Alastair Reynolds - Absolution Gap

“Good, Surgeon-General?”

“The lying thing. The ability to read faces. That’s your little stock in trade, isn’t it? Your little party trick?”

They had arrived at what Rashmika judged to be the base of the Clocktower. The surgeon-general pulled out a key, slipped it into a lock next to a wooden door and admitted them into what was obviously a private compartment. The walls were made of trellised iron. Inside he pressed a sequence of brass knobs and they began to rise. Through the trelliswork, Rashmika watched the walls of the elevator shaft glide by. Then the walls became stained glass, and as they ascended past each coloured facet the light changed in the compartment: green to red, red to gold, gold to a cobalt blue that made the surgeon-general’s shock of white hair glow as if electrified.

“I still don’t know what this is about,” she persisted.

“Are you frightened?”

“A bit.”

“You needn’t be.” She saw that he was telling the truth, at least as he perceived it. This calmed her slightly. “We’re going to treat you very well,” he added. “You’re too valuable to us to be treated otherwise.”

“And if I decide I don’t want to stay here?”

He looked away from her, glancing out of the window. The light traced the outline of his face with dying fire. There was something about him—a muscular compactness to his body, that bulldog face—that made her think of circus performers she had seen in the badlands, who were actually unemployed miners touring from village to village to supplement their income. He could have been a fire-eater or an acrobat.

“You can leave,” he said, turning back to her. “There’d be no point keeping you here without your permission. Your usefulness to us depends entirely on your good will.”

Perhaps she was reading him incorrectly, but she did not think he was lying about that, either.

“I still don’t see…” she said.

“I’ve done my homework,” he told her. “You’re a rara avis , Miss Els. You have a gift shared by fewer than one in a thousand people. And you have the gift to a remarkable degree. You’re off the scale. I doubt that there’s anyone else quite like you on the whole of Hela.”

“I just see when people lie,” she said.

“You see more than that. Look at me now.” He smiled at her again. “Am I smiling because I am genuinely happy, Miss Els?”

It was the same feral smile she had seen before. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re right. Do you know why you can tell?”

“Because it’s obvious,” she said.

“But not to everyone. When I smile on demand—as I did just then—I make use of only one muscle in my face: the zygomatics major. When 1 smile spontaneously—which I confess does not happen very often—I flex not only my zygomaticus major but I also tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis.” Grelier touched a finger to the side of his temple. “That’s the muscle that encircles the eye. The majority of us cannot tighten that muscle voluntarily. I certainly can’t. By the same token the majority of us cannot stop it tightening when we are genuinely pleased.” He smiled again; the elevator was slowing. “Many people do not see the difference. If they notice it, they notice it subliminally, and the information is lost in the welter of other sensory inputs. The crucial data is ignored. But to you these things come screaming through. They sound trumpets. You are incapable of ignoring them.”

“I remember you now,” she said.

“I was there when they interviewed your brother, yes. I remember the fuss you made when they lied to him.”

“Then they did lie.”

“You always knew it.”

She looked at him: square in the face, alert to every nuance. “Do you know what happened to Harbin?”

“Yes,” he replied.

The trelliswork carriage rattled to a halt.

Grelier led her into the dean’s garret. The six-sided room was alive with mirrors. She saw her own startled expression jangling back at her, fragmented like a cubist portrait. In the confusion of reflections she did not immediately notice the dean himself. She saw the view through the windows, the white curve of Hela’s horizon reminding her of the smallness of her world, and she saw the suit—the strange, roughly welded one—that she recognised from the Adventist insignia. Rash-mika’s skin prickled: just looking at the suit disturbed her. There was something about it, an impression of evil radiating from it in invisible lines, flooding the room; a powerful sense of presence, as if the suit itself embodied another visitor to the garret.

Rashmika walked past the suit. As she neared it the impression of evil became perceptibly stronger, almost as if invisible rays of malevolence were boring into her head, fingering their way into the private cavities of her mind. It was not like her to respond so irrationally to something so obviously inanimate, but the suit had an undeniable power. Perhaps, buried inside it, was a mechanism for inducing disquiet. She had heard of such things: vital tools in certain spheres of negotiation. They tickled the parts of the brain responsible for stimulating dread and the registering of hidden presences.

Now that she thought she could explain the suit’s power she felt less disturbed by it. All the same, she was glad when she reached the other side of the garret, into full view of the dean. At first she thought he was dead. He was lying back on his couch, hands clasped across his blanketed chest like a man in the repose of the recently deceased. But then the chest moved. And the eyes—splayed open for examination—were horribly alive within their sockets. They trembled like little warm eggs about to hatch.

“Miss Els,” the dean said. “I hope your trip here was an enjoyable one.”

She couldn’t believe she was in his presence. “Dean Quaiche,” she said. “I heard… I thought…”

“That I was dead?” His voice was a rasp, the kind of sound an insect might have manufactured by the deft rubbing of chitinous surfaces. “I have never made any secret of my continued existence, Miss Els… for all these years. The congregation has seen me regularly.”

“The rumours are understandable,” Grelier said. The surgeon-general had opened a medical cabinet on the wall and was now fishing through its innards. “You don’t show your face outside of the Lady Morwenna, so how are the rest of the population expected to know?”

“Travel is difficult for me.” Quaiche pointed with one hand towards a small hexagonal table set amid the mirrors. “Have some tea, Miss Els. And sit down, take the weight off your feet. We have much to talk about.”

“I have no idea why I am here, Dean.”

“Didn’t Grelier tell you anything? I told you to brief the young lady, Grelier. I told you not to keep her in the dark.”

Grelier turned from the wall and walked towards Quaiche, carrying bottles and swabs. “I told her precisely what you asked me to tell her: that her services were required, and that our use for her depended critically on her sensitivity to facial microexpressions.”

“What else did you tell her?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

Rashmika sat down and poured herself some tea. There appeared little point in refusing. And now that she was being offered a drink she realised that she was very thirsty.

“I presume you want me to help you,” she ventured. “You need my skill, for some reason or other. There is someone you’re not sure if you trust or not.” She sipped at the tea: whatever she thought of her hosts, it tasted decent enough. “Am I warm?”

“You’re more than warm, Miss Els,” Quaiche remarked. “Have you always been this astute?”

“Were I truly astute, I’m not sure I’d be sitting here.”