“And after the bridge was built?”

“By then one of the Haussmann cults had gained possession of the body. The Church of Sky, they called themselves. And—for reasons of convenience, if nothing else—they’d decided that he must have died not just near the bridge but right under it. And that the bridge was not really a space elevator at all—or if it was, that was just a superficial function—but really a sign from God: a ready-made shrine to the crime and glory of Sky Haussmann.”

“But people designed and built the bridge.”

“Under God’s will. Don’t you understand? It’s nothing you can argue with, Tanner. Give up now.”

We passed a few cultists moving in the opposite direction, two men and a woman. I felt a jolt of familiarity when I saw them, but I couldn’t remember if I had ever seen any in the flesh before. They wore ash-coloured smocks and both sexes tended to wear their hair long. One man had a kind of mechanical coronet fixed on his skull—maybe some kind of pain-inducing device—while the other man’s left sleeve was pinned flatly to his side. The woman had a small dolphin-shaped mark on her forehead, and I remembered the way in which Sky Haussmann had befriended the dolphins aboard the Santiago; spending time with the creatures that the other crew shunned.

Recollection of that detail struck me as odd. Had someone told it to me before?

“Have you got that gun ready?” Dieterling said. “You never know. We might walk round the corner and find the bastard tying his shoelaces.”

I patted the gun to reassure myself that it was still there, then said, “I don’t think it’s our day to be lucky, Miguel.”

We stepped through a door set into the concourse’s inner wall, the sound of chanting monks now quite unmistakably human; sustaining a note that was almost but not quite perfect.

For the first time since entering the anchorpoint terminal, we could see the thread.