After two hours, near the limit of the time that he thought he could reasonably spend away from the house, and some time after he’d decided the hell with discretion and ramped his active sensors up to maximum, Fassin found one end of the CloudTunnel, looming out of the gel-thick mist like a vast dark mouth. He took the little gascraft into the forty-metre-wide maw, turning up his sonosense now that the signals would be shielded by the walls of the CloudTunnel section itself. He increased his speed, too, barrelling along the great slowly curving tube like the ghost of some Dweller long gone.

The study shell was still there, a hollow sphere almost filling the CloudTunnel tube near the mid-point of its eighty-kilometre length, but it had been ransacked, stripped bare. Whatever secrets it might have held had long since been taken or trashed.

Fassin turned some lights on to check round the place, finding nothing intact, nothing beyond empty shelves and ragged lengths of carbon board, diamond dust like frosted ice and frayed fibres, waving in the turbulence of his passing.

He formed a tiny cavity with his sonosense and watched it collapse instantly, snapped to nothing by the grinding weight of the column of gas above it. A fine place to feel crushed, he thought, then went back the way he’d come and ascended slowly to the house and Library Twenty-One again.

The colonel was there. She looked startled when he appeared from behind the hidden door, even though he’d told her earlier what he intended to do.

“Major. Seer Taak. Fassin,” she said. She sounded… odd.

Fassin looked around. Nobody else here; good, he thought. “Yes?” he said, letting the bookcase door close behind him.

Hatherence floated right up to him, stopping just a metre away. Her esuit showed a uniform dull grey he hadn’t seen her display before.

“Colonel,” he asked her. “Are you all right? Is everything—”

“There is… you must prepare… I… I am sorry to…

There is bad news, Fassin,” she said finally, in a rushed, broken voice. “Very bad news. I am so sorry.”

* * *

The Archimandrite Luseferous did not really buy into the whole idea of the Truth. Of course, when he had been rising within the ranks of the Cessoria he had given every appearance of believing in it, and had been a gifted evangelist and disputer, arguing, many times, with great force, logic and passion for the Church and its views. He had been often commended for this. He could see at the time that his superiors were impressed, see it even when they didn’t want to admit to him or to themselves that they had been impressed. He had a gift for argument. And for dissembling, for lying (if you insisted on using such crude, un-nuanced terminology), for appearing to believe one thing while, at best, actually not caring one way or the other. He had never really cared whether the Truth was true.

The idea of faith interested him, even fascinated him, not as an intellectual idea, not as a concept or some abstract theoretical framework, but as a way of controlling people, as a way of understanding and so manipulating them. As a flaw, in the end, as something which was wrong with others that was not wrong with him.

Sometimes he could not believe all the advantages other people seemed prepared to hand him. They had faith and so would do things that were plainly not in their own immediate (or, often, long-term) best interests, because they just believed what they had been told; they experienced altruism and so did things that, again, were not necessarily to their advantage; they had sentimental or emotional attachments to others and so could be coerced, once more, into doing things they would not have done otherwise. And — best of all, he sometimes thought — people were self-deceiving. They thought they were brave when they were really cowards, or imagined they could think for themselves when they most blatantly could not, or believed they were clever when they were just good at passing exams, or thought they were compassionate when they were just sentimental.

The real strength came from a perfectly simple maxim: Be completely honest with yourself; only ever deceive others.

So many edges! So many ways that people made his progress easier. If everybody he’d ever met and competed with and struggled against had been just like him in these respects he’d have had a much harder rise to power. He might not even have prevailed at all, because without all these advantages it largely came down to luck, and he might not have had sufficient.

In the old days he had once wondered how many of the Cessorian high command, his old bosses, really believed in the Truth. He strongly suspected that the higher you went, the greater grew the proportion of those who didn’t really believe at all. They were in it for the power, the glory, the control and the glamour.

Now he rarely thought about any of that. Now he would just assume that anybody in such a position would be completely and cynically self-interested and be mildly surprised and even slightly disgusted to find that any of them really did have genuine faith. The disgust would come from the feeling that the person concerned was letting down the side, and the suspicion that they would feel they were somehow — perversely — superior to their less-deluded peers.

“And so you really believe in all that? You really do?”

“Sir, of course, sir! It is the rational faith. Simple logic dictates. It is inescapable. You know this better than I, sir. Sir, I think you tease me.” The girl looked away, smiling down, coquettish, shy, perhaps a little alarmed, just possibly even daring to feel slightly insulted.

He reached out and took her hair, swinging her face round to his, a gold-dark silhouette against the sparse sprinkle of distant stars. “Child, I am not sure that in all my life I have ever teased. Not once.”

The girl did not seem to know what to say. She looked around, perhaps at the pale stars through the screen-glass, perhaps at the snow-white tumble of low-gee puff-bedding, perhaps at the shell of screens forming the walls of their little nest, surfaces on which startlingly detailed and inventive acts of sexuality were being enacted. Perhaps she looked at her two companions, both now curled and asleep.

“Well, then, sir,” she said at last, “not teased. I would not say you teased me. Perhaps rather that you make fun of me because you are so much more educated and clever than me.”

That, the Archimandrite thought, was perhaps more like it. But he still was not sure. Did this young thing still carry the Truth inside her, even after all the normal-span generations that had come and gone since he’d formally swept away all this nonsense?

In a way it didn’t matter in the slightest; as long as nobody ever began to use their religion to organise against him he could not care less what people really thought. Obey me, fear me. Hate me if you want. Don’t ever pretend to love me. That was all he asked of people. Faith was just another lever, like sentiment, like empathy, like love (or what people thought was love, what they claimed was love, the fanciful, maybe even dishonest bit that wasn’t lust, which was honest. And, of course, another lever).

But he wanted to know. A less civilised fellow in his situation would have considered having the girl tortured to find out the truth, but people being tortured over something like this soon ended up just telling you what they thought you wanted to hear — anything to get the pain to stop. He’d learned that quickly enough. There was a better way.

He reached for the pod’s remote control and adjusted the spin, creating the illusion of gravity once more. “Go on all fours in front of the window,” he told the girl. “It’s time again.”

“Sir, of course, sir.” The girl quickly assumed the position he wanted, crouched against the oncoming star field, seemingly fixed even though the pod was revolving. The brightest sun, screen dead-centre, was Ulubis.