Prologue

 

 

“WE DWELL IN darkness. Our physical lives are but a brief flare, nothing more. A flicker. We were devoid of physical form for an eternity before, and will be devoid of a physical form for an eternity after. In the grand scale of the lifespan of Grud’s glorious cosmos, we might as well not have lived at all.”

Pastor Elvene Mandt Carbonara had been the Senior Arch-Primate of the Eighth Church of Grud the Unforgiving, a religious sect quite popular in southern Euro-Cit. She was about forty, I think. Tall with sallow skin, a wide frame but a narrow head, a noticeably asymmetrical hairline and an unsettling under-bite. Not easy on the eye.

But then neither am I, I know that. I wasn’t criticising her looks, just commenting.

She’d go through months-long phases where she spoke solely in quotes from her church’s religious tracts and the rest of us were never sure whether she believed any of it, or she was just messing with us, or if it was a smokescreen for something else. That last one is most likely: she was scared, and talked non-stop to mask her fear.

She’d been on Titan for over a year, but this was my first time working directly alongside her. I’d seen her many times, of course, but like most of the prisoners, I kept my distance whenever possible. One of those rules of prison life: steer clear of the ones who talk to themselves, or flinch at the invisible fairies buzzing around them, or claim to have invented a way to turn dirt into coffee... because crazy is contagious.

So the Pastor generated an imperceptible force field around herself by constantly talking about the afterlife, and that kept her reasonably safe from the psychopaths.

But it didn’t keep away those who were looking for some form of guidance. The ‘lost souls’ who seem to be destined to stand behind more eloquent people while angrily shouting, “Yeah!” and waving their fists in the air.

We were out in the Bronze, one-forty-something kilometres west of the prison complex, and the Pastor’s latest diatribe had begun within minutes of sub-warden Kalai Takenaga telling her, “Carbonara, you’re with Dredd. He’ll show you the ropes. Dredd, go easy on her.”

As we’d walked away from the bus, Carbonara stared down at her feet and muttered something with each step. I’d made the mistake of asking her what she was doing.

“Blessing the footsteps. She who blesseth the steps of her feet shall forever walk upright and steady in the house of Grud. Colonials, chapter twelve, verse six. Have you been saved, Rico Dredd?”

I declined to answer, and that was when she hit me with the piece about dwelling in darkness.

I didn’t want to get drawn into any kind of argument or debate. I said, “See all these loose rocks? See those two wheelbarrows? You take one of the barrows, I don’t care which. If you see any rocks with a silver streak through them, or silver speckles”—I reached down and scooped up a fist-sized rock—“Like this? See? You find rocks like this, anything from the size of your thumb upwards, you put them into your barrow.”

She nodded, but it was more of a bow, her environment suit bending slightly at the hips rather than the neck. “Collect the ones with the silver. Got it. And then?”

“And then you keep going until your barrow is almost too heavy to push, and then you push it back towards the truck. The crew there will empty it for you, and then you come back here with the empty barrow and repeat the process until you run out of rocks or the sub-warden tells us it’s time to quit. When we’ve picked this area clean, we come back with diggers and sieves. Got to get every molecule of iridium.”

Pastor Carbonara looked down at her gloved hands. “These hands were designed for clasping in prayer, not picking up rocks. These are blessed hands, holy instruments of the all-strong Grud who shall—”

“I don’t care how magic you think your hands are. You ordered the murders of eighty-two former members of your cult, so now you get to pick up rocks. Believe me, this is one of the easiest jobs on this whole damn moon, so my advice is you shut up and get to work.”

She raised her head and glared at me through her tinted visor. “There is a special booth in Hell’s foetid diner reserved for the likes of you, Rico Dredd. The sins of the wicked are a deposit in the bank of hell, and their reward is a hefty dividend of unbearable torment every day, forever. So it is written in the letter from Saint Brenda to the Pomeranians.”

“Just go pick up the damn rocks!”

Sub-warden Takenaga called over to me, “Trouble, Dredd?”

“Not yet,” I called back. “Any chance I can trade partners?”

“Take a guess.”

Within half an hour of working alongside Pastor Carbonara, I could have happily killed her. After another half-hour, I would have been just as happy for her to kill me.

I had known others who talked as much: Cadet Wagner had been a chatterbox, as had Elemeno Pea, the first prisoner I got to know on Titan. But the Pastor was something else entirely. For four solid hours she methodically sorted through the rocks and scree and did a damn good job of it, but she did not once stop talking about her church, about Grud, about sinners.

We’d been assigned a thirty-metre-square area to clear, so I couldn’t move far enough away to be completely out of earshot, but I noticed that the inmates working around us seemed to be keeping to the far sides of their patches.

I’d no choice but to try to tune out her rhetoric and let it wash over me.

You don’t argue with a crazy Grud-botherer because they train for that. You can’t fast-track to the end of their sermon by pretending to agree with them because they have an inexhaustible supply of fresh diatribes lined up and ready to go. And you certainly don’t ask a religious nut, “What do you mean, exactly?” because they will tell you.

In the Academy of Law back in Mega-City One we were taught how to remain calm under pressure. A vital skill for a Judge, and handy for inmates, it turns out. I was able to ignore Pastor Elvene Mandt Carbonara, to mentally turn her volume down from eleven to about one or two and just ride it out.

But not every prisoner had that skill. Many of them had never been Judges, or they were out of practice.

Over time, some of them began to listen to what she had to say.

She was a charismatic, imaginative, intelligent, very persuasive spiritual crackpot sentenced to life on a half-frozen moon with a little over two hundred of the toughest, most dangerous people who ever walked the Earth.

Any fool should have been able to see that this was not a match made in Heaven.