sink lower, dropping below the zero-altitude surface datum. He turned, vectoring along the length of the rift. He had drifted one or two kilometres out from the nearest wall, but the more distant one looked no closer than it had before he crossed the threshold. The spacing of the walls was irregular, but here at the equator the sides of the rift were never closer than thirty-five kilometres apart. The rift was a minimum of five or six kilometres deep, pitching down to ten or eleven in the deepest, most convoluted parts of the valley floor. The feature was hellishly vast, and Quaiche came to the gradual conclusion that he did not actually like being in it very much. It was too much like hanging between the sprung jaws of a trap. He checked the clock: four hours before the Dominatrix was due to emerge from the far side of Haldora. Four hours was a long time; he expected to be on his way back well before then. "Hang on, Mor," he said. "Not long now." But of course she did not hear him. He had entered the rift south of the equator and was now moving towards the northern hemisphere. The fractured mosaic of the floor oozed beneath him. Measured against the far wall, the motion of his ship was hardly apparent at all, but the nearer wall slid past quickly enough to give him some indication of his speed. Occasionally he lost his grasp of scale, and for a moment the rift would become much smaller. These were the dangerous moments, for it was usually when an alien landscape became familiar, homely and containable that it would reach out and kill you. Suddenly he saw the bridge coming over the horizon between the pinning walls. His heart hammered in his chest. No doubt at all now, if ever there had been any: the bridge was a made thing, a confection of glistening thin threads. He wished Morwenna were here to see it as well. He was recording all the while as the bridge came closer, looming kilometres above him: a curving arc connected to the walls of the rift at either end by a bewildering filigree of supporting scrollwork. There was no need to linger. Just one sweep under the span would be enough to convince Jasmina. They could come back later with heavy-duty equipment, if that was what she wished. Quaiche looked up in wonder as he passed under the bridge. The roadbed—what else was he meant to call it?—bisected the face of Haldora, glowing slightly against the darkness of the gas giant. It was perilously thin, a ribbon of milky white. He wondered what it would be like to cross it on foot. The Daughter swerved violently, the gee-force pushing red curtains into his vision. "What..." Quaiche began. But there was no need to ask: the Daughter was taking evasive action, doing exactly what she was meant to. Something was trying to attack him. Quaiche blacked out, hit consciousness again, blacked out once more. The landscape hurtled around him, pulsing bright light back at him, reflected from the Daughter's steering thrusters. Blackout again. Fleeting consciousness. There was a roaring in his ears. He saw the bridge from a series of abrupt, disconnected angles, like jumbled snapshots. Below it. Above it. Below it again. The Daughter was trying to find shelter. This wasn't right. He should have been up and out, no questions asked. The Daughter was supposed to get him away from any possible threat as quickly as possible. This veering—this indecision—was not characteristic at all. Unless she was cornered. Unless she couldn't find an escape route. In a window of lucidity he saw the situational display on the console. Three hostile objects were firing at him. They had emerged from niches in the ice, three metallic echoes that had nothing to do with the first one he had seen. The Scavenger's Daughter shook herself like a wet dog. Quaiche saw the exhaust plumes of his own miniature missiles whipping away, corkscrewing and zigzagging to avoid being shot down by the buried sentries. Blackout again. This time when he came around he saw a small avalanche oozing down one side of the cliff. One of the attacking objects was now offline: at least one of his missiles had found its mark. The console flickered. The hull's opacity switched to absolute black. When the hull cleared and the console recovered he was looking at emergency warnings across the board, scribbled in fiery red Latinate script. It had been a bad hit. Another shiver, another pack of missiles streaking away. They were tiny things, thumb-sized antimatter rockets with kilotonne yields. Blackout again. A sensation of falling when he came round. Another little avalanche; one fewer attacker on the display. One of the sentries was still out there, and he had no more ordnance to throw at it. But it wasn't firing. Perhaps it was damaged—or maybe just reloading. The Daughter dithered, caught in a maelstrom of possibilities. "Executive override," Quaiche said. "Get me out of here." The gee-force came hard and immediately. Again, curtains of red closed on his vision. But he did not black out this time. The ship was keeping the blood in his head, trying to preserve his consciousness for as long as possible. He saw the landscape drop away below, saw the bridge from above. Then something else hit him. The little ship stalled, thrust interrupted for a jaw-snapping instant. She struggled to regain power, but something—some vital propulsion subsystem—must have taken a serious hit. The landscape hung motionless below him. Then it began to approach again. He was going down. Fade to black. Quaiche fell obliquely towards the vertical wall of the rift, slipping in and out of consciousness. He assumed he was going to die, smeared across that sheer cliff face in an instant of glittering destruction, but at the last moment before impact, the Scavenger's Daughter used some final hoarded gasp of thrust to soften the crash. It was still bad, even as the hull deformed to soften the blow. The wall wheeled around: now a cliff, now a horizon, now a flat plane pressing down from the sky. Quaiche blacked out, came to consciousness, blacked out again. He saw the bridge wheel around in the distance. Clouds of ice and rubble were still belching from the avalanche points in the sides of the cliff where his missiles had taken out the attacking sentries. All the while, Quaiche and his tiny jewel of a ship tumbled towards the floor of the rift. [ Ararat, 2675 ] Vasko followed Clavain and Scorpio into the administration compound, Blood escorting them through a maze of underpopulated rooms and corridors. Vasko expected to be turned back at any moment: his Security Arm clearance definitely did not extend to this kind of business. But although each security check was more stringent than the last, his presence was accepted. Vasko supposed it unlikely that anyone was going to argue with Scorpio and Clavain about their choice of guest. Presently they arrived at a quarantine point deep within the compound, a medical centre housing several freshly made beds. Waiting for them in the quarantine centre was a sallow-faced human physician named Valensin. He wore enormous rhomboid-lensed spectacles; his thin black hair was glued back from his scalp in brilliant waves, and he carried a small scuffed bag of medical tools. Vasko had never met Valensin before, but as the highest-ranking physician on the planet, his name was familiar. "How do you feel, Nevil?" Valensin asked. "I feel like a man overstaying his welcome in history," Clavain said. "Never one for a straight answer, were you?" But even as he was speaking Valensin had whipped some silvery apparatus from his bag and was now shining it into Clavain's eyes, squinting through a little eyepiece of his own. "We ran a medical on him during the shuttle flight," Scorpio said. "He's fit enough. You don't have to worry about him doing anything embarrassing like dropping dead on us." Valensin flicked the light off. "And you, Scorpio? Any immediate plans of your own to drop dead?" "Make your life a lot easier, wouldn't it?" "Migraines?" "Just getting one, as it happens." "I'll look you over later. I want to see if that peripheral vision of yours has deteriorated any faster than I was anticipating. All this running around really isn't good for a pig of your age." "Nice of you to remind me, particularly when I have no choice in the matter." "Always happy to oblige." Valensin beamed, popping his equipment away. "Now, let me make a couple of things clear. When that capsule opens, no one so much as breathes on the occupant until I've given them an extremely thorough examination. And by thorough, of course, I mean to the limited degree possible under the present conditions. I'll be looking for infectious agents. If I do find anything, and if I decide that it has even a remote chance of being unpleasant, then anyone who came into contact with the capsule can forget returning to First Camp, or wherever else they call home. And by unpleasant I'm not talking about genetically engineered viral weapons. I mean something as commonplace as influenza. Our antiviral programmes are already stretched to breaking point." "We understand," Scorpio said. Valensin led them into a huge room with a high domed ceiling of skeletal metal. The room smelt aggressively sterile. It was almost completely empty, save for an intimate gathering of people and machines near the middle. Half a dozen white-clad workers were fussing over ramshackle towers of monitoring equipment. The capsule itself was suspended from the ceiling, hanging on a thin metal line like a plumb bob. The scorched-black egg-shaped thing was much smaller than Vasko had been expecting: it almost looked too small to hold a person. Though there were no windows, several panels had been folded back to reveal luminous displays. Vasko saw numbers, wobbling traces and trembling histograms. "Let me see it," Clavain said, pushing through the workers to get closer to the capsule. At this intrusion, one of the workers surrounding the capsule made the mistake of frowning in Scorpio's direction. Scorpio glared back at him, flashing the fierce curved incisors that marked his ancestry. At the same moment Blood signalled to the workers with a quick lateral stab of his trotter. Obediently they filed away, vanishing back into the depths of the compound. Clavain gave no sign that he had even noticed the commotion. Still hooded and anonymous, he slipped between the obstructions and moved to one side of the capsule. Very gently he placed a hand near one of the illuminated panels, caressing the scorched matt hide of the capsule. Vasko guessed it was safe to stare now. Scorpio looked sceptical. "Getting anything?" "Yes," Clavain said. "It's talking to me. The protocols are Conjoiner." "Certain of that?" asked Blood. Clavain turned away from the machine, only the fine beard hairs on his jaw catching the light. "Yes," he said. Now he placed his other hand on the opposite side of the panel, bracing himself, and lowered his head until it lay against the capsule. Vasko imagined that the old man's eyes would be shut, blocking off outward distraction, concentration clawing grooves into his forehead. No one was saying anything, and Vasko realised that he was even making an effort not to breathe loudly. Clavain tilted his head this way and that, slowly and deliberately, in the manner of someone trying to find the optimum orientation for a radio antenna. He locked at one angle, his frame tensing through the fabric of the coat. "Definitely Conjoiner protocols," Clavain said. He remained silent and perfectly still for at least another minute, before adding, "I think it recognises me as another Conjoiner. It's not allowing me complete system access—not yet, anyway—but it's letting me query certain low-level diagnostic functions. It certainly doesn't look like a bomb." "Be very, very careful," Scorpio said. "We don't want you being taken over, or something worse." "I'm doing my best," Clavain said. "How soon can you tell who's in it?" Blood asked. "I won't know for sure until it cracks open," Clavain said, his voice low but cutting through everything else with quiet authority. "I'll tell you this now, though: I don't think it's Skade." "You're absolutely sure it's Conjoiner?" Blood insisted. "It is. And I'm fairly certain some of the signals I'm picking up are coming from the occupant's implants, not just from the capsule itself. But it can't be Skade: she'd be ashamed to have anything to do with protocols this old." He pulled his head away from the capsule and looked back at the company. "It's Remontoire. It has to be." "Can you make any sense of his thoughts?" Scorpio asked. "No, but the neural signals I'm getting are at a very low level, just routine housekeeping stuff. Whoever's inside this is probably still unconscious." "Or not a Conjoiner," Blood said. "We'll know in a few hours," Scorpio said. "But whoever it is, there's still the problem of a missing ship." "Why is that a problem?" Vasko asked. "Because whoever it is didn't travel twenty light-years in that capsule," Blood said. "But couldn't he have come into the system quietly, parked his ship somewhere we wouldn't see it and then crossed the remaining distance in the capsule?" Vasko suggested. Blood shook his head. "He'd still have needed an in-system ship to make the final crossing to our planet." "But we could have missed a small ship," Vasko said. "Couldn't we?" "I don't think so," Clavain said. "Not unless there have been some very unwelcome developments."
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Hela Surface, 2615	Quaiche came around, upside down. He was still. Everything, in fact, was immensely still: the ship, the landscape, the sky. It was as if he had been planted here centuries ago and had only just opened his eyes. But he did not think he could have been out for long: his memories of the terrifying attack and the dizzying fall were very clear. The wonder of it, really, was not that he remembered those events, but that he was alive at all. Moving very gently in his restraints, he tried to survey the damage. The tiny ship creaked around him. At the limit of his vision, as far as he could twist his neck (which seemed not to be broken), he saw dust and ice still settling from one of the avalanche plumes. Everything was blurred, as if seen through a thin grey veil. The plume was the only thing moving, and it confirmed to him that he could not have been under for more than a few minutes. He could also see one end of the bridge, the marvellous eye-tricking complexity of scrolls supporting the gently curving roadbed. There had been a moment of anxiety, as he watched his ordnance rip away, when he had worried about destroying the thing that had brought him here. The bridge was huge, but it also looked as delicate as tissue paper. But there was no evidence that he had inflicted any damage. The thing must be stronger than it looked. The ship creaked again. Quaiche could not see the ground with any clarity. The ship had come to rest upside down, but had it really reached the bottom of Ginnungagap Rift? He looked at the console but couldn't focus on it properly. Couldn't—now that he paid attention to the fact—focus on much at all. It was not so bad if he closed his left eye. The gee-force might have knocked a retina loose, he speculated. It was precisely that kind of fixable damage that the Daughter was prepared to inflict in the interests of bringing him back alive. With his right eye open he appraised the console. There was a lot of red there—Latinate script proclaiming systems defects—but also many blank areas where there should have been something. The Daughter had clearly sustained heavy damage, he realised: not just mechanical, but also to the cybernetic core of her avionics suite. The ship was in a coma. He tried speaking. "Executive override. Reboot." Nothing happened. Voice recognition might be one of the lost faculties. Either that or the ship was as alive as she was ever going to be. He tried again, just to be on the safe side. "Executive override. Reboot." But still nothing happened. Close down that line of enquiry, he thought. He moved again, shifting an arm until his hand came into contact with one of the tactile control clusters. There was discomfort as he moved, but it was mostly the diffuse pain of heavy bruising rather than the sharpness of broken or dislocated limbs. He could even shift his legs without too much unpleasantness. A screaming jag of pain in his chest didn't bode well for his ribs, however, but his breathing seemed normal enough and there were no odd sensations anywhere else in his chest or abdomen. If a few cracked ribs and a detached retina were all he had suffered, he had done rather well. "You always were a jammy sod," he said to himself as his fingers groped around the many stubs and stalks of the tactile control cluster. Every voice command had a manual equivalent; it was just a question of remembering the right combinations of movements. He had it. Finger there, thumb there. Squeeze. Squeeze again. The ship coughed. Red script flickered momentarily into view where there had been nothing a moment before. Getting somewhere. There was still juice in the old girl. He tried again. The ship coughed and hummed, trying to reboot herself. Flicker of red, then nothing. "Come on," Quaiche said through gritted teeth. He tried again. Third time lucky? The ship spluttered, seemed to shiver. The red script appeared again, faded, then came back. Other parts of the display changed: the ship explored her own functionality as she came out of the coma. "Nice one," Quaiche said as the ship squirmed, reshaping her hull—probably not intentional, just some reflex adjustment back to the default profile. Rubble sputtered against the armour, dislodged in the process. The ship pitched several degrees, Quaiche's view shifting. "Careful..." he said. It was too late. The Scavenger's Daughter had begun to roll, keeling off the ledge where it had come to temporary rest. Quaiche had a glimpse of the floor, still a good hundred metres below, and then it was coming up to meet him, fast. Subjective time stretched the fall to an eternity. Then he hit the deck; although he didn't black out, the tumbling series of impacts felt as if something had him in its jaws and was whacking him against the ground until he either snapped or died. He groaned. This time it seemed unlikely that he was going to get away so lightly. There was heavy pressure on his chest, as if someone had placed an anvil there. The cracked ribs had given in, most likely. That was going to hurt when he had to move. He was still alive, though. And this time the Daughter had landed right-way-up. He could see the bridge again, framed like a scene in a tourist brochure. It was as if Fate were rubbing it in, reminding him of just what it was that had got him into this mess in the first place. Most of the red parts on the console had gone out again. He could see the reflection of his own stunned-looking face hovering behind the fragmented Latinate script, deep shadows cutting into his cheeks and eye sockets. He had seen a similar image, once: the face of some religious figure burned into the fabric of an embalming shroud. Just a sketch of a face, like something done in thick strokes of charcoal. The indoctrinal virus grumbled in his blood. "Reboot," he said, spitting crunched tooth. There was no response. Quaiche groped for the tactile input cluster, found the same sequence of commands, applied them. Nothing happened. He tried again, knowing that this was his only option. There was no other way to awaken the ship without a full diagnostic harness. The console flickered. Something was still alive; there was still a chance. As he kept on applying the wake-up command, a few more systems returned from sleep each time, until, after eight or nine tries, there was no further improvement. He didn't want to continue for fear of draining the remaining avionics power reserves, or stressing the systems that were already alive. He would just have to make do with what he had. Closing his left eye, he scanned the red messages: a cursory glance told him that the Scavenger's Daughter was going nowhere in a hurry. Critical flight systems had been destroyed in the attack, secondaries smashed during the collision with the wall and the long tumble to the ground. His beautiful, precious gem of a private spacecraft was ruined. Even the self-repair mechanisms would have a hard time fixing her now, even if he had months to wait while they worked. But he supposed he should be grateful that the Daughter had kept him alive. In that sense she had not failed him. He examined the read-outs again. The Daughter's automated distress beacon was working. Its range would be restricted by the walls of ice on either side, but there was nothing to obstruct the signal from reaching upwards—except, of course, the gas giant he had positioned between himself and Morwenna. How long was it until she would emerge from the sunlit side of Haldora? He checked the ship's one working chronometer. Four hours until the Dominatrix would emerge from behind Haldora. Four hours. That was all right. He could last that long. The Dominatrix would pick up the distress signal as soon as she came out from behind Haldora, and would then need an hour or so to get down to him. Ordinarily he would never have risked bringing the other ship so close to a potentially dangerous site, but he had no choice. Besides, he doubted that the booby-trap sentries were anything to worry about now: he had destroyed two of three and the third looked to have run out of power; it would surely have taken another pot shot at him by now if it had the means. Four hours, plus another one to reach him: five in total. That was all it would take until he was safe and sound. He would sooner have been out of the mess right now, this instant, but he could hardly complain, especially not after telling Morwenna that she had to endure six hours away from him. And that business about not sewing the relay satellites? He had to admit to himself now that he had been thinking less about Morwenna's safety and more about not wanting to waste any time. Well, he was getting a dose of his own medicine now, wasn't he? Better take it like a man. Five hours. Nothing. Piece of piss. Then he noticed one of the other read-outs. He blinked, opened both eyes, hoping that it was some fault of his vision. But there was no mistake. The hull was breached. The flaw must be tiny: a hairline crack. Ordinarily, it would have been sealed without him knowing about it, but with so much damage to the ship, the normal repair systems were inoperable. Slowly—slowly enough that he had yet to feel it—he was losing air pressure. The Daughter was doing her best to top up the supply with the pressurised reserves, but it could not continue this indefinitely. Quaiche did the sums. Time to exhaustion: two hours. He wasn't going to make it. Did it make any difference whether or not he panicked? He mulled this over, feeling that it was important to know. It was not simply the case that he was stuck in a sealed room with a finite amount of oxygen slowly being replaced by the carbon dioxide of his exhalations. The air was whistling out through a crack in the hull, and the leak was going to continue no matter how quickly he used up the oxygen by breathing. Even if he only drew one breath in the next two hours, there would still be no air left when he came to take the next. It wasn't depleting oxygen that was his problem, it was escaping atmosphere. In two hours he would be sucking on good hard vacuum, the kind some people paid money for. They said it hurt, for the first few seconds. But for him the transition to airlessness would be gradual. He would be unconscious—more than likely dead—long before then. Perhaps within the next ninety minutes. But it probably wouldn't hurt not to panic, would it? It might make a slight difference, depending on the details of the leak. If the air was being lost as it made its way through the recycling system, then it would certainly help matters if he used it as slowly as possible. Not knowing where the crack was, he might as well assume that panic would make a difference to his life expectancy. Two hours might stretch to three... three to four if he was really lucky and prepared to tolerate a bit of brain damage. Four might, just might, stretch to five. He was kidding himself. He had two hours. Two and a half at the absolute limit. Panic all you like, he told himself. It was not going to make a shred of difference. The virus tasted his fear. It gulped it up, feeding on it. It had been simmering until now, but as he tried to hold the panic at bay it rose in him, crushing rational thought. "No," Quaiche said, "I don't need you now." But maybe he did. What good was clarity of mind if there was nothing he could do to save himself? At least the virus would let him die with the illusion that he was in the presence of something larger than himself, something that cared for him and was there to watch over him as he faded away. But the virus simply did not care either way. It was going to flood him with immanence whether he liked it or not. There was no sound save his own breathing and the occasional patter of icy scree still raining down on him, dislodged from the high sides of the rift during his descent. There was nothing to look at except the bridge. But in the silence, distantly, he heard organ music. It was quiet now, but coming nearer, and he knew that when it reached its awesome crescendo it would fill his soul with joy and terror. And though the bridge looked much the way it had before, he could see the beginnings of stained-glass glories in the black sky beyond it, squares and rectangles and lozenges of pastel light starting to shine through the darkness, like windows into something vaster and more glorious. "No," Quaiche said, but this time without conviction. An hour passed. Systems gave up the ghost, portions of the red script dropping off the console. Nothing that failed was going to make much difference to Quaiche's chances of survival. The ship was not going to put him out of his misery by blowing up, however painless and immediate that might have been. No, Quaiche thought: the Scavenger's Daughter would do all in her power to keep him alive until that last ragged breath. The sheer futility of the exercise was completely wasted on the machine. She was still sending out that distress signal, even though he would be two or three hours dead by the time the Dominatrix received it. He laughed: gallows humour. He had always thought of the Daughter as a supremely intelligent machine. By the standards of most spacecraft—certainly anything that did not already have at least a gamma-level subpersona running it—that was probably the case. But when you boiled it down to essentials she was still a bit on the dim side. "Sorry, ship," he said. And laughed again, except this time the laughing segued into a series of self-pitying sobs. The virus was not helping. He had hoped that it would, but the feelings it brought were too superficial. When he most needed their succour he could feel them for the paper-thin façades they were. Just because the virus was tickling the parts of his brain that produced feelings of religious experience didn't mean he was able to turn off the other parts of his mind that recognised these feelings as having been induced artificially. He truly felt himself to be in the presence of something sacred, but he also knew, with total clarity, that this was due to neuroanatomy. Nothing was really with him: the organ music, the stained-glass windows in the sky, the sense of proximity to something huge and timeless and infinitely compassionate were all explicable in terms of neural wiring, firing potentials, synaptic gaps. In his moment of greatest need, when he most desired that comfort, it had deserted him. He was just a godless man with a botched virus in his blood, running out of air, running out of time, on a world to which he had given a name that would soon be forgotten. "I'm sorry, Mor," he said. "I screwed up. I really fucking screwed up." He thought of her, so distant from him, so unreachable... and then he remembered the glass-blower. He hadn't thought about the man for a long time, but then again it had been a long time since he had felt this alone. What was his name? Trollhattan, that was it. Quaiche had encountered him in one of the migrogravitic commercial atria of Pygmalion, one of Parsifal's moons, around Tau Ceti. There had been a glass-blowing demonstration. The free-fall artisan Trollhattan had been an ancient Skyjack defector with plug-in limbs and a face with skin like cured elephant hide, cratered with the holes where radiation-strike melanomas had been inexpertly removed. Trollhattan made fabulous glass constructs: lacy, room-filling things, some of them so delicate that they could not withstand even the mild gravity of a major moon. The constructs were always different. There were three-dimensional glass orreries that stressed the eye with their aching fineness. There were flocks of glass birds, thousands of them, linked together by the tiniest mutual contact of wingtip against wingtip. There were shoals of a thousand fish, the glass of each fish shot through with the subtlest of colours, yellows and blues, the rose-tipped fins of a heartbreaking translucence. There were squadrons of angels, skirmishes of galleons from the age of fighting sail, fanciful reproductions of major space battles. There were creations that were almost painful to look at, as if by the very act of observation one might subtly unbalance the play of light and shade across them, causing some tiny latent crack to widen to the point where the structure became unsustainable. Once, an entire Trollhattan glasswork had indeed spontaneously exploded during its public unveiling, leaving no shard larger than a beetle. No one had ever been sure whether that had been part of the intended effect. What everyone agreed on was that Trollhattan artefacts were expensive. They were not cheap to buy in the first place, but the export costs were a joke. Just getting one of the things off Pygmalion would bankrupt a modest Demarchist state. They could be buffered in smart packing to tolerate modest accelerations, but every attempt to ship a Trollhattan artefact between solar systems had resulted in a lot of broken glass. All surviving works were still in the Tau Ceti system. Entire families had relocated to Parsifal just to be able to possess and show off their own Trollhattan creation. It was said that somewhere in interstellar space, a slow-moving automated barge carried hundreds of the artefacts, crawling towards another system (which one depended on which story you listened to) at a few per cent of lightspeed, fulfilling a commission placed decades earlier. It was also said that whoever had the wit to intercept and pirate that barge—without shattering the Trollhattan artefacts—would be wealthy beyond the bounds of decency. In an era in which practically anything with a blueprint could be manufactured at negligible cost, handmade artefacts with watertight provenance were amongst the few "valuable" things left. Quaiche had considered dabbling in the Trollhattan market during his stay on Parsifal. He had even, briefly, hooked up with an artisan who believed he could produce high-quality fakes using miniature servitors to chew away an entire room-sized block of glass. Quaiche had seen the dry-runs: they were good, but not that good. There was something about the prismatic quality of a real Trollhattan that nothing else in the universe quite matched. It was like the difference between ice and diamond. In any case, the provenance part had been the killer. Unless someone killed off Trollhattan, there was no way the market would swallow the fakes. Quaiche had been sniffing around Trollhattan when he saw the demonstration. He had wanted to see if there was any dirt he could use on the glass-blower, anything that might make him open to negotiation. If Trollhattan could be persuaded to turn a blind eye when the fakes started hitting the market—saying he didn't exactly remember making them, but didn't exactly remember not making them either—then there might still be some mileage to be had out of the scam. But Trollhattan had been untouchable. He never said anything and he never moved in the usual artist's circles. He just blew glass. Dismayed, his enthusiasm for the whole thing waning in any case, Quaiche had lingered long enough to watch part of the demonstration. His cold, dispassionate interest in the practical matter of the value of Trollhattan's art had quickly given way to awe at what was actually involved. Trollhattan's demonstration involved only a small work, not one of the room-filling creations. When Quaiche arrived, the man had already crafted a wonderfully intricate free-floating plant, a thing of translucent green stem and leaves with many horn-shaped flowers in pale ruby; now Trollhattan was fashioning an exquisite shimmering blue thing next to one of the flowers. Quaiche did not immediately recognise the shape, but when Trollhattan began to draw out the incredibly fine curve of a beak towards the flower, Quaiche saw the hummingbird. The arc of amber tapered to its point a finger's width from the flower, and Quaiche imagined that this would be it, that the bird and the plant would float next to one another without being connected. But then the angle of the light shifted and he realised that between the tip of the beak and the stigma of the plant was the finest possible line of blown glass, a crack of gold like the last filament of daylight in a planetary sunset, and that what he was seeing was the tongue of the hummingbird, blown in glass. The effect had surely been deliberate, for the other onlookers noticed the tongue at more or less the same moment. No suggestion of emotion flickered on the parts of Trollhattan's face still nominally capable of registering it. In that moment, Quaiche despised the glass-blower. He despised the vanity of his genius, judging that studied and total absence of emotion to be as reprehensible as any display of pride. Yet he also felt a vast upwelling of admiration for the trick he had just seen performed. How would it feel, Quaiche wondered, to import a glimpse of the miraculous into everyday life? Trollhattan's spectators lived in an age of miracles and wonders. Yet that glimpse of the hummingbird's tongue had clearly been the most surprising and wonderful thing any of them had seen in a long time. It was certainly true for Quaiche. A sliver of glass had moved him to the core, when he was least expecting it. He thought now of the hummingbird's tongue. Whenever he was forced to leave Morwenna, he always imagined a thread of stretching molten glass, tinged with gold and spun out to the exquisite thinness of the hummingbird's tongue, connecting himself to her. As the distance increased, so did the thinness and inherent fragility of the tongue. But as long as he was able to hold that image in mind, and consider himself still linked to her, his isolation did not seem total. He could still feel her through the glass, the tremors of her breathing racing along the thread. But the thread seemed thinner and frailer now than he had ever imagined it, and he didn't think he could feel her breathing at all. He checked the time: another half-hour had passed. Optimistically, he could not have much more than thirty or forty minutes' of air left. Was it his imagination or had the air already begun to taste stale and thin? [ Hela, 2727 ] Rashmika saw the caravan before the others did. It was half a kilometre ahead, merging on to the same track they were following, but still half-hidden by a low series of icy bluffs. It appeared to move very slowly compared to Crozet's vehicle, but as they got closer she realised that this was not true: the vehicles of the caravan were much larger, and it was only this size that made their progress seem at all ponderous. The caravan was a string of perhaps four dozen machines stretching along nearly a quarter of a kilometre of the trail. They moved in two closely spaced columns, almost nose-to-tail, with no more than a metre or two between the back of each vehicle and the front of the one behind it. In Rashmika's estimation, no two of them were exactly alike, although in a few cases it was possible to see that the vehicles must have started off identically, before being added to, chopped about or generally abused by their owners. Their upper structures were a haphazard confusion of jutting additions buttressed with scaffolding. Symbols of ecclesiastical affiliation had been sprayed on wherever possible, often in complicated chains denoting the shifting allegiances between the major churches. On the rooftops of many of the caravan machines were enormous tilted surfaces, all canted at the same precise angle by gleaming pistons. Vapour puffed from hundreds of exhaust apertures. The majority of the caravan vehicles moved on wheels as tall as houses, six or eight under each machine. A few others moved on plodding caterpillar tracks, or multiple sets of jointed walking limbs. A couple of the vehicles used the same kind of rhythmic skiing motion as Crozet's icejammer. One machine moved like a slug, inching itself along via propulsive waves of its segmented mechanical body. She had no idea at all how a couple of them were propelled. But regardless of their mismatched designs, all the machines were able to keep exact pace with each other. The entire ensemble moved with such co-ordinated precision that there were walkways and tunnels thrown across the gaps between them. They creaked and flexed as the distances varied by fractions of a metre, but were never broken or crushed. Crozet steered his icejammer alongside the caravan, using what remained of the trail, and inched forwards. The rumbling wheels towered above the little vehicle. Rashmika watched Crozet's hands on the controls with a degree of unease. All it would take would be a slip of the wrist, a moment's inattention, and they would be crushed under those wheels. But Crozet looked calm enough, as if he had done this kind of thing hundreds of times before. "What are you looking for?" Rashmika asked. "The king vehicle," Crozet said quietly. "The reception point—the place where the caravan does business. It's normally somewhere near the front. This is a pretty big lash-up, though. Haven't seen one like this for a few years." "I'm impressed," Rashmika said, looking up at the moving edifice of machinery towering above the little jammer. "Well, don't be too impressed," Crozet said. "A cathedral—a proper cathedral—is a bit bigger than this. They move slower, but they don't stop either. They can't, not easily. Like stopping a glacier. Near one of those mothers, even I get a bit twitchy. Wouldn't be half so bad if they didn't move..." "There's the king," Linxe said, pointing through the gap in the first column. "Other side, dear. You'll have to loop around." "Fuck. This is the bit I really don't like." "Play it safe and come up from the rear." "Nah." Crozet flashed an arc of dreadful teeth. "Got to show some bloody balls, haven't I?" Rashmika felt her seat kick into the back of her spine as Crozet applied full power. The column slid past as they overtook the vehicles one by one. They were moving faster, but not by very much. Rashmika had expected the caravan to move silently, the way most things did on Hela. She couldn't exactly hear it, but she felt it—a rumble below audible sound, a chorus of sonic components reaching her though the ice, through the ski blades, through the complicated suspension systems of the icejammer. There was the steady rumble of the wheels, like a million booted feet being stamped in impatience. There was the thud, thud, thud, as each plate of the caterpillar tracks slammed into ice. There was the scrabble of picklike mechanical feet struggling for traction against frosty ground. There was the low, groaning scrape of the segmented machine, and a dozen other noises she couldn't isolate. Behind it all, like a series of organ notes, Rashmika heard the labour of countless engines. Crozet's icejammer had gained some distance from the leading pair of machines, which had dropped back behind them by perhaps twice their own length. Batteries of floodlights shone ahead of the caravan, bathing Crozet's vehicle in harsh blue radiance. Rashmika saw tiny figures moving behind windows, and even on the top of the machines themselves, leaning against railings. They wore pressure suits marked with religious iconography. The caravans were a fact of life on Hela, but Rashmika admitted to only scant knowledge of how they operated. She knew the basics, though. The caravans were the mobile agents of the great churches, the bodies that ran the cathedrals. Of course, the cathedrals moved—slowly, as Crozet had said—but they were almost always confined to the equatorial belt of the Permanent Way. They sometimes deviated from the Way, but never this far north or south. The all-terrain caravans, however, could travel more freely. They had the speed to make journeys far from the Way and yet still catch up with their mother cathedrals on the same revolution. They split up and re-formed as they moved, sending out smaller expeditions and merging with others for parts of their journeys. Often, a single caravan might represent three or four different churches, churches that might have fundamentally different views on the matter of the Quaiche miracle and its interpretation. But all the churches shared common needs for labourers and component parts. They all needed recruits. Crozet steered the icejammer into the central part of the path, immediately ahead of the convoy. They had encountered a slight upgrade now, and the slope was causing the icejammer to lose its advantage of speed compared to the caravan, which merely rolled on, oblivious to the change in level. "Be careful now," Linxe said. Crozet flicked his control sticks and the rear of the icejammer swung to the other side of the procession. The nose followed, and with a thud the skis settled into older grooves in the ice. The gradient had sharpened even more, but that was all right now—Crozet no longer needed to keep ahead of the caravan. Slowly, therefore, but with the unstoppable momentum of land sliding past a ship, the lead machines caught up with them. "That's the king, all right," Crozet said. "Looks like they're ready for us, too." Rashmika had no idea what he meant, but as they drew alongside, she saw a pair of skeletal cranes swinging out from the roof, dropping metal hooks. A jaunty pair of suited figures rode down on the cable lines, one standing on each hook. Then they passed out of view, and nothing happened for several further seconds until she heard heavy footsteps stomping around somewhere on the roof of the jammer. Then she heard the clunk of metal against metal, and a moment later the motion of the icejammer was dreamily absent. They were being winched off the ice, suspended to one side of the caravan. "Cheeky sods do it every time," Crozet said. "But there's no point arguing with'em. You either take it or leave it." "At least we can get off and stretch our legs for a bit," Linxe said. "Are we on the caravan now?" Rashmika asked. "Officially, I mean?" "We're on it," Crozet said. Rashmika nodded, relieved that they were now out of reach of the Vigrid constabulary. There had been no sign of the investigators, but in her mind's eye they had only ever been one or two bends behind Crozet's icejammer. She still did not know what to make of the business of the constabulary. She had expected some fuss to be made if the authorities discovered she had run away. But beyond a request for people to keep a lookout for her—and to return her to the badlands if they found her—she had not expected any active efforts to be made to bring her back. It was worse than that, of course, since the constabulary had got it into their heads that she'd had something to do with the explosion in the demolition store. She guessed they were assuming that she was running away because she had done it, out of fear at being found out. They were wrong, of course, but in the absence of a better suspect she had no obvious defence. Crozet and Linxe, thankfully, had given her the benefit of the doubt: either that or they just didn't care what she might have done. But she had still been worried about a constabulary roadblock bringing the icejammer to a halt before they reached the caravan. Now she could stop worrying—about that, at least. It only took a minute for a docking arrangement to be set up. Crozet appeared to have precious little say in the matter, for without him doing anything that Rashmika was aware of, the air in the vehicle gusted, making her ears pop slightly. Then she heard footsteps coming aboard. "They like you to know who's boss," Crozet told her, as if this needed explaining. "But don't be afraid of anyone here, Rashmika. They put on a show of strength, but they still need us badlanders." "Don't worry about me," Rashmika told him. A man bustled into the cabin as if he had left on some minor errand only a minute earlier. His wide froglike face had a meaty complexion, the bridge of skin between the base of his flat nub of a nose and the top of his mouth glistening with something unpleasant. He wore a long-hemmed coat of thick purple fabric, the collars and cuffs generously puffed. A lopsided beret marked with a tiny intricate sigil sat lopsidedly on the red froth of his hair, while his fingers were encumbered by many ornate rings. He carried a compad in one hand, its read-out screen scrolling through columns of numbers in antique script. There was, Rashmika noticed, a kind of construction perched on his right shoulder, a jointed thing of bright green columns and tubes. She had no idea of its function, whether it was an ornament or some arcane medical accessory. "Mr. Crozet," the man said by way of welcome. "What an unexpected surprise. I really didn't think you were going to make it this time." Crozet shrugged. Rashmika could tell he was doing his best to look nonchalant and unconcerned, but the act needed some work. "Can't keep a good man down, Quaestor." "Perhaps not." The man glanced at the screen, pursing his lips in the manner of someone sucking on a lemon. "You have, however, left things a tiny bit late in the day. Pickings are slim, Crozet. I trust you will not be too disappointed." "My life is a series of disappointments, Quaestor. I think I've probably got used to it by now." "One devoutly hopes that is the case. We must all of us know our station in life, Crozet." "I certainly know mine, Quaestor." Crozet did something to the control panel, presumably powering down the icejammer. "Well, are you open for business or not? You've really been working hard to polish that lukewarm welcome routine." The man smiled very thinly. "This is hospitality, Crozet. A lukewarm welcome would have involved leaving you on the ice, or running you over." "I'd best count my blessings, then." "Who are you?" Rashmika asked suddenly, surprising herself. "This is Quaestor..." Linxe said, before she was cut off. "Quaestor Rutland Jones," the man interrupted, his tone actorly, as if playing to the gallery. "Master of Auxiliary Supplies, Superintendent of Caravans and other Mobile Units, Roving Legate of the First Adventist Church. And you'd be?" "The First Adventists?" she asked, just to make sure she had heard him properly. There were many offshoots of the First Adventists, a number of them rather large and influential churches in their own right, and some of them had names so similar that it was easy to get them confused. But the First Adventist Church was the one she was interested in. She added, "As in the oldest church, the one that goes all the way back?" "Unless I am very mistaken about my employer, yes. I still don't believe you have answered my question, however." "Rashmika," she said, "Rashmika Els." "Els." The man chewed on the syllable. "Quite a common name in the villages of the Vigrid badlands, I believe. But I don't think I've ever encountered an Els this far south." "You might have, once," Rashmika said. But that was a little unfair: though the caravan her brother had travelled on had also been affiliated to the Adventists, it was unlikely that it had been this one. "I'd remember, I think." "Rashmika is travelling with us," Linxe said. "Rashmika is... a clever girl. Aren't you, dear?" "I get by," Rashmika said. "She thought she might find a role in the churches," Linxe said. She licked her fingers and neatened the hair covering her birthmark. He put down the compad. "A role?" "Something technical," Rashmika said. She had rehearsed this encounter a dozen times, always in her imagination having the upper hand, but it was all happening too quickly and not the way she had hoped. "We can always use keen young girls," the quaestor said. He was digging in a chest pocket for something. "And boys, for that matter. It would depend on your talents." "I have no talents," Rashmika said, transforming the word into an obscenity. "But I happen to be literate and numerate. I can program most marques of servitor. I know a great deal about the study of the scuttlers. I have ideas about their extinction. Surely that can be of use to someone in the church." "She wonders if she couldn't find a position in one of the church-sponsored archaeological study groups," Linxe said. "Is that so?" the quaestor asked. Rashmika nodded. As far as she was concerned, the church-sponsored study groups were a joke, existing only to rubber-stamp current Quaicheist doctrine regarding the scuttlers; but she had to start somewhere. Her real goal was to reach Harbin, not to advance her study of the scuttlers. However, it would be much easier to find him if she began her service in a clerical position—such as one of the study groups—rather than with lowly work like Way repair. "I think I could be of value," she said. "Knowing a great deal about the study of a subject is not the same as knowing anything about the subject itself," the quaestor told her with a sympathetic smile. He pulled his hand from his breast pocket, a small pinch of seeds between forefinger and thumb. The jointed green thing on his shoulder stirred, moving with a curious stiffness that reminded Rashmika of something inflated, like a balloon-creature. It was an animal, but unlike any that Rashmika—in her admittedly limited experience-remembered seeing. She saw now that at one end of its thickest tube was a turretlike head, with faceted eyes and a delicate, mechanical-looking mouth. The quaestor offered his fingers to the creature, pursing his lips in encouragement. The creature stretched itself down his arm and attacked the pinch of seeds with a nibbling politeness. What was it? she wondered. The body and limbs were insectile, but the elongated coil of its tail, which was wrapped around the quaestor's upper arm several times, was more suggestive of a reptile. And there was something uniquely birdlike about the way it ate. She remembered birds from somewhere, brilliant crested strutting things of cobalt blue with tails that opened like fans. Peacocks. But where had she ever seen peacocks? The quaestor smiled at his pet. "Doubtless you have read many books," he said, looking sidelong at Rashmika. "That is to be applauded." She looked at the animal warily. "I grew up in the digs, Quaestor. I've helped with the excavation work. I've breathed scuttler dust from the moment I was born." "Unfortunately, though, that's hardly the most unique of claims. How many scuttler fossils have you examined?" "None," Rashmika said, after a moment. "Well, then." The quaestor dabbed his forefinger against his lip, then touched it against the mouthpiece of the animal. "That's enough for you, Peppermint." Crozet coughed. "Shall we continue this discussion aboard the caravan, Quaestor? I don't want to have too great a journey back home, and we still have a lot of business to attend to." The creature—Peppermint—retreated back along the quaestor's arm now that its feast was over. It began to clean its face with tiny scissoring forelimbs. "The girl's your responsibility, Crozet?" the quaestor asked. "Not exactly, no." He looked at Rashmika and corrected himself. "What I mean is, yes, I'm taking care of her until she gets where she's going, and I'll take it personally if anyone lays a hand on her. But what she does with herself after that is none of my business." The quaestor's attention snapped back to Rashmika. "And how old are you, exactly?" "Old enough," she said. The green creature turned the turret of its head towards her, its blank faceted eyes like blackberries. [ Hela Surface, 2615 ] Quaiche slipped in and out of consciousness. With each transition, the difference between the two states became less clear cut. He hallucinated, and then hallucinated that the hallucinations were real. He kept seeing rescuers scrabbling over the scree, picking up their pace as they saw him, waving their gloved hands in greeting. The second or third time, it made him laugh to think that he had imagined rescuers arriving under exactly the same circumstances as the real ones. No one would ever believe him, would they? But somewhere between the rescuers arriving and the point where they started getting him to safety, he always ended up back in the ship, his chest aching, one eye seeing the world as if through a gauze. The Dominatrix kept arriving, sliding down between the sheer walls of the rift. The long, dark ship would kneel down on spikes of arresting thrust. The mid-hull access hatch would slide open and Morwenna would emerge. She would come out in a blur of pistons, racing to his rescue, as magnificent and terrible as an army arrayed for battle. She would pull him from the wreck of the Daughter, and with a dreamlike illogic he would not need to breathe as she helped him back to the other ship through a crisp, airless landscape of shadow and light. Or she would come out in the scrimshaw suit, somehow managing to make it move even though he knew the thing was welded tight, incapable of flexing. Gradually the hallucinations took precedence over rational thought. In a period of lucidity, it occurred to Quaiche that the kindest thing would be for one of the hallucinations to occur just as he died, so that he was spared the jolting realisation that he had still to be rescued. He saw Jasmina coming to him, striding across the scree with Grelier lagging behind. The queen was clawing out her eyes as she approached, banners of gore streaming after her. He kept waking up, but the hallucinations blurred into one another, and the feelings induced by the virus became stronger. He had never known such intensity of experience before, even when the virus had first entered him. The music was behind every thought, the stained-glass light permeating every atom of the universe. He felt intensely observed, intensely loved. The emotions did not feel like a façade any more, but the way things really were. It was as if until now he had only been seeing the reflection of something, or hearing the muffled echo of some exquisitely lovely and heart-wrenching music. Could this really just be the action of an artificially engineered virus on his brain? It had always felt like that before, a series of crude mechanically induced responses, but now the emotions felt like an integral part of him, leaving no room for anything else. It was like the difference between a theatrical stage effect and a thunderstorm. Some dwindling, rational part of him said that nothing had really changed, that the feelings were still due to the virus. His brain was being starved of oxygen as the air in the cabin ran out. Under those circumstances, it would not have been unusual to feel some emotional changes. And with the virus still present, the effects could have been magnified many times. But that rational part was quickly squeezed out of existence. All he felt was the presence of the Almighty. "All right," Quaiche said, before passing out, "I believe now. You got me. But I still need a miracle."
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Hela, 2615	He woke. He was moving. The air was cold but fresh and there was no pain in his chest. <So this is it,> he thought. The last hallucination, perhaps, before his brain slid into the trough of cascading cell-death. <Just make it a good one, and try to keep it up until I die. That's all I'm asking for.> But it felt real this time. He tried looking around, but he was still trapped inside the Daughter. Yet his view of things was moving, the landscape bouncing and jolting. He realised that he was being dragged across the scree, down to the level part of the floor. He craned his neck and through his good eye he saw a commotion of pistons, shining limb joints. Morwenna. But it wasn't Morwenna. It was a servitor, one of the repair units from the Dominatrix. The spiderlike robot had attached adhesive traction plates to the Scavenger's Daughter and was hauling it across the ground, with Quaiche still in it. Of course, of course, of course: how else was it going to get him out of there? He felt stupid now. He had no suit and no airlock. For all intents and purposes, in fact, the ship was his vacuum suit. Why had this never occurred to him before? He felt better: clear-headed and sharp. He noticed that the servitor had plugged something into one of the Daughter's umbilical points. Feeding fresh air back into it, probably. The Daughter would have told the servitor what needed to be done to keep her occupant alive. The air might even be supercharged with oxygen, to take the edge off his pain and anxiety. He could not believe this was happening. After all the hallucinations, this really, genuinely felt like reality. It had the prickly texture of actual experience. And he did not think that servitors had featured in any of his hallucinations to date. He had never thought things through clearly enough to work out that a servitor would have to drag the ship to safety with him in it. Obvious in hindsight, but in his dreams it had always been people coming to his rescue. That one neglected detail had to make it real, didn't it? Quaiche looked at the console. How much time had passed? Had he really managed to make the air last for five hours? It had seemed doubtful before, but here he was, still breathing. Perhaps the indoctrinal virus had helped, putting his brain into some mysterious state of zenlike calm so that he used up the oxygen less quickly. But there wouldn't have been any air left, let alone oxygen, not by the third or fourth hour. Unless the ship had made a mistake. This was a dismaying thought, given all that he had been through, but it was the only possible explanation. The air leak must not have been as serious as the Daughter had thought it was. Perhaps it had started off badly, but had sealed itself to some extent. Perhaps the auto-repair systems had not been totally destroyed, and the Daughter had been able to fix the leak. Yes, that had to be it. There was simply no other explanation. But the console said that only three hours had passed since his crash. That wasn't possible. The Dominatrix was still supposed to be tucked away behind Haldora, out of communications range. It would be out of range for another sixty minutes! Many more minutes, even at maximum burn, before it could possibly reach him. And maximum burn was not an option either, was it? There was a person aboard the ship who had to be protected. At the very least, the Dominatrix would have been restricted to slowdown acceleration. But it was sitting there, on the ice. It looked as real as anything else. The time had to be wrong, he thought. The time had to be wrong, and the leak must have fixed itself. There was no other possibility. Well, there was, now that he thought about it, but it did not merit close examination. If the time was right, then the Dominatrix must have somehow received his distress signal before emerging from behind Haldora. The signal would have had to find its way around the obstruction of the planet. Could that have happened? He had assumed it was impossible, but with the evidence of the ship sitting before him, he was ready to consider anything. Had some quirk of atmospheric physics acted as a relay for his message, curving it around Haldora? He couldn't swear that something like that was impossible. If the clock was correct, what was the alternative? That the entire planet had ceased to exist just long enough for his message to get through? Now that would have been a miracle. He had asked for one, but he hadn't really been expecting one. Another servitor was waiting by the open dorsal lock. Co-operating, the two machines hoisted the Daughter into the Dominatrix. Once inside the bay, the machines nudged the Daughter until a series of clunking sounds resonated through the hull. Despite the damage it had sustained, the little ship was still more or less the right shape to be accommodated by the cradle. Quaiche looked down, watched the airlock sealing beneath him. A minute later, another servitor—much smaller this time—was opening the Daughter, preparing to lift him out of it. "Morwenna," he said, finding the energy to talk despite the returning pain in his chest. "Morwenna, I'm back. Bruised but intact." But there was no reply. [ Ararat, 2675 ] The capsule was preparing to open. Clavain sat before it, his fingers laced together beneath his chin, his head bowed as if in prayer, or the remorseful contemplation of some recent and dreadful sin. He had thrown back his hood; white hair spilled over the collar of his coat and on to his shoulders. He looked like an old man, of obvious stature and respectability, but he did not look much like the Clavain everyone thought they knew. Scorpio had little doubt that the workers would go back to their husbands and wives, lovers and friends and, despite express orders to the contrary, they would talk abut the elderly apparition that had materialised out of the night. They would remark on his uncanny similarity to Clavain, but how much older and frailer he looked. Scorpio was equally certain they would prefer the old man to turn out to be someone else entirely, with their leader really halfway around the world. If they accepted this old man as Clavain, it meant that they had been lied to, and that Clavain was nothing more than a grey ghost of himself. Scorpio sat down in the vacant seat next to him. "Picking something up?" It was a while before Clavain answered, his voice a whisper. "Not much more than the housekeeping stuff I already reported. The capsule blocks most of his neural transmissions. They're only coming through in shards, and sometimes the packets are scrambled." "Then you're certain it's Remontoire?" "I'm certain that it isn't Skade. Who else can it be?" "I'd say there are dozens of possibilities," Scorpio whispered back. "No, there aren't. The person inside this capsule is a Conjoiner." "One of Skade's allies, then." "No. Her friends were all cast from the same mould: new-model Conjoiners, fast and efficient and as cold as ice. Their minds feel different." "You're losing me, Nevil." "You think we're all alike, Scorp. We're not. We never were. Every Conjoiner I ever linked minds with was different. Whenever I touched Remontoire's thoughts it was like..." Clavain hesitated for a moment, smiling slightly when the right analogy occurred to him. "Like touching the mechanism of a clock. An old clock, good and dependable. The kind they had in churches. Something made of iron, something ratcheted and geared. I think to him I was something even slower and more mechanical... a grindstone, perhaps. Whereas Galiana's mind..." He faltered. "Easy, Nevil." "I'm all right. Her mind was like a room full of birds. Beautiful, clever songbirds. And they were singing—not in some mindless cacophony, not in unison, but to each other—a web of song, a shining, shimmering conversation, quicker than the mind could follow. And Felka..." He hesitated again, but resumed his thread almost immediately. "Felka's was like a turbine hall, that awful impression of simultaneous stillness and dreadful speed. She seldom let me see deep into it. I'm sure she thought I wouldn't be able to take it." "And Skade?" "She was like a shining silver abattoir, all whirling and whisking blades, designed to slice and chop reality and anyone foolish enough to peer too far into her skull. At least, that's what I saw when she let me. It may not have had very much to do with her true mental state. Her head was like a hall of mirrors. What you saw in it was only what she wanted you to see." Scorpio nodded. He had met Skade on precisely one occasion, for a few minutes only. Clavain and the pig had infiltrated her ship, which was damaged and drifting after she had attempted, with the aid of dangerous alien machinery, to exceed the speed of light. She had been weakened then, and evidently disturbed by the things that she had seen after the accident. But even though he had not been able to see into her mind, he had come away from the meeting with a sure sense that Skade was not a woman to be trifled with. Frankly, he did not very much mind that he would never be able to see into her skull. But he still had to assume the worst. If Skade was in the capsule, it was entirely possible that she would be disguising her neural packets, lulling Clavain into a false sense of security, waiting for the moment when she could claw her way into his skull. "The instant you feel anything odd..." Scorpio began. "It's Rem." "You're absolutely certain of that?" "I'm certain it isn't Skade. Good enough for you?" "I suppose it'll have to do, pal." "It had better," Clavain said, "because..." He fell silent and blinked. "Wait. Something's happening." "Good or bad?" "We're all about to find out." The glowing displays in the side of the egg had never been still since the moment it had been pulled from the sea, but now they were changing abruptly, flicking from one distinct mode to another. A pulsing red circle was now flashing several times a second rather than once every ten. Scorpio watched it, hypnotised, and then observed it stop flashing entirely, glaring at them with baleful intent. The red circle became green. Something inside the egg made a muffled series of clunks, making Scorpio think of the kind of old mechanical clock Clavain had described. A moment later the side of the capsule cracked open: Scorpio, for all that he was expecting something, jumped at the sudden lurch of movement. Cool steam vented out from under the widening crack. A large plaque of scorched metal folded itself back on smooth hinged machinery. A jangle of smells hit the pig: sterilising agents, mechanical lubricants, boiling coolants, human effluvia. The steam cleared to reveal a naked human woman packed inside the egg, bent into a foetal position. She was covered in a scum of protective green jelly; lacy black machinery curled around her, like vines wrapping a statue. "Skade?" Scorpio said. She didn't look like his memories of Skade—her head was the right shape, for a start—but a second opinion never hurt. "Not Skade," Clavain said. "And not Remontoire, either." He stood back from the capsule. Some automated system kicked in. The machinery began to unwind itself from around her, while pressure jets cleansed her skin of the protective green jelly. Beneath the matrix her flesh was a pale shade of caramel. The hair on her skull had been shaved almost to the scalp. Small breasts were tucked into the concave space between her legs and upper body. "Let me see her," Valensin said. Scorpio held him back. "Hold on. She's come this far on her own; I'm sure she can manage for a few more minutes." "Scorp's right," Clavain said. The woman quivered like some inanimate thing shocked into a parody of life. With stiff scrabbling movements she picked at the jelly with her fingers, flinging it away in cloying patches. Her movements became more frantic, as if she was trying to douse a fire. "Hello," Clavain said, raising his voice. "Take it easy. You're safe and amongst friends." The seat or frame into which the woman had been folded pushed itself from the egg on pistons. Even though much of the enveloping machinery had unwrapped itself, a great many cables still vanished into the woman's body. A complex plastic breathing apparatus obscured the lower part of her face, giving her a simian profile. "Anyone recognise her?" Vasko asked. The frame was slowly unwinding the woman, pulling her out of the foetal position into a normal human posture. Ligaments and joints creaked and clicked unpleasantly. Beneath the mask the woman groaned and began to rip away the cables and lines that punctured her skin or were attached to it by adhesive patches. "I recognise her," Clavain said quietly. "Her name's Ana Khouri. She was Ilia Volyova's sidekick on the old Infinity, before it fell into our hands." "The ex-soldier," Scorpio said, remembering the few times he had met the woman and the little he knew of her past. "You're right—it's her. But she looks different, somehow." "She would. She's twenty years older, give or take. They've also turned her into a Conjoiner." "You mean she wasn't one before?" Vasko asked. "Not while we knew her," Clavain said. Scorpio looked at the old man. "Are you sure she's one now?" "I picked up her thoughts, didn't I? I could tell she wasn't Skade or one of Skade's cronies. Stupidly, I assumed that meant she had to be Remontoire." Valensin attempted to push past one more time. "I'd like to help her now, if that's not too much of an inconvenience." "She's taking care of herself," Scorpio said. Khouri sat in what was almost a normal position, the way someone might sit while waiting for an appointment. But the moment of composure only lasted a few seconds. She reached up and pulled away the mask, tugging fifteen centimetres of phlegmy plastic tubing from her throat. At that point she let out a single bellowing gasp, as if someone had punched her unexpectedly in the stomach. Hacking coughs followed, before her breathing settled down. "Scorpio..." Valensin said. "Doc, I haven't hit a man in twenty-three years. Don't give me a reason to make an exception. Sit down, all right?" "Better do as he says," Clavain told him. Khouri turned her head to face them. She held up a palm to shade the bloodshot slits of her eyes, blinking through the gaps between her fingers. Then she stood, still facing them. Scorpio watched with polite indifference. Some pigs would have been stimulated by the presence of a naked human woman, just as there were some humans who were attracted to pigs. But although the points of physiological difference between a female pig and a female human were hardly extreme, it was precisely those differences that mattered to Scorpio. Khouri steadied herself by holding on to the capsule with one hand. She stood with her knees slightly together, as if at any moment she might collapse. Yet she was able to tolerate the glare now, if only by squinting at them. She spoke. Her voice was hoarse but firm. "Where am I?" "You're on Ararat," Scorpio said. "Where." It was not phrased as a question. "On Ararat will do for now." "Near your main settlement, I'm guessing." "As I said..." "How long has it been?" "That depends," Scorpio said. "A couple of days since we picked up the beacon from your capsule. How long you were under the sea, we don't know. Or how long it took you to reach the planet." "A couple of days?" The way she looked at him, it was as if he had said weeks or months. "What exactly took you so long?" "You're lucky we got to you as quickly as we did," Blood said. "And the wakeup schedule wasn't in our control." "Two days... Where's Clavain? I want to see him. Please don't anyone tell me you let him die before I got here." "You needn't worry about that," Clavain said mildly. "As you can see, I'm still very much alive." She stared at him for a few seconds with the sneering expression of someone who thought they might be the victim of a poorly executed hoax. "You?" "Yes." He offered his palms. "Sorry to be such a disappointment." She looked at him for a moment longer, then said, "I'm sorry. It's just not... quite what I was expecting." "I believe I can still make myself useful." He turned to Blood. "Fetch her a blanket, will you? We don't want her catching her death of cold. Then I think we'd better let Doctor Valensin perform a comprehensive medical examination." "No time for that," Khouri said, ripping away a few adhesive patches she had missed. "I want you to get me something that can cross water. And some weapons." She paused, then added, "And some food and water. And some clothes." "You seem in a bit of a hurry," Clavain said. "Can't it wait until morning? It's been twenty-three years, after all. There must be a great deal to talk about." "You have no fucking idea," she said. Blood handed Clavain a blanket. He stepped forward and offered it to Khouri. She wrapped it around herself without any real enthusiasm. "We can do boats," Clavain said, "and guns. But I think it might help if we had some idea just why you need them right this moment." "Because of my baby," Khouri said. Clavain nodded politely. "Your baby." "My daughter. Her name's Aura. She's here, on... what did you say this place was called?" "Ararat," Clavain said. "OK, she's here on Ararat. And I've come to rescue her." Clavain glanced at his companions. "And where would your daughter be, exactly?" "About eight hundred kilometres away," Khouri said. "Now get me those weps. And an incubator. And someone who knows field surgery." "Why field surgery?" Clavain asked. "Because," Khouri replied, "you're going to have to get her out of Skade first."
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Hela, 2727	Rashmika looked up at the scuttler fossil. A symbol of conspicuous wealth, it hung from the ceiling in a large atrium area of the caravan vehicle. Even if it was a fake, or a semi-fake botched together from incompatible parts, it was still the first apparently complete scuttler she had ever seen. She wanted to find a way to climb up there and examine it properly, taking note of the abrasion patterns where the hard carapacial sections slid against each other. Rashmika had only ever read about such things, but she was certain that with an hour of careful study she would be able to tell whether it was authentic, or at the very least exclude the possibility of its being a cheap fake. Somehow she didn't think it was very likely to be either cheap or fake. Mentally, she classified the scuttler body morphology. DK4V8M, she thought. Maybe a DK4V8L, if she was being confused by the play of dust and shadows around the trailing tail-shell. At least it was possible to apply the usual morphological classification scheme. The cheap fakes sometimes threw body parts together in anatomically impossible formations, but this was definitely a plausible assemblage of components, even if they hadn't necessarily come from the same burial site. The scuttlers were a taxonomist's nightmare. The first time one had been unearthed, it had appeared to be a simple case of reassembling the scattered body parts to make something that looked like a large insect or lobster. The scuttler exhibited a complexity of body sections, with many different highly specialised limbs and sensory organs, but they had all snapped back together in a more or less logical fashion, leaving only the soft interior organs to be conjectured. But the second scuttler hadn't matched the first. There were a different number of body sections, a different number of limbs. The head and mouth parts looked very dissimilar. Yet—again—all the pieces snapped together to make a complete specimen, with no embarrassing bits left over. The third hadn't matched the first or second. Nor the fourth or fifth. By the time the remains of a hundred scuttlers had been unearthed and reassembled, there were a hundred different versions of the scuttler body-plan. The theorists groped for an explanation. The implication was that no two scuttlers were born alike. But two simultaneous discoveries shattered that idea overnight. The first was the unearthing of an intact clutch of infant scuttlers. Though there were some differences in body-plan, there were identical infants. Based on their frequency of occurrence, statistics argued that at least three identical adults should already have been discovered. The second discovery—which happened to explain the first—was the unearthing of a pair of adult scuttlers in the same area. They had been found in separated but connected chambers of an underground tunnel system. Their body parts were reassembled, providing another two unique morphologies. But upon closer examination something unexpected was discovered. A young researcher named Kimura had begun to take a particular interest in the patterns caused by the body sections scraping against each other. Something struck her as not quite right about the two new specimens. The scratch marks were inconsistent: a scrape on the edge of one carapace had no matching counterpart on the adjoining one. At first, Kimura assumed the two clusters of body parts were hoaxes; there was already a small market for that kind of thing. But something made her dig a little deeper. She worried at the problem for weeks, convinced that she was missing something obvious. Then one night, after a particularly busy day examining the scratches at higher and higher magnifications, she slept on it. She dreamed feverish dreams, and when she woke she dashed back to her lab and confirmed her nagging suspicion. There was a precise match for every scratch—but it was always to be found on the other scuttler. The scuttlers interchanged body parts with each other. That was why no two scuttlers were ever alike. They made themselves dissimilar: swapping components in ritualised ceremonies, then crawling away to their own little hollows to recuperate. As more scuttler pairs were unearthed, so the near-infinite possibilities of the arrangement became apparent. The exchange of body parts had pragmatic value, allowing scuttlers to adapt themselves for particular duties and environments. But there was also an aesthetic purpose to the ritualised swapping: a desire to be as atypical as possible. Scuttlers that had deviated far from the average body plan were socially successful creatures, for they must have participated in many exchanges. The ultimate stigma—so far as Kimura and her colleagues could tell—was for one scuttler to be identical to another. It meant that at least one of the pair was an outcast, unable to find a swap-partner. Bitter arguments ensued among the human researchers. The majority view was that this behaviour could not have evolved naturally; that it must stem from an earlier phase of conscious bioengineering, when the scuttlers tinkered with their own anatomies to allow whole body parts to be swapped from creature to creature without the benefit of microsurgery and antirejection drugs. But a minority of researchers held that the swapping was too deeply ingrained in scuttler culture to have arisen in their recent evolutionary history. They suggested that, billions of years earlier, the scuttlers had been forced to evolve in an intensely hostile environment—the evolutionary equivalent of a crowded lobster pot. So hostile, in fact, that there had been a survival value not just in being able to regrow a severed limb, but also in actually being able to reattach a severed limb there and then, before it was eaten. The limbs—and later, major body parts—had evolved in turn, developing the resilience to survive being ripped from the rest of the body. As the survival pressure increased, the scuttlers had evolved intercompatibility, able to make use not just of their own discarded parts but those of their kin. Perhaps even the scuttlers themselves had no memory of when the swapping had begun. Certainly, there was no obvious allusion to it in the few symbolic records that had ever been found on Hela. It was too much a part of them, too fundamentally a part of the way they viewed reality, for them to have remarked upon it. Looking up at the fantastic creature, Rashmika wondered what the scuttlers would have made of humanity. Very probably they would have found the human race just as bizarre, regarding its very immutability horrific, like a kind of death. Rashmika knelt down and propped the family compad on the slope of her legs. She flipped it open and pulled the stylus from its slot in the side. It wasn't comfortable, but she would only be sitting like that for a few minutes. She began to draw. The stylus scratched against the compad with each fluid, confident stroke of her hand. An alien animal took shape on the screen. Linxe had been right about the caravan: no matter how frosty the reception had been, it still afforded them all the chance to get out of the icejammer for the first time in three days. Rashmika was surprised at the difference it made to her general mood. It wasn't just that she had stopped worrying about the attention of the Vigrid constabulary, although the question of why they had come after her continued to nag at her. The air was fresher in the caravan, with interesting breezes and varying smells, none of which were as unpleasant as those aboard the icejammer. There was room to stretch her legs, as well: the interior of just this one caravan vehicle was generously laid out, with wide, tall gangways, comfortable rooms and bright lights. Everything was spick-and-span and—compared at least to the welcome—the amenities were more than adequate. Food and drink were provided, clothes could be washed, and for once it was possible to reach a state of reasonable cleanliness. There were even various kinds of entertainment, even though it was all rather bland compared to what she was used to. And there were new people, faces she hadn't seen before. She realised, after some reflection, that she had been wrong in her initial judgement of the relationship between the quaestor and Crozet. While there did not appear to be much love lost between them, it was obvious now that both parties had been of some use to each other in the past. The mutual rudeness had been a charade, concealing an icy core of mutual respect. The quaestor was fishing for titbits, aware that Crozet might still have something he could use. Crozet, meanwhile, needed to leave with mechanical spares or other barterable goods. Rashmika had only intended to sit in on a few of the negotiation sessions, but she quickly realised that she could, in a small way, be of practical use to Crozet. To facilitate this she sat at one end of the table, a sheet of paper and a pen before her. She was not allowed to bring the compad into the room, in case it contained voice-stress-analysis software or some other prohibited system. Rashmika noted down observations about the items Crozet was selling, writing and sketching with the neatness she had always taken pride in. Her interest was genuine, but her presence also served another purpose. In the first negotiation session, there had been two buyers. Later, there was sometimes a third or fourth, and the quaestor or one of his deputies would always attend as an observer. Each session would begin with one of the buyers asking Crozet what he had to offer them. "We aren't looking for scuttler relics," they said the first time. "We're simply not interested. What we want are artefacts of indigenous human origin. Things left on Hela in the last hundred years, not million-year-old rubbish. There's a declining market for useless alien junk, what with all the rich solar systems being evacuated. Who wants to add to their collection, when they're busy selling their assets to buy a single freezer slot?" "What sort of human artefacts?" "Useful ones. These are dark times: people don't want art and ephemera, not unless they think it's going to bring them luck. Mainly what they want are weapons and survival systems, things they think might give them an edge when whatever they're running from catches up with them. Contraband Conjoiner weapons. Demarchist armour. Anything with plague-tolerance, that's always an easy sell." "As a rule," Crozet said, "I don't do weapons." "Then you need to adapt to a changing market," one of the men replied with a smirk. "The churches moving into the arms trade? Isn't that a tiny bit inconsistent with scripture?" "If people want protection, who are we to deny them?" Crozet shrugged. "Well, I'm all out of guns and ammo. If anyone's still digging up human weapons on Hela, it isn't me." "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, bonelike 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. 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. [ Ararat, 2675 ] 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 cognizant 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." "The ships are here," she said, sighing, as if spoiling a carefully planned surprise. "All of them. They're concentrated in the immediate volume of space around this planet. Remontoire, the Zodiacal Light, the two remaining starships from Skade's taskforce—they're all up there, within one AU of this planet. They've been in your system for nine weeks. That's how I got here, Clavain." "You can't hide ships that easily," he said. "Not consistently, not all the time. Not when we're actively looking for them." "We can now," she said. "We have techniques you know nothing about. Things we've learned... things we've had to learn since the last time you saw us. Things you won't believe." Clavain glanced at Scorpio. The pig tried to guess what was going through the old man's mind and failed. "Such as?" Clavain asked. "New engines," she said. "Dark drives. You can't see them. Nothing sees them. The exhaust... slips away. Camouflaging screens. Free-force bubbles. Miniaturised cryo-arithmetic engines. Reliable control of inertia on bulk scales. Hypometric weapons." She shivered. "I really don't like the hypometric weapons. They scare me. I've seen what happens when they go wrong. They're not right." "All that in twenty-odd years?" Clavain asked, incredulously. "We had some help." "Sounds as if you had God on the end of the phone, taking down your wish list." "It wasn't God, believe me. I should know. I was the one who did the asking." "And who exactly did you ask?" "My daughter," Khouri said. "She knows things, Clavain. That's why she's valuable. That's why Skade wants her." Scorpio felt dizzy: it seemed that every time they scratched back one layer of Khouri's story, there was something even less comprehensible behind it. "I still don't understand why you didn't signal your arrival from orbit," Clavain said. "Partly because we didn't want to draw attention to Ararat," Khouri said. "Not until we had to. There's a war going on up there, understand? A major space engagement, with heavily stealthed combatants. Any kind of signalling is a risk. There's also a lot of jamming and disruption going on." "Between Skade's forces and your own?" "It's more complicated than that. Until recently, Skade was fighting with us, rather than against us. Even now, aside from the personal business between Skade and myself, I'd say we're in what you might call a state of uneasy truce." "Then who the hell are you fighting?" Clavain asked. "The Inhibitors," Khouri said. "The wolves, whatever you want to call them." "They're here?" Scorpio asked. "Actually in this system?" "Sorry to rain on your parade," Khouri said. "Well," Clavain said, looking around, "I don't know about the rest of you, but that certainly puts a dent in my day." "That was the idea," Khouri said. Clavain ran a finger down the straight line of his nose. "One other thing. Several times since you arrived here you've mentioned a word that sounds like 'hella.' You even said we had to get there. The name means nothing to me. What is its significance?" "I don't know," she said. "I don't even remember saying it."
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Hela, 2727	Quaestor Jones had been warned to expect a new guest aboard his caravan. The warning had come straight from the Permanent Way, with the official seals of the Clocktower. Shortly afterwards, a small spacecraft—a single-seat shuttle of Ultra manufacture shaped like a cockleshell—came sliding over the procession of caravan vehicles. The ruby-hulled vehicle loitered on a spike of expertly balanced thrust, hovering unnervingly while the caravan continued on its way. Then it lowered, depositing itself on the main landing pad. The hull opened and a vacuum-suited figure stepped from the vehicle's hatch. The figure hesitated, reaching back into the cockpit for a walking stick and a small white case. Cameras tracked him from different viewpoints as he made his way down into the caravan, opening normally impassable doors with Clocktower keys, shutting them neatly behind him. He walked very slowly, taking his time, giving the quaestor the opportunity to exercise his imagination. Now and then he tapped his cane against some component of the caravan, or paused to run a gloved hand along the top of a wall, inspecting his fingers as if for dust. "I don't like this, Peppermint," the quaestor told the creature perched on his desk. "It's never good when they send someone out, especially when they only give you an hour's warning. It means they want to surprise you. It means they think you're up to something." The creature busied itself with the small pile of seeds the quaestor had tipped on to the table. There was something engrossing about just watching it eat and then clean itself. Its faceted black eyes—in the right light they were actually a very dark, lustrous purple—shone like rare minerals. "Who can it be, who can it be..." the quaestor said, drumming his fingers on the table. "Here, have some more seeds. A stick. Who do we know who walks with a stick?" The creature looked up at him, as if on the verge of having an opinion. Then it went back to its nibbling, its tail coiled around a paperweight. "This isn't good, Peppermint. I can feel it." The quaestor prided himself on running a tight ship, as far as caravans went. He did what the church asked of him, but in every other respect he kept his nose out of cathedral business. His caravan always returned to the Way on time to meet its rendezvous, and he rarely came back without a respectable haul of pilgrims, migrant workers and scuttler artefacts. He took care of his passengers and clients without in any way seeking their friendship or gratitude. He needed neither: he had his responsibilities, and he had Peppermint, and that was all that mattered. Things had not been as good lately as in the past, but that went for all the caravans, and if they were going to single anyone out for punishment, there were others who had far worse records than the quaestor. Besides, the church must have been largely satisfied with his work for them over the last few years, or else they would not have allowed his caravan to grow so large and to travel such important trade routes. He had a good relationship with the cathedral officials he dealt with, and—though none of them would ever have admitted it—a reputation for fairness when it came to dealing with traders like Crozet. So what was the purpose of this surprise visit? He hoped it had nothing to do with blood. It was well known that the closer you got to cathedral business, the more likely you were to come into contact with the agents of the Office of Bloodwork, that clerical body which promulgated the literal blood of Quaiche. Bloodwork was an organ of the Clocktower, he knew that. But this far from the Way, Quaiche's blood ran thin and diluted. It was hard to live in the country, beyond the iron sanctuary of the cathedrals. You needed to think about icefalls and geysers. You needed detachment and clarity of mind, not the chemical piety of an indoctrinal virus. But what if there had been a change of policy, a broadening of the reach of Bloodwork? "It's that Crozet," he said, "always brings bad luck. Shouldn't have let him aboard this late in the run. Should've sent him back with his tail between his legs. He's a lazy good-for-nothing, that one." Peppermint looked up at him. The little mouthparts said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." "Yes, thank you, Peppermint." The quaestor opened his desk drawer. "Now why don't you climb in there until we've seen our visitor? And keep your trap shut." He reached out for the creature, ready to fold it gently into a form that would fit within the drawer. But the door to his office was already opening, the stranger's passkey working even here. The suited figure walked in, stopped and closed the door behind him. He rested the cane against the side of the table and placed the white case on the ground. Then he reached up and unlatched his helmet seal. The helmet was a rococo affair, with bas-relief gargoyles worked around the visor. He slid it over his head and set it down on the end of the table. Rather to his surprise, the quaestor did not recognise the man. He had been expecting one of the usual church officials he dealt with, but this was truly a stranger. "Might I have a wee word, Quaestor?" the man asked, gesturing towards the seat on his side of the desk. "Yes, yes," Quaestor Jones said hastily. "Please sit down. How was your, um...?" "My journey from the Way?" The man blinked, as if momentarily narcotised by the utter dullness of the quaestor's question. "Unremarkable." Then he looked at the creature that the quaestor had not had time to hide. "Yours, is it?" "My Pep... my Petnermint. My Peppermint. Pet. Mine." "A genetic toy, isn't it? Let me have a guess: one part stick insect, one part chameleon, one part something mammalian?" "There's cat in him," the quaestor said. "Definitely cat. Isn't there, Peppermint?" He pushed some of the seeds towards the visitor. "Would you like to, um...?" Again to the quaestor's surprise—and he wasn't quite sure why he had asked in the first place—the stranger took a pinch of the seeds and offered his hand up to Peppermint's head. He did it very gently. The creature's mandibles began to eat the seeds, one by one. "Charming," the man said, leaving his hand where it was. "I'd get one for myself, but I hear they're very hard to come by." "Devils to keep healthy," the quaestor said. "I'm sure they are. Well, to business." "Business," the quaestor said, nodding. The man had a long, thin face with a very flat nose and a strong jaw. He had a shock of white hair sticking straight up from his brow, stiff as a brush and mathematically planar on top, as if sliced off with a laser. Under the room's lights it shone with a faint blue aura. He wore a high-collared side-buttoned tunic marked with the Clocktower insignia: that odd, mummylike spacesuit radiating light through cracks in its shell. But there was something about him that made the quaestor doubt that he was a cleric. He didn't have the smell of someone with Quaiche blood in them. Some high-ranking technical official, then. "Don't you want to know my name?" the man asked. "Not unless you want to tell me." "You're curious, though?" "I was told to expect a visitor. That's all I need to know." The man smiled. "That's a very good policy. You can call me Grelier." The quaestor inclined his head. There had been a Grelier involved in Hela's affairs since the very earliest days of the settlement, after the witnessing of the first vanishing. He presumed the Grelier family had continued to play a role in the church ever since, down through the generations. "It's a pleasure to have you aboard the caravan, Mr. Grelier." "I won't be here long. Just wanted, as I said, a wee word." He stopped feeding Peppermint, dropping the remaining seeds on the floor. Then he bent down and retrieved the white case, setting it on his lap. Peppermint started cleaning itself, making prayerlike motions. "Has anyone come aboard lately, Quaestor?" "There are always people coming and going." "I mean lately, last few days." "Well, there's Crozet, I suppose." The man nodded and flipped open the lid of his case. It was, the quaestor saw, a medical kit. It was full of syringes, racked next to each other like little pointy-headed soldiers. "Tell me about Crozet." "One of our regular traders. Makes his living in the Vigrid region, keeps himself to himself. Has a wife named Linxe, and a son, Culver." "They're here now? I saw an icejammer winched against your machine as I came in." "That's his," the quaestor said. "Anyone else come in on it?" "Just the girl." The man raised his eyebrows. Like his hair, they were the colour of new snow under moonlight. "Girl? You said he had a son, not a daughter." "She was travelling with them. Not a relative, a hitchhiker. Name of... " The quaestor pretended to rack his memory. "Rashmika. Rashmika Els. Sixteen, seventeen standard years." "Had your eye on her, did you?" "She made an impression. She couldn't help but make an impression." The quaestor's hands felt like two balls of eels, sliding slickly against each other. "She had a certainty about her, a determination you don't see very often, especially not in one her age. She seemed to be on a mission." The man reached into the case and took out a clear syringe. "What was her relationship to Crozet? Everything aboveboard?" "As far as I know she was just his passenger." "You heard about the missing-persons report? A girl running away from her family in the Vigrid badlands? The local constabulary enquiring after a possible saboteur?" "That was her? I didn't put two and two together, I'm afraid." "Good for you that you didn't." He held the syringe up to the light, his face distorted through the glass. "Or you might have sent her back where she came from." "That wouldn't have been good?" "We'd rather she stayed on the caravan for now. She's of interest to us, you see. Give me your arm." The quaestor rolled up his sleeve and leant across the table. Peppermint eyed him, pausing in its ablutions. The quaestor could not refuse. The command had been issued so calmly that there could be no prospect of disobedience. The syringe was clear: he had come to take blood, not give it. The quaestor forced himself to remain calm. "Why does she have to stay on the caravan?" "So she gets to where she has to get to." Grelier slid the needle in. "Any complaints from your usual acquisitions department, Quaestor?" "Complaints?" "About Crozet. About him making a bit more out of his scuttler junk than he normally does." "The usual mutterings." "This time there might be something in them. The girl sat in on his dealings, didn't she?" The quaestor realised that his interrogator knew the answer to almost every question he had come to ask. He watched the syringe as it filled with his blood. "She seemed curious," he said. "She says she's interested in scuttler relics. Fancies herself as a bit of a scholar. I didn't see any harm in letting her sit in. It was Crozet's decision, not mine." "I bet it was. The girl has a talent, Quaestor, a God-given gift: she can detect lies. She reads microexpressions in the human face, the subliminal signals most of us barely notice. They scream at her, like great neon signs." "I don't see..." He pulled out the syringe. "The girl was reading your acquisitions negotiators, seeing how sincere they were when they said they'd reached their limit. Sending covert signals to Crozet." "How do you know?" "I was expecting her to show up. I listened for the signs. They brought me here, to this caravan." "But she's just a girl." "Joan of Arc was just a girl. Look at the bloody mess she left behind." He put a plaster on the quaestor's arm, then slid the syringe into a special niche in the side of the case. The blood drained out as the plunger was pushed down by a mechanical piston. The case hummed and chugged to itself. "If you want to see her..." the quaestor began. "No, I don't want to see her. Not yet, at least. What I want is for you to keep her in your sight until you reach the Way. She mustn't return with Crozet. Your job is to make sure she stays aboard the caravan." The quaestor pulled down his sleeve. "I'll do my best." "You'll do more than your best." With the case still on his lap he reached over and picked Peppermint up, holding the stiff creature in the fist of one of his vacuum suit gauntlets. With the other hand he took hold of one of Peppermint's forelimbs and pulled it off. The creature thrashed wildly, emitting a horrid shrill whistle. "Oh," Grelier said. "Now look what I've done." "No," the quaestor said, frozen in shock. Grelier placed the tormented animal back down on the table and flicked the severed arm to the floor. "It's just a limb. Plenty more where that came from." Peppermint's tail writhed in agonised coils. "Now let's talk particulars," Grelier said. He reached into a pocket of his suit and pulled out a small metal tube. The quaestor flinched, one eye still on his mutilated pet. Grelier nudged the tube across the table. "The girl is a problem," he said. "She has the potential to be useful to the dean, although he doesn't know it yet." The quaestor tried to hold his voice together. "You actually know the dean?" "On and off." "You'd know if he was alive, I mean?" "He's alive. He just doesn't get out of the Clocktower very often." Grelier looked at Peppermint again. "Ask a lot of questions for a caravan master, don't you?" "I'm sorry." "Open the tube." The quaestor did as he was told. Inside, tightly rolled, were two pieces of paper. He pulled them out gently and flattened them on the table. One was a letter. The other contained a series of cryptic markings. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do with these." "That's all right, I'll tell you. The letter, you keep here. The markings, including the tube, you give to a man named Pietr." "I don't know anyone called Pietr." "You should. He's a pilgrim, already aboard your caravan. A wee bit on the unstable side." "Unstable?" Ignoring him, Grelier tapped the case, which was still humming and gurgling to itself as it assayed the quaestor's blood. "Most of the virus strains in circulation aren't particularly dangerous. They induce religious feelings or visions, but they don't directly meddle with the host's sense of self. What Pietr has is different. We call it DEUS-X. It's a rare mutation of the original indoctrinal virus that we've tried to keep the lid on. It places him at the centre of his own private cosmos. He doesn't always realise it, but the virus is rewiring his sense of reality such that he becomes his own God. He'll be drawn to the Way, to one or other of the orthodox churches, but he'll always feel in conflict with conventional doctrine. He'll bounce from one sect to another, always feeling himself on the verge of enlightenment. His choices will become more and more extreme, pushing him towards odder and odder manifestations of Haldora worship, like the Observers." The quaestor had never heard of DEUS-X, but the religious type Grelier had described was familiar enough to him. They were usually young men, usually very serious and humourless. There was something already in their brains that the virus latched on to. "What does he have to do with the girl?" "Nothing, yet. I just want him to come into possession of that tube and that piece of paper. It will mean something to him already, although he'll never have seen the markings written down that precisely. For him it will be like finding illuminated scripture, where before all he had were scratches on stone." The quaestor examined the paper again. Now that he looked closer, he thought he had seen the markings before. "The missing vanishing?" he asked. "I thought that was just an old wives' tale." "It doesn't matter if it's an old wives' tale or not. It'll be one of the fringe beliefs with which Pietr has already come into contact. He'll recognise it and it will spur him to act." Grelier studied the quaestor very carefully, as if measuring his reliability. "I have arranged for a spy to be present amongst the Observers. He will mention to Pietr something about a girl on a crusade, something already foretold. A girl born in ice, destined to change the world." "Rashmika?" Grelier made a gun shape with his hand, pointed it at the quaestor and made a clicking sound. "All you have to do is bring them together. Allow her to visit the Observers and Pietr will take care of the rest. He won't be able to resist passing on the knowledge he has gained." The quaestor frowned. "She needs to see those markings?" "She needs a reason to meet the dean. The other letter will help—it concerns her brother—but it may not be enough. She's interested in the scuttlers, so the missing vanishing will prick her curiosity. She'll have to follow it to its conclusion, no matter how badly her instincts tell her to stay away from the cathedrals." "But why don't I just give her the tube now? Why the need for this cumbersome charade with the Observers?" Grelier looked at Peppermint again. "You really don't learn, do you?" "I'm sorry, I just..." "The girl is extraordinarily difficult to manipulate. She can read a lie instantly, unless the liar is completely sincere. She needs to be handled with a buffer of unquestioning, utterly delusional self-belief." Grelier paused. "Anyway, I need to know her limits. When I have studied her from a distance, she can be approached openly. But until then I want to guide her remotely. You are part of the buffer, but you will also be a test of her ability." "And the letter?" "Give it to her personally. Say it came into your possession through a secret courier and that you know nothing beyond that. Observe her closely, and report on her reaction." "And what if she asks too many questions?" Grelier smiled sympathetically. "Have a bash at lying." The medical case chimed, its analysis complete. Grelier swung it around so that the quaestor could see the results. On the inside of the lid, histograms and pie charts had sprung into view. "All clear?" the quaestor asked. "Nothing you need worry about," Grelier replied. On his private cameras, the quaestor watched the ruby-hulled cockleshell spacecraft lift off from the caravan. It flipped over, its main thrusters throwing wild shadows across the landscape. "I'm sorry, Peppermint," he said. The creature was trying to clean its face, its one remaining forelimb thrashing awkwardly across its mouthparts like a broken windscreen-wiper. It looked at the quaestor with those blackcurrant eyes, which were not as uncomprehending as he might have wished. "If I don't do what he wants, he'll come back. But whatever he wants with that girl isn't right. I can feel it. Can you? I didn't like him at all. I knew he was trouble the moment he landed." The quaestor flattened out the letter again. It was brief, written in a clear but childish script. It was from someone called Harbin, to someone called Rashmika. [ Ararat, 2675 ] The flight to the Nostalgia for Infinity only took ten minutes, most of which was spent in the final docking phase, queued up behind the transports that had arrived earlier. There were a number of entry points into the towering ship, open apertures like perfectly rectangular caves in the sides of the spire. The highest was more than two kilometres above the surface of the sea. In space they would have been the docking bays for small service craft, or the major airlocks that permitted access to the ship's cavernous internal chambers. Scorpio had never really enjoyed trips to the Infinity, under any circumstances. Frankly, the ship appalled him. It was a perversion, a twisted mutation of what a mechanical thing should be like. He did not have a superstitious bone in his body, but he always felt as if he was stepping into something haunted or possessed. What really troubled him was that he knew this assessment was not entirely inaccurate. The ship was genuinely haunted, in the sense that its whole structural fabric had been inseparably fused with the residual psyche of its erstwhile Captain. In a time when the Melding Plague had lost some of its horror, the fate of the Captain was a shocking reminder of the atrocities it had been capable of. The shuttle dropped off its passengers in the topmost docking bay, then immediately returned to the sky on some other urgent colonial errand. A Security Arm guard was already waiting to escort them down to the meeting room. He touched a communications earpiece with one finger, frowning slightly as he listened to a distant voice, then he turned to Scorpio. "Room is secured, sir." "Any apparitions?" "Nothing reported above level four hundred in the last three weeks. Plenty of activity in the lower levels, but we should have the high ship to ourselves." The guard turned to Vasko. "If you'd care to follow me." Vasko looked at Scorpio. "Are you coming down, sir?" "I'll follow in a moment. You go ahead and introduce yourself. Say only that you are Vasko Malinin, an SA operative, and that you participated in the mission to recover Clavain—and then don't say another word until I get there." "Yes, sir." Vasko hesitated. "Sir, one other thing?" "What?" "What did he mean about apparitions?" "You don't need to know," Scorpio said. Scorpio watched them troop off into the bowels of the ship, waiting until their footsteps had died away and he was certain that he had the landing bay to himself. Then he made his way to the edge of the bay's entrance, standing with the tips of his blunt, childlike shoes perilously close to the edge. The wind scrubbed hard against his face, although today it was not especially strong. He always felt in danger of being blown out, but experience had taught him that the wind usually blew into the chamber. All the same, he remained ready to grab the left-hand edge of the door for support should an eddy threaten to tip him over the lip. Blinking against the wind, his eyes watering, he watched the claw-shaped aircraft bank and recede. Then he looked down, surveying the colony that, despite Clavain's return, was still very much his responsibility. Kilometres away, First Camp sparkled in the curve of the bay. It was too distant to make out any detail save for the largest structures, such as the High Conch. Even those buildings were flattened into near-insignificance by Scorpio's elevation. The happy, bustling squalor and grime of the shanty streets were invisible. Everything appeared eerily neat and ordered, like something laid out according to strict civic rules. It could have been almost any city, on any world, at any point in history. There were even thin quills of smoke rising up from kitchens and factories. Yet other than the smoke there was nothing obviously moving, nothing that he could point to. But at the same time the entire settlement trembled with a frenzy of subliminal motion, as if seen through a heat haze. For a long time, Scorpio had thought that he would never adjust to life beyond Chasm City. He had revelled in the constant roaring intricacy of that place. He had loved the dangers almost as much as the challenges and opportunities. On any given day he had known that there might be six or seven serious attempts on his life, orchestrated by as many rival groups. There would be another dozen or so that were too inept to be worth bringing to his attention. And on any given day Scorpio might himself give the order to have one of his enemies put to sleep. It was never business with Scorpio, always personal. The stress of dealing with life as a major criminal element in Chasm City might have appeared crippling. Many did crack—they either burned out and retreated back to the limited spheres of petty crime that had bred them, or they made the kind of mistake it wasn't possible to learn from. But Scorpio had never cracked, and if he had ever screwed up it was one time only—and even then it had not exactly been his fault. It had been wartime by then, after all. The rules were changing so fast that now and then Scorpio had even found himself acting legally. Now that had been frightening. But the one mistake he had made had been nearly terminal. Getting caught by the zombies, and then the spiders... and because of that he had fallen under Clavain's influence. And at the end of it a question remained: if the city had defined him so totally, what did it mean to him no longer to have the city? It had taken him a while to find out—in a way, he had only really found the answer when Clavain had left and the colony was entirely in Scorpio's control. He had simply woken up one morning and the longing for Chasm City was gone. His ambition no longer focused on anything as absurdly self-centred as personal wealth, or power, or status. Once, he had worshipped weapons and violence. He still had to keep a lid on his anger, but he struggled to remember the last time he had held a gun or a knife. Instead of feuds and scores, scams and hits, the things that crammed his days now were quotas, budgets, supply lines, the bewildering mire of interpersonal politics. First Camp was a smaller city—barely a city at all, really—but the complexity of running it and the wider colony was more than enough to keep him occupied. He would never have believed it back in his Chasm City days, but here he was, standing like a king surveying his empire. It had been a long journey, fraught with reversals and set-backs, but somewhere along the way—perhaps that first morning when he awoke without longing for his old turf—he had become something like a statesman. For someone who had started life as an indentured slave, without even the dignity of a name, it was hardly the most predictable of outcomes. But now he worried that it was all about to slip away. He had always known that their stay on this world was only ever intended to be temporary, a port of call where this particular band of refugees would wait until Remontoire and the others were able to regroup. But as time went on, and the twenty-year mark had approached and then passed without incident, the seductive idea had formed in his mind that perhaps things might be more permanent. That perhaps Remontoire had been more than delayed. That perhaps the wider conflict between humanity and the Inhibitors was going to leave the settlement alone. It had never been a realistic hope, and now he sensed that he was paying the price for such thinking. Remontoire had not merely arrived, but had brought the arena of battle with him. If Khouri's account of things was accurate, then the situation truly was grave. The distant town glimmered. It looked hopelessly transient, like a patina of dust on the landscape. Scorpio felt a sudden visceral sense that someone dear to him was in mortal danger. He turned abruptly from the open door of the landing deck and made his way to the meeting room.
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Ararat, 2675	The meeting room lay deep inside the ship, in the spherical chamber that had once been the huge vessel's main command centre. The process of reaching it now resembled the exploration of a large cave system: there were cold, snaking warrens of corridor, spiralling tunnels, junctions and dizzying shafts. There were echoing sub-chambers and claustrophobic squeeze-points. Weird, unsettling growths clotted the walls: here a leprous froth, there a brachial mass horribly suggestive of petrified lung tissue. Unguents dripped constantly from ceiling to floor. Scorpio dodged the obstacles and oozing fluids with practised ease. He knew that there was nothing really hazardous about the ship's exudations—chemically they were quite uninteresting—but even for someone who had lived in the Mulch, the sense of revulsion was overpowering. If the ship had only ever been a mechanical thing, he could have taken it. But there was no escaping the fact that much of what he saw stemmed in some arcane sense from the memory of the Captain's biological body. It was a matter of semantics as to whether he walked through a ship that had taken on certain biological attributes or a body that had swollen to the size and form of a ship. He didn't care which was more accurate: both possibilities revolted him. Scorpio reached the meeting room. After the gloom of the approach corridors it was overwhelmingly bright and clean. They had equipped the ship's original spherical command chamber with a false floor and suitably generous wooden conference table. A refurbished projector hung above the table like an oversized chandelier, shuffling through schematic views of the planet and its immediate airspace. Clavain was already waiting, garbed in the kind of stiff black dress uniform that would not have looked outrageously unfashionable at any point in the last eight hundred years. He had allowed someone to further tidy his appearance: the lines and shadows remained on his face, but with the benefit of a few hours' sleep he was at least recognisable as the Clavain of old. He stroked the neat trim of his beard, one elbow propped on the table's reflective black surface. His other hand drummed a tattoo against the wood. "Something kept you, Scorp?" he asked mildly. "I needed a moment of reflection." Clavain looked at him and then inclined his head. "I understand." Scorpio sat down. A seat had been reserved for him next to Vasko, amid a larger group of colony officials. Clavain was at the head of the table. To his left sat Blood, his powerful frame occupying the width of two normal spaces. Blood, as usual, managed to look like a thug who had gate-crashed a private function. He had a knife in one trotter and was digging into the nails of the other with the tip of the blade, flicking excavated dirt on to the floor. In stark contrast was Antoinette Bax, sitting on Clavain's right side. She was a human woman Scorpio had known since his last days in Chasm City. She had been young then, barely out of her teens. Now she was in her early forties—still attractive, he judged, but certainly heavier around the face, and with the beginnings of crow's-feet around the corners of her eyes. The one constant—and the thing that she would probably take to her grave—was the stripe of freckles that ran across the bridge of her nose. It always looked as if it had just been painted on, a precisely stippled band. Her hair was longer now, pinned back from her forehead in an asymmetrical parting. She wore complex locally made jewellery. Bax had been a superb pilot in her day, but lately there had been few opportunities for her to fly. She complained about this with good humour, but at the same time knuckled down to solid colony work. She had turned out to be a very good mediator. Antoinette Bax was married. Her husband, Xavier Liu, was a little older than her, his black hair now veined with silver, tied back in a modest tail. He had a small, neat goatee beard and he was missing two fingers on his right hand from an industrial accident down at the docks fifteen or so years ago. Liu was a genius with anything mechanical, especially cybernetic systems. Scorpio had always got on well with him. He was one of the few humans who genuinely didn't seem to see a pig when he talked to him, just another mechanically minded soul, someone he could really talk to. Xavier was now in charge of the central machine pool, controlling the colony's finite and dwindling reserve of functioning servitors, vehicles, aircraft, pumps, weapons and shuttles: technically it was a desk job, but whenever Scorpio called on him, Liu was usually up to his elbows in something. Nine times out of ten, Scorpio would find himself helping out, too. Next to Blood was Pauline Sukhoi, a pale, spectral figure seemingly either haunted by something just out of sight, or else a ghost herself. Her hands and voice trembled constantly, and her episodes of what might be termed transient insanity were well known. Years ago, in the patronage of one of Chasm City's most shadowy individuals, she had worked on an experiment concerning local alteration of the quantum vacuum. There had been an accident, and in the whiplash of severing possibilities that was a quantum vacuum transition, Sukhoi had seen something dreadful, something that had pushed her to the edge of madness. Even now she could barely speak of it. It was said that she passed her time sewing patterns into carpets. Then there was Orca Cruz, one of Scorpio's old associates from his Mulch days, one-eyed but still as sharp as a monofilament scythe. She was the toughest human he knew, Clavain included. Two of Scorpio's old rivals had once made the mistake of underestimating Orca Cruz. The first Scorpio knew of it was when he heard about their funerals. Cruz wore much black leather and had her favourite firearm out on the table in front of her, scarlet fingernails clicking against the ornamented Japan-work of its carved muzzle. Scorpio thought the gesture rather gauche, but he had never picked his associates for their sense of decorum. There were a dozen other senior colony members in the room, three of them swimmers from the Juggler contact section. Of necessity they were all young baseline humans. Their bodies were sleek and purposeful as otters', their flesh mottled by faint green indications of biological takeover. They all wore sleeveless tunics that showed off the broadness of their shoulders and the impressive development of their arm muscles. They had tattoos worked into the paisley complexity of their markings, signifying some inscrutable hierarchy of rank meaningful only to other swimmers. Scorpio, on balance, did not much like the swimmers. It was not simply that they had access to a luminous world that he, as a pig, would never know. They seemed aloof and scornful of everyone, including the other baseline humans. But it could not be denied that they had their uses and that in some sense they were right to be scornful. They had seen things and places no one else ever would. As colonial assets, they had to be tolerated and tapped. The nine other seniors were all somewhat older than the swimmers. They were people who had been adults on Resurgam before the evacuation. As with the swimmers, the faces changed when new representatives were cycled in and out of duty. Scorpio, nonetheless, made it his duty to know them all, with the intimate fondness for personal details he reserved only for close friends and blood enemies. He knew that this curatorial grasp of personal data was one of his strengths, a compensation for his lack of forward-thinking ability. It therefore troubled him profoundly that there was one person in the room that he hardly knew at all. Khouri sat nearly opposite him, attended by Dr. Valensin. Scorpio had no hold on her, no insights into her weaknesses. That absence in his knowledge troubled him like a missing tooth. He was contemplating this, wondering if anyone else felt the same way, when the murmur of conversation came to an abrupt end. Everyone, including Khouri, turned towards Clavain, expecting him to lead the meeting. Clavain stood, pushing himself up. "I don't intend to say very much. All the evidence I've seen points to Scorpio having done an excellent job of running this place in my absence. I have no intention of replacing his leadership, but I will offer what guidance I can during the present crisis. I trust you've all had time to read the summaries Scorp and I put together, based on Khouri's testimony?" "We've read them," said one of the former colonists—a bearded, corpulent man named Hallatt. "Whether we take any of it seriously is another thing entirely." "She certainly makes some unusual claims," Clavain said, "but that in itself shouldn't surprise us, especially given the things that happened to us after we left Yellowstone. These are unusual times. The circumstances of her arrival were bound to be a little surprising." "It's not just the claims," Hallatt said. "It's Khouri herself. She was Ilia Volyova's second-in-command. That's hardly the best recommendation, as far as I'm concerned." Clavain raised a hand. "Volyova may well have wronged your planet, but in my view she also atoned for her sins with her last act." "She may believe she did," Hallatt said, "but the gift of redemption lies with the sinned-against, rather than the sinner. In my view she was still a war criminal, and Ana Khouri was her accomplice." "That's your opinion," Clavain allowed, "but according to the laws that we all agreed to live under during the evacuation, neither Volyova nor Khouri were to be held accountable for any crimes. My only concern now is Khouri's testimony, and whether we act upon it." "Just a moment," Khouri said as Clavain sat down. "Maybe I missed something, but shouldn't someone else be taking part in this little set-up?" "Who did you have in mind?" Scorpio asked. "The ship, of course. The one we happen to be sitting in." Scorpio scratched the fold of skin between his forehead and the upturned snout of his nose. "I don't quite follow." "Captain Brannigan brought you all here, didn't he?" Khouri asked. "Doesn't that entitle him to a seat at this table?" "Maybe you weren't paying attention," Pauline Sukhoi said. "This isn't a ship any more. It's a landmark." "You're right to ask about the Captain," Antoinette Bax said, her deep voice commanding immediate attention. "We've been trying to establish a dialogue with him almost since the Infinity landed." Her many-ringed fingers were knitted together on the table, her nails painted a bright chemical green. "No joy," she said. "He doesn't want to talk." "Then the Captain's dead?" Khouri said. "No..." Bax said, looking around warily. "He still shows his face now and then." Pauline Sukhoi addressed Khouri again. "Might I ask something else? In your testimony you claim that Remontoire and his allies—our allies—have achieved significant breakthroughs in a range of areas. Drives that can't be detected, ships that can't be seen, weapons that cut through space-time... that's quite a list." Sukhoi's frail, frightened voice always sounded on the verge of laughter. "All the more so given the very limited time that you've had to make these discoveries." "They weren't discoveries," Khouri said. "Read the summary. Aura gave us the clues to make those things, that's all. We didn't discover anything." "Let's talk about Aura," Scorpio said. "In fact, let's go right back to the beginning, from the moment our two forces separated around Delta Pavonis. Zodiacal Light was badly damaged, we know that much. But it shouldn't have taken more than two or three years for the self-repair systems to patch it up again, provided you fed them with enough raw material. Yet we've been waiting here for twenty-three years. What took you so long?" "The repairs took longer than we anticipated," Khouri replied. "We had problems obtaining the raw materials now that the Inhibitors had so much of the system under their control." "But not twenty years, surely," said Scorpio. "No, but once we'd been there a few years it became clear we were in no immediate danger of persecution by the Inhibitors provided we stayed near the Hades object, the re-engineered neutron star. That meant we had more time to study the thing. We were scared at first, but the Inhibitors always kept clear of it, as if there was something about it they didn't like. Actually, Thorn and I had already guessed as much." "Tell us a bit more about Thorn," Clavain said gently. They all heard the crack in her voice. "Thorn was the resistance leader, the man who made life difficult for the regime until the Inhibitors showed up." "Volyova and you struck up some kind of relationship with him, didn't you?" Clavain asked. "He was our way of getting the people to accept our help to evacuate. Because of that I had a lot of involvement with Thorn. We got to know each other quite well." She faltered into silence. "Take your time," Clavain said, with a kindness Scorpio had not heard in his voice lately. "One time, stupid curiosity drew Thorn and I too close to the Inhibitors. They had us surrounded, and they'd even started pushing their probes into our heads, drinking our memories. But then something—some entity—intervened and saved us. Whatever it was, it appeared to originate around Hades. Maybe it was even an extension of Hades itself, another kind of probe." Scorpio tapped the summary before him. "You reported contact with a human mind." "It was Dan Sylveste," she said, "the same self-obsessed bastard who started all this in the first place. We know he found a way into the Hades matrix all those years ago, using the same route that the Amarantin took to escape the Inhibitors." "And you think Sylveste—or whatever he had become by then—intervened to save you and Thorn?" Clavain asked. "I know he did. When his mind touched mine, I got a blast of... call it remorse. As if the penny had finally dropped about how big a screw-up he'd been, and the damage he'd done in the name of curiosity. It was as if he was ready, in a small way, to start making amends." Clavain smiled. "Better late than never." "He couldn't work miracles, though," Khouri said. "The envoy that Hades sent to Roc to help us was enough to intimidate the Inhibitor machines, but it didn't do more than hamper them, allowing us to make it back to Ilia. But it was a sign, at least, that if we stood a hope of doing something about the Inhibitors, the place to look for help was in Hades. Some of us had to go back inside." "You were one of them?" Clavain said. "Yes," she said. "I did it the same way I'd done it before, because I knew that would work. Not via the front door inside the thing orbiting Hades, the way Sylveste did it, but by falling towards the star. By dying, in other words; letting myself get ripped apart by the gravitational field of Hades and then reassembled inside it. I don't remember any of that. I guess I'm grateful." It was clear to Scorpio that even Khouri had little idea of what had really happened to her during her entry into the Hades object. Her earlier account of things had made it clear that she believed herself to have been physically reconstituted within the star, preserved in a tiny, quivering bubble of flat space-time, so that she was immune to the awesome crush of Hades' gravitational field. Perhaps that had indeed been the case. Equally, it might have been some fanciful fiction created for her by her once-human hosts. All that mattered, ultimately, was that there was a way to communicate with entities running inside the Hades matrix—and, perhaps more importantly, a way to get back out into the real universe. Scorpio was contemplating that when his communicator buzzed discreetly. As he stood up from the table, Khouri halted her monologue. Irritated at the interruption, Scorpio lifted the communicator to his face and unspooled the privacy earpiece. "This had better be good." The voice that came was thready and distant. He recognised it as belonging to the Security Arm guard that had met them at the landing stage. "Thought you needed to know this, sir." "Make it quick." "Class-three apparition reported on five eighty-seven. That's the highest in nearly six months." As if he needed to be told. "Who saw it?" "Palfrey, a worker in bilge management." Scorpio lowered his voice and pressed the earpiece in more tightly. He was conscious that he had the full attention of everyone in the room. "What did Palfrey see?" "The usual, sir: not very much, but enough that we'll have a hard time persuading him to go that deep again." "Interview him, get it on record, make it clear that he speaks of this to no one. Understood?" "Understood, sir." "Then find him another line of work." Scorpio paused, frowning as he thought through all the implications. "On second thoughts, I'd like a word with him as well. Don't let him leave the ship." Without waiting for a reply, Scorpio broke the link, spooled the earpiece back into the communicator and returned to the table. He sat down, gesturing at Khouri for her to continue. "What was all that about?" she asked. "Nothing that need worry you." "I'm worried." He felt a splinter of pain between his eyes. He had been getting a lot of headaches lately, and this kind of day didn't help. "Someone reported an apparition," he said, "one of the Captain's little manifestations that Antoinette mentioned. Doesn't mean anything." "No? I show up, he shows up, and you think that doesn't mean something?" Khouri shook her head. "I know what it means, even if you don't. The Captain understands there's some heavy stuff going down." The splinter of pain had become a little broken arrowhead. He pinched the bridge of skin between snout and forehead. "Tell us about Sylveste," he said with exaggerated patience. Khouri sighed, but did as she was asked. "There was a kind of welcoming committee inside the star, Sylveste and his wife, just as I'd last met them. It even looked like the same room—a scientific study full of old bones and equipment. But it didn't feel the same. It was as if I was taking part in some kind of parlour game, but I was the only one not in on it. I wasn't talking to Sylveste any more, if I ever had been." "An impostor?" Clavain asked. "No, not that. I was talking with the genuine article... I'm sure of that... but at the same time it wasn't Sylveste, either. It was as if... he was condescending to me, putting on a mask so that I'd have something familiar to talk to. I knew I wasn't getting the whole story. I was getting the comforting version, with the creepy stuff taken out. I don't think Sylveste thought I was capable of dealing with what he'd really become, after all that time." She smiled. "I think he thought he'd blow my mind." "After sixty years in the Hades matrix, he might have," Clavain said. "All the same," Khouri said, "I don't think there was any actual deception. Nothing that wasn't absolutely essential for the sake of my sanity, anyhow." "Tell us about your later visits," Clavain said. "I went in alone the first few times. Then it was always with someone else—Remontoire sometimes, Thorn, a few other volunteers." "But always you?" Clavain asked. "The matrix accepted me. No one was willing to take the risk of going in without me." "I don't blame them." Clavain paused, but it was apparent to all present that he had something more to say. "But Thorn died, didn't he?" "We were falling towards the neutron star," she said, "just the way we always did, and then something hit us. Maybe an energy burst from a stray weapon, we'll never know for sure; it might have been orbiting Hades for a million years, or it could have been something from the Inhibitors, something they risked placing that close to the star. It wasn't enough to destroy the capsule, but it was enough to kill Thorn." She stopped speaking, allowing an uncomfortable silence to invade the room. Scorpio looked around, observing that everyone had their eyes downcast; that no one dared look at Khouri, not even Hallatt. Khouri resumed speaking. "The star captured me alive, but Thorn was dead. It couldn't reassemble what was left of him into a living being." "I'm sorry," Clavain said, his voice barely audible. "There's something else," Khouri said, her voice nearly as quiet. "Go on." "Part of Thorn did survive. We'd made love on the long fall to Hades, and so when I went into the star, I took a part of him with me. I was pregnant." Clavain waited a decent while before answering, allowing her words to settle in, giving them the dignified space they warranted. "And Thorn's child?" "She's Aura," Khouri said. "The baby Skade stole from me. The child I came here to get back."
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Ararat, 2675	The room in which Palfrey had been told to wait for Scorpio was a small annexe off one of the larger storage areas used by bilge management, the branch of the administration tasked with keeping the lower levels of the ship as dry as possible. The curved walls of the little chamber were layered with a glossy grey-green plaque that had hardened into stringy, waxy formations. The smooth floor was sheet metal. Anchored to it with thick bolts was a small, battered desk from Central Amenities, upon which lay an ashtray, a half-empty beaker of something tarlike and the parts of several dismantled bilge pump assemblies. Bookended by the pump parts was what Scorpio took to be a vacuum helmet of antique design, silver paint peeling from its metal shell. Behind the desk, Palfrey sat chain-smoking, his eyes red with fatigue, his sparse black hair messed across the sunburned pink of his scalp. He wore khaki overalls with many pockets, and some kind of breathing apparatus hung around his neck on frayed cords. "I understand you saw something," Scorpio said, pulling up another chair, the legs squealing horribly against the metal, and sitting in it the wrong way around, facing the man with his legs splayed either side of the backrest. "That's what I told my boss. All right if I go home now?" "Your boss didn't give me a very clear description. I'd like to know a bit more." Scorpio smiled at Palfrey. "Then we can all go home." Palfrey stubbed out his current cigarette. "Why? It's not as if you believe me, is it?" Scorpio's headache had not improved. "Why do you say that?" "Everyone knows you don't believe in the sightings. You think we're just finding reasons to skive off the deep-level duties." "It's true that your boss will have to arrange a new detail for that part of the ship, and it's true that I don't believe all the reports that reach my desk. Many of them, however, I'm inclined to take seriously. Often they follow a pattern, clustering in one part of the ship, or moving up and down a series of adjacent levels. It's as if the Captain focuses on an area to haunt and then sticks with it until he's made his point. You ever seen him before?" "First time," Palfrey said, his hands trembling. His fingers were bony, the bright-pink knuckles like blisters ready to pop. "Tell me what you saw." "I was alone. The nearest team was three levels away, fixing another pump failure. I'd gone down to look at a unit that might have been overheating. I had my toolkit with me and that was all. I wasn't planning to spend much time down there. None of us like working those deep levels, and definitely not alone." "I thought it was policy not to send anyone in alone below level six hundred." "It is." "So what were you doing down there by yourself?" "If we stuck to the rules you'd have a flooded ship in about a week." "I see." He tried to sound surprised, but he heard the same story about a dozen times a week, all over the colony. Individually, everyone thought they were on the only team being stretched past breaking point. Collectively, the whole settlement was lurching from one barely contained crisis to another. But only Scorpio and a handful of his lieutenants knew that. "We don't fiddle the timesheets," Palfrey volunteered, as if this must have been next thing on Scorpio's mind. "Why don't you tell me about the apparition? You were down looking at the hot pump. What happened?" "Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. Couldn't tell what it was at first—it's dark down there, and our lights don't work as well as they should. You imagine a lot of stuff, so you don't immediately jump out of your skin the first time you think you see something. But when I shone the light on it and looked properly, there was definitely something there." "Describe it." "It looked like machinery. Junk. Old pump mechanisms, old servitor parts. Wires. Cables. Stuff that must have been lying down there for twenty years." "You saw machinery and you thought that was an apparition?" "It wasn't just machinery," Palfrey said defensively. "It was organised, gathered together, lashed into something larger. It was man-shaped. It just stood there, watching me." "Did you hear it approach?" "No. As I said, it was just junk. It could have been there all along, waiting until I noticed it." "And when you did notice it—what happened then?" "It looked at me. The head—it was made up of hundreds of little bits—moved, as if acknowledging me. And I saw something in the face, like an expression. It wasn't just a machine. There was a mind there. A distinct purpose." Redundantly, he added, "I didn't like it." Scorpio drummed the tips of his fingers against the seatback. "If it helps, what you saw was a class-three apparition. A class one is a localised change in the atmospheric conditions of the ship: an unexplained breeze, or a drop in temperature. They're the commonest kind, reported almost daily. Only a fraction probably have anything at all to do with the Captain." "We've all experienced those," Palfrey said. "A class two is a little rarer. We define it as a recognisable speech sound, a word or sentence fragment, or even a whole statement. Again, there's an element of uncertainty. If you're scared and you hear the wind howl, it's easy to imagine a word or two." "It wasn't one of those." "No, clearly not. Which brings us to a class-three manifestation: a physical presence, transient or otherwise, manifesting either via a local physical alteration of the ship's fabric—a face appearing in a wall, for instance—or the coopting of an available mechanism or group of mechanisms. What you saw was clearly the latter." "That's very reassuring." "It should be. I can also tell you that despite rumours to the contrary no one has ever been harmed by an apparition, and that very few workers have ever seen a class three on more than one occasion." "You're still not getting me to go down there again." "I'm not asking you to. You'll be reassigned to some other duty, either in the high ship levels or back on the mainland." "The sooner I'm off this ship, the better." "Good. That's sorted, then." Scorpio moved to stand up, the chair scraping against the floor. "That's it?" Palfrey asked. "You've told me everything I need to know." Palfrey poked around in the ashtray with the dead stub of his last cigarette. "I see a ghost and I get interviewed by one of the most powerful men in the colony?" Scorpio shrugged. "I just happened to be in the area, thought you'd appreciate my taking an interest." The man looked at him with a critical expression Scorpio seldom saw in pigs. "Something's up, isn't it?" "Not sure I follow you." "You wouldn't interview someone from bilge management unless something was going down." "Take it from me, something's always going down." "But this must be more than that." Palfrey smiled at him, the way people smiled when they thought they knew something you'd have preferred them not to know, or when they imagined they had figured out an angle they weren't supposed to see. "I listen. I hear about all the other apparitions, not just the ones on my shift." "And your conclusion is?" "They've been growing more frequent. Not just in the last day or so, but over the last few weeks or months. I knew it was only a matter of time before I saw one for myself." "That's a very interesting analysis." "The way I see it," Palfrey said, "it's as if he—the Captain—is getting restless. But what would I know? I'm just a bilge mechanic." "Indeed," Scorpio said. "You know something's happening, though, don't you? Or you wouldn't be taking so much interest in a single sighting. I bet you're interviewing everyone these days. He's really got you worried, hasn't he?" "The Captain's on our side." "You hope." Palfrey sniggered triumphantly. "We all hope. Unless you have some other plans for getting off this planet, the Captain's our only ticket out of here." "You're talking as if there's some sudden urgency to leave." Scorpio considered telling him that there might well be, just to mess with his mind. He had decided that he did not very much like Palfrey. But Palfrey would talk, and the last thing Scorpio needed now was a wave of panic to deal with in addition to Khouri's little crisis. He would just have to deny himself that small, puissant pleasure. He leaned across the table, Palfrey's stench hitting him like a wall. "A word of this meeting to anyone," he said, "and you won't be working in effluent management any more. You'll be part of the problem." Scorpio pushed himself up from the chair, intending to leave Palfrey alone with his thoughts. "You haven't asked me about this," Palfrey said, offering Scorpio the battered silver helmet. Scorpio took it from him and turned it in his hands. It was heavier than he had expected. "I thought it belonged to you." "You thought wrong. I found it down there in the junk, when the apparition had gone. I don't think it was there before." Scorpio took a closer look at the helmet. Its design appeared very old. Above the small rectangular porthole of the faceplate were many rectangular symbols containing blocks of primary colour. There were crosses and crescents, stripes and stars. The pig wondered what they meant. [ Hela, 2727 ] Now that she had time on her hands, Rashmika used it to explore the caravan. Although there was a great deal of space to investigate inside, she quickly found that one compartment in the caravan was much like another. Wherever she went she encountered the same bad smells, the same wandering pilgrims and traders. If there were variations on these themes they were too dull and nuanced to interest her. What she really wanted was to get outside, on to the roof of the procession. It was many months since she had seen Haldora, and now that the gas giant had finally crept above the horizon as the caravan narrowed the distance to the cathedrals of the Way, she was struck by a desire to go outside, lie on her back and just look at the huge planet. But the first few times she tried to find a way to the roof, none of the doors would open for her. Rashmika tried different routes and times of the day, hoping to slip through a gap in the caravan's security, but the roof was well protected, presumably because there was a lot of sensitive navigation equipment up there. She was backtracking from one dead end when she found her way blocked by the quaestor. He had his little green pet with him, squatting on his shoulder. Was it Rashmika's imagination or was there something wrong with one of its forelimbs? It ended in a green-tipped stump that she did not remember seeing before. "Can I help you, Miss Els?" "I was just exploring the caravan," she said. "That's allowed, isn't it?" "Within certain restrictions, yes." He nodded beyond her, to the door she had found blocked. "The roof, naturally, is one of the places that are out of bounds." "I wasn't interested in the roof." "No? Then you must be lost. This door only leads to the roof. There's nothing up there to interest you, take my word for it." "I wanted to see Haldora." "You must have seen it many times before." "Not recently, and never very far above the horizon," she said. "I wanted to see it at the zenith." "Well, you'll have to wait for that. Now... if you don't mind." He pushed past her, his bulk pressing unpleasantly against her in the narrow squeeze of the corridor. The green creature tracked her with his faceted eyes. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," it intoned. "Where are you going, Quaestor? You're not wearing a suit." "Run along now, Miss Els." He did something that he obviously did not want her to see, reaching into a shadowed alcove next to the door that a casual visitor would never have noticed. He tried to be quick about it, to hide the gesture. She heard a low click, as if some hidden mechanism had just snapped open. The door worked for him. He stepped through. In the red-lit space beyond she glimpsed emergency equipment and several racked vacuum suits. She came back several hours later, when she was certain that the quaestor had returned inside the caravan. She carried her own surface suit in a collapsed bundle, sneaking it through the rumbling innards of the caravan. She tried the door: it was still blocked to her. But when she slipped her hand into the alcove that the quaestor had not wanted her to see she found a concealed control. She applied pressure and heard the click as the locking mechanism relaxed. Presumably there was some further fail-safe that would have prevented the inner door from opening if the outer one was also open. That was not the case now, however, and the door yielded to her as it had to the quaestor. She slipped into the lock, secured the inner door behind her and changed into her own suit. She checked the air, satisfying herself that there was enough in the reservoir, and feeling a moment of déjà vu as she remembered making the same check before leaving her home. She recalled how the reservoir had not been completely full, as if someone had used her suit recently. She had thought little of it at the time, but now a cluster of thoughts arrived in quick, uneasy succession. There had been foot-prints in the ice around the surface lock, suggesting that someone had used the lock as well as the suit. The prints had been small enough to belong to her mother, but they could just as easily have belonged to Rashmika. She remembered the constabulary, too, and their suspicion that she had had something to do with the sabotage. She hadn't helped her case by running away shortly afterwards, but they wouldn't have come after her unless they had some additional evidence to link her to the act. What did it mean? If she had been the one who had blown up the store of demolition charges, surely she'd have some memory of doing it. More to the point, why would she have done such a pointless thing? No, she told herself, it couldn't have been her. It was just an unfortunate set of coincidences. But she could not dismiss her doubts that easily. Ten minutes later she was standing under airless sky astride the back of the huge machine. The business with the sabotage still troubled her, but with an effort of will she forced her thoughts on to more immediate matters. She thought back to what had happened in the corridor, when the quaestor had found her. Convenient, that. Of all the possible entrances to the roof he had bumped into her at precisely the one she had been trying. More than likely he had been spying on her, observing her peregrinations through his little rolling empire. When he had spoken to her he had been hiding something. She was certain of that: it had been written on his face, in the momentary elevation of his eyebrows. His own guilt at spying on her? She doubted that he had the chance to spy on many girls her age, so he was probably making the most of it, him and that horrible pet of his. She didn't like the idea of him watching her, but she would not be on the caravan for very long and all she really cared about now was exploring the roof. If he had been observing her, then he would have had plenty of chances to stop her when she was changing into her own suit and finding the steps that led up to the roof. No one had come, so perhaps his attention had been elsewhere, or he had decided it was not worth his bother to stop her going where she wanted. Quickly she forgot all about him, thrilled to be outside again. Rashmika had never seen a vanishing. Two had occurred in her lifetime, once when Haldora was visible from the badlands, but she had been in classes at the time. Of course, she knew that the chances of seeing anything were tiny, even if one had the extreme good fortune to be out on the ice when it happened. The vanishings lasted for only a fraction of a second. By the time you knew one had happened, it was always too late. The only people who had ever seen one happen—with the exception of Quaiche, of course, who had started it all—were those who made it their duty to observe Haldora at every possible moment. And even then they had to pray that they did not blink or look away at that critical instant. Deprived of sleep by drugs and elective neurological intervention, they were half-mad to begin with. Rashmika could not imagine that kind of dedication, but then she had never felt the slightest inclination to join a church in the first place. She wanted to observe a vanishing because she still clung to the notion that it was a rational natural phenomenon rather than evidence of divine intervention on the cosmic scale. And in Rashmika's view it would be a shame not to be able to say one had seen something so rare, so wondrous. Consequently, ever since she was small, and whenever Haldora was high, she would try to devote some time each day to watching it. It was nothing compared to the endless hours of the cathedral observers, and the statistical odds against seeing anything did not bear contemplation, but she did it anyway, cheerfully ignoring such considerations while chiding those who did not share her particular brand of scientific rationalism. The caravan's roof was a landscape of treacherous obstructions. There were crouching generator boxes, radiator grilles and vanes, snaking conduits and power lines. It all looked very old, patched together over many years. She made her way from one side to the other, following the course of a railed catwalk. When she reached the edge she looked over, appalled at how far down the ground was and how slowly it now appeared to move. There was no one else up here, at least not on this particular machine. She looked up, craning her neck as far as the awkward articulation of the helmet joint permitted. The sky was full of counter-moving lights. It was as if there were two celestial spheres up there, two crystal globes nested one within the other. As always the effect was immediately dizzying. Normally the sense of vertigo was little more than a nuisance, but this high up it could easily kill her. Rashmika tightened her grip on the railing and looked back down at the horizon again. Then, steeled, she looked up once more. The illusion that she stood at the centre of two spheres was not entirely inaccurate. The lights pinned to the outermost sphere were the stars, impossibly distant; pinned to the innermost sphere were the ships in orbit around Hela, the sunlight glinting off the polished perfection of their hulls. Occasionally one or other would flicker with the hard gemlike flash of steering thrust as the Ultra crews trimmed their orbits or prepared for departure. At any one time, Rashmika had heard, there were between thirty and fifty ships in orbit around Hela, always coming and going. Most were not large vessels, for the Ultras distrusted Haldora and preferred to hold their most valuable assets much further out. In general those she saw were in-system shuttles, large enough to hold frozen pilgrims and a modest team of Ultra negotiators. The ships that flew between Hela and orbit were usually even smaller, for the churches did not allow anything large to approach Hela's surface. The big ships, the starships—the lighthuggers—made only very rare visits to Hela's orbit. When they did, they hung in the sky like ornaments, sliding along invisible tracks from horizon to horizon. Rashmika had seen very few of those in her lifetime; they always impressed and scared her at the same time. Her world was a froth of ice lathered around a core of rubble. It was fragile. Having one of those vessels nearby—especially when they made main-drive adjustments—was like holding a welding torch close to a snowball. The vertigo returned in waves. Rashmika looked back towards the horizon, easing the strain on her neck. The old suit was dependable, but it was not exactly engineered for sightseeing. Here, instead, was Haldora. Two-thirds of it had risen above the horizon now. Because there was no air on Hela, nothing to blur features on the horizon, there were very few visual cues to enable one to discriminate between something a few dozen kilometres away and something nearly a million kilometres beyond that. The gas giant appeared to be an extension of the world on which she stood. It looked larger when it was near the horizon than the zenith, but Rashmika knew that this was an illusion, an accidental by-product of the way her mind was wired together. Haldora loomed about forty times larger in the sky of Hela than the Moon did in the skies of Earth. She had always wondered about this, for it implied that the Moon was really not a very impressive thing compared to Haldora, in spite of the Moon's prominence in Earth literature and mythology. From the angle at which she saw it, Haldora appeared as a fat crescent. Even without the suit's contrast filters slid down, she made out the bands of equatorial coloration that striped the world from pole to pole: shades of ochre and orange, sepia and buff, vermilion and amber. She saw the curlicues and flukes where the colour bands mingled or bled; the furious scarlet eye of a storm system, like a knot in wood. She saw the tiny dark shadows of the many smaller moons that wheeled around Haldora, and the pale arc of the world's single ring. Rashmika crouched down until she was sitting on her haunches. It was as uncomfortable as trying to look up, but she held the posture for as long as she was able. At the same time she kept on looking at Haldora, willing it, daring it to vanish, to do that which had brought them all here in the first place. But the world simply hung there, seemingly anchored to the landscape, close enough to touch, as real as anything she had ever seen in her life. And yet, she thought, it does vanish. That it happened—that it continued to happen—was not disputed, at least not by anyone who had spent any significant time on Hela. Look at it long enough, she thought, and—unless you are unlucky—you will see it happen. It just wasn't her turn today. Rashmika stood up, then made her way past the point where she had emerged, towards the rear of the vehicle. She was looking back along the procession of the caravan now, and she could see the other machines rising and falling in waves as they moved over slight undulations in the trail. The caravan was even longer than when she had first arrived: at some point, without any fanfare, a dozen more units had tagged on to the rear. It would keep growing until it reached the Permanent Way, at which point it would fragment again as various sections were assigned to specific cathedrals. She reached the limit of the catwalk, at the back of the vehicle. There was an abyss between her and the next machine, spanned only by a flimsy-looking bridge formed from many metal slats. It had not been apparent from the ground, but now she saw that the distance—vertical and horizontal—was changing all the while, making the little bridge lash and twist like something in pain. Instead of the stiff railings she now held, there were only metal wires. Down below, halfway to the ground, was a pressurised connector that puffed in and out like a bellows. That looked much safer. Rashmika supposed that she could go back inside the caravan and find her way to that connector. Or she could pretend that she had done enough exploring for one day. The last thing she needed to do was start making enemies this early in her quest. There would be plenty of time for that later on, she was certain. Rashmika stepped back, but only for a moment. Then she returned to the bridge and spread her arms apart so that each hand could grip one of the wire lines. The bridge writhed ahead of her, the metal plates slipping apart, revealing an awful absence. She took a step forwards, planting one booted foot on the first plate. It did not feel safe. The plate gave beneath her, offering no hint of solidity. "Go on," she said, goading herself. She took the next step, and both feet were on the bridge. She looked back. The lead vehicle pitched and yawed. The bridge squirmed under her, throwing her from one side to the other. She held on tightly. She wanted desperately to turn back, but a small, quiet voice told her she must not. The voice told her that if she did not have the courage to do this one simple thing, then she could not possibly have the courage to find her brother. Rashmika took another step along the bridge. She began to cross the gap. It was what she had to do.
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Ararat, 2675	Blood bustled into the conference room, a huge number of rolled-up maps tucked beneath his arms. He placed the maps on the table and then spread one of them wide, the map flattening itself obediently. It was a single sheet of thick creamy paper as wide as the table, with the slightly mottled texture of leather. At a command from Blood, topographic features popped into exaggerated relief, then shaded themselves according to the current pattern of daylight and darkness on that part of Ararat. Latitude and longitude appeared as thin glowing lines, labelled with tiny numerals. Khouri leant across, studying the map for a moment. She turned it slightly, then pointed to one small chain of islands. "Near here," she said, "about thirty kilometres west of that strait, eight hundred kilometres north of here." "Is this thing updated in real-time?" Clavain asked. "Refresh time is about every two days on average," Scorpio said. "It can take a bit longer. Depends on the vagaries of satellite positions, high-altitude balloons and cloud cover. Why?" "Because it looks as if there's something more or less where she said there would be." "He's right," Khouri said. "It has to be Skade's ship, doesn't it?" Scorpio leant in to inspect the tiny white dot. "That's no ship," he said. "It's just a speck of ice, like a small iceberg." "You're sure about that?" Clavain asked. Blood jabbed his trotter at the point Khouri had indicated. "Let's be certain. Map: magnify, tenfold." The surface features of the map crawled away to the edges. The speck of ice swelled until it was the size of a fingernail. Blood told the map to apply an enhancement filter, but there was no obvious increase in detail save for a vague suggestion that the iceberg was bleeding into the surrounding sea, extending fine tendrils of whiteness in all directions. "No ship," Scorpio said. Clavain sounded less certain. "Ana, the craft Skade came down in—you said in your report that it was a heavy corvette, correct?" "I'm no expert on ships, but that's what I was told." "You said it was fifty metres long. That would be about right for a moray-class corvette. The funny thing is, that iceberg looks about the same size. The proportions are consistent—maybe a bit larger, but not much." "Could be coincidence," Blood said. "You know there are always bits of iceberg drifting down into those latitudes. Sometimes they even make it as far south as here." "But there are no other icebergs in the surrounding area," Clavain pointed out. "All the same," Scorpio said, "there can't be a ship in that thing, can there? Why would it have ended up covered in ice? If anything, ships come in hot, not cold. And why wouldn't the ice have melted by now?" "We'll find out when we get there," Clavain said slowly. "In the meantime, let's stick to practicalities. We won't want to alarm Skade into doing something rash, so we'll make sure our approach is slow and obvious." He indicated a spot on the map, to the south of the iceberg. "I suggest we take a shuttle out to about here; Antoinette can fly us. Then we'll drop two or three boats and make the rest of the crossing by sea. We'll carry surgical equipment and close-quarters arms, but nothing excessive. If we need to destroy the ship we can always call in an air-strike from the mainland." He looked up, his finger still pressing down on the map. "If we leave this afternoon, we can time our arrival at the iceberg for dawn, which will give us a whole day in which to complete negotiations with Skade." "Wait a moment," said Dr. Valensin, smiling slightly. "Before we get too carried away—are you telling me that you're actually taking any of this seriously?" "You mean you're not?" Clavain asked. "She's my patient," Valensin said, looking sympathetically at Khouri. "I'll vouch for the fact that she's isn't obviously insane. She has Conjoiner implants, and if her child had them as well they could have communicated with each other while the child was still in her womb. It would have been unorthodox, but Remontoire could have put those implants in her unborn child using microsurgical remotes. Given Conjoiner medicine, too, it's not inconceivable that Skade could have removed Khouri's child without evidence of surgery. But the rest of it? This whole business about a space war taking place on our doorstep? It's a bit of a stretch, wouldn't you say?" "I'm not so sure," Clavain said. "Please explain," Valensin said, looking to his colleagues for support. Clavain tapped the side of his skull. "Remember, I'm a Conjoiner as well. The last time I was able to check, all the machinery in my head was still working properly." "I could have told you as much," Valensin said. "What you forget is how sensitive it is. It's designed to detect and amplify ambient fields, signals produced by machines or other Conjoiners. Two Conjoiners can share thoughts across tens of metres of open space even if there aren't any amplifying systems in the environment. The hardware translates those fields into patterns that the organic part of the brain can interpret, harnessing the basic visual grammar of the perceptual centre." "This isn't news to me," Valensin said. "So consider the implications. What if there really was a war going on out there—a major circumsolar engagement, with all sorts of weapons and countermeasures being deployed? There'd be a great deal of stray electromagnetic noise, much more powerful than normal Conjoiner signals. My implants might be picking up signals they can't interpret properly. They're feeding semi-intelligible patterns into my meat brain. The meat does its best to sort out the mess and ends up throwing shapes and faces into the sky." "He told me he'd been seeing things," Scorpio said. "Figures, signs and portents," Clavain said. "It only began in the last two or three months. Khouri said the fleet arrived nine weeks ago. That's too much of a coincidence for me. I thought that perhaps I was going mad, but it looks as if I was just picking up rumours of war." "Like the good old soldier you always were," Scorpio said. "It just means I'm inclined to take Khouri seriously," Clavain said, "no matter how strange her story." "Even the part about Skade?" Valensin asked. Clavain scratched his beard. His eyes were slit-lidded, almost closed, as if viewing a vast mental landscape of possibilities. "Especially the part about Skade," he replied. [ Hela, 2727 ] Rashmika looked straight ahead. She had nearly reached the other machine. In the distance she could see suited figures moving about on errands, clambering from one catwalk to another. Cranes swung out, burdened by pallets of heavy equipment. Servitors moved with the eerie, lubricated glide of clockwork automata. The vast single machine, the sum of many parts that was the caravan, needed constant care. It was, Rashmika suspected, a little like a cathedral in microcosm. She stood again on the relatively firm ground of another vehicle. The motion of this one depended on legs rather than wheels, so instead of rumbling steadily, the metal surface beneath her feet drummed a slow rhythm, a series of timed thuds as each piston-driven mechanical foot hit ice. The gap she had crossed looked trivial now, a matter of metres, but she did not doubt that it would be just as unnerving on the way back. Now she looked around. There was something very different about the layout of this roof: it was more ordered, lacking any of the obvious mechanical clutter of the last one. The few equipment boxes had been neatly stowed around the edges of the roof, with the conduits and power lines routed likewise. Occupying much of the central area was a tilted surface, angled up from the roof on a set of pistons; she'd seen it during the approach in Crozet's icejammer, and she'd also seen something like it in her village: an array of solar collectors forming part of the reserve power supply in case the main generators failed. The array had been a precise mosaic of small, square photovoltaic cells that spangled emerald and blue as they caught the light. But here there were no cells; instead the surface was covered by ranks of dark cruciform objects. Rashmika counted them: there were thirty-six cruciform shapes, arranged six across and six high, and every one of the objects was about the same size as a human being. She walked closer, but with trepidation. There really were people shackled to the tilted surface, held in place by clasps around their wrists, their heels supported by small platforms. As near as she could tell they were dressed identically. Each one wore a hooded, foot-length gown of chocolate-brown material, cinched around the waist by a braided white rope. The cowl of each hood framed the curved mirror of a vacuum suit visor. She saw no faces, just the warped reflection of the slowly crawling landscape, herself an insignificant part of it. They were looking at Haldora. It was obvious now: the tilt of the platform was just right for observation of the rising planet. As the caravan approached the Way and the cathedrals that ran on it, the platform would approach the horizontal, until the thirty-six watchers were all flat on their backs, staring at the zenith. They were pilgrims, she realised. They had been picked up by the caravan during its deviation away from the equatorial settlements. She had been stupid not to realise that there were bound to be some along for the ride. There was an excellent chance that some of them had even come down from the badlands, perhaps even from her village. She looked up at them, wondering if they were somehow aware of her presence. She hoped that their attentions were too thoroughly fixed on Haldora for them to take any notice of her. That was the point of them being up there, after all: half-crucified, lashed to an iron raft, forced to stare into the face of the world they considered miraculous. The thing that she found most disturbing was the speed with which these pilgrims had taken their faith to this limit. It was likely that they had only left their homes in the last few weeks. Until then, they would have had very little choice but to act like normal members of a secular community. They were welcome to their beliefs, but the necessary duties of functioning in the badlands precluded taking religious observations as seriously as this. They would have had to fit into families and work units, and to smile at the jokes of their colleagues. But here, now, they were free. Very likely there was already Quaicheist blood in their veins. Rashmika looked back along the winding line of the caravan. There were other tilted surfaces. Assuming that they each held about the same number of pilgrims, there could easily have been two hundred just on this one caravan. And at any one time there were many other caravans on Hela. It amounted to thousands of pilgrims being transported to the shining Way, with thousands more making the journey on foot, step by agonising step. The futility of it, the sheer miserable waste of finite human life, made her indignant and filled with self-righteous anger. She wanted to climb on to the rack herself to wrench one of the pilgrims away from the sight that transfixed them, to rip back the cowl from their helmet, to press her own face against that blank mirror and try to make contact—before it was too late—with whatever fading glimmer of human individuality remained. She wanted to drive a rock into the faceplate, shattering faith in an instant of annihilating decompression. And yet she knew that her anger was horribly misdirected. She knew that she only loathed and despised these pilgrims because of what she feared had happened to Harbin. She could not smash the churches, so she desired instead to smash the gentle innocents who were drawn towards them. At this realisation she felt a secondary sort of revulsion directed towards herself. She could not recall ever feeling a hatred of this intensity. It was like a compass needle turning inside her, looking for a direction in which to settle. It both awed and frightened her that she had the capacity for such animus. Rashmika forced a kind of calm upon herself. In all the time that she had been watching them, the figures had never stirred. Their dark-brown cloaks hung about their suited figures in reverential stillness, as if the various folds and twists in the fabric had been chiselled from the hardest granite by expert masons. Their mirrored faces continued to reflect the slow ooze of the landscape. Perhaps it was a kindness that she could not see the individuals behind the glass. Rashmika turned from them, and then began to make her way back towards the bridge.
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Ararat, 2675	The shuttle came to a halt, hovering a few metres above the water. The rescue team assembled in the rear bay, waiting as the first boat—still tethered to the shuttle—was lowered gently on to the surface of the water. The sea was vast and dark in all directions, but also calm, apart from the area immediately within the thermal footprint of the shuttle. There was no wind, nor any indication of unusual Juggler activity, and the sea currents in this region were at their usual seasonal ebb. The iceberg would barely have moved between updates from the mapping network. Once the boat had stabilised, the first three members of the team were lowered individually on to its decking. Scorpio went down first, followed by a male Security Arm officer called Jaccottet, with Khouri completing the trio. Rations, weapons and equipment were lowered down in scuffed metal boxes, then quickly stowed in waterproof hatches along the sides of the boat. The last thing to go in was the portable incubator, a transparent box with an opaque base and carrying handle. This was secured with particular care, almost as if it already held a child. The first boat was then unhitched, allowing Scorpio to steer it clear of the shuttle. The whine of its battery-driven motor cut across the loud simmer of the hovering shuttle. The second boat was then lowered down and allowed to settle. Vasko watched as another Security Arm officer—a woman named Urton—was lowered down into it, followed by Clavain. The old man teetered at first, but quickly found his sea legs. Then it was Vasko's turn to be lowered down, helped by Blood. Vasko had expected that the other pig would be joining them on the operation, but Scorpio had ordered him to return to First Camp, to take care of things there. Scorpio's only concession had been to let Blood come this far, to help with the loading of the boats. The final boxes of equipment were lowered down, causing the boat to sink even more worryingly low in the water. The instant it was unhitched, the Security Arm woman had it speeding over to join Scorpio's craft. The hulls chafed and squealed together. Minutes of whispered activity followed while items were transferred from craft to craft, until they were evenly trimmed. "You ready for this?" Urton asked Vasko. "It's not too late to back out, you know." She had been on his case from the moment they had met, during mission-planning sessions back on the Nostalgia for Infinity . Before that, their paths had barely crossed: like Jaccottet, she had only ever been another Arm operative to Vasko, with a few years of seniority on him. "You seem to have a particular problem with me being on this mission," he said, as calmly as he could. "Is it something personal?" "Some of us have earned the right to be here," she said. "That's all." "And you think I haven't?" "You did a small favour for the pig," she said, keeping her voice low. "Because of that you ended up embroiled in something bigger than you. That doesn't mean you automatically earn my undying respect." "I'm not really interested in your respect," Vasko said. "What I'm interested in is your professional co-operation." "You needn't worry about that," she said. He started to say something, but she had already turned away, levering a heavy Breitenbach cannon into locking stanchions set along one side of the boat. Vasko did not know what he had done to earn her hostility. Was it simply the fact that he was younger and less experienced? Sighing, he busied himself by helping to check and stow the equipment. It was not pleasant work: all the delicate tackle—the weapons, navigation and communication devices—had been lathered in a revolting opaque grey mucous layer of protective unguent. It kept getting all over his hands, breaking free in sticky ropes. Swearing under his breath, wiping the muck off on to his knees, he barely noticed as the shuttle yawed away, leaving them alone at sea. They slid across kilometres of mirror-flat water. The cloud layer had broken up in patches, opening ragged windows in the deep black sky. There were stars visible now, but it was one of those comparatively rare nights when none of Ararat's moons were above the horizon. Lamps provided their only illumination. The boats kept within metres of each other, scudding side by side, the whine of their motors not quite loud enough to hinder conversation. Vasko had decided early in the expedition that his best course of action—having apparently won the grudging approval of Clavain—would be to say as little as possible. Besides, he had plenty to think about. He sat near the back of the second boat, squatting on the gunwale, loading and unloading a weapon in a kind of mindless loop, burning the action into the muscle memory of his hands so that it would happen without thought when he needed it to. For the hundredth time since they had set out, he wondered if it would actually come to violence. Perhaps the whole thing would be revealed to be a colossal misunderstanding, nothing more. In Vasko's opinion, however, that was rather unlikely. They had all read Khouri's testimony; had all sat in on the session while she was cross-examined. Much of what had been discussed had meant little to Vasko, but as the argument and interrogation had continued, a picture had begun to form in his mind. What was clear was this: Ana Khouri had returned from the computational matrix of the Hades neutron star with Thorn dead and his unborn child in her belly. Even then, she had known what Aura signified: that the unborn girl was not merely her child, but an agent of the ancient minds—human and alien—trapped within the sanctuary of the Hades matrix. Aura was a gift to humanity, her mind loaded with information capable of making a difference in the war against the Inhibitors. In Sylveste's case—and it seemed likely that she carried some of his memories in addition to the reserves of knowledge—she was an act of atonement. Khouri knew also that Aura's information had to be accessed as quickly as possible if it was going to mean anything. They did not have time to wait for her to be born, let alone for her to grow up and begin talking. With Khouri's permission, therefore, Remontoire had sent droves of surgical remotes into the heads of mother and child while Aura was still inside Khouri's womb. The drones had established Conjoiner-type implants in both Aura and Khouri, enabling them to share thoughts and experiences. Khouri had become Aura's mouthpiece and eyes: she had found herself dreaming Aura's dreams, unwilling or unable to define precisely where Aura ended and she began. Her child's thoughts were leaking into her own, permeating them to the point where no concrete division existed. But the thoughts and experiences had remained difficult to interpret. Khouri's daughter was still an unborn child; the structures of her mind were tentative and half-formed, her mental model of the external universe necessarily vague. Khouri had done her best to interpret the signals, but despite her efforts only a fraction of the things she was picking up were intelligible. But even that fraction had turned out to be of vital importance. Following clues from Aura—sifting jewel-like nuggets from a slurry of confusing signals—Remontoire had made drastic improvements to his arsenal of weapons and instruments. If nothing else, Aura's potential significance was becoming obvious. But that was when Skade had entered the affair. She had arrived in the Delta Pavonis system long after the Inhibitors had completed their torching of Resurgam and the other planets. Quickly she had established lines of negotiation with the human elements still present after the departure of the Nostalgia for Infinity. Her ultimate objective remained the recovery of as many of the old Conjoiner-built cache weapons as possible. But with her own fleet damaged, and with the Inhibitors themselves gathering en masse, Skade was in no position to take what she wanted by brute force. By then, the Zodiacal Light had completed its self-repairs and the human exploration of the Hades object had reached its logical conclusion. As Remontoire and his allies moved out of the system, therefore, Skade had shadowed them. Tentative communications ensued, and Skade had deployed her existing assets to protect the evacuees from the pursuing Inhibitor elements. The gesture was calculated and risky, but nothing else would convince Remontoire that she was to be trusted. But Skade had wanted nothing more than to be trusted. She had seen the evidence of Remontoire's new technologies and had realised that she was now at a tactical disadvantage. She had originally come to take the cache weapons—but the new ones would do equally well. What had really interested her, however, was Aura. Over months of shiptime, as the Zodiacal Light and the other two Conjoiner ships raced towards Ararat, Skade had played a delicate game of insinuation. She had gained Remontoire's confidence, making conspicuous sacrifices, trading intelligence and resources. She had played on his old loyalties to the Mother Nest, convincing him that it was in their mutual best interests to co-operate. When, finally, Remontoire had allowed some of Skade's fellow Conjoiners aboard his ship, it had merely seemed like the latest cordial step in a thawing détente. But the Conjoiners had turned out to be a snatch-team. Killing dozens in the process, they had located Khouri, drugged her and taken her back to Skade's ship. There, Skade's surgeons had operated on Khouri to remove Aura. The foetus, still only in its sixth month of development, had then been reintroduced into another womb. A biocybernetic support construct of living tissue, the womb had then been installed in the new body Skade had grown for herself after discarding her old, damaged one in the Mother Nest. The implants in Aura's head were meant to communicate only with their counterparts in Khouri, but Skade's infiltration routines had quickly undone Remontoire's handiwork. With Aura now growing inside her, Skade had tapped into the same flow of data that had already given Remontoire his new weapons. She had her prize, but even then Skade was clever. Too clever, perhaps. She should have killed Khouri then and there, but in Khouri she had seen another means of obtaining leverage over Remontoire. Even after her child had been ripped from her, Khouri was still useful as a potential hostage. Following negotiations, Skade had returned her to Remontoire in return for even more technological trade-offs. Aura would have given her these things sooner or later, but Skade had been in no mood to wait. By then, the Inhibitors were almost upon them. When the ships eventually arrived around Ararat, the battle had entered a new and silent phase. As the humans had escalated their conflict to include the use of novel, barely understood weaponry, the Inhibitors had retaliated with savage new strategies of their own. It was a war of maximum stealth: all energies were redirected into undetectable wavebands. Phantom images were projected to confuse and intimidate. Matter and force were thrown around with abandon. Day by day, skirmish by skirmish, even hour by hour, the human factions had fallen in and out of co-operation, depending on minute changes in battle projections. Skade had only wanted to aid Remontoire if the alternative was her own guaranteed annihilation. Remontoire's reasoning had not been so very far removed. But a week ago, Skade had changed her tactics. A corvette had left one of her two remaining heavy ships. Remontoire's side had tracked the swiftly moving ship to Ararat as it slipped between the major battle fronts. Analysis of its acceleration limits suggested that it was carrying at least one human occupant. A small detachment of Inhibitor forces had chased the corvette, cutting much closer to the planet than they usually did. It was as if the machines had realised that something significant was at stake, and that the corvette must be stopped at all costs. They had failed, but not before damaging the Conjoiner ship. Again, Remontoire and his allies had managed to track the limping spacecraft as its stealth systems shifted in and out of functionality. They had watched the ship ditch in Ararat's atmosphere, making a barely controlled landing in the sea. There was no sign that anyone on Ararat had even noticed. A few days later, Khouri had followed. Remontoire had refused to commit a larger force, not when there was so little chance of making it past the Inhibitors to the surface. But they had agreed that a small capsule might stand a slim chance. In addition, someone really needed to let the people on Ararat know what was going on, and sending Khouri would kill two birds with one stone. Vasko thought about the strength of mind that it must have taken for Khouri to come down here on her own, with no guarantee of rescue, let alone of being able to save her daughter. He wondered what the stronger emotion was: her love for her daughter, or the hatred she must have felt towards Skade. The more he considered it, the less likely it seemed that this situation was the result of any kind of misunderstanding. And he very much doubted that any of this was going to be resolved by negotiation. Skade might have stolen Aura from Khouri, but she had had the element of surprise, and she would have lost nothing if her attempt had resulted in the death of either mother or baby. But that wasn't true now. And Skade—if she was still alive and if the baby was still alive inside her—would be expecting them. What would it take to make her give up Aura? In the lamp-light, Vasko saw a flicker of silver-grey from Clavain's direction, and watched as the old man examined the knife he had brought with him from his island retreat. [ Hela, 2727 ] Rashmika had arranged a private meeting with Quaestor Jones. It took place immediately after a trading session, in the same windowless room she had visited with Crozet. Behind his desk, the quaestor waited for her to say something, hands folded across his generous paunch, his lips conveying suspicion mingled with faint prurient interest. Now and then he popped a morsel of food into the jaws of his pet, which squatted on the desk like a piece of abstract sculpture moulded from bright-green plastic. As she studied him, Rashmika wondered how good he was at telling truth from lies. It was difficult to tell with some people. "She's a persistent little madam, Peppermint," the quaestor said. "Warned her away from the roof, and there she was, not two hours later. What do you think we should do with her, eh?" "If you don't want people up on the roof, you ought to make it a bit harder to get up there," Rashmika said. "In any case, I don't particularly like being spied on." "I have an obligation to protect my passengers," he said. "If you don't like that, you're very welcome to leave when Mr. Crozet returns to the badlands." "Actually, I want to stay aboard," Rashmika said. "You mean you wish to make the pilgrimage to the Way?" "No." She hid her distaste at the thought of the people on the racks. She had learned that they were called Observers. "Not that. I want to travel to the Way and to find work there. But pilgrimage hasn't got anything to do with it." "Mm. We've already been over your skills profile, Miss Els." It did not please her that he remembered her name. "We barely discussed it, Quaestor. I don't think you can really make an honest assessment of my skills based on one short conversation." "You informed me you were a scholar." "Correct." "So return to the badlands and continue your scholarship." He made an effort to look and sound reasonable. "What better place to further your study of the scuttlers than at the very site where their relics are being unearthed?" "It isn't possible to study there," she said. "No one cares what the relics signify as long as they're able to get good money for them. No one's interested in the bigger picture." "And you are, I take it?" "I have theories concerning the scuttlers," she said, fully aware of how precocious she sounded, "but to make further progress I need access to proper data, the kind in the possession of the church-sponsored archaeological groups." "Yes, we all know about those groups. But aren't they in a position to form theories of their own? Begging your pardon, Miss Els, but why do you imagine that you—a seventeen-year-old—are likely to bring a fresh perspective to the matter?" "Because I have no vested interest in maintaining the Quaicheist view," Rashmika said. "Which would be?" "That the scuttlers are an incidental detail, unrelated to the deeper matter of the vanishings, or at best a reminder of what's likely to happen to us if we don't follow the Quaicheist route to salvation." "There's no doubt that they were denied salvation," the quaestor said, "but then so were eight or nine other alien cultures. I forget what the latest count is. There's clearly no particular mystery here. Local details about this particular vanished species, their history and society and so on, still need to be researched, of course, but what happened to them in the end isn't in doubt. We've all heard those pilgrims' tales from the evacuated systems, Miss Els, the stories about machines emerging from the dark between the stars. Now, it seems, it's our turn." "The supposition being that the scuttlers were wiped out by the Inhibitors?" she asked. He popped a crumb into the intricate little mouth of his animal. "Draw your own conclusions." "That's all I've ever done," she said. "And my conclusion is that what happened here was different." "Something wiped them out," the quaestor said. "Isn't that enough for you?" "I'm not sure it was the same thing that wiped out the Amarantin, or any of those other cultures. If the Inhibitors had been involved, do you think they'd have left this moon intact? They might have compunctions about destroying a world, a place with an established biosphere, but an airless moon like Hela? They'd have turned it into a ring system, or a cloud of radioactive steam. Yet whoever or whatever finished off the scuttlers wasn't anywhere near that thorough." She paused, fearful of revealing too much of her cherished thesis. "It was a rush job. They left behind too much. It's almost as if they wanted to leave a message, maybe a warning." "You're invoking an entirely new agency of cosmic extinction, is that it?" Rashmika shrugged. "If the facts demand it." "You're not greatly troubled by self-doubt, are you, Miss Els?" "I know only that the vanishings and the scuttlers must be related. So does everyone else. They're just too scared and intimidated to admit it." "And you're not?" "I was put on Hela for a reason," she said, the words tumbling out of her mouth as if spoken by someone else. The quaestor looked at her for a long, uncomfortable moment. "And this crusade," he said, "this quest to uncover the truth no matter how many enemies it makes you—is that why you're so intent on reaching the Permanent Way?" "There's another reason," she said, quietly. The quaestor appeared not to have heard her. "You have a particular interest in the First Adventists, don't you? I noticed it when I mentioned my role as legate." "It's the oldest of the churches," Rashmika said. "And one of the largest, I'd imagine." "The largest. The First Adventist order runs three cathedrals, including the largest and heaviest on the Way." "I know they have an archaeological study group," she said. "I've written to them. Surely there'd be some work for me there." "So you can advance your theory and rub everyone up the wrong way?" She shook her head. "I'd work quietly, doing what was needed. It wouldn't stop me examining material. I just need a job, so that I can send some money home and make some enquiries." He sighed, as if the world and all its troubles were now his responsibility. "What exactly do you know of the cathedrals, Miss Els? I mean in the physical sense." She sensed that the question, for once, was a sincere one. "They are moving structures," she said, "much larger than this caravan, much slower... but machines, all the same. They travel around Hela on the equatorial road we call the Permanent Way, completing a revolution once every three hundred and twenty standard days." "And the point of this circumnavigation?" "Is to ensure that Haldora is always in the sky, always at the zenith. The world moves beneath the cathedrals, but the cathedrals cancel out that motion." A smile ghosted the quaestor's lips. "And what do you know about the motion of the cathedrals?" "It's slow," she said. "On average, the cathedrals only have to move at a baby's crawl to complete a circuit of Hela in three hundred and twenty days. A third of a metre a second is enough." "That doesn't seem fast, does it?" "Not really, no." "I assure you it does when you have a few hundred vertical metres of metal sliding towards you and you have a job to do that involves stepping out of the way at the last possible moment, before you fall under the traction plates." Quaestor Rutland Jones leant forwards, compressing the bulk of his belly against the table and lacing his fingers before him. "The Permanent Way is a road of compacted ice. With one or two complications, it encircles the planet like a ribbon. It is never wider than two hundred metres, and is frequently much narrower than that. Yet even a small cathedral may be fifty metres across. The largest of them—the Lady Morwenna, for instance—are double that. And since the cathedrals all wish to situate themselves under the mathematically exact spot on the Way that corresponds to Haldora being precisely at the zenith, directly overhead, there is a certain degree of... " His voice became mockingly playful. "...competition for the available space. Between rival churches, even those bound by the ecumenical protocols, it can be surprisingly fierce. Sabotage and trickery are not unheard of. Even amongst cathedrals belonging to one church, there is still a degree of playful jockeying." "I'm not sure I see your point, Quaestor." "I mean that damage to the Way—deliberately inflicted vandalism—is not unusual. Cathedrals may leave obstacles in their wake, or they may tamper with the integrity of the Way itself. And Hela itself does its share of harm. Rock blizzards... ice-flows... volcanic eruptions... all these can render the Way temporarily impassable. That is why cathedrals have Permanent Way gangs." He looked at Rashmika sharply. "The gangs work ahead of the cathedrals. Not too far ahead, or they risk their good work being exploited by rivals, but just far enough to enable their tasks to be completed before their cathedrals arrive. I'll make no bones about it: the work is difficult and dangerous. But it is work that requires some of the skills you have mentioned." He tapped pudgy fingers against the table. "Working under vacuum, on ice. Using cutting and blasting tools. Programming servitors for the most hazardous tasks." "That's not the kind of work I had in mind," Rashmika said. "No?" "Like I said, I think my skills would be put to far better use in a clerical context, such as one of the archaeological study groups." "That may be so, but vacancies in those groups are rare indeed. On the other hand, by the very nature of the work, vacancies do tend to keep opening up in clearance gangs." "Because people keep dying?" "It's tough work. But it is work. And there are degrees of risk even in clearance duty. It shouldn't be too difficult to find you something slightly less hazardous than fuse-laying, something where you might not even have to wear a surface suit all day long. And it might keep you occupied until something opens up in one of the study groups." Rashmika read the quaestor's face. He had not lied to her so far. "It's not what I wanted," she said, "but if it's all that's on offer, I'll have to take it. If I said I was prepared to do such work, could you find me a vacancy?" "If I felt I could live with myself afterwards... then yes, I dare say I could." "I'm sure you'd sleep fine at night, Quaestor." "And you are certain that this is what you want?" She nodded, before her own doubt began to show. "If you could start making the arrangements, I would be grateful." "There are always favours that can be called in," he said. "But there is something I need to mention. There are people looking for you, from the Vigrid badlands. The constabulary can't touch you here, but your absence has been noted." "That doesn't surprise me." "There has been speculation about the purpose of your mission. Some say it has something to do with your brother." The green creature looked up, as if taking a sudden interest in the conversation. It was definitely missing one of its forelimbs, Rashmika noted. "Harbin Els," the quaestor continued. "That's his name, isn't it?" There was clearly no point pretending otherwise. "My brother went to look for work on the Way," she said. "They lied to him about what would happen, said they wouldn't put the dean's blood in him. We never saw him again." "And now you feel the need to find out what became of him?" "He was my brother," she said. "Then perhaps this may be of interest to you." The quaestor reached under his desk and produced a folded sheet of paper. He pushed it towards her. The green creature watched it slide across the desk. She took the letter, rubbing her thumb against the red wax seal that held it closed. Embossed on the seal was a spacesuit, arms spread like a crucifix, radiating shafts of light. The seal had been broken; it only loosely adhered to the paper on one side of the join. "What is it?" she asked, looking at his face very carefully. "It came through official channels, from the Lady Morwenna. That's a Clocktower seal." That part was true, she thought. Or at least the quaestor sincerely believed that was the case. "When?" "Today." But that was a lie. "Addressed to me?" "I was told to make sure you saw it." He looked down, not wanting to meet her eyes. It made his face harder to read. "By whom?" "No one... I..." Again, he was lying. "I looked at it. Don't think ill of me—I look at all correspondence that passes through the caravan. It's a matter of security." "Then you know what it says?" "I think you should read it for yourself," he said.
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Hela, 2727	The ticking of his cane marked the surgeon-general's progress through the iron of the great cathedral. Even in the parts of the cathedral where the engines and traction mechanisms were audible, they heard him coming long before he arrived. His footsteps were as measured and regular as the beats of a metronome, the tap of his cane punctuating the rhythm, iron against iron. He moved with a deliberate arachnoid slowness, giving the nosy and the idle time to disperse. Occasionally he was aware of watchers secreted behind metal pillars or grilles, spying on him, thinking themselves discreet. More often than not he knew with certainty that he went about his errands unobserved. In the long years of his service to Quaiche, one thing had been made clear to the cathedral populace: Grelier's business was not a matter for the curious. But sometimes those who fled from him were doing so for reasons other than the edict to keep their noses out of his work. He reached a spiral staircase, a helix of skeletal iron plunging down into the clanking depths of Motive Power. The staircase was ringing like a struck tuning fork. Either it was picking up a vibration from the machines below or someone had just employed it to get away from Grelier. He leant over the balustrade, peering down the corkscrewing middle of the staircase. Two turns below, pudgy fingers slipped urgently along the handrail. Was that his man? Very probably. Humming to himself, Grelier unlatched the protective gate that allowed entry to the stairwell. He flipped it shut with the sharp end of his cane and began to descend. He took his time, allowing each pair of footfalls to echo before proceeding down to the next step. He let the cane tap, tap, tap against the balusters, informing the man that he was coming and that there was no conceivable avenue of escape. Grelier knew the innards of Motive Power as intimately as he knew the innards of every section of the cathedral. He had sealed all the other stairwells with the Clocktower key. This was the only way up or down, and he would be sure to seal it once he reached the bottom. His heavy medical case knocked against one thigh as he descended, in perfect synchrony with the tapping of the cane. The machines in the lower levels sang more loudly as he approached them. There was no part of the cathedral where you couldn't hear those grinding mechanisms, if there were no other sounds. But in the high levels the noise from the motors and traction systems had to compete with organ music and the permanently singing voices of the choir. The mind soon filtered out that faint background component. Not here. Grelier heard the shrill whine of turbines, which set his teeth on edge. He heard the low clank and thud of massive articulated cranks and eccentrics. He heard pistons sliding, valves opening and closing. He heard relays chattering, the low voices of technical staff. He descended, cane tapping, medical kit ready. Grelier reached the lowest turn of the spiral. The exit gate squeaked on its hinges: it hadn't been latched. Someone had been in a bit of a hurry. He stepped through the doorframe and placed his medical kit between his shoes. He took the key from his breast pocket and locked the gate, preventing anyone from ascending from this level. Then he picked up the medical kit and resumed his leisurely progress. Grelier looked around. There was no sign of the fugitive, but there were plenty of places where a man might hide. This did not concern Grelier: in time, he was bound to find the pudgy-fingered absconder. He could allow himself a few moments to look around, take a break from his usual routine. He did not come down here all that often, and the place always impressed him. Motive Power occupied one of the largest chambers of the cathedral, on the lowest pressurised level. The chamber ran the entire two-hundred-metre length of the moving structure. It was one hundred metres wide and fifty metres from floor to magnificently arched ceiling. Machinery filled much of the available volume, except for a gap around the walls and another of a dozen or so metres below the ceiling. The machinery was immense: it lacked the impersonal, abstract vastness of starship mechanisms, but there was something more intimate and therefore more personally threatening about it. Starship machinery was vast and bureaucratic: it just didn't notice human beings. If they got on the wrong side of it they simply ceased to exist, annihilated in a painless instant. But as huge as the machinery in Motive Power was, it was also small enough to notice people. If they got in the way of it they were liable to find themselves maimed or crushed. It wouldn't be painless and it wouldn't be instantaneous. Grelier pushed his cane against the pale-green carapace of a turbine. Through the cane he felt the vigorous thrum of trapped energies. He thought of the blades whisking round, drawing energy from the superheated steam spewing from the atomic reactor. All it would take was a flaw in one of the blades and the turbine could blow apart at any instant, bringing whirling, jagged death to anyone within fifty metres. It happened now and then; he usually came down to clean up the mess. It was all rather thrilling, really. The reactor—the cathedral's atomic power plant—was the largest single chunk of machinery in the chamber, housed in a bottle-green dome at the rear end of the room. The kindest thing you could say about it was that it worked and it was cheap. There was no nuclear fuel to be mined on Hela, but the Ultras provided a ready supply. Dirty and dangerous, maybe, but more economical than antimatter and easier to work with than a fusion power plant. They had done the calculations: refining local ice to provide fusion fuel would have required a pre-processing plant as large as the entire existing Motive Power assembly. But the cathedral had already grown as big as it ever could, given the dimensions of the Way and the Devil's Staircase. Besides, the reactor worked and supplied all the power that the cathedral required, and the reactor workers didn't get sick all that often. From the reactor's apex sprouted a tangle of high-pressure steam pipes. The gleaming silver intestines traversed the entire chamber, subject to inexplicable hairpin bends and right angles. They fed into thirty-two turbines, stacked atop one another in two rows, each row eight turbines long. Catwalks, inspection platforms, access tunnels, ladders and equipment elevators caged the whole humming mass. The turbines were dynamos, converting the rushing steam into electrical power. They fed the electrical energy into the main traction motors, twenty-four of them squatting atop the turbines in two rows of twelve. The traction motors in turn converted the electrical energy into mechanical force, propelling the great cranked and hinged mechanisms that ultimately moved the cathedral along the Way. At any one time only ten of the twelve motors on one side were doing any work: the spare set was idling, ready to be connected into use if another motor or set of motors needed to be taken offline for overhaul. The mechanisms themselves passed overhead, extending from the traction motors to the walls on either side. They penetrated the walls via pressure-proofed gaskets positioned at the precise rocking points of the main coupling rods. The gaskets were troublesome, Grelier gathered: they were always failing and having to be replaced. But somehow or other the mechanical motion generated inside the Motive Power chamber had to be conveyed beyond the walls, into vacuum. Above him, with a dreamlike slowness, the coupling rods swept back and forth and up and down in orchestrated waves, beginning at the front of the chamber and working back. A complicated arrangement of smaller cranks and eccentrics connected the rods to each other, synchronising their movements. Aerial catwalks threaded between the huge spars of thrusting metal, allowing workers to lubricate joints and inspect failure points for metal fatigue. It was risky work: one moment of inattention and there'd be lubrication of entirely the wrong sort. There was more to Motive Power, of course. A lot more. Somewhere there was even a small foundry, working day and night to fabricate replacement parts. The largest components had to be made in Wayside plants, but it always took time to procure and deliver such replacements. The artisans in Motive Power took great pride in their ingenuity when it came to fixing something at short notice, or pressing a part into service for a different function than intended. They knew what the bottom line was: the cathedral had to keep moving, no matter what. No one was asking the world of them—it only had to move a third of a metre a second, after all. You could crawl faster than that, easily. The point was not the speed, but that the cathedral must never, ever stop. "Surgeon-General, might I help you?" Grelier tracked the voice to its source: someone was looking down at him from one of the catwalks above. The man wore the grey overalls of Motive Power, and was gripping the handrail with oversized gloves. His bullet-shaped scalp was blue with stubble, a filthy neckerchief around his collar. Grelier recognised the man as Glaur, one of the shift bosses. "Perhaps you could come down here for a moment," Grelier said. Glaur complied immediately, traversing the catwalk and vanishing back into the machinery. Grelier tapped his cane idly against the cleated metal floor, waiting for the man to make his way down. "Something up, Surgeon-General?" Glaur asked when he arrived. "I'm looking for someone," Grelier told him. No need to say why. "He won't belong down here, Glaur. Have you seen anyone unexpected?" "Like who?" "The choirmaster. I'm sure you know the fellow. Pudgy hands." Glaur looked back up to the slowly threshing coupling rods. They moved like the oars of some biblical galleon, manned by hundreds of slaves. Grelier imagined that Glaur would much rather be up there working with the predictable hazards of moving metal than down here navigating the shifting treacheries of cathedral politics. "There was someone," Glaur offered. "I saw a man move through the hall a few minutes ago." "Seem in a bit of a rush, did he?" "I assumed he was on Clocktower business." "He wasn't. Any idea where I might find him now?" Glaur glanced around. "He might have taken one of the staircases back up to the main levels." "Not likely. He'll still be down here, I think. In which direction was he moving when you saw him?" A moment of hesitation, which Grelier duty noted. "Towards the reactor," Glaur said. "Thank you." Grelier tapped his cane smartly and left the shift boss standing there, his momentary usefulness over. He followed his quarry's path towards the reactor. He resisted the temptation to pick up his pace, maintaining his stroll, tapping the cane against the floor or any suitably resonant thing he happened to pass. Now and then he stepped over a glassed, grilled window in the floor, and paused awhile to watch the faintly lit ground crawl beneath him, twenty metres below. The cathedral's motion was rock steady, the jerky walking motion of the twenty buttressed treads smoothed out by the skill of engineers like Glaur. The reactor loomed ahead. The green dome was surrounded by its own rings of catwalks, rising to the apex. Heavily riveted viewing windows were set with thick dark glass. He caught sight of a sleeve vanishing around the curve of the second catwalk from the ground. "Hello," Grelier called. "Are you there, Vaustad? I'd like a wee word." No reply. Grelier circled the reactor, taking his time. From above, its originator always out of sight, came a metallic scamper. He smiled, dismayed at Vaustad's stupidity. There were a hundred places to hide in the traction hall. Simian instinct, however, had driven the choirmaster to head for higher ground, even if that meant being cornered. Grelier reached the gated access point to the ladder. He stepped through it and locked the gate behind him. He could not climb and carry the medical kit and the cane, so he left the medical kit on the ground. He tucked the cane into the crook of his arm and made his way upwards, one rung at a time, until he reached the first catwalk. He walked around it once, just to unnerve Vaustad further. Humming quietly to himself, he looked over the edge and took in the scenery. Occasionally he rapped the cane against the curving metal sides of the reactor, or the black glass of one of the inspection portholes. The glass reminded him of the tarlike chips in the cathedral's front-facing stained-glass window, and he wondered for a moment if it was the same material. Well, on to business. He reached the ladder again and ascended to the next level. He could still hear that pathetic lab-rat scampering. "Vaustad? Be a good fellow and come here, will you? It'll all be over in a jiffy." The scampering continued. He could feel the man's footfalls through the metal, transmitted right around the reactor. "I'll just have to come over to you myself, then, won't I?" He began to circumnavigate the reactor. He was on a level with the coupling rods now. There were none close to him, but—seen in foreshortened perspective—the moving spars of metal threshed like scissor blades. He saw some of Glaur's technicians moving amongst that whisking machinery, oiling and checking. They appeared imprisoned in it, yet magically uninjured. The hem of a trouser leg vanished around the curve. The scampering increased in pace. Grelier smiled and halted, leaning over the edge. He was close now. He took the top end of his cane and twisted the head one quarter turn. "Up or down?" he whispered to himself. "Up or down?" It was up. He could hear the clattering rising above him, to the next level of the catwalk. Grelier didn't know whether to be pleased or disappointed. Down, and the hunt would be over. The man would find his escape blocked, and Grelier would have had no difficulty pacifying him with the cane. With the man docile, it would only take a minute or two to inject him with the top-up dose. Efficient, but where was the fun in that? At least now he was getting a run for his money. The end result would still be the same: the man cornered, no way out. Touch him with the cane and he'd be putty in Grelier's hands. There would be the problem of getting him down the ladder, of course, but one of Glaur's people could help with that. Grelier climbed to the next level. This catwalk was smaller in diameter than the two below, set back towards the apex of the reactor dome. There was only one more level, at the apex itself, accessed by a gently sloping ramp. Vaustad was moving up the ramp as Grelier watched. "There's nothing for you up there," the surgeon-general said. "Turn around now and we'll forget all about this." Would he hell. But Vaustad was beyond reason in any case. He had arrived at the apex and was taking a moment to look back at his pursuer. Pudgy hands, mooncalf face. Grelier had his man all right, not that there had ever been much doubt. "Leave me alone," Vaustad shouted. "Leave me alone, you bloody ghoul!" "Sticks and stones," Grelier said with a patient smile. He tapped his cane against the railing and began to ascend the ramp. "You won't get me," Vaustad said. "I've had enough. Too many bad dreams." "Oh, come now. A little prick and it'll all be over." Vaustad grabbed hold of one of the silver steam pipes erupting from the top of the reactor dome, wrapping himself around it. He began to scramble up it, using the pipe's metal ribs for grip. There was nothing graceful or speedy about his progress, but it was steady and methodical. Had he planned this? Grelier wondered. It had been a mistake to forget about the steam pipes. But where would he go, ultimately? The pipes would only take him back along the hall towards the turbines and the traction motors. It might prolong the chase, but it was still futile in the long run. Grelier reached the reactor's apex. Vaustad was a metre or so above his head. He held up the cane, trying to tap Vaustad's heels. No good; he had made too much height. Grelier turned the head of the cane another quarter turn, increasing the stun setting, and touched it against the pipework. Vaustad yelped, but kept moving. Another quarter turn of the cane: maximum-discharge setting, lethal at close quarters. He kissed the end of the cane against the metal and watched Vaustad hug the pipe convulsively. The man clenched his teeth, moaned, but still managed to hold on to the pipe. Grelier dropped the cane, the charge exhausted. Suddenly this wasn't proceeding quite the way he had planned it. "Where are you going?" Grelier asked, playfully. "Come down now, before you hurt yourself." Vaustad said nothing, just kept crawling. "You'll do yourself an injury," Grelier said. Vaustad had reached the point where his pipe curved over to the horizontal, taking it across the hall towards the turbine complex. Grelier expected him to stop at the right-angled turn, having made his point. But instead Vaustad wriggled around the bend until he was lying on the upper surface of the pipe with his arms and legs wrapped around it. He was now thirty metres from the ground. The scene was drawing a small audience. About a dozen of Glaur's men were standing in the hall below, looking up at the spectacle. Others had paused in their work amongst the coupling rods. "Clocktower business," Grelier said warningly. "Go back to your jobs." The workers drifted away, but Grelier was aware that most of them were still keeping one eye on what was happening. Had the situation reached the point where he needed to call in additional assistance from Bloodwork? He hoped not; it was a matter of personal pride that he always took care of these house calls on his own. But the Vaustad call was turning messy. The choirmaster had made about ten metres of horizontal distance, carrying him beyond the perimeter of the reactor. There was only floor below him now. Even in Hela's reduced gravity, a fall from thirty metres on to a hard surface was probably not going to be survivable. Grelier looked ahead. The pipe was supported from the ceiling at intervals, hanging by thin metal lines anchored to enlarged versions of the ribs. The nearest line was about five metres in front of Vaustad. There was no way he would be able to get around that. "All right," Grelier said, raising his voice above the din of the traction machinery. "You've made your point. We've all had a bit of a laugh. Now turn around and we'll talk things over sensibly." But Vaustad was beyond reason now. He had reached the supporting stay and was trying to wriggle past it, shifting much of his weight to one side of the pipe. Grelier watched, knowing with numbing inevitability that Vaustad was not going to make it. It would have been a difficult exercise for an agile young man, and Vaustad was neither. He was curled around the obstacle now, one leg hanging uselessly over the side, the other trying to act as a balance, one hand on the metal stay and the other fumbling for the nearest rib on the other side. He stretched, straining to reach the rib. Then he slipped, both legs coming off the pipe. He hung there, one hand taking his weight while the other thrashed around in midair. "Stay still!" Grelier called. "Stay still and you'll be all right. You can hold yourself there until we get help if you stop moving!" Again, a fit young man could have held himself up there until rescue arrived, even hanging from one hand. But Vaustad was a large, soft individual who had never had to use his muscles before. Grelier watched as Vaustad's remaining hand slipped from the metal stay. He watched Vaustad fall down to the floor of the traction hall, hitting it with a thump that was nearly muffled by the constant background noise. There had been no scream, no gasp of shock. Vaustad's eyes were closed, but from the expression on his upturned face it was likely that the man had died instantly. Grelier collected his cane, stuffed it into the crook of his arm and made his way back down the series of ramps and ladders. At the foot of the reactor he retrieved his medical kit and unlocked the access door. By the time he reached Vaustad, half a dozen of Glaur's workers had gathered around the body. He considered shooing them away, then decided against it. Let them watch. Let them see what Bloodwork entailed. He knelt down by Vaustad and opened the medical kit. It gasped cold. It was divided into two compartments. In the upper tray were the red-filled syringes of top-up doses, fresh from Bloodwork. They were labelled for serotype and viral strain. One of them had been intended for Vaustad and would now have to go to new home. He peeled back Vaustad's sleeve. Was there still a faint pulse? That would make life easier. It was never a simple business, drawing blood from the dead. Even the recently deceased. He reached into the second compartment, the one that held the empty syringes. He held one up to the light, symbolically. "The Lord giveth," Grelier said, slipping the syringe into one of Vaustad's veins and starting to draw blood. "And sometimes, unfortunately, the Lord taketh away." He filled three syringes before he was done. Grelier latched the gate to the spiral staircase behind him. It was good, on reflection, to escape the aggressive stillness of the traction hall. Sometimes it seemed to him that the place was a cathedral within a cathedral, with its own unwritten rules. He could control people, but down there—amid machines—he was out of his element. He had tried to make the most of the business with Vaustad, but everyone knew that he had not come to take blood, but to give it. Before ascending further he stopped at one of the speaking points, calling a team down from Bloodwork to deal with the body. There would be questions to answer, later, but nothing that would cost him any sleep. Grelier moved through the main hall, on his way to the Clocktower. He was taking the long way around, in no particular hurry to see Quaiche after the Vaustad debacle. Besides, it was his usual custom to make at least one circumnavigation of the hall before going up or down. It was the largest open space in the cathedral, and the only one—save for the traction hall—where he could free himself from the mild claustrophobia that he felt in every other part of the moving structure. The hall had been remade and expanded many times, as the cathedral itself grew to its present size. Little of that history was evident to the casual eye now, but having lived through most of the changes, Grelier saw what others might have missed. He observed the faint scars where interior walls had been removed and relocated. He saw the tidemark where the original, much lower ceiling had been. Thirty or forty years had passed since the new one had been put in—it had been a mammoth exercise in the airless environment of Hela, especially since the old space had remained occupied throughout the whole process and the cathedral had, of course, kept moving the entire time. Yet the choir had not missed a note during the entire remodelling, and the number of deaths amongst the construction workers had remained tolerably low. Grelier paused awhile at one of the stained-glass windows on the right-hand side of the cathedral. The coloured edifice towered dozens of metres above him. It was framed by a series of divided stone arches, with a rose window at the very top. The cathedral's architectural skeleton, traction mechanisms and external cladding were necessarily composed largely of metal, but much of the interior was faced with a thin layer of cosmetic masonry. Some of it had been processed from indigenous Hela minerals, but the rest of it—the subtle biscuit-hued stones and the luscious white-and-rose marbles—had been imported by the Ultras. Some of the stones, it was said, had even come from cathedrals on Earth. Grelier took that with a large pinch of salt: more than likely they'd come from the nearest suitable asteroid. It was the same with the holy relics he encountered during his tour, tucked away in candlelit niches. It was anyone's guess how old they really were, whether they'd been hand-crafted by medieval artisans or knocked together in manufactory nano-forges. But regardless of the provenance of the stonework that framed it, the stained-glass window was a thing of beauty. When the light was right, it not only shone with a glory of its own but transmitted that glory to everything and everyone within the hall. The details of the window hardly mattered—it would still have been beautiful if the chips of coloured, vacuum-tight glass had been arranged in random kaleidoscopic patterns—but Grelier took particular note of the imagery. It changed from time to time, following dictates from Quaiche himself. When Grelier sometimes had difficulty reading the man directly (and that was increasingly the case) the windows offered a parallel insight into Quaiche's state of mind. Take now, for instance: when he had last paid attention to this window, it had focused on Haldora, showing a stylised view of the gas giant rendered in swirling chips of ochre and fawn. The planet had been set within a blue backdrop speckled with the yellow chips of surrounding stars. In the foreground there had been a rocky landscape evoked in contrasting shards of white and black, with the gold form of Quaiche's crashed ship parked amid boulders. Quaiche himself was depicted outside the ship, robed and bearded, kneeling on the ground and raising an imploring hand to the heavens. Before that, Grelier recalled, the window had shown the cathedral itself, pictured descending the zigzagging ramp of the Devil's Staircase, looking for all the world like a tiny storm-tossed sailing ship, all the other cathedrals lagging behind, and with a slightly smaller rendition of Haldora in the sky. Before that, he couldn't be sure, but he thought it might have been a more modest variation on the theme of the crashed ship. The images that the window showed now were clear enough, but their significance to Quaiche was much more difficult to judge. At the top, worked into the rose window itself, was the familiar banded face of Haldora. Below that were a couple of metres of starlit sky, shaded from deep blue to gold by some artifice of glass tinting. Then, taking up most of the height of the window, was a toweringly impressive cathedral, a teetering assemblage of pennanted spires and buttresses, lines of converging perspective making it clear that the cathedral sat immediately below Haldora. So far so good: the whole point of a cathedral was for it to remain precisely below the gas giant, just as depicted. But the cathedral in the window was obviously larger than any to be found on the Permanent Way; it was practically a citadel in its own right. And—unless Grelier was mistaken—it was clearly portrayed as being an outgrowth of the rocky foreground landscape, as if it had foundations rather than traction mechanisms. There was no sign of the Permanent Way at all. The window puzzled him. Quaiche chose the content of the windows, and he was usually very literal-minded in his selections. The scenes might be exaggerated, might even have the taint of unreality (Quaiche outside his ship without a vacuum suit, for instance) but they usually bore at least some glancing relationship to actual events. But the present content of the window appeared to be worryingly metaphorical. That was all Grelier needed, Quaiche going all metaphorical on him. But what else was he to make of the vast, grounded cathedral? Perhaps it symbolised the fixed, immobile nature of Quaiche's faith. Fine, Grelier told himself: you think you can read him now, but what if the messages start getting even foggier? He shook his head and continued his journey. He traversed the entire left-hand wall of the cathedral, not seeing any further oddities amongst the windows. That was a relief, at least. Perhaps the new design would turn out to be a temporary aberration, and life would continue as normal. He moved around to the front of the cathedral, into the shadow of the black window. The chips of glass were invisible; all he could see were the ghostly arcs and pillars of the supporting masonry. The design in that window had undoubtedly changed since the last time he had seen it. He moved back across to the right-hand side and proceeded along half the length of the cathedral until he arrived at the base of the Clocktower. "Can't put it off any longer," Grelier said to himself. Back in her quarters on the caravan, Rashmika opened the letter, breaking the already weakened seal. The paper sprung wide. It was good-quality stuff: creamy and thick, better than anything she had handled in the badlands. Printed inside, in neat but naïve handwriting, was a short message. She recognised the handwriting. Dear Rashmika, I am very sorry not to have been in touch for so long. I heard your name on the broadcasts from the Vigrid region, saying you had run away from home. I had a feeling that you would be coming after me, trying to find out what had happened to me since my last letter. When I found out that there was a caravan coming towards the Way, one that you might have been able to reach with help, I felt certain you would be on it. I made an enquiry and found out the names of the passengers and now I am writing this letter to you. I know you will think it strange that I have not written to you or any of the family for so long. But things are different now, and it would not have been right. Everything that you said was true. They did not tell the truth to start with, and they gave me the dean's blood as soon as I arrived at the Way. I am sure you could tell this from the letters I sent to begin with. I was angry at first, but now I know that it was all for the best. What's done is done, and if they had been honest it wouldn't have happened this way. They had to tell a lie for the greater good. I am happy now, happier than I have ever been. I have found a duty in life, something bigger than myself. I feel the dean's love and the love of the Creator beyond the dean. I don't expect you to understand or like any of this, Rashmika. That's why I stopped writing home. I didn't want to lie, and yet I also didn't want to hurt anyone. It was better to say nothing. It is kind and brave of you to come after me. It means more than you can imagine. But you must go home now, before I bring you any more hurt. Do this for me: go home, back to the badlands, and tell everyone that I am happy and that I love them all. I miss them terribly, but I do not regret what I have done. Please. Do that for me, will you? And take my love as well. Remember me as I was, as your brother, not as what I have become. Then it will all be for the best. With love, Your brother, Harbin Els. Rashmika read it one more time, scrutinising it for hidden meaning, and then put it down. She closed it, but the seal would no longer hold the edges tight. Grelier liked the view, if little else. Two hundred metres above the surface of Hela, Quaiche's room was a windowed garret at the very top of the Clocktower. From this vantage point one could see nearly twenty kilometres of the Way in either direction, with the cathedrals strung along it like artfully placed ornaments. There were only a few of them ahead, but to the rear they stretched back far over the horizon. The tops of distant spires sparkled with the unnatural clarity of things in vacuum, tricking the eye into the illusion that they were much nearer than they actually were. Grelier reminded himself that some of those spires were nearly forty kilometres behind. It would take them thirty hours or more to reach the spot now immediately beneath the Lady Morwenna, the better part of a Hela day. There were some cathedrals so far behind that even their spires were not visible. 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 skull: 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 his hands 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 had he 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." Grelier had looked at him carefully. "I don't know what you mean." "I mean the body factory," Quaiche had said, "your little problem with supply and demand. There's more to it than just meeting Jasmina's insatiable taste for fresh bodies, isn't there? You've also got a sideline in body usage yourself. You like them small, undeveloped. You take them out of the tanks before they're reached adulthood—sometimes even before they've reached childhood—and you do things to them. Vile, vile things. Then you put them back in the tanks and say they were never viable." "They have no minds," Grelier had said, as if this excused his actions. "Anyway, what exactly are you proposing—blackmail?" "No, just an incentive. Help me dispose of Jasmina, help me with other things, and I'll make sure no one ever finds out about the factory." Quietly, Grelier had said, "And what about my needs?" "We'll think of something, if that's what it takes to keep you working for me." "Why should I prefer you as my master in place of Jasmina? You're as insane as each other." "Perhaps," Quaiche had said. "The difference is, I'm not murderous. Think about it." Grelier had, and before very long had decided that his short-term best interests lay beyond the Gnostic Ascension. He would co-operate with Quaiche for the immediate future, and then find something better—something less submissive—at the earliest opportunity. Yet here he was, over a century later. He had underestimated his own weakness to a ludicrous degree. For in the Ultras, with their ships crammed full of ancient, faulty reefersleep caskets, Quaiche had found the perfect means of keeping Grelier in his service. But Grelier had known nothing of this future in the earliest days of their liaison. Their first move had been to engineer Jasmina's downfall. Their plan had consisted of three steps, each of which had to be performed with great caution. The cost of discovery would be huge, but—Grelier was certain now—in all that time she had never once suspected that the two former rivals were plotting against her. That didn't mean that things had gone quite according to plan, however. First, a camp had been established on Hela. There were habitation modules, sensors and surface rovers. Some Ultras had come down, but as usual their instinctive dislike of planetary environments had made them fidgety, anxious to get back to their ship. Grelier and Quaiche, by contrast, had found it the perfect venue in which to further their uneasy alliance. And they had even made a remarkable discovery, one that only aided their cause. It was during their earliest scouting trips away from the base, under the eye of Jasmina, that they had found the very first scuttler relics. Now, at last, they had some idea of who or what had made the bridge. The second phase of their plan had been to make Jasmina unwell. As master of the body factory, it had been a trivial matter for Grelier. He had tampered with the clones, slowing their development, triggering more abnormalities and defects. Unable to anchor herself to reality with regular doses of self-inflicted pain, Jasmina had grown insular. Her judgement had become impaired, her grasp on events tenuous. That was when they had attempted the third phase: rebellion. They had meant to engineer a mutiny, taking over the Gnostic Ascension for their own ends. There were Ultras—former friends of Morwenna—who had showed some sympathy to Quaiche. During their initial explorations of Hela, Quaiche and Grelier had located a fourth fully functional sentry of the same type that had downed the Scavenger's Daughter . The idea had been to exploit Jasmina's flawed judgement to drag the Gnostic Ascension within range of the remaining sentry weapon. Ordinarily, she would have resisted bringing her ship within light-hours of a place like Hela, but the spectacle of the bridge, and the discovery of the scuttler relics, had overridden her better instincts. With the expected damage from the sentry—ultimately superficial, but enough to cause panic and confusion amongst her crew—the ship would have been ripe for takeover. But it hadn't worked. The sentry had attacked with greater force than Quaiche had anticipated, inflicting fatal, spreading damage on the Gnostic Ascension. He had wanted to cripple the ship and occupy it for his own purposes, but instead the vessel had blown up, waves of explosions stuttering away from the impact points on her hull until the wave front of destruction had reached the Conjoiner drives. Two bright new suns had flared in Hela's sky. When the light faded, there had been nothing left of Jasmina, or of the great lighthugger that had brought Quaiche and Grelier to this place. Quaiche and Grelier had been stranded. But they were not doomed. They'd had all they needed to survive on Hela for years to come, courtesy of the surface camp already established. They had begun to explore, riding out in the surface rovers. They had collected scuttler parts, trying to fit the weird alien fossils together into some kind of coherent whole, always failing. To Quaiche it had become an obsessive enterprise. Above him, the puzzle of Haldora. Below, the maddening taxonomic jigsaw of the scuttlers. He had thrown himself into both mysteries, knowing that somehow they were linked, knowing that in finding the answer he would understand why he had been saved and Morwenna sacrificed. He had believed that the puzzles were tests from God. He had also believed that only he was truly capable of solving them. A year had passed, then another. They circumnavigated Hela, using the rovers to carve out a rough trail. With each circumnavigation, the trail became better defined. They had made excursions to the north and south, veering away from the equator to where the heaviest concentrations of scuttler relics were to be found. Here they had mined and tunnelled, gathering more pieces of the jigsaw. Always, however, they had returned to the equator to mull over what they had found. And one day, in the second or third year, Quaiche had realised something critical: that he must witness another vanishing. "If it happens again, I have to see it," he had told Grelier. "But if it does happen again—for no particular reason—then you'll know it isn't a miracle." "No," Quaiche had said, emphatically. "If it happens twice, I'll know that God wanted to show it to me again for a reason, that he wanted to make sure there could no doubt in my mind that such a thing had already happened." Grelier had decided to play along. "But you have the telemetry from the Dominatrix. It confirms that Haldora vanished. Isn't that enough for you?" Quaiche had dismissed this point with a wave of his hand. "Numbers in electronic registers. I didn't see it with my own eyes. This means something to me." "Then you'll have to watch Haldora for ever." Hastily, Grelier had corrected himself. "I mean, until it vanishes again. But how long did it disappear for last time? Less than a second? Less than an eyeblink? What if you miss it?" "I'll have to try not to." "For half a year you can't even see Haldora." Grelier had pointed out, sweeping his arm overhead. "It rises and falls." "Only if you don't follow it. We circled Hela in under three months the first time we tried; under two the second time. It would be easier still to travel slowly, keeping pace with Haldora. One-third of a metre a second, that's all it would take. Keep up that pace, stay close to the equator, and Haldora will always be overhead. It'll just be the landscape that changes." Grelier had shaken his head in wonderment. "You've already thought this through." "It wasn't difficult. We'll lash together the rovers, make a travelling observation platform." "And sleep? And blinking?" "You're the physician," Quaiche had said. "You figure it out." And figure it out he had. Sleep could be banished with drugs and neuro-surgery, coupled with a little dialysis to mop up fatigue poisons. He had taken care of the blinking as well. "Ironic, really," Grelier had observed to Quaiche. "This is what she threatened you with in the scrimshaw suit: no sleep and an unchanging view of reality. Yet now you welcome it." "Things changed," Quaiche had said. Now, standing in the garret, the years collapsed away. For Grelier, time had passed in a series of episodic snapshots, for he was only revived from reefersleep when Quaiche had some immediate need of him. He remembered that first slow circumnavigation, keeping pace with Haldora, the rovers lashed together like a raft. A year or two later another ship had arrived: more Ultras, drawn by the faint flash of energy from the dying Gnostic Ascension. They were curious, naturally cautious. They kept their ship at a safe distance and sent down emissaries in expendable vehicles. Quaiche traded with them for parts and services, offering scuttler relics in turn. A decade or two later, following trade exchanges with the first ship, another had arrived. They were just as wary, just as keen to trade. The scuttler relics were exactly what the market wanted. And this time the ship was willing to offer more than components: there were sleepers in its belly, disaffected émigrés from some colony neither Quaiche nor Grelier had ever heard of. The mystery of Hela—the rumours of miracle—had drawn them across the light-years. Quaiche had his first disciples. Thousands more had arrived. Tens of thousands, then hundreds. For the Ultras, Hela was now a lucrative stopover on the strung-out, fragile web of interstellar commerce. The core worlds, the old places of trade, were now out of bounds, touched by plague and war. Lately, perhaps, by something worse than either. It was difficult to tell: very few ships were making it out to Hela from those places now. When they did, they brought with them confused stories of things emerging from interstellar space, fiercely mechanical things, implacable and old, that ripped through worlds, engorging themselves on organic life, but which were themselves no more alive than clocks or orreries. Those who came to Hela now came not only to witness the miraculous vanishings, but because they believed that they lived near the end of time and that Hela was a point of culmination, a place of final pilgrimage. The Ultras brought them as paid cargo in their ships and pretended to have no interest in the local situation beyond its immediate commercial value. For some, this was probably true, but Grelier knew Ultras better than most and he believed that lately he had seen something in their eyes—a fear that had nothing to do with the size of their profit margins and everything to do with their own survival. They had seen things as well, he presumed. Glimpses, perhaps: phantoms stalking the edge of human space. For years they must have dismissed these as travellers' tales, but now, as news from the core colonies stopped arriving, they were beginning to wonder. There were Ultras on Hela now. Under the terms of trade, their lighthugger starships were not permitted to come close to either Haldora or its inhabited moon. They congregated in a parking swarm on the edge of the system, dispatching smaller shuttles to Hela. Representatives of the churches inspected these shuttles, ensuring that they carried no recording or scanning equipment pointed at Haldora. It was a gesture more than anything, one that could have been easily circumvented, but the Ultras were surprisingly pliant. They wanted to play along, for they needed the business. Quaiche was completing his dealings with an Ultra when Grelier arrived in the garret. "Thank you, Captain, for your time," he said, his ghost of a voice rising in grey spirals from the life-support couch. "I'm sorry we weren't able to come to an agreement," the Ultra replied, "but you appreciate that the safety of my ship must be my first priority. We are all aware of what happened to the Gnostic Ascension." Quaiche spread his thin-boned fingers by way of sympathy. "Awful business. I was lucky to survive." "So we gather." The couch angled towards Grelier. "Surgeon-General Grelier... might I introduce Captain Basquiat of the lighthugger Bride of the Wind?" Grelier bowed his head politely at Quaiche's new guest. The Ultra was not as extreme as some that Grelier had encountered, but still odd and unsettling by baseline standards. He was very thin and colourless, like some desiccated weather-bleached insect, but propped upright in a blood-red support skeleton ornamented with silver lilies. A very large moth accompanied the Ultra: it fluttered before his face, fanning it. "My pleasure," Grelier said, placing down the medical kit with its cargo of blood-filled syringes. "I hope you had a nice time on Hela." "Our visit was fruitful, Surgeon-General. It wasn't possible to accommodate the last of Dean Quaiche's wishes, but otherwise, I believe both parties are satisfied with proceedings." "And the other small matter we discussed?" Quaiche asked. "The reefersleep fatalities? Yes, we have around two dozen braindead cases. In better times we might have been able to restore neural structure with the right sort of medichine intervention. Not now, however." "We'd be happy to take them off your hands," Grelier said. "Free-up the casket slots for the living." The Ultra flicked the moth away from his lips. "You have a particular use for these vegetables?" "The surgeon-general takes an interest in their cases," Quaiche said, interrupting before Grelier had a chance to say anything. "He likes to attempt experimental neural rescripting procedures, don't you, Grelier?" He looked away sharply, not waiting for an answer. "Now, Captain—do you need any special assistance in returning to your ship?" "None that I am aware of, thank you." Grelier looked out of the east-facing window of the garret. At the other end of the ridged roof of the main hall was a landing pad, on which a small shuttle was parked. It was the bright yellow-green of a stick insect. "Godspeed back to the parking swarm, Captain. We await transhipment of those unfortunate casket victims. And I look forward to doing business with you on another occasion." The captain turned to walk out, but paused before leaving. He had noticed the scrimshaw suit for the first time, Grelier thought. It was always there, standing in the corner of the room like a silent extra guest. The captain stared at it, his moth fluttering orbits around his head, then continued on his way. He could have no idea of the dreadful significance it represented to Quaiche: the final resting place of Morwenna and an ever-present reminder of what the first vanishing had cost him. Grelier waited until he was certain the Ultra was not coming back. "What was all that about?" he asked. "The extra stuff he 'couldn't accommodate'?" "The usual negotiations," Quaiche said, as if the matter was beneath him. "Count yourself lucky that you'll get your vegetables. Now—Bloodwork, eh? How did it go?" "Wait a moment." Grelier moved to one wall and worked a brass-handled lever. The jalousies folded shut, admitting only narrow wedges of light. Then he bent down over Quaiche and removed the sunglasses. Quaiche normally kept them on during his negotiations: partly to protect his eyes against glare, but also because without them he was not a pretty sight. Of course, that was precisely the reason he sometimes chose not to wear them, as well. Beneath the eyeshades, hugging the skin like a second pair of glasses, was a skeletal framework. Around each eye were two circles from which radiated hooks, thrusting inwards to keep the eyelids from closing. There were little sprays built into the frames, blasting Quaiche's eyes with moisture every few minutes. It would have been simpler, Grelier said, to have removed the eyelids in the first place, but Quaiche had a penitential streak as wide as the Way, and the discomfort of the frame suited him. It was a constant reminder of the need for vigilance, lest he miss a vanishing. Grelier took a small swab from the garret's medical locker and cleaned away the residue around Quaiche's eyes. "Bloodwork, Grelier?" "I'll come to that. Just tell me what that business with the Ultra was all about. Why did you want him to bring his ship closer to Hela?" Visibly, Quaiche's pupils dilated. "Why do you think that's what I wanted of him?" "Isn't it? Why else would he have said that it was too dangerous?" "You presume a great deal, Grelier." The surgeon-general finished cleaning up, then slotted the top pair of glasses back into place. "Why do you want the Ultras closer, all of a sudden? For years you've worked hard to keep the bastards at arm's-reach. Now you want one of their ships on your doorstep?" The figure in the couch sighed. He had more substance in the darkness. Grelier opened the slats again, observing that the yellow-green shuttle had departed from the landing pad. "It was just an idea," Quaiche said. "What kind of idea?" "You've seen how nervous the Ultras are lately. I trust them less and less. Basquiat seemed like a man I could do business with. I was hoping we might come to an arrangement." "What sort of arrangement?" Grelier returned the swabs to the cabinet. "Protection," Quaiche said. "Bring one group of Ultras here to keep the rest of them away." "Madness," Grelier said. "Insurance," his master corrected. "Well, what does it matter? They weren't interested. Too worried about bringing their ship near to Hela. This place scares them as much as it tantalises them, Grelier." "There'll always be others." "Perhaps..." Quaiche sounded as if the whole business was already boring him, a mid-morning fancy he now regretted. "You asked about Bloodwork," Grelier said. He knelt down and picked up the case. "It didn't go swimmingly, but I collected from Vaustad." "The choirmaster? Weren't you supposed to be administering?" "Wee change of plan." Bloodwork: the Office of the Clocktower dedicated to the preservation, enrichment and dissemination of the countless viral strains spun off from Quaiche's original infection. Almost everyone who worked in the cathedral carried some of Quaiche in their blood now. It had reached across generations, mutating and mingling with other types of virus brought to Hela. The result was a chaotic profusion of possible effects. Many of the other churches were based on, or had in some sense even been caused by, subtle doctrinal variants of the original strain. Bloodwork operated to tame the chaos, isolating effective and doctrinally pure strains and damping out others. Individuals like Vaustad were often used as test cases for newly isolated viruses. If they showed psychotic or otherwise undesirable side-effects, the strains would be eliminated. Vaustad had earned his role as guinea pig after a series of regrettable indiscretions, but had grown increasingly fearful of the results of each new test jab. "I hope you know what you're doing," Quaiche said. "I need Bloodwork, Grelier, more so now than ever. I'm losing my religion." Quaiche's own faith was subject to horrible lapses. He had developed immunity to the pure strain of the virus, the one that had infected him before his time aboard the Gnostic Ascension. One of the principle tasks of Bloodwork was to isolate the new mutant strains that were still able to have an effect on Quaiche. Grelier didn't advertise the fact, but it was getting harder and harder to find them. Quaiche was in a lapse now. Out of them, he never spoke of losing his religion. It was just there, solidly apart of him. It was only during the lapses that he found it possible to think of his faith as a chemically engineered thing. These interludes always worried Grelier. It was when Quaiche was at his most conflicted that he was at his least predictable. Grelier thought again of the enigmatic stained-glass window he had seen below, wondering if there might be a connection. "We'll soon have you right as rain," he said. "Good. I'll need to be. There's trouble ahead, Grelier. Major icefalls reported in the Gullveig Range, blocking the Way. It will fall to us to clear them, as it always does. But even with God's Fire I'm still worried that we'll lose time on Haldora." "We'll make it up. We always do." "Drastic measures may be called for if the delay becomes unacceptably large. I want Motive Power to be ready for whatever I ask of them—even the unthinkable." The couch tilted again, its reflection breaking up and reforming in the slowly moving mirrors. They were set up to guide light from Haldora into Quaiche's field of view: wherever he sat, he saw the world with his own eyes. "The unthinkable, Grelier," he added. "You know what I mean by that, don't you?" "I think so," Grelier said. And then thought of blood, and also of bridges. He also thought of the girl he was bringing to the cathedral and wondered if perhaps—just perhaps—he had set in motion something it would no longer be possible to stop. <But he won't do it,> he thought. <He's insane, no one doubts that, but he isn't that insane. Not so insane that he'd take the Lady Morwenna across the bridge, over Absolution Gap.>
Absolution Gap	Alastair Reynolds	[ "hard SF" ]	[ "Revelation Space" ]	Ararat, 2675	The internal map of the Nostalgia for Infinity was a long scroll of scuffed, yellowing paper, anchored at one end by Blood's knife and at the other by the heavy silver helmet Palfrey had found in the junk. The scroll was covered with a dense crawl of pencil and ink lines. In places it had been erased and redrawn so many times that the paper had the thin translucence of animal skin. "Is this the best we've got?" Blood asked. "It's better than nothing," Antoinette said. "We're doing our best with very limited resources." "All right." The pig had heard that a hundred times in the last week. "So what does it tell us?" "It tells us that we have a problem. Did you interview Palfrey?" "No. Scorp took care of that." Antoinette fingered the mass of jewellery packed into her earlobes. "I had a little chat with him as well. I wanted to see how the land was lying. Turns out practically everyone in bilge management is convinced that the Captain is changing his haunt patterns." "And?" "Now that we've got the last dozen or so apparitions plotted, I'm beginning to think they're right." The pig squinted at the map, his eyes poorly equipped for discerning the smoke-grey pencil marks in the low light of the conference room. Maps had never really been his thing, even during his days under Scorpio in Chasm City. There, it had hardly mattered. Blood's motto had always been that if you needed a map to find your way around a neighbourhood, you were already in trouble. But this map was important. It depicted the Nostalgia for Infinity, the very sea-spire in which they were sitting. The ship was a tapering cone of intricate vertical and horizontal lines, an obelisk engraved with crawling, interlocked hieroglyphics. The lines showed floor levels, interconnecting shafts and major interior partitions. The ship's huge internal storage bays were unmarked cavities in the diagram. The ship was four kilometres tall, so there was no space on the map for detail at the human scale. Individual rooms were usually not marked at all unless they had some strategic importance. Mostly, mapping it was a pointless exercise. The ship's slow processes of interior reorganisation—utterly outside the control of its human occupants—had rendered all such efforts nearly useless within a handful of years. There were other complications. The high levels of the ship were well charted. Crews were always moving around in these areas, and the constant presence of human activity seemed to have dissuaded the ship from changing itself too much. But the deep levels, and especially those that lay below sea level, were nowhere near as well visited. Teams only went down there when they had to, and when they did they usually found that the interior failed utterly to conform to their expectations. And the transformed parts of the ship—warped according to queasy, biological archetypes—were by their very nature difficult to map with any accuracy. Blood had been down into some of the most severely distorted zones of the deep ship levels. The experience had been akin to the exploration of some nightmarish cave system. It was not only the interior of the ship that remained uncertain. Before descending from orbit, the lighthugger had prepared itself for landing by flattening its stern. In the chaos of that descent, very few detailed observations of the changes had been possible. And since the lower kilometre of the ship—including the twin nacelles of the Conjoiner drives—was now almost permanently submerged, there had been little opportunity to improve matters in the meantime. Divers had explored only the upper hundred metres of the submerged parts, but even their reports had revealed little that was not already known. Sensors could probe deeper, but the cloudy shapes that they returned showed only that the basic form of the ship was more or less intact. The crucial question of whether or not the drives would ever work again could not be answered. Through his own nervous system of data connections the Captain presumably knew the degree of spaceworthiness of ship. But the Captain wasn't talking. Until, perhaps, now. Antoinette had marked with annotated red stars all recent and reliable apparitions of John Brannigan. Blood peered at the dates and comments, the handwritten remarks which gave details of the type of apparition and the associated witness or witnesses. He dabbed at the map with his knife, scraping the blade gently against it, scything arcs and feints against the pencil marks. "He's moving up," Blood observed. Antoinette nodded. A lock of hair had come loose, hanging across her face. "That's what I thought, too. Judging by this, I'd say Palfrey and his friends have a point." "What about the dates? See any patterns there?" "Only that things looked pretty normal until a month or so ago." "And now?" "Draw your own conclusions," she said. "Me, I think the map speaks for itself. The hauntings have changed. The Captain's suddenly become restless. He's increased the range and boldness of his haunts, showing up in parts of the ship where we've never seen him before. If I included the reports I didn't think were entirely trustworthy, you'd see red marks all the way up to the administration levels." "But you don't believe those, do you?" Antoinette pushed back the stray strands of hair. "No, right now I don't. But a week ago I wouldn't have believed half of the others, either. Now all it'd take is one good witness above level six hundred." "And then what?" "All bets would be off. We'd have to accept that the Captain's woken up." In Blood's view this was already a given. "It can't be down to Khouri, can it? If the Captain had started behaving differently today, then I could believe it. But if this is real, it started weeks ago. She wasn't here then." "But they'd arrived in-system by then," Antoinette pointed out. "The battle was already here. How do we know the Captain wasn't sensitive to that? He's a ship. His senses reach out for light-hours in all directions. Being anchored to a planet doesn't change that." "We don't know that Khouri was telling the truth," Blood said. Antoinette used her red marker to add another star, one that corresponded to Palfrey's report. "I'd say we do now," she said. "All right. One other thing. If the Cap's woken up..." She looked at him, waiting for him to finish the sentence. "Yes?" "Do you think it means he wants something?" Antoinette picked up the helmet, causing the map to roll back on itself with a snapping sound. "Guess one of us is going to have to ask him," she replied. Two hours before dawn something twinkled on the horizon. "I see it, sir," Vasko said. "It's the iceberg, like we saw on the map." "I don't see anything," Urton said, after peering into the distance for half a minute. "I do," Jaccottet said, from the other boat. "Malinin's right, I think. There's something there." He reached for binoculars and held them to his eyes. The wide cowl of the lenses stayed rigidly fixed on target even as the rest of the binoculars wavered in Jaccottet's hands. "What do you see?" Clavain asked. "A mound of ice. At this range, that's about all I can make out. Still no sign of a ship, though." "Good work," Clavain said to Vasko. "We'll call you Hawkeye, shall we?" On Scorpio's order the boats slowed to half their previous speed, then veered gradually to port. They commenced a long encirclement of the object, viewing it from all sides in the slowly changing dawn light. Within an hour, as the boats spiralled nearer, the iceberg had become a small round-backed hummock. There was, in Vasko's opinion, something deeply odd about it. It sat on the sea and yet seemed a part of it as well, surrounded as it was by a fringe of white that extended in every direction for perhaps twice the diameter of the central core. It made Vasko think of an island, the kind that consisted of a single volcanic mountain, with gently sloping beaches reaching the sea on all sides. He had seen a few icebergs, when they drifted down to the latitude of First Camp, and this was unlike any iceberg in his experience. The boats circled closer. Now and then, Vasko heard Scorpio speaking to Blood via his wrist radio. The western sky was a bruised purple, with only a scattering of bright stars showing. In the east it was a bleak shade of rose. Against either backdrop the pale mound of the iceberg threw back subtly distorted variations of the same hues. "We've circled it twice," Urton reported. "Keep it up," Clavain instructed. "Reduce our distance by half, but slow to half our present speed. She may not be alert, and I don't want to startle her." "Something's not right about that iceberg, sir," Vasko said. "We'll see." Clavain turned to Khouri. "Can you sense her yet?" "Skade?" she asked. "I was thinking more of your daughter. I wondered if there might be some remote cross-talk between your mutual sets of implants." "We're still a long way out." "Agreed, but let me know the instant you feel anything. My own implants may not pick up Aura's emissions at all, or not until we're much nearer. And in any case you are her mother. I am certain you'll recognise her first, even if there is nothing unusual about the protocols." "I don't need reminding that I'm her mother," Khouri said. "Of course. I just meant..." "I'm listening for her, Clavain. I've been listening for her from the moment you pulled me out of that capsule. You'll be the first to hear if I pick up Aura." Half an hour later they were close enough to make out more detail. It was clear to all of them now that this was no ordinary iceberg, even if one discounted the way it infiltrated the water around it. Indeed, it appeared increasingly unlikely that the thing was any kind of iceberg at all. Yet it was made of ice. The sides of the floating mass were weird and crystalline. Rather than facets or sheets, they consisted of a thickening tangle of white spars, a briar formed from interleaved spikes of ice. Stalagmites and stalactites daggered up and down like icy incisors. Vertical spikes bristled like rapiers. At the root of each spike was a flourish of smaller growths thrusting out in all directions, intersecting and threading through their neighbours. In all directions, the spikes varied in size. Some—the major trunks and branches of the structure—were as wide across as the boat. Others were so thin, so fine, that they formed only an iridescent haze in the air, as if the merest breeze would shatter them into a billion twinkling parts. From a distance, the berg had appeared to be a solid block. Now the mound seemed to be formed from a huge haphazardly tossed pile of glass needles. Unthinkable numbers of glass needles. It was a glistening cavity-filled thicket, as much hollow space as ice. It was easily the most unsettling thing Vasko had ever seen in his life. They circled closer. Of all of them, only Clavain seemed unimpressed by the utter strangeness of what lay before them. "The smart maps were accurate," he said. "The size of this thing... by my reckoning, you could easily hide a moray-class corvette inside it." Vasko raised his voice. "You still think there might be a ship inside that thing, sir?" "Ask yourself a question, son. Do you really think Mother Nature had anything to do with this?" "But why would Skade surround her ship with all this strange ice?" Vasko persisted. "I wouldn't have thought it was much use as armour, and all it's done so far is make her ship more visible on the maps." "What makes you so sure she had any choice, son?" "I don't follow, sir." Scorpio said, "He's suggesting that all this might mean there's something wrong with Skade's ship. Isn't that right?" "That's my working hypothesis," Clavain said. "But what..." Vasko abandoned his question before he got himself into even deeper water. "Whatever's inside," Clavain said, "we still have to reach it. We don't have tunnelling equipment or anything that can blast through thick ice. But if we're careful, we won't have to. We just have to locate a route through to the middle." "What if Skade spots us, sir?" Vasko asked. "I'm hoping she does. The last thing I want is to have to knock on her front door. Now take us closer. Nice and slowly does it." Bright Sun rose. In the early minutes of dawn, the iceberg took on an entirely different character. Against the soft violet of the sky the whole structure seemed magical, as delicate as some aristocrat's confection. The briar spikes and icy spars were shot through with gold and azure, the colours refracted with the untainted dazzle of cut diamond. There were glorious halos, shards and jangles of chromatic purity, colours Vasko had never seen in his life. Instead of shadows, the interior shone turquoise and opal with a radiance that groped and fingered its way to the surface through twisting corridors and canyons of ice. And yet within that shining interior there was a shadowy kernel, a hint of something cocooned. The two boats had come within fifty metres of the outer edge of the island's fringe. The water had been calm for much of their journey, but here in the immediate vicinity of the iceberg it moved with the languor of some huge sedated animal, as if every ripple cost the sea great effort. Closer to the edge of the fringe, the sea was already beginning to freeze. It had the slick blue-grey texture of animal hide. Vasko touched his fingers just beneath the surface of the water by the boat and then pulled them back out immediately. Even here, this far from the fringe, the water was much colder than it had been when they had left the shuttle. "Look at this," Scorpio said. He had one of the smart maps rolled out before him. Khouri was studying it, too, obviously agreeing with something Scorpio was saying to her as he pointed out features with the blunt-trottered stub of one hand. Clavain opened his own map. "What is it, Scorp?" "An update just came through from Blood. Take a look at the iceberg: it's larger." Clavain made his map display the same coordinates. The iceberg leapt into view. Vasko peered over the old man's shoulder, searching for the pair of boats. There was no sign of them. He assumed that the update had taken place before sunset the previous evening. "You're right," Clavain said. "What would you say... thirty, forty per cent larger, by volume?" "Easily," Scorpio said. "And this isn't real-time. If it's growing this rapidly, it could be ten or twenty per cent larger again by now." Clavain folded his map: he had seen enough. "It certainly seems to be refrigerating the surrounding water. Before very long, where we're sitting will be frozen as well. We're lucky we arrived when we did. If we'd left it a few more days, we'd never have stood a chance. We'd be looking at a mountain." "Sir," Vasko said, "I don't understand how it can be getting larger. Surely it should be shrinking. Icebergs don't last at these latitudes." "I thought you said you didn't know much about them," Clavain replied. "I said we don't see many in the bay, sir." Clavain looked at him shrewdly. "It's not an iceberg. It never was. It's a shell of ice around Skade's ship. And it's growing because the ship is making it grow by cooling the sea around it. Remember what Khouri said? They have ways of making their hulls as cold as the cosmic microwave background." "But you also said you didn't think Skade had any control over this." "I'm not sure she has." "Sir..." Clavain cut him off. "I think something may have gone wrong with the cryo-arithmetic engines that keep the hull cold. What, I don't know. Perhaps Skade will tell us, when we find her." Until a day ago Vasko had never heard of cryo-arithmetic engines. But the phrase had cropped up in Khouri's testimony—it was one of the technologies that Aura had helped Remontoire and his allies to perfect as they raced away from the ruins of the Delta Pavonis system. In the hours that followed, Vasko had done his best to ask as many questions as possible, trying to fill in the most embarrassing voids in his knowledge. Not all of his questions had met with ready answers, even from Khouri. But Clavain had told him that the cryo-arithmetic engines were not completely new, that the basic technology had already been developed by the Conjoiners towards the end of their war against the Demarchists. At that time, a single cryo-arithmetic engine had been a clumsy thing the size of a mansion, too large to be carried on anything but a major spacecraft. All efforts to produce a miniaturised version had ended in disaster. Aura, however, had shown them how to make engines as small as apples. But they were still dangerous. The cryo-arithmetic principle was based on a controlled violation of thermodynamic law. It was an outgrowth from quantum computation, exploiting a class of algorithms discovered by a Conjoiner theorist named Qafzeh in the early years of the Demarchist war. Qafzeh's algorithms—if implemented properly on a particular architecture of quantum computer—led to a net heat loss from the local universe. A cryo-arithmetic engine was in essence just a computer, running computational cycles. Unlike ordinary computers, however, it got colder the faster it ran. The trick—the really difficult part—was to prevent the computer from running even faster as it chilled, spiralling into a runaway process. The smaller the engine, the more susceptible it was to that kind of instability. Perhaps that was what had happened to Skade's ship. In space, the engines had worked to suck heat away from the corvette's hull, making the ship vanish into the near-zero background of cosmic radiation. But the ship had sustained damage, perhaps severing the delicate web of control systems monitoring the cryo-arithmetic engines. By the time it hit Ararat's ocean it had become a howling mouth of interstellar cold. The water had begun to freeze around it, the odd patterns and structures betraying the obscene violation of physical law taking place. Could anyone still be alive inside it? Vasko noticed something then. It was possible that he was the first. It was a keening sound at the very limit of his hearing, a sensation so close to ultrasound that he barely registered it as noise at all. It was more like a kind of data arriving by a sensory channel he had never known he possessed. It was like singing. It was like a million fingers circling the wet rims of a million wine glasses. He could barely hear it, and yet it threatened to split his skull open. "Sir," Vasko said, "I can hear something. The iceberg, sir, or whatever it is—it's making a noise." "It's the sun," Clavain said, after a moment. "It must be warming the ice, stressing it in different ways, making it creak and shiver." "Can you hear it, sir?" Clavain looked at him with an odd expression on his face. "No, son, I can't. These days, there are a lot of things I can't hear. But I'm taking your word for it." "Closer," Scorpio said. Through dark, dank corridors of the great drowned ship, Antoinette Bax walked alone. She held a torch in one hand and the old silver helmet in the other, her fingers tucked through the neck ring. Lolloping ahead of her with the eagerness of a hunting dog, the wandering golden circle of torchlight defined the unsettling sculptural formations that lined the walls: here an archway that appeared to be made from spinal vertebrae, there a mass of curled and knotted intestinal tubes. The crawling shadows made the tubes writhe and contort like copulating snakes. A steady damp breeze blew up from the lower decks, and from some unguessable distance Antoinette heard the clanging report of a hesitant, struggling mechanism—a bilge pump, maybe, or perhaps the ship itself remaking a part of its own fabric. Sounds propagated unpredictably through the ship, and the noise could just as easily have originated mere corridors away as from some location kilometres up or down the spire. Antoinette hitched high the collar of her coat. She would have preferred company—any company—but she knew that this was the way it had to be. On each of the very few occasions in the past when she had elicited anything from the Captain that might be construed as a meaningful response, it had always been when she was alone. She took this as evidence that the Captain was prepared to reveal himself to her, and that there was an element of trust—however small—in their relationship. True or not, Antoinette had always believed that she stood a better chance of communicating with the Captain than her peers did. It was all about history. She had owned a ship herself once, and although that ship had been much smaller than the Nostalgia for Infinity, in some sense it, too, had been haunted. "Talk to me, John," she had said on previous occasions. "Talk to me as someone you can trust, as someone who appreciates a little of what you are." There had never been an unequivocal answer, but if she looked at all the instances when she had drawn some response, however devoid of content, it appeared to her that the Captain was more likely to do something in her presence than not. Taken together, none of these apparitions amounted to any kind of coherent message. But what if the recent spate of manifestations pointed to him emerging from some dormant state? "Captain," she said now, holding aloft the helmet, "you left a calling card, didn't you? I've come to give it back. Now you have to keep your side of the bargain." There was no response. "I'll be honest with you," she said. "I really don't like it down here. Matter of fact, it scares the hell out of me. I like my ships small and cosy, with décor I chose myself." She cast the torch beam around, picking out an overhanging globular mass filling half the corridor. She stooped under the shock-frozen black bubbles, brushing her fingers against their surprising warmth and softness. "No, this isn't me at all. But I guess this is your empire, not mine. All I'm saying is that I hope you realise what it takes to bring me down here. And I hope you're going to make it worthwhile for me." Nothing happened. But she had never expected success at first bite. "John," she said, deciding to risk familiarity, "we think something may be happening in the wider system. My guess is you may have some suspicions about this as well. I'll tell you what we think, anyway—then you can decide for yourself." The character of the breeze changed. It was warmer now, with an irregularity about it that made her think of ragged breathing. Antoinette said, "Khouri came back. She dropped out of the sky a couple of days back. You remember Khouri, don't you? She spent a lot of time aboard, so I'd be surprised if you didn't. Well, Khouri says there's a battle going on around Ararat, something that makes the Demarchist-Conjoiner war look like a snowball fight. If she isn't lying, we've got two squabbling human factions up there, plus a really frightening number of wolf machines. You remember the wolves, don't you, Captain? You saw Ilia throw the cache weapons at them, and you saw what good it did." There it was again. The breeze had become a faint suction. In Antoinette's estimation that already made it a class-one apparition. "You're here with me, aren't you?" Another shift in the wind. The breeze returned, sharpened to a howl. The howl ripped her hair loose, whipping it in her eyes. She heard a word whispered in the wind: Ilia. "Yes, Captain. Ilia. You remember her well, don't you? You remember the Triumvir. I do, too. I didn't know her for long, but it was long enough to see that she isn't the kind of woman you'd forget in a hurry." The wind had died down. All that remained was a nagging suction. A small, sane voice warned Antoinette to stop now. She had achieved a clear result: a class one by anyone's definition, and almost certainly (if she had not imagined the voice) a class two. That was enough for one day, wasn't it? The Captain was nothing if not temperamental. According to the records she had left behind, Ilia Volyova had pushed him into a catatonic sulk many times by trying to coax just one more response from him. Often it had taken the Captain weeks to emerge from one of those withdrawals. But the Triumvir had had months or years to build up her working relationship with the Captain. Antoinette did not think she had anywhere near as much time. "Captain," she said, "I'll lay the cards on the table. The seniors are worried. Scorpio's so worried he's pulled Clavain back from his island. They're taking Khouri seriously. They've already gone to see if they can get her baby back for her. If she's right, there's a Conjoiner ship already in our ocean, and it was damaged by the wolves. They're here, Captain. It's crunch time. Either we sit here and let events happen around us, or we think about the next move. I'm sure you know what I mean by that." Abruptly, as if a door or valve had slammed shut somewhere, the suction stopped. No breeze, no noise, only Antoinette standing alone in the corridor with the small puddle of light from her torch. "Holy shit," Antoinette said. But then, ahead of her, a cleft of light appeared. There was a squeal of metal and part of the corridor wall hinged aside. A new sort of breeze hit her face, a new concoction of biomechanical smells. Through the cleft she saw a new corridor, curving sharply down towards underlying decks. Golden-green light, firefly pale, oozed up from the depths. "I guess I was right about the calling card," she said.

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