He slung a black haversack over one shoulder and walked across the terrazzo, interlaid chevrons of sapphire and diamond gliding beneath his soles. The Temple rose above him, sculptured spires hectic with Kiwidinok figures. His catechist decrypted hidden data in the stonework, graphing up a commentary on the architecture, how the manifold truths of the Asymmetrist Testament were amplified in every Masonic nuance. Obsidian steps climbed from the terrazzo into the Kiwidinok-encrusted doorway. Inside, he was met by one of the Machinehood: an Apparent Intelligence that his catechist identified as a cardinal named Bellarmine, after the Jesuit theologian who warned Galileo against the heresy of the heliocentric universe. Bellarmine's androform frame was shrouded in a hooded black cloak, but where the cloak parted, Sergio glimpsed a mesh-work of sculpted metal overlaying armatures, intestinal feedlines and pulsing diodes.
'I'm humbled to be admitted--' Sergio began, offering a complex genuflection of servility to the cardinal.
'Yes, yes,' Bellarmine said, no expression on the minimalist silver ovoid of his face. 'Pleasantries later. I advocate haste.'
'I flew as fast as I could.'
'Did you notice anything on your way here? We have reports of clan incursions in this sector of the Diocese. Clanfolk don't usually come here.'
'There was . . .' Except perhaps he'd dreamed the clanfolk, as he'd dreamed Indrani. Possibly the question was a test. 'Sorry; I spent the flight in prayer. Is Ivan as ill as we've heard?'
'Transcendence is imminent. He's no longer on medical support. He asked that we discontinue it, so that his last hours might be lucid. That, I suppose, has some bearing on your arrival.' Bellarmine's voice was like a cheap radio.
'You don't know why I'm here?'
'There's something he insists on telling only to a human priest.'
'Then our ignorance is equal,' Sergio said, suppressing a smile. There had been few occasions since his ordination when he had felt equality of any sort with a member of the Machinehood. The Machinehood knew things; they were always a step ahead of the human clergy, and the Order's higher echelons were dominated by Apparents. They'd been afforded ecclesiastical rights since the Ecumenical Synthesis, when the Founder had returned from the edge of the system with his message of divine intervention. Given the nature of the Kiwidinok, it could hardly have been otherwise, but that did not mean that Sergio was comfortable in their presence. 'Will you show me to Ivan?' he asked.
Bellarmine escorted him through a warren of twisting and ascending passageways, walls covered with Kiwidinok friezes. They passed other Apparents on the way, but never another human.
'Of course, there were rumours,' Bellarmine said, as if passing the time of day. 'About the reason for your summons. You were ordained less than nine standard years ago?'
'Your information's excellent,' Sergio said, his teeth clenched.
'It generally is. Was the procedure painful?'
'Of course not. The catechist's very small before they implant it - it's hardly a mosquito bite.' He touched the weal on his scalp. 'They induce scar tissue quite deliberately. But once the thing's growing inside you, you don't feel much at all. No pain receptors in the brain.'
'I'm curious, that's all. One hears reports. How did you feel when you saw the cards properly: the first images of Perdition?'
He remembered the cards very well. The senior priest had opened a rosewood box and shown them to him before the catechist was installed. Each card contained a grey square composed of thousands of tinier grey cells of varying shades - eleven, in fact, since that was the maximum number of shades that the human eye could discriminate. The matrix of grey cells looked random, but once the catechist was installed - once it had interfaced with the appropriate brain centres, and decoded his idiosyncratic representation of the exterior world - something odd happened. The grey cells peeled away, revealing an image underneath. They'd told him how it worked, but he didn't pretend to remember the details. What mattered was that the catechist permitted the ordained to view sacred data, and only the ordained.
And he remembered seeing Perdition for the first time. And the feeling of disappointment, that something so crucial could be so mundane, so uninspiring. 'I felt,' he said, 'that I was seeing something very holy.'
'Interesting,' Bellarmine said, after due reflection. 'I've heard some say it's an anticlimax. But one oughtn't be surprised. After all, it's just a neutron star.'
He led Sergio across the unbalustraded walkway of a flying buttress, the ornithopter a tiny thing far below, like a grounded insect beside an anthill.
'You mentioned rumours,' Sergio said, to take his mind off the drop below him. 'Presupposing I'd done something that would merit it, I doubt very much that Ivan would summon me across half of Mars just for a reprimand.'
'Sick old men do unusual things,' the Apparent said, as they re-entered the middle spire. 'But, of course, the point is hypothetical. If you had sinned against the Order, if you had committed some indiscretion against your vows - even somewhere remote from Chryse - we'd know of it.'
'I don't doubt it.'
'That's wise.' Bellarmine came to a halt. 'Well, we've arrived. Are you ready, Menendez?'
'No. I'm nervous, and I don't understand why I'm here. Except that this has something to do with it.' He hefted the haversack like a trophy. 'But I guess the only way to find out is to step inside and see what Ivan wants.'
'Perhaps you shouldn't expect an answer.'
'What are you saying, that he doesn't necessarily know why he asked me here?'
'Only that he's sick, Menendez.'
They entered a room where death was a quiet presence, like dew waiting to condense. Perfumed candles burned in sconces along the walls, each grasped in a Kiwidinok hand: rapier-thin fingers of wrought iron. Through the sepia gloom, Sergio discerned the sheeted form of the dying man, his bed surrounded by the hooded shapes of deactivated monitors, like kneeling orisons.
'You should be wary of tiring him. He may be slipping from us, but that doesn't mean we should squander the seconds we have left in his presence.'
'Are you staying here?'
'Oh, don't worry about me. I won't be far.'
'That's a shame.' Sergio suppressed a grin. 'That you have to leave, I mean, of course.'
After the Apparent had gone, Sergio waited for many minutes until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He doubted that he had ever seen a creature as near to death as Ivan, and it was a small miracle that someone this withered was even capable of metabolism; no matter if each breath was undoubtedly weaker than the one before it. Finally, Sergio's arm tired, and he placed the haversack on the floor. Perhaps it was the faint sound of the contact, or the imperceptible disturbance that the gesture imparted to the room's air currents, but the old man chose that moment to open his eyes, a process as languid as the opening of a rose at dawn.
'Menendez,' Ivan said, his lips barely parting. 'That's your name, isn't it?' Then, after a pause: 'How was your flight from Vikingville?'
'The thermals,' Sergio said, 'were excellent.'
'Used to fly gliders, you know. Paragliders. I jumped from a tepui in Venezuela, once. Back on Earth. Before the Kiwidinok came. One shit-scary thing to do.'
'Your memories do you credit, Ivan.'
'Christ, and I thought Bellarmine was stiff. Loosen up. I need reverence like I need a skateboard. You brought the recorder?'
'It's ready, although I'm not sure what you want of me. The Diocese told me next to nothing.'
'That's because they didn't have the damnedest idea. Here. Pass the bag.' Ivan's hands emerged from the sheets and probed the haversack, removing the consecrated antique tape recorder and situating it carefully next to his bedside. 'Ah, good,' he said. 'You brought the other thing. That's good, Menendez. Real good. Think I like you better already.' Trembling, he removed a small flask of whisky, uncapping it and holding it under his nose. 'Clanfolk-brewed, huh? You took a risk bringing it, I know.'
'Not really. I presumed it served some symbolic funct
ion.'
'You go right on presuming that, son.' Ivan tipped the flask to his lips, then placed it aside, amidst a pile of personal effects on the other side of the bed. 'You help yourself, you want some. And sit down, won't you?'
'I'd like to know why I'm here.'
'Well, there's no mystery. There's something I have to tell you - all of you - and I couldn't trust any of the senior Apparents.'
Sergio lowered himself into a seat, nervously glancing over his shoulder. For a moment, he'd imagined that he'd glimpsed Bellarmine's face there, rendered bronze in the candlelight . . . but there was no evidence of him now. 'Does what you have to tell me relate to the Kiwidinok?'
'The Kiwidinok, and Perdition and everything else!' He paused to lubricate his lips, studying Sergio through slitted eyes. 'Not quite the reaction I was expecting.'
'I was . . .' Sergio shook his head. Thinking of Indrani. 'Where do you think we should begin?'
'The day I stopped shovelling shit in Smolensk.'
'I--'
'The day the Kiwidinok came. October 2078. Year Zero. Yeah, I know what you're thinking, that you know it all. That the episode's well documented. Sure enough, but . . .' Now Ivan found a reserve of strength adequate to push himself from the horizontal, until he was almost sitting. Sergio adjusted the pillows behind his head. 'It's well documented, but what comes later isn't. If I just came out and told you, you might conceivably think I'd lost all grip on reality.'
'I'd never dream of dismissing what you have to say; none of us would.'
'See if you feel that way when I'm finished, son!' Ivan allowed himself another thimbleful of clanfolk whisky, offering it ineffectually in Sergio's direction before continuing. 'How old are you, son, twenty-four, twenty-five, in standard years? I can't have been much older than you when it happened. We didn't call them Kiwidinok back then. That came much later, once they'd ransacked our cultural data and chosen a name for themselves. It's a Chippewa word; means of the wind. Maybe it has something to do with the way they move around.'
'That seems likely.'
They had arrived eighty-four years earlier, entering the solar system at virtually the speed of light. Their gnarly, lozenge-shaped ship, which might once have been a small asteroid, deployed a solar sail when it was somewhere beyond the distance of Pluto. It seemed laughable - had these visitors crossed interstellar space in the mistaken assumption that the pressure of solar radiation would decelerate their craft? Yet, staggeringly, the Kiwidinok ship came to a standstill in only three hours, before quietly swallowing its sail and vectoring towards the Earth.
Diplomatic teams were invited within the presence of the aliens. In the few video images that existed, the Kiwidinok resembled steel and neon sculptures of angels, blurred and duplex, like Duchamp's painting of a woman descending a staircase - humanoid, slender as knives and luminous, sprouting wings that simply faded out at their extremities, as if fashioned from finer and finer silk. Their faces were achingly beautiful, though masklike and impassive, and their slitted mouths and jewelled eyes betrayed only vacuous serenity. Quickly the diplomatic teams realised that they were dealing with machines. Once, so they themselves claimed, the Kiwidinok had been organic, but not for tens of millions of years.
'Our perspective . . . is different,' they had said, in one of the rare instances when they openly discussed their nature. 'Our perception of quantum reality differs from yours. It is not as ours once was.'
'What do you think they meant by that?' Ivan said, breaking from his narrative to stare at Sergio intently. 'No, leave the recorder running.'
'I can't begin to guess.'
'Must have been something to do with their becoming machines, don't you agree?'
'That would make sense. Is this - um - strictly relevant? I'm only thinking of your strength.'
Ivan's hand clenched around Sergio's wrist. 'More relevant than you can possibly imagine.' He emitted a fusillade of coughs before continuing. 'You need to understand this much, if nothing else: the problem of quantum measurement - that's the crux. How the superposed states of a quantum system collapse down to one reality. Understand that - and understand why it's a problem - and the rest will follow.'
Sergio looked guiltily at the recorder, aware of how every word spoken was being captured indelibly. 'There was mention in the seminary of cats, I believe. Cats in boxes, with radioisotopes and vials of arsenic.'
'When I wasn't shovelling shit in Smolensk, I used to think of myself as something of an amateur philosopher. I'd read all the popular articles, sometimes even kidded myself that I understood the math. The point is, all quantum systems - atoms, crystals, cats, dogs - exist in a superposition of possible states, like photographs stacked on top of each other. Provided you don't actually look at them, that is. But as soon as a measurement's made on the system, as soon as any part of it is observed, the system collapses - chooses one possible outcome out of all the options available to it and discards all the others.' Ivan relaxed his grip. 'Would you pour me some water? My throat is rather dry. That clanfolk stuff's real firewater.'
While he attended to this, Sergio said, 'There was never time, was there? To ask the Kiwidinok everything we might have wanted.'
Ivan quenched his thirst. 'When they announced that they were leaving, that was when the big panic began, because it seemed as if we hadn't learned enough from them; not supped sufficiently from the fount of their wisdom.'
'That was when they made the offer.'
'Yes. They'd already dropped hints here and there along the line that our - how shall I say it? That our existence wasn't quite as we imagined it to be; that there was some fundamental aspect of our nature that we just weren't aware of.' Ivan held his hand up to the candlelight, as if appalled at some new translucence in his flesh. 'You humans, they'd say, you just don't get it, do you? That was what it was like. They said that we could spend our remaining time asking them little questions, and not even chipping at this one fundamental misapprehension - or we could arrange for one person to be, shall I say, enlightened?'
'And you were selected,' Sergio said.
'Put my name forward, didn't I? Ivan Pashenkov: effluent disposal technician from Smolensk. Didn't think I had a chance in hell - or Perdition, huh? Don't laugh so much, son.'
'How did you feel when they selected you, out of all the millions who applied?'
'Very drunk. Or was that the day afterwards? Hell, I don't know. How was I meant to feel? Privileged? It wasn't as if they picked me on my merit. It was sheer luck.'
After his selection, the Kiwidinok had taken him aboard their ship, along with a handful of permitted recording devices small enough to be worn about his person. Preparing to depart, the ship had encased itself in a field of polarised inertia, defining a preferred axis along which resistance to acceleration was essentially zero, essentially infinite in all directions perpendicular to that axis. For interstellar travel, this was hardly an inconvenience.
'They immobilised me,' Ivan said. 'Locked me in a pod, and pumped me full of drugs.'
'How was it?'
He reached up with one hand and traced a line along the occipital crown of his skull, fingertips skating through the veil-like hair that still haloed his scalp. 'The brain's divided into two hemispheres; certain mental tasks assigned to one or the other half, like language, or appreciating a good wine, or making love to a woman.' The remark hung in the air, like an accusing finger. Then he resumed: 'There's a tangle of nerves bridging the hemispheres: the commissure or corpus callosum. They're the means by which we synthesise the different models of the world constructed in either hemisphere; the analytic and the emotional, for instance. But the Kiwidinok drive did something to my head. Nerve impulses found it difficult to cross the commissure, because it required movement against the preferred axis of the polarisation field. I found my thoughts - my conscious experience - stagnating in one or the other hemisphere. I'd think of things, but I couldn't assign names to any of the mental symbols I was imagining, because the re
quisite neural paths were obstructed.'
'But it didn't last long.'
He waved his hand. 'Longer than you think. We got there, eventually. They showed me the sun and it was faint, but not nearly as faint as the brightest stars, which meant they couldn't have carried me very far beyond the system.'
'Just beyond the cometary halo.'
'Mm. To within a few light-minutes of Perdition, except of course we didn't even know it existed.'
'Everything that you've told me,' Sergio said, 'accords exactly with what we were told in the seminary. If you now reveal that the object in question was a neutron star, I don't see how your account can differ in any significant way from the standard teachings. I mean, the mere existence of--'